The political discussion in this thread is fascinating. There are people advancing intelligent arguments about how the presidents podium remarks were flippant but basically on topic and that he wasn't telling people to actually drink bleach. While true, in my eyes it is obvious that he conflated sterilizing a surface with killing infection in a human and then started riffing on it.
It is incredibly strange and scary to me that not everyone is on the same page here. If you want to be generous you could say that the president was fatigued and had a 'brain fart' conflating the two. But this wasn't an issue with being articulate or not, or off the cuff or not, or how prescriptive he was. The man clearly thought that disinfecting surfaces relates to treating people. I find it terrifying that our leader could make such a mistake, especially at this stage of the pandemic.
> I find it terrifying that our leader could make such a mistake, especially at this stage of the pandemic.
As an european citizen, I find it terrifying that the leader who is responsible for preserving NATO, and thus is the guardian of the Free World, shows such a poor lack of judgement.
The fascinating thing for me, reading this thread, is how smart people are tripping over themselves to justify obvious nonsense. It’s really amazing to watch this in real time.
After all the effort they put in, making themselves look like shills trying conjure up post-hoc justifications for his idiocy and he just comes out and throws them all under the bus by claiming he was being "Sarcastic". Unreal.
Easily the worst U.S. president in history. I mean, say what you like about James Buchanan but I’m pretty certain he never suggested anyone INJECT THEMSELVES WITH DISINFECTANT!
I dont think he suggested people inject themselves with disinfectant. That summary is what allows people to say that headlines are blown out of proportion and allows glossing over the real and only slightly more nuanced issue.
The man showcased profound misunderstanding, but he didn't prescribe lysol injections.
He absolutely is on record suggesting that injecting disinfectant would be a promising area of research, no summary required:
“I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute! And is there a way we can do something by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs... so it’d be interesting to check that.”
How are you going to check that injecting disinfectant into people won’t work against COVID-19 without injecting disinfectant into people?
He didn’t prescribe Lysol injections because he’s not a medical doctor and therefore not allowed to prescribe anything to anyone.
Though the trials of lysol injections would not start in humans, they also would not start in mice, or in yeast, or at all. It is absurd to suggest anyone look into injecting any surface disinfectants into a living creature, let alone a human, let alone during a pandemic, let alone at the White House podium on a day the US had a 9/11's worth of deaths due to the virus in a single 24-hour time period.
Almost the entire briefing was about UV light killing viruses. Ultraviolet light is classified as a non-chemical disinfectant, and Trump was asking if we can bring it into the body. In his comment he said "The whole concept of the light that kills under one minute, thats pretty powerful".
The thought process of "we can disinfect surfaces why not people" is essentially how germ theory and antiseptics were discovered. It's incredibly strange and scary to me how this form of thinking is now pathologized.
Just following up on this thread in case there was any doubt about the consequences of the presidents actions: " NYC Poison Control Calls for Bleach, Lysol Double After Trump Disinfectant Comment" [1]
Mistake or not and sarcasm or not, it's clear what people interpreted his statements as meaning. His words prompted medical officials and Lysol to release statements about not drinking disinfectants and state agencies are reporting people calling in about using it as a potential treatment for Covid-19 [1-3]. Trump has also now back-stepped and says it was a "Prank on Reporters just to see what would happen" [4].
I've also got to admit (at the risk of getting caught up in all of these political posts) that I find it strange that the parent article is on the front page. When I read the title (note: I didn't know about the Trump press conference at the time and had to look it up after seeing the comments in this thread) I actual thought to myself: "that sounds like a quack cure, you can't disinfect blood". Interestingly there does seem to be some effectiveness to the therapy, although for different reasons than disinfection.
Now that I know the political connection, however, what is upsetting to me is that the reason this post appears to be on the front page isn't because of some genuine evidence based interest in this therapy option, but instead to cover for the president's strange assertions about sterilizing blood. This includes quotes such as using "tremendous ultraviolet" or "just very powerful light" inside the body to kill the virus. It's the selective focus on the this one section of a speech that verbatim included advocacy for taking disinfectants internally (again, regardless of intention that's how people read it).
Research doesn't mean pulling out the one article that supports what you want to believe. It means putting in the time and effort to understand the ensemble of views on a subject and it's pretty clear that this UV therapy, although interesting, is some far out on left field technique. Even though it has some some efficacy, just as stuff like acupuncture and chiropractic therapy is evidence based, it's use for something like Covid-19 seems questionable.
Ok, it turns out that my skeptic alarm wasn't wrong on this. It looks like there's a whole cottage industry of people who are peddling non-FDA-approved UV blood irradiation therapy and ozone therapy as a cure-all for everything from depression to AIDS. It goes by the name "BioPhotonic Therapy" if you do some googling. There's probably a good reason why nobody besides "alternative medicine" providers practice this stuff [1].
I appreciate your analysis, but "the reason this post appears to be on the front page" is not necessarily to "cover for the president's strange assertions about sterilizing blood". It has sparked some nuanced discussion about the article – for example about the oxidative stress being the main driver – that slowly floats to the top and can clarify other discussions elsewhere.
In that way it's good that submissions only contain the article URLs, as the merit of the article is discussed, not the submission.
You could argue that, but in that case my inclination would be that you are arguing in bad faith or we live in different realities. There was nothing about that speech which suggested a didactic presentation to me. Like i said in the parent, it seems very obvious that at the moment of speaking he was unable to differentiate between disinfecting surfaces and anti-viral therapy. Something that any adult of middling education should be able to do.
"Firstly UBI is clearly an example of the well-known phenomenon called “hormesis” or “biphasic dose response’."
They're saying that the benefits are not due to any germicidal effects, but in response to the oxidative stress it imposes, which is generally considered to be detrimental at higher levels.
To put it perhaps over-simply, it exercises the blood.
I recently read that COVID-19 counts decline after near infrared irradiation of body tissue. The authors thought that this is due to the resulting nitric oxide increase in the blood. Alas, I can’t find the paper right now.
I recall hearing that red light therapy (shining red lights on the target area) has been used to treat restless leg syndrome. I wonder how much untapped potential light therapy has because it's a lot more fringe.
Indeed, red light therapy is very versatile. It increases the rate of stem cell maturation, helps cell to de-stress (by pushing out nitric oxide), increases energy production (by stimulating cytochrome-c-oxidase), and on top of that has systemic effects, too - the nitric oxide kills some pathogens and vasodilates (lowering high blood pressure), and, depending on where you shine the light, e.g. hormone production is increased. Those are all subtle improvements, but they add up.
IIRC, your eyes actually irradiate a significant chunk of your blood per minute. One of the trade-offs of wearing sunglasses is that you cut off this process.
Unclear how large of an effect is has, probably less than removing blood and irradiating it, since that process doesn’t have to balance against eye damage.
