any activity that boils down to causing animal suffering for human pleasure. shooting a lion because you enjoy it is the same as eating a cow because you enjoy it
-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
Hot Takes
- Thread starter Crux
- Start date
Cow isn't alive when you're eating it. Gaining pleasure from eating cooked meat isn't comparable to killing animals that can experience pain.
I believe that it boils down to the amount of suffering animal get before being slaughtered. I'm okay with people gaining pleasure from killing animal as long animal's experience of death is short and painless as possible.
Here's my hot take: line fishing is clearly unnesscary sadistic torture. Don't tell me that ripping apart fish's mouth with hook then suffocating the fish while pictures are being taken is necessary at all.
I believe that it boils down to the amount of suffering animal get before being slaughtered. I'm okay with people gaining pleasure from killing animal as long animal's experience of death is short and painless as possible.
Here's my hot take: line fishing is clearly unnesscary sadistic torture. Don't tell me that ripping apart fish's mouth with hook then suffocating the fish while pictures are being taken is necessary at all.
yeah but it's alive when you slaughter it, sometimes even for hours beforehand
Coriander is the fucking worst, dish soap tasting, piece of shit herb to ever be considered edible.
ive heard that this is pretty strongly influenced by genetics but its fairly interesting - i dont think theres a food item more polarizing than coriander except for maybe brussell sprouts
i dont know if this is particularly 'hot' but seeing 'well-done steak is bad' was sincerely posted here: any statement holding up healthcare workers (be they doctors, nurses or those involved in distribution / production of drugs) to be heroes during the coronavirus pandemic is abhorrent. the medical industry has consistently overprescribed antibiotics to the point of weakening our overall ability to combat illnesses. they have played a major role in creating modern drug addiction and abuse issues. they uphold a system that is inaccessible for many due to the extreme costs imposed by treatments or certain drugs. our ability to actually have a 'healthy' society is seriously jeopardized through the (in)action of healthcare workers (there is probably a good argument to be made at how incentivized healthcare workers are to actually see people be 'healthy' under a system where healthcare is such a ludicrously high profit industry). to applaud people in this industry for doing nothing more than what their job requires of them (and of which many are paid a pretty penny to do so) borders on farcical.
I'm not sure who is calling those "distributing / producing drugs" heroes right now, considering that there's no drug or vaccine yet that fights the virus (and god help us when the drug industry gets one and price gouges it).
A relatively new problem that every doctor I know is very mindful of. Most won't want to prescribe antibiotics unless it's absolutely needed and an issue is that sometimes it absolutely is needed. If the problem is that it's our best and only resource against infections, you can't just get rid of its use.
I assume you mean the opioid crisis and this is true, but again now doctors are extremely reticent to prescribe opioids and sorting out addicts from those legitimately in need is a common part of being a doctor now.
Politicians and capitalists uphold a system that is abused by insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. What exactly do you think doctors and nurses have to do with this? The American Medical Association had to change its stance against Single Payer due to doctor and nurse protest.
You're implying regular breaks of the Hippocratic oath, of doctors not doing their jobs and not caring about the health of a patient. Do you have any evidence for this, or that the opioid and antibiotic problems came about in bad faith? Further, even the insurance industry is incentivised to keep people healthy (preventative medicine) because this radically keeps their costs down, and with our current laws they generally have the final say in what is or isn't done. So what are you on about? This all feels like a very Trumpish soft accusation of wrongdoing with no evidence.
30 million Americans stopped "doing what their job requires of them" when covid hit. I stopped driving a cab. These people are working in hospitals that are now hopelessly overcrowded.
Nurses are absolutely not paid a pretty penny for what they do. Nursing is a dirty job with fairly low barrier to entry and tons of demands. It does not pay well.
Another large myth is that people get out of medical school after 8 years and mountains of debt and the cash starts raining on them. The truth is that resident doctors (the ones you are almost certainly going to be talking about as being on the frontlines of the pandemic) get paid about the same that nurses do, and with nurses often work around 20 hour shifts (a problem that has certainly not improved with the pandemic). The dream job of getting a high paid position at the hospital or starting your own practice takes a lot of time, work, and abuse, all while sitting that debt. If you want to be rich, become a lawyer.