Whoa, never thought of that. If you look at how much blood needs to be treated in the paper it's only 3.5ml per kg. So most likely enough blood is being exposed on a daily basis.
However I think the major difference is going to be the intensity of the dose. Cells get through the retina and sclera pretty quickly, less then a second, and UV from sunlight isn't actually that intense on the ground (3mW/cm^2 [0]). Dosing in the paper ranges from .1W/cm^ to 200W/cm^2 for anywhere from 10 seconds to 30 minutes. In the minimum case this is ~5 orders of magnitude more UV.
On a side note, I really dislike the default layout of NIH reports. I always have to pick the classic or PDF to be able to read them.
The lens in your eye is also pretty opaque to UV light, which is why you can't see UV light at all. There probably is some effect, but it will be very minor.
That makes me thing we could do some interesting surgery to boost this effect: everyone gets a glass window grafted to their forearm or something, with capillaries squished up against it.
No. More likely it's related to the massive problem of vitamin D deficiency across the world.
"Vitamin D deficiency is worldwide a prevalent health problem and has health impacts on about one billion people. Deficiency or insuffciency of vitamin D is common in the US population, mainly because of inadequate dietary intake, sedentary lifestyles, and reduced sun exposure"
To expand on SamBam's response: how this works, if in fact it does, it's not by directly killing pathogens in the blood. FTFA, less than 10% of the blood by volume needs to be irradiated for effectiveness.
...also, in case anyone is wondering, it doesn't ONLY kill the bacteria. It also destroys a huge amount of other things floating in our blood stream that we need to live.
The blood isn't just red blood cells and water. It's filled with proteins, other types of cells, antibodies, and myriad of things - many of which we don't even understand yet.
My guess is this is on the top page after the President of the US recently suggested shinning UV inside people’s bodies or injecting disinfectant be looked into as a coronavirus treatment.
“ It was not uncommon in the early twentieth century to treat pneumonia with x-rays. A review showed low doses from kilovoltage x-rays reduced pneumonia mortality from roughly 30 percent to 10 percent on average.”
Ah, but as pointed out else-thread, it's not killing the bacteria. From the Conclusions section:
"Many people therefore assume that UBI must act by killing pathogens (bacteria, viruses or other microorganisms) circulating in the bloodstream. However there is no evidence that this is actually the case."
The benefits are then ascribed to homesis, much like how low-dose ionizing radiation actually seems to benefit the immune system.
My intuition as someone who has a UV light on their drinking water is also that the blood would also be too opaque for direct irradiation, anyway.
(You need to filter your water before it hits the UV light, because if it is eg cloudy or has too many minerals in it, the water treatment salesman tells me, the UV light won't actually do anything.)
It does note that "only 5–7% of blood volume needs to be treated with UV to produce the optimum benefit", so you'd be left with enough functional blood.
It's certainly interesting, but it's gonna be misused as a "see Trump was right!" bludgeon today by people who skip the conclusion ("use for drug-resistant bacterial sepsis").
> It does note that "only 5–7% of blood volume needs to be treated with UV to produce the optimum benefit", so you'd be left with enough functional blood.
The context leading up to that phrase puts the treatment in a different light (forgive the pun): "However the use of UBI (Ultraviolet blood irradiation) to treat septicemia cannot be solely due to UV-mediated killing of bacteria in the blood-stream, ...".
And UBI of course needs a machine hooked up to your arteries. It's not shining light in your body.
I've actually received a version of whole blood UV treatment about 10 years ago. For whatever reason I ended up feeling euphoric, memorably so, one of the best days of my life. It may have something to do with the fact that I was given oxygen after I started to faint after I saw the blood being withdrawn.
I collected a lot of papers about this modality and related ones. I can share them if anyone would like. I will not be able to comment on them and I am not a medical professional. Perhaps this was simply the placebo that appealed to me.
But the reason I sought out this treatment is that it is practiced by a doctor who was recommended to me by an MD PhD neurologist at Mayo Clinic. That doctor now does more with ozone gas than he does with ultraviolet blood irradiation. he considers it to be part of a class of "oxidative therapies" including very high doses of vitamin C.
Similar to this tech that uses the nasal cavity to irradiate blood at a beneficial wavelength.
"The nasal cavity is saturated with blood capillaries and five major arteries connect directly to the circulatory system – making it the perfect location for non-invasive systemic photobiomodulation.
Vielight systemic photobiomodulation technology is hypothesized to boost the immune system and increase blood oxygenation levels."
From the article, which I found relevant wrt. COVID:
> These observations led to application of UBI in patients suffering from pneumonia. In a series of 75 cases in which the diagnoses of pneumonia were confirmed by X-rays, all patients responded well to UBI showing a rapid decrease in temperature, disappearance of cyanosis (often within 3–5 min), cessation of delirium if present, a marked reduction in pulse rate and a rapid resolution of pulmonary consolidation. A shortening of the time of hospitalizations and accelerated convalescence was regularly observed.
Of course I have no idea how this generalizes to the pneumonia you get from coronavirus...
Yeah, clear. Reading your other comment made me realize there's of course the important distinction between viral and bacterial disease to be made, too...
No, the bacterial problem is true. COVID-19 causes massive bacterial infections in the lungs. Think of the green slime you cough out with the common cold, but deep in your lung. It's almost the same virus after all.
The virus itself causes something else in the red bloodcells prohibiting the transport of oxygen, but this is unlikely the major letal problem.
Covid-19 is a coronavirus, the common cold is usually a rhinovirus. They're not 'almost the same virus' as you assert, they're completely different virus families [1].
For starters, coronaviruses are enveloped, and rhinoviruses are naked.
Sure, and that’s why I said “/usually/ a rhinovirus”.
But saying the common cold is “almost the same virus” as coronavirus still isn’t true as a blanket statement: the vast majority of common colds (up to 85% by your stats) are a caused by completely different virus family.
Viruses don't usually do any damage to the body. It's the immune system's response to virus that causes damage. The immune system releases chemicals into the blood stream (inflammation) and the increase of these chemicals in the blood reduces oxygen transport. If left unchecked, these chemicals can cause sepsis, and the lack of oxygen causes organ failure, and that is how a virus becomes lethal. These inflammatory chemicals produced by your immune system are what gets trapped in the lungs as pneumonia, which causes other issues. So controlling inflammation and reducing the viral population is the key to survival.
This sounds too hopeful, and charitable with how the medical industry works. There's a reason Gilead is in the pharmaceutical business and not in the blood irradiation machine business.
How is it we're talking about this and not the concrete steps towards the millions of daily tests needed safely end social isolation?
I've received UVA and UVB phototherapies. To treat GVHD. Works great. Last I checked, no one really knows how or why.
UV is totally worth investigating.
It's totally inappropriate (dangerous) for the POTUS to speculate on TV during a pandemic. Especially while actively thwarting or malignecting actual proven useful treatments and mitigations.
Shame on media (and us) for the ongoing attempts to divine a coherent narrative from the blather of a madman.
It's fairly clear that Trump is looking for a reason, any reason, that it could be okay to re-open quickly, and is indulging in a lot of wishful thinking in pursuit of this. Mass testing and contact tracing is probably the right route, but it's not a route that's likely to be implemented in the next couple of weeks, so it's probably not particularly exciting to him.
There are also those proponents of nebulizing (dilute) peroxide. While I wouldn't try this myself, peroxide modulates lymphocytes and would surely result in a decrease in viral load. Peroxide is not unknown to the body, given the various endogenous peroxidases that catalyze it. Dilution would seem to be critical, though. I have wondered whether it wasn't worth some controlled studies, if they haven't happened already (shrug)
Peroxide is directly virucidal through oxidation of the lipid envelope and RNA degradation. Whether lymphocytes would be activated in lung tissue in vivo is entirely speculative.
Sure. Again, this is where the mechanism matters. There are plenty of things that kill viruses; you have to be able to deliver it in a useful way that doesn't kill the patient.
But peroxide is not just some random thing like bleach. It's generated internally from superoxide dismutase in the normal process of scavenging radicals and is also an immune signalling mechanism. As mentioned, it is reduced by a reaction catalyzed by peroxidase so the body "knows" how to shunt it around safely and reduce it when necessary. It's perfectly safe in appropriate dilution on scrapes, cuts etc. The key is not to overwhelm the antioxidant defenses. Lung tissue is much more delicate, but it's not ridiculous to suggest that a very low concentration might be worth testing.
> In 1801 Johann Wilhelm Ritter, a Polish physicist working at the University of Jena in Germany discovered a form of light beyond the violet end of the spectrum that he called “Chemical Rays” and which later became “Ultraviolet” light
‘However with the development of antibiotics, UBI use declined and it has now been called “the cure that time forgot”.‘
It says antibiotics. Is it me or UBI was used to treat bacterial infections or the OP is desperately correlating this study with the “effectiveness” of testing viruses with UBI? I feel like a lot of partisan users are getting the boot from Reddit and they are channeling out their frustrations here. Guys let’s keep HN pure with tech only posts.
It may be worth looking into further, but the section near the end of this very long article that recommends quack treatment websites really calls into question the quality of the rest of it and the motivations of the authors, if you ask me. E.g.:
Assuming that this works (which I will do for the point of this conversation, not that I believe it):
1. You'd have to create a bunch of hemo-irradiators (which don't currently exist).
2. You'd have to train perfusionists or nurses to use them.
3. You'd have to place large-bore dialysis-style catheters into patients for the purpose of using these devices.
4. You'd have to have 1:1 RN staffing to use these machines (just like we do for continuous veno-venous hemofiltration devices for renal failure patients in the ICU).
Lots of downstream things to think about beyond just whether the concept is feasible.
I assume by “works” you mean in relation to COVID19?
Sars-Cov2 is a respiratory disease. I guess it maybe present in blood, but it doesn’t seem like removing it from blood would help with the respiratory issues it causes.
I can’t see how you would easily get UV light into the lungs. But maybe there’s a way... seems a bit far fetched.
My understanding of the article was that it doesn't need to be a blood-borne disease. The authors point out several times that, while most people would assume this works by directly killing germs (i.e. like sterilizing water with UV), this is not the mechanism. The exact mechanism is still unclear (which is one of the reasons it was never as widely adopted), but it seems more likely to be boosting the immune system.
So there would be no need to shine UV light directly into the lungs.
To expand on the unknown method of action. It could for example be removing other pathogens from the blood that lets the immune system focus on covid-19. Alternatively, random cellular damage could clause a useful immune response. Etc etc.
Medicine has often found treatments that works without any real understanding of why.
Isn't this true of Pasteur and his initial application of vaccines?
While he identified the mechanism of inoculation, my understanding is he theorized that it was due to the attenuated pathogen outcompeting the virulent one for nutrients rather than due to stimulation of the immune system.
I think I got that from a lecture by a science historian once. This idea seems to be glossed in the Wikipedia article on Pasteur here:
>While he identified the mechanism of inoculation, my understanding is he theorized that it was due to the attenuated pathogen outcompeting the virulent one for nutrients rather than due to stimulation of the immune system.
How could it outcompete the actual virus if the actual virus isn't there yet at the time of vaccination?
There are some indications that COVID-19 can already triggers cytokine storms by itself and that's what's killing some patients that seem to get better then crash.
I think the current understanding is that the primary way that it kills is through circulatory system effects, blood clots that cause difficulty getting oxygen from the lungs, as well as strokes and heart attacks and other organ failures.
That's not an understanding, it's an observation and a very preliminary hypothesis for one of the major immediate causes of death. Huge difference.
Because of all the additional attention, it would be unsurprising for doctors to seemingly discover all kinds of previously unexamined phenomenon which have always been present, or to confuse increases in certain phenomenon as peculiar rather than simply reflecting the fact that you have a ton of patients with the same type of illness. For example, in one of the articles about blood clots a doctor is quoted as saying something to the effect of, "we're used to seeing these types of blood clots in the ICU, but only in 1 or 2 patients at a time, never in this number". For the sake of argument, maybe that's just because they've never had an entire ICU full of patients in viral-induced acute respiratory distress, that such blood clots happen to be more prevalent in such cases, and if you examined all such ICU patients over time (COVID, flu, w'ever), you'd see a similar pattern. (Because it's usually the elderly who die from respiratory infections, not alot of attention is paid to mechanisms of death. "Pneumonia" is something of a catch-all term, especially with an older cohort.) Maybe it's typical of anything that can incite such immune reactions--the article hinted that the mechanism may be related to how Ebola works, except with opposite outcomes (clots instead of bleeding out), which suggests the mechanism might be more a reflection of the severity of the distress than anything peculiar to the infectious agent, per se. Maybe younger cohorts are more likely to clot, but before COVID-19 they rarely died or had such severe symptoms, so nobody quantified prevalence. And if so, treating the clots might not significantly reduce fatality rates; or maybe it would, not just for COVID-19 but any similar viral ailment.
The problem is the lungs are an incredible network of tunnels. If you spread out the surface area of your lungs, they would cover a tennis court (something I heard a long time ago, likely not exactly correct but generally right).
You could get UV light to the large bronchi but you couldn't get UV light into all the million little aveoli.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lung, Estimates of the total surface area of lungs vary from 50 to 75 square metres (540 to 810 sq ft);[28][29] roughly the same area as one side of a tennis court. They then offer two references for this.