That's not to say that no practicing doctors ever weren't corrupt and there are a lot of problems with the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, their respective lobbies, and hospital administration. But to put this all on underpaid and overworked residential doctors and nurses has no basis at all.
I worked in medical insurance until I couldn't stand it anymore, and from all my interactions with insurance companies and the healthcare workers, I can say with 100% certainly that it's not the healthcare workers who are the bad guys.
you cannot absolve doctors and nurses of their role in the very system in which they participate. using oxycontin as a case study - doctors and nurses willingly went to events hosted by purdue pharma to advertise their drugs including oxycontin. doctors were recognised early on into the development and marketing of the drug itself as being susceptible to being marketed a drug and push it for profits of a private corporation. they attended dinners, luxury vacations and whatever else hosted by purdue pharma - with their own internal documents showing that these dinners would lead to a massive increase in a doctors inclination to prescribe oxycontin. this is nepotism, doctors are very much in bed with the pharmaceutical companies that are taking people for a ride. its not like there are not strong precedent cases that should lead doctors to be at least somewhat wary of heavily marketed claims by pharmaceutical companies (see: thalidomide)
Whether it is in 'bad faith' isnt the correct question to ask (exceptionally difficult to prove), rather being whether the conduct was negligent, which in all examples listed points to yes. purdue pharma is getting rightfully sued for their actions - but the doctors and nurses who attended these events, were super enthused to prescribe oxycontin and enable these kinds of industry practices should be taken to task as well. overprescription of antibiotics has been a lazy cope from doctors for decades. my last point in brackets (which you seem to take the most umbrage with) was pretty clearly conjecture, but doctors / nurses are only one stage removed from the chain of pharmaceutical company (who do definitely have a profit motive in the population being less healthy) to consumer - and are once again heavily linked to them.
none of this is even a rebuttal to the argument that doctors and nurses should not be called heroes, (to be fair it wasnt particulaly salient point to my own post). but for arguments sake what do you consider a 'pretty penny'? best source i know of for salaries in america seems to show median registered nurse salary at 75k/annum. Doctors make far more. debt is a lot harder to quantify given how widely it fluctuates based on scholarship / school / privilege but is a fair enough point that should be considered. however, although not necessarily living in gilded mansions, these people dont have to scrounge in the gutters for money like the many who were in low paying, low security jobs rendered inoperable by covid that they are unlikely to receive them back any time soon, if at all. these people are the ones truly on the 'frontlines' of this pandemic - they are shouldering the majority burden of the economic downturn and the cases / deaths but i am not seeing anyone call them 'heroes'.
Doctors should be wary of heavily marketed claims by pharmaceutical companies... but then what? Pharm has a stranglehold on medicinal science and the lobby industry that protects it from government intervention. Doctors, who rely on constantly updated scientific knowledge, absolutely require the information that Pharm has to give them in the form that Pharm chooses.
I've known doctors who were uncomfortable with resort conferences and those who believed that these affairs "couldn't adversely influence them" (although that's clearly not true, hopefully you can recognize the attitude). Should anything that could be construed as nepotism be forbidden by the government? Almost certainly. But the power to change that is also squarely in Pharm's hands, and I don't see how whinging about frontline healthcare workers addresses that. It's impossible to practice medicine without involvement from pharmaceuticals and insurance companies. Alternative medicine is not an alternative.
The evidence you've linked shows that Oxy was marketed to doctors as being safe and less addictive, which is also what a randomized double-blind test at the time showed. I haven't even found much evidence that Purdue didn't think Oxy was safer, although I don't think that absolves them of any wrongdoing.
It was actually part of my job to report doctors who received kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies (among other forms of medical nepotism), but this literally never happened on my watch. It has happened, but it's abnormal.
As I said before, doctors AND insurance are incentivized to keep people healthy (the first by oath, the second by money). I cannot for the life of me think of a single example of Pharm having any effect on "making people unhealthy for profit". Clearly your problem with them is that they can just sell product to healthy people anyway when they shouldn't be.
I wouldn't call that a pretty penny in America. The average salary in the US is 50k, a completely pitiful amount of money given US spending power. This baseline has been heavily used to show the inadequacy in salary growth over time vs inflation. 50k is pitiful, so 75k is not rich. My best friend is a teacher and he makes 75k. That's not a profession known for its adequate salaries. Purdue's Oxy salesmen got 75k on average just in bonuses and that was in 1996.