So you're off by a factor of 2 but are basically correct.
UV light can go through the corners, and walls, if you make it strong enough. It could easily get into the smallest of aveoli. You may not have much of a lung left after that, though.
How about the patient breaths dilute Argon, and then excite it with a magnetic field so it lights up and create UV from inside the lungs? I think Argon is non toxic, and I think we’re only aiming for weak UV exposure.
And also, if you are intubating the person, they are probably pretty close to death. And then on top of that you paralyze them (with a medication, temporarily). So you are stopping their breathing. You have a few seconds in these people to get their lungs connected to mechanical ventilation. From what I've seen, if you don't, the outcomes are very bad.
This may be somewhat different from the typical intubation case, for example prior to surgery. Where its a generally more healthy person who has not been hypoxic for hours or days and is not at the last of their reserves...
Claims about the surface area of fractals are almost always true if generally interpreted. If you went down to the atomic scale you could probably calculate that the surface area of your lungs would cover the Earth. :)
The fractal structure of the lung ends with relatively smooth tissue after a finite amount of branching. So the usual arguments about fractals notwithstanding, there actually is a finite area to discuss that makes sense.
Sure, but if you look closer you will see that all of the cells have holes for stuff to go in and out, and the proteins sticking up from the surface have shapes, and so on. That's why I said "the atomic scale" not "the microscopic scale."
Any claim about surface area that relies on the examination at the atomic scale is no longer due to the fractal nature of the lung's branches. Such claims would be equality true (or false) of non-fractal organs.
That assumes the fractal nature continues at all scales, which won't hold here I suspect (i.e. it's not enough for the structure to exist on those scales, the scaling properties have to continue for the geometry to be "fractal")
If you blast a bright enough light it has the potential to penetrate extremely deeply. It would be a balancing act of maximizing luminosity while minimizing human tissue damage.
> Sars-Cov2 is a respiratory disease. I guess it maybe present in blood, but it doesn’t seem like removing it from blood would help with the respiratory issues it causes.
Biological systems are almost unimaginably complex. Unintuitive effects are not uncommon.
Presumably it depends on the virus, but tissues of the respiratory tract, from the nose/mouth all the way down to the lungs, have many of the same receptors. Typically a cold or flu virus infects the surface tissues in your nasal passages and then replicates its way down into your lungs, assuming it cares to reach that far.
At least, that's how someone who researched rhinoviruses once explained it to me many years ago, but probably using more accurate terminology.
Also, AFAIU, these viruses have also evolved other exploits. It's no coincidence that cold viruses induce sneezing and other sinus irritations; the viral fragments themselves have evolved to trigger this behavior, which is why it can happen after a live infection is gone--your tissues are still shedding viral fragments.
Re: staffing - I agree that there is a difference between plasmapheresis (which is reasonable to monitor a few people at once) and ICU care (which, at least at my institution, we generally rely on 1:1 staffing for devices that circulate blood outside of the body).
Re: catheters - agreed that they are routinely placed, but they're morbid and we don't do it unless necessary. Generally we use a different type of catheter for recirculation vs a standard central line, so this probably can't be piggy-backed on what is already going to be placed in the ICU.
I wonder if a simpler model could be done. When donating plasma your blood is cycled through some machine that removes the plasma and then your red blood cells are pumped back into your body. It's about the same as donating blood as far as pain/invasiveness. While it would take some doing, it seems pumping your blood around a UV light source has GOT to be simpler than removing the plasma. Yes, you still have to make the machine, but intuitively it doesn't seem super complicated.
Make the machine? Take an ordinary plasma donation machine, insert a UV irradiation gizmo into the blood path somewhere. Obviously not ideal but it could be built much faster.
They suggest treating only 5-7% of the blood, which is 250 - 350 ml. It's still going to be an elaborate procedure, but a lot less so than hemodialysis, which moves much larger volumes of blood. You wouldn't even need a large-bore catheter, and keeping the blood pressure stable would be far less of a concern, so you probably don't have to do it 1:1.
Couldn't you treat the blood within the body? Find a high flow, easily accessibly blood vessel and inject a thin fiber optic cable connected to a uv laser?
That is maybe technically true, but completely misses the context. The only reason this link from 2018 was submitted today and the only reason it's voted up to the top of the front page of HN is because the president of the United States went on camera yesterday claiming that injecting bleach and disinfectants and using UV light was a promising path to a covid treatment.
So now we have to argue about whether or not a 70-year-old quack treatment from soviet Russia is effective against this current pandemic instead of building consensus on test deployment or lockdown exit protocols. It's the same thing that happened with chloroquines last month. It's tiresome, and harmful.
Oh, yeah, I mean, that's definitely why this is here, but it's extremely doubtful that it's what Trump was promoting; he was probably just confused about sterilisation vs treatment of humans, and grasping at straws.
He didn't say using light or disinfectants were "promising". Please don't make me defend Trump, because I hate him, but I hate misinformation more. He suggested it might be possible, but clearly he was off script and had no idea what he was talking about and just making conversation, something that a president should not do. He shouldn't have said anything, but he didn't say it was "promising".
"So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too. It sounds interesting.
BRYAN: We’ll get to the right folks who could.
TRUMP: Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.
So we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s — that’s pretty powerful."
Technically, you are correct, he didn't say the word "promising". Given that promising has latinate origins, rather than germanic, it's likely not in his vocabulary.
Still hydroxychloroquine ended up killing a bunch of vets, and at least one person credible enough to ingest it directly without medical advice or a prescription.
I applaud your goals of precision, but, stochastic terrorism is real, and the point of communication, especially in such dire circumstances, shouldd not only to be understood, but to make it impossible to be misunderstood.
Clarity and unambiguous language from leaders is literally essential public health.
It's entirely too close for the leader of the free world.
It's also remarkably stupid. Like astoundingly dumb.
To quote Craig Manzin: 'One of the hallmarks of the dangerously stupid is the consistent belief they’ve found great solutions that experts somehow missed.'
The Manzin quote isn't appropriate. The experts themselves have stated they're still investigating the virus and potential solutions. Trump wasn't suggesting they experts missed something.
It is entirely appropriate. One person died from ingesting hydroxychloroquine[1]. Perscriptions for hydroxychloroquine increased 46X. [2] It turns out that taking it killed more people than the control group. [3].
The Maryland Emergency Management Agency received over 100 calls about injecting disinfectant as a potential cure. [4]
You know, it's possible to explore highly experimental therapies for a novel disease without naming them explicitly at the presidential press briefing during a pandemic. Doing so is INCREDIBLY irresponsible, as evidenced above.
I'm seeing this a lot, but it's pretty clear that's exactly what he was saying, just confusingly. Here's a transcript (I couldn't find a more official link, but it definitely matches the video): https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-coronaviru...
Bill Bryan stands up and reports that they've tested a bunch of disinfectant processes in vitro and on surfaces, including bleach. Then Trump immediately begins riffing on that, before the guy sits down, and says, verbatim:
> [...] And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.
Now, no one is going to call that a clear statement. But in context it seems really obvious to me that he's talking about injecting exactly the list of disinfectants that he's referring to.
I think "promising" sounds like a very apt paraphrase of what he said. I did indeed watch the press conference, and I didn't present it as a literal quote. Do we need to dig in and tear out the quote word by word now before we're even allowed to refute it? Is that really a good use of our collective time?
I'm not. I have a longstanding account, but had a... somewhat suspicious event on other social media that I think might have been inspired by comments here. My account has never been very private and there's a lot of potentially harvestable information there. So I'm experimenting with keeping my comments in more controversial topics isolated.
I'll assume no negative intent and that English is not your first language, because there's a big difference between calling something "promising" versus "interesting to look at".
I am a native English speaker and would agree that "interesting to look at" is perhaps a little weaker than "promising." Maybe 20% weaker, as if there's a scale.
However, the transcript from the NY Times and BBC--not to mention my comment above--also has him saying "a great idea to look at" in the same response, which I do think is equivalent to 'promising'.
This is an inevitable consequence of telling others to be careful with their words.
How, exactly? In context, a treatment being "interesting to look at" is interesting because you think it might work. Isn't that what "promising" means in the same context? You seem to be hiding behind the presidents imprecision here. I genuinely don't understand how someone could look at the video of that press conference and think the president was not celebrating the idea of possibly finding a cure by injecting disinfectants into people's bodies.
> Do we need to dig in and tear out the quote word by word now before we're even allowed to refute it?
Yes, this is a forum consisting largely of founder-engineers and words mean things. Not all bugs are spiders, not all disinfectants are bleach. Claiming the president suggested we inject bleach is disinformation, and it weakens the credibility of the rest of your argument.
Does the president bear any responsibility whatsoever for his own words, or should we treat them as oracular emanations of the divine, to be explored for meaning like the entrails of a sacrificial beast or the residues at the bottom of a coffee cup?
What you are saying is disinformation. Nobody has suggested injecting bleach. Bleach is a disinfectant, not all disinfectants(i.e agents that disinfectant) are bleach. It was poorly worded enough without you spinning it, the spin only strengthens his base of people who don't trust the media because of sophistry like this.
Is there some other disinfectant that we could be injecting that would not be of roughly equal harm?
Because I don't think injecting hydrogen peroxide, benzalkonium chloride, or isopropyl alcohol is going to have an effect that's any better.
Quibbling over whether or not they meant bleach or some other disinfectant isn't really the point. The point is the President was lending credence to the idea that injecting disinfectant into the human bloodstream might be a good thing to do. Which is absurd, regardless of whether or not he specifically meant bleach, and bleach is a perfectly reasonable stand in.
OK, I went back and checked the transcript. It's true that the president didn't say the word "bleach". It's not true that "nobody" did. Trump was riffing off of a report that had just been given by Bill Bryan, listing out some anticeptic testing in an in vitro context.
Bleach was, in fact, the first disinfectant in his list. Then Trump stands up and says we should investigate injecting those into the body.
I really don't think this it's applying a whole lot of spin to argue that Trump was saying we should inject the stuff the guy he was referring to had listed.
It’s extremely doubtful that this obscure anti-bacterial technique is what he was talking about; he was probably just confused by reporting on UV room sterilisation, which is a real, effective, practice, but not suitable for humans unless you’re not fussy about whether they survive.
> “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but we’re going to test it?” he added, turning to Mr. Bryan, who had returned to his seat. “And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.”
FTA. He was very explicitly talking about doing it inside human bodies.
Yes:"The Healight technology employs proprietary methods of administering intermittent ultraviolet (UV) A light via a novel endotracheal medical device."
> I'm not fan of Trump, but the attacks on him over this and hydroxychloroquine are ridiculous.
Even without going into the absurdity of any of his specific claims, he should not be standing at a podium spitballing and speculating about potential treatments that he may or may not have heard about. Kind of the opposite of what is required from a leader during a crisis, and the impacts of doing so can actually be pretty devastating.
> impacts of doing so can actually be pretty devastating.
Source on this? I have heard about the couple that ate the aquarium chemicals, a bit of a stretch unless I missed the part where Trump mentioned aquarium chemicals
You need a source to acknowledge that a President's words have impact and that speaking ignorantly and off the cuff on medical topics can lead to misunderstanding and dangerous decision making by the general public?
There's a reason why Reckitt Benckiser Group quickly issued a statement after Trump's claims, imploring people not to consume "through injection, ingestion or any other route" any of their products.
Yeah, and, in my opinion, the reason why Reckitt Benckiser Group quickly issued a statement after Trump's claims is as much the media as Trump himself. The media had an opportunity to educate people on "proprietary methods of administering intermittent ultraviolet (UV) A light via a novel endotracheal medical device" to which Trump is referring and instead ran stories about Lysol. Would we even be talking about Lysol if they had led with Healight? I won't claim to know the answer to this question because I don't but it is worth considering that the answer is "no".
Edit: just to combat the obvious response, would we even be talking about Lysol if Trump had not made those comments? Obviously, no. Two wrongs don't make a right
Having watched the unedited press conference, there's zero evidence that he was talking about the Healight. If he were, they have had nearly 24 hours to clarify that he was referring to that. It's not the media's role to search out and bolster rational explanations for the President's seemingly irrational claims.
The Healight also offers no explanation for his "injecting disinfectant" claims, which were separate from the UV light claims. The term "disinfectant" among the public is most commonly used to indicate household disinfectant chemicals. So when the President muses about "injecting disinfectant", why would it be the media's role to then go and hunt for explanations that actually make sense from a medical perspective?
I would say that there is "little evidence" that he was talking about Healight because his sentences are barely coherent but it does appear to be that he is referring to "injecting" UV light to "disinfect" the lungs which is what Healight is doing when you get past the exact words that I quoted.
Yes, I believe it is the media's responsibility to be more intelligent than the President in this case, which honestly shouldn't be very hard. Time and time again they are lowering themselves to Trump's level presumably to soak up that sweet sweet ad revenue
You acknowledge that the President speaks in "barely coherent" sentences. And that he's not very intelligent.
That's the real problem, here. That's the real story.
If we view the media's role as nothing more than taking Trump's drivel and turning it into teachable moments or trying to find a positive spin on it, not only does it basically position the media as a PR arm of whomever the current administration is, by doing so it fails in its duty to inform the public about what is actually going on in the White House, and what the President is actually saying.
A key role of the fourth estate is to hold the President to account. That is incompatible with your view that they need to be a booster of the President in the name of "intelligence" or elevation of the dialogue.