Speaking of nurses, you've talked a great deal about nurses overprescribing medicine, and that's only true if we're talking about nurse practitioners. There are 20 rns to every np and they cannot prescribe medication. NPs also make closer to (and sometimes over) 100k. It's worth noting that NPs are also probably the most notorious overprescribers as Pharm salesmen specifically target them due to their relative lack of education (it's not as if an NP is more prone to corruption than anyone else). They are however also frontline healthcare workers and we'll get to the danger element of that later.
Residential doctors, the core frontline workforce, make 60k a year. They work 80 hours a week. They do this for 3-7 years out of medical school. A Seattle residential doctor can be making less than minimum wage when you do the math. Nurses are expected to work only 40 hours a week, but those limits were lifted with covid. I don't have data regarding the average nurse shift right now but it's easy to find people working multiple overtime shifts a week. I can't even imagine being abused the way the system abuses Residents and that was before there was a major risk factor. It's the massive amount of overwork in the hospital system that leads to what you call "lazy prescribing", not an actual poor work ethic. I could not imagine having the work ethic these people require.
That's a huge concern, but what exactly makes those people 'heroes'? When people are calling frontline healthcare workers heroes, that word isn't being used interchangeably with 'victim'. Healthcare workers are actively fighting the pandemic (if not by interacting with covid patients, then by addressing hospital overworkload, possibly the biggest danger that covid presents). Now as of June, 600 healthcare workers had died of covid. It's harder to tell how many healthcare workers (of which there are over 18 million) would be frontline. A lot of the well-paid paid doctors, especially those with their own practices, are only doing zoom consultations, so if you don't think those people are heroes, that's fine (I still wouldn't lay the sins of pharm and insurance on their shoulders). Going by the stats I had access to, and those may be outdated now, I would have said about 25% of healthcare workers were essential. That would put us at about 26 deaths per 100k workers. That puts it within the realm of the most dangerous jobs in America (edit: I had some shaky math and I fixed some figures. I'm running off of memory and conjecture, we really won't know until these numbers get compiled after this year, but even a conservative estimate makes this a relatively very dangerous profession right now). Mind you, it used to be one of the safest. Perhaps these statistics are not impressive to you, but danger to police doesn't even crack the top 20 and conservatives think that's worth shooting unarmed black people over. So let's see... fighting the pandemic, 60k a year, 80 hours a week (maybe more), high personal danger, all this when they could be getting pandemic assistance instead? Some call them heroes because they feel expendable.
While there are massive problems with the healthcare industry, it feels like criticizing the current support for frontline workers could only possibly serve to delegitamize the dangers of the covid crisis. As I touched on, perhaps the biggest danger of covid is that hospitals are overworked, so that if your life is threatened by something over than covid you may be unable to receive proper care. We desperately need frontline healthcare workers to go through this hell, and that's a major infrastructure problem that I haven't seen my government addressing in a long-term capacity (the military set up a free hospital near Seattle, so that's cool, but not meant to be long-term pandemic relief).
I'm absolutely in favor of villainizing Big Pharm and insurance as well as many hospital administrations. And there's much that doctors and nurses can be criticized on if we want the best health system possible. But even as I'm as much a cynic as anyone on smogon, I can think of few professions less morally tainted by capitalism. It's such a shitty job and it eventually pays out, but you absolutely have to believe that what you're doing is for the greater good or you'd just break.
Last edited:
"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored."
- Dawkins
Last edited:
not to sidetrack riveting intellectual discourse:
That Potion Seller video isn’t actually funny.
That Potion Seller video isn’t actually funny.
'firebot being shut down was a bitch-ass move' is not a hot take, it's a correct one
I don’t know man, have you seen the number of likes and loves on tennisace’s post. Seems like people want to see firebot burn.
my hot take is that posting has become a lost art. the sheer volume of memes and youtubes combined with the desire for precious luvdiscs are too alluring; high effort posts designed to make u feel real emotions (fear, anger) have fallen out of vogue. it makes me sad to see whole threads where not a single Post has been drafted, planned, quality-controlled by the Posting Council, and grammar-checked twice. i look around the forums and only see a few true posting devotees staying true to the artform
btw pun was intended.
Smogoff is an ass name
why is it called appeal if they never accept it