Edit: I will also add that I see now that Trump is claiming that his talk yesterday of UV light and injecting disinfectants was "sarcasm".
I don't think you understand my argument. That's fine, I haven't been articulating it very well, let me give it another shot.
> That's the real problem, here. That's the real story.
Is it? Is Donald Trump's incorrect use of the word disinfectant the most important thing happening in the world right now?
> If we view the media's role as nothing more than taking Trump's drivel and turning it into teachable moments or trying to find a positive spin on it, not only does it basically position the media as a PR arm of whomever the current administration is, by doing so it fails in its duty to inform the public about what is actually going on in the White House, and what the President is actually saying.
I have a few points here:
1. I don't think that the media needs to put a "positive spin". As I mentioned, the preferable response in my opinion is something along the lines of "Trump is wrong, but here is whats right" and then quickly move on. Instead, they put a negative spin on things, connecting Trump's words to Lysol because it better matched their incentives, which went viral and made this the biggest news story of the week. I'm sure some Trump supporter is going to inject Lysol because that's now what Trump said even though its not really what he said
2. The media IS in many ways a PR arm of whomever the current administration is. The government has a lot of control over what the media says as do many other powerful/wealthy individuals/organizations in this country. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
3. By criticizing Trump so often, the media leads many to believe that #2 is not the truth. But, the vast majority of criticism of the current administration is trivial in nature. Trump incorrectly using the word "disinfectant" is not the most important thing happening in the country this week. Not even close.
4. As a result of #3, the Trump administration has basically free rein to do any of the real evil things that the US government does on a regular basis without fear of scrutiny. The media is too busy talking about "disinfectant" to talk about any real issues. And the general public (edit: Democrats) trusts that the media is holding the Trump administration to a high standard as a result of #3. In terms of "real evil things", I think the media should be investigating the current bailouts and injection of liquidity in financial markets. But, the persons/organizations getting rich off that (at the tax payers expense), are the same powerful persons/organizations that have control over the media (again, see Chomsky).
All in all, I see the focus on this disinfectant as one of a long series of smoke screens to give the appearance of keeping the White House in check. In reality, they are just polluting our brains with all this talk about Lysol. Instead, they should have just said, maybe Trump is talking about this UV light therapy, and then moved on to something more important, instead of creating this whole hullabaloo about Lysol that really is not important in the grand scheme of things.
This is not a new pattern - this has been happening since Trump took office. The media uproar about what dumb things Trump said each week isn't real scrutiny.
Another way to look at it is that Trump intentionally says stupid things often to keep the media pre-occupied with that and distracted from the real things his administration is doing. In other words, he is "controlling the news cycle". I think this is a valid interpretation of the events although I don't give Trump that much credit and I think we should be looking closer at the media because they're going to be relevant much longer than Trump will. But, if this strikes a chord with you at all, consider this question: perhaps the media should not be taking the bait? The sarcasm comment aligns better with this theory. He got what he wanted and can now backtrack on his statements
PS. I realize that the argument in this comment is far from my argument in previous comments. It took some time for more to develop my thoughts. I'll be more careful next time. I would apologize for wasting time but I think I already paid the price in terms of downvotes
PPS. Summarizing my argument one last time before I put a lid on this: it seems to me that this whole disinfectant debacle is a big waste of time and the media could be doing better by educating people on treatment options to keep them optimistic or investigating real bad shit that the Trump administration is doing to make this country a better place. Thanks for your time, I definitely learned a lot from this argument and appreciate your participation even if we don't see eye to eye on this issue.
The statement we are supposed to find the strongest plausible interpretation of is this one
So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous - whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light and I think you said that hasn't been checked but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you're going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it'd be interesting to check that'
I don't think anybody can plausibly claim this incoherent stream of verbiage is an attempt to raise ultraviolet irradiation of blood as a possibility, particularly not in the context of a discussion which instead focused on how sunlight weakens the virus and isopryl alcohol kills it within one minute. And especially not now the person who made that statement has walked it back and said it was 'sarcastic'
HN guidelines don't require HNers to abandon their critical faculties.
It's hard to defend Trump's words on this topic. He's not a medical expert and doesn't sound like one.
But, in my opinion, it would benefit people more if the media tried to educate instead of "hurr durr he wants you to inject Lysol". Sadly I am optimistic in thinking the media exists to educate rather than accumulate ad views...
We need to be pursuing all treatment options right now, even if the gut feeling is that they won't work. We're in a situation that we have never been in before (i.e. pandemic with modern medicine), it is not far-fetched to believe the solution is something that we never expected to work.
Perhaps you can elaborate on what you see as "the consequences" to help me understand your point of view? Personally, I didn't think that he was suggesting to inject Lysol until I read that in the main stream media. And when I looked into it myself, I found Healight, and I think this is something the media could have pointed me instead of their knee-jerk Lysol reaction
I explicitly agreed with your point a few posts ago:
> It's hard to defend Trump's words on this topic. He's not a medical expert and doesn't sound like one.
My point is, the media is fighting stupidity with stupidity with this whole Lysol thing. They could have used this as an opportunity to say, we know Trump sounds dumb, but let us teach you about what he is actually referring to
Sorry I'm a different guy. Should have kept out of it I suppose.
But yeah, its a game now, pointing out how (nearly) everything the guy says is dumb. Its not a game we should be playing; he should be sticking to broad goals and comforting the public. Like, you know, a leader. Instead of a regular schmuck way out of his depth who likes to hear himself talk.
No worries! I agree with mostly everything you have written. I just wish that the media used these opportunities to educate people on what Trump was actually talking about instead of getting obsessed with the specific words (namely "disinfectant" and "inject") that he used to describe it
It seems that given effectiveness of UV treatment on surfaces, he extrapolated its potential to use within the body. Just because he landed on a solution that on paper sounds like an anti-bacterial cure from the 40s and 50s doesn't mean that is the same treatment he was suggesting.
I think rsynnott is saying it's pure coincidence that what he suggested sounds like UBI and it's likely that UBI is a term Trump has never heard before.
Hence the need to find around something that when appropriately distorted by biased media will make some of Trump's statements (exposing Covid-19 patients to UV) appear more legit to the uninformed, so that the whole "inject disinfectants" thing can be conveniently buried.
The paper is old, let's see how many news sources will magically remember about it to turn it into a PR stunt.
Given that one only needs to recirculate 5-7% of the blood and expose it to UV C, could we not shrink this age-old device into something portable? I don't know anything about phlebotomy or the implications of liquid pressure in the body, but it seems like if you can administer a syringe you can draw blood, UV it, and put it back in as well.
Is there a reason everyone presumes in-situ/ closed-loop treatment is required, other than that is what the paper discussed? It seems like an artificial constraint, or maybe just the convenient method to use for research.
Why not: Remove whole blood, treat whole blood (possibly in bulk with other patients' bags of blood), replace whole blood.
It would address most of what you list, and otherwise simplify things, especially if only a small % of blood needs to be treated.
The blood is typically not where the virus or bacteria are concentrated.
Also, "treating" the blood would also destroy red and white blood cells which we need to survive. ...not to mention the 10^6 other proteins, antibodies, and many unknown structures in the blood. ...things we'd be breaking that we don't even know what they do yet.
Yes. When you remove the blood from the body and expose it to UV, you're exposing the pathogens in the blood directly to UV. When the blood is still inside the body, UV can't reach it, it's blocked by the skin. Also, that causes sunburns.
I can't help thinking that this may have been the subject of the rambling, inarticulate speech recently given by POTUS? When I hear these crazy headlines, I think that he didn't come up with this stuff on his own, so did he hear this from a sane advisor or some kook on his staff? After he went to the mat for hydroxychloroquine, it's pretty natural for everyone to be skeptical, though.
> I can't help thinking that this may have been the subject of the rambling, inarticulate speech recently given by POTUS?
Given his mention of disinfectants at the same time, it's far more likely they just told him how they disinfect surfaces like doorknobs and countertops and he ran with it.
Either way, he should know better to not speak about something that he is not an expert in. His job right now is to keep society calm and rational, and I feel he is doing the exact opposite.
I imagine most of us have been in technical meetings where people who have no idea about the real problem are speaking as if they are the expert. Its incredibly unproductive, and only slows down making real progress and and getting to a real resolution.
Even if he was right, which he is not, he should let his experts speak about these matters and get out of the way.
Our great leader has been calling himself an “expert” in various fields for years now, so I’m not sure why you’re surprised by how he’s doing the same thing now...
He has also been culling any form of dissent from his government, so it’s now essentially an echo chamber.
What seems like a paradox to me is how he can be so smart at playing crowds, working the political system, etc. He beat a Clinton in a race for president - that's no mean feat.
But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side. I don't think there's any other way to square that.
One of the women from Shark Tank described him as the single best salesperson she has ever seen. She said he could hone in on a person's weakness and use that to make a sale and it worked.
That's basically what he did during the election. He honed in on the single worst characteristic about the other candidates, "Low Energy Jeb", "Lyin' Ted", "Crooked Hillary", etc. And it worked.
The problem is that he's a salesman, he's not an intellectual. So a lot of the stuff he says is off the cuff and colloquial which is dangerous and unpresidential. He succeeded in business by bullying his opponents and using his power against them by squeezing them. But it's not something that works in politics, because his opponents are generally much smarter than he is.
> He succeeded in business by bullying his opponents and using his power against them by squeezing them
That was my impression before the election, when I didn't pay any attention. I thought he was a successful bully, which wouldn't necessarily be the worst combination for a President.
After learning about his actual business history (Thanks, Trump Inc.! podcast) I think the 'succeeded' part is pretty arguable. He was born unbelievably wealthy, had a string of some unbelievable business failures, and was subsequently bailed out by some known (Deutsche Bank) as well as unknown shady actors and practices.
Now that I understand his business history, I wouldn't consider him to have succeeded in business. He could have been vastly more wealthy today by doing nothing other than invest in index funds, which to me counts as largely unsuccessful.
No that's easily derivable from public information about his businesses and the performance of index funds over time. The most knowing how much he spent could tell us is whether he would have been able to spend more or less than he did.
- Case A: Donald Trump runs his companies starting at year X and meanwhile leads a lavish lifestyle, ending up with N1 dollars.
- Case B: Donald Trump puts all his money in index funds and spends nothing, ending up with N2 dollars.
As far as I can tell, you are saying N2 > N1, therefore he would have been better off investing in index funds. But you are comparing apples to oranges if you have different spending habits between the cases. It could be that running his private plane or plating things in gold or whatever would have drained his index fund investment totally.
Investing the bulk of your money in index funds during the great market run-up following the second World War and having the guts to ride out the storm when the market tanks periodically, I think is not trivial. There was a secretary in NYC who did that and died with an 11M fortune. She was clearly very successful.
I think Trump has been successful. Many people born into wealth lose it or at least don't grow it. So he deserves some kudos here.
I think people don't like to give him credit for anything, but if you "only" grow your fortune at the rate of the market, then you're really tracking the average success of American business. That's by definition better than 50% of public companies and in the top few percent of individuals. That's successful in my books.
This post is attracting quite a bit of negative attention, but I stand by my assessment as fair. If you disagree, maybe you want to point out how it's not fair? I think people just hate Trump (which I do as well, but I can separate concerns.)
If he manages to get a second term (which seems not inconceivable) you'll have to redefine what you mean by 'not something that works in politics'.
People who can't stand Trump have taken the bait. Deplorable is not a popular word anymore but the reaction to the President's inconsequential meandering does, happily for some, imply that Trump fans are gullible, poor and idiotic.
to be a good salesman requires high levels of empathy (ego, in the competitive sense, is the other requisite characteristic). perhaps relatedly, this seems to be true of sociopaths as well.
note that empathy here refers to the facet that let's you tease out how people are feeling and what's causing those feelings (to your point), not the one that makes you genuinely care for other people.
with that said, it's unlikely that the election tipping point was honing in on the biggest weakness of an opponent. that's incidental to his real strength in this area, which is honing in on the central fear of--let's not beat around the bush--large blocks of white people.
this is how you make sense of seemingly disparate issues like immigration, nationalism, tax breaks for the wealthy, and anti-abortionism that the trump campaign championed (even if he doesn't personally care about immigration or abortion policy, for example).
trump won by using his sales-honed empathy to zero in on this central fear and then beat that drum relentlessly to victory. clinton, on the other hand, empathized in the other sense of the word (to some extent), but failed at understanding the basic motivations of the populace.
>He succeeded in business by bullying his opponents and using his power against them by squeezing them. But it's not something that works in politics, because his opponents are generally much smarter than he is.
This depends on what you mean by "works in politics"? He won the presidency after all, and then went on to beat a resistant republican party into submission. He lowered taxes on the rich, packed the supreme court, and is in the process of handing out 6 trillion dollars to wall street. His approval ratings have been constant through impeachment and pandemic [1] and he still has a good shot at reelection.
Assuming you aren't a supporter, I think there is a significant risk in underestimating his political successes. We shall see if Biden and the DNC can "outsmart" him in 2020.
I'm certain Trump will beat Biden. That's all on the DNC in being stupid enough to back Biden, given his questionable health and advanced age.
All they had to do, arguably, is advance a viable candidate with no glaring weaknesses, and they utterly failed. It's going to be another 4 years of Trump.
You think Trump is a viable candidate with no glaring weaknesses? The five year racist lie and conspiracy theory of birtherism he peddled before he was even a candidate? The Trump University scam before he was a candidate? The Trump Foundation fraud and scam, before he was a candidate, to which he had to admit wrongdoing in an out of court settlement with NY state, pay a fine, and accept a ten year ban on running charities? He can't even run a non-profit without incompetency and fraud, and you think this is not a glaring weakness, and can still run a country? And this doesn't at all adequately cover the pussy grabbing, and over twenty times credibly accused of sexual assault.
Some people love these things about him. And some people don't care. That's why he's president. Not because he has no glaring weaknesses. A turnip has no glaring weaknesses compared to Trump.
He is a D-minus tabloid trash celebrity clown act. Always has been. Always will be. For three years as president, as candidate, before he was in politics, and while he flipped multiple times between being a registered Democrat and Republican, when he wasn't in politics at all. He was always a clown act. He is the most exquisite representative for both his supporters and the people who are non-participants, and in some hilariously perverse sense he's evidence that democracy does work still in America. He properly implicates American culture. Even the fact he lost the popular vote yet still is president, is representative of American culture where you can be a dipshit loser and a bad person, but still make lots of money and be famous, and that's what makes you a winner.
This thread is exactly why Trump is so dangerous to the democratic party. Look at the level of vehenemence and aggression in your post directed at a potential ally.
> So a lot of the stuff he says is off the cuff and colloquial which is dangerous and unpresidential.
Is there actually a codified set of instructions on what is "presidential" and what is not? Otherwise we descend into the domain of things being verboten and the retort of "well it's common sense" and so forth.
At some point we have to be willing to be intellectually honest about who speaks and acts with respect and integrity and who does not.
E.g. when Trump says there were "very fine people, on both sides" of a white supremacist rally, what should we make of that? Should we quibble over implausible re-interpretations of his words and conclude that maybe he meant something other than what's obvious? Should we say hey, okay, maybe Nazism and white supremacist movements deserve another look because, like, everything's relative, man, you know?
When Trump uses racist and sexist dogwhistles (e.g. "a young woman governor") to denigrate to his political opponents, what's the takeaway there? Is that okay? Is that a man worthy of respect, of sitting in the Oval Office?
When Trump suggests that we should inject ourselves with "disinfectant" to cure COVID, am I supposed to conclude that he is so smart I just can't possibly understand the genius behind his words (it's so simple!) or should I throw that on the pile of evidence that he's an ignorant person with no capability and/or inclination for understanding complex issues?
If I thought everything was relative, I'd have to think nothing mattered more than anything else, and the logical next step would be to lay down in my bed and wait for the sweet release of death. We live in a world that is not black and white, but we have to do the best we can to be better people and hold our leaders to high standards. Intellectual honesty is the first step, and it's what the GOP and their more intellectually accomplished adherents lack.
However you want to define presidential, I'm petty sure it excludes Trump. But that's what people wanted. He sold himself as the outside candidate. The drain the swamp anti establishment choice. I think he didn't have much power to really shake things up, but not for lack of trying.
I mean, literally more people wanted Clinton than wanted Trump, per capita.
Not that it actually mattered, given the way the US electoral process works, but the premise that Clinton was overwhelmingly unpopular is an exaggeration. She just wasn't popular enough in the right states.
It's true that a lot of Democrats wanted Bernie Sanders, but I suspect more of them flipped to Hillary Clinton than to Donald Trump.
>> He beat a Clinton in a race for president - that's no mean feat.
>> But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side.
> The second thing is part of the reason he achieved the first thing. His smarts is knowing what sells to his base, and what consolidates them.
> Part of that is saying "dumb" or offensive stuff, with a lining of rhetoric that echoes with their anxieties.
I agree and disagree. I think you're right that his "dumbness" helped, but I don't think it was just about saying offensive stuff. It also meant that he was very willing to push polices that were against the status quo consensus (e.g. tariffs [1]), without hemming and hawing. That can appeal strongly to people who feel that the status quo hurts them.
It's usually smart to play it safe, which means not straying too far from the status quo and only risk the minimum you think is required for victory. To stray, you either have to be really smart (come up with a brilliant bet no one else sees), or really dumb (not realizing there are safer bets to achieve your goal). Trump was the latter.
> To stray, you either have to be really smart (come up with a brilliant bet no one else sees), or really dumb (not realizing there are better bets to achieve your goal). Trump was the latter.
I guess I'm not convinced that it's easy to differentiate the two.
I'm no supporter of the current POTUS, but I think his reality-TV derived smarts are indeed a kind of "smarts", in the same way that con-artists, or even popular show-runners are very smart. For one thing, they know their audience.
Of course it's a disaster in our current situation, but I don't think he won the office through pure idiocy.
That's the "dumbness" explanation of why he recommended disinfectant injection.
I guess I don't buy that it's dumb, in the same way that I don't think Infowars pushing its fake covid19 cures and treatments is dumb, even if it is ethically reprehensible.
There is nothing I would love more than to respond to Trump's antics with an eyeroll and carry on in the pursuit of my own interests until he's turfed out of office. But his asinine tweets or remarks are frequently followed by policy changes with negative real-world consequences for real people, as well as malign behavior by his supporters.
It's not just messaging, it's backed up with force. You just haven't experienced that first-hand yet.
The problem in this case is not necessarily that President Trump is dumb (he may well be), but rather that he is dangerously overconfident in his abilities. He is one of those people who assumes that he knows more than the experts in those areas, and no amount of counter-examples dissuades him from that.
This is a horrible attribute in a president, who constantly has to deal with an array of issues that no one person could ever be expert in.
A laughable comparison. The man who said "The only thing I know is that I know nothing" is a far cry from the man who said "I don't take any responsibility at all".
There are several factors in US politics that led to Trump's election (including foreign involvement), and none of them are "Trump was someone who was qualified to be a capable leader."
Whether it's the anti-intellectualist trend that lurks in some segments of the US population, or the way that the Republican party successfully intertwined themselves into American religious institutions several decades ago to make Republican party loyalty be perceived as an odd form of "cultural-Christian" piety by many who were swept up by the "religious Right" and "moral majority" movements, or the straight-up disinformation campaigns targeted at the most willful audiences....not one factor was tied to Trump being a good people leader or an intelligent strategist. It's more that he was the guy that happened to be there when a confluence of other efforts came to fruition, and he was crazy/manipulable/stupid enough to be useful for the role of "candidate".
>What seems like a paradox to me is how he can be so smart at playing crowds, working the political system, etc. He beat a Clinton in a race for president - that's no mean feat.
But then he does things like this that reveal he's actually a bit on the dumb side. I don't think there's any other way to square that.
It is easy to square; it's social class. It's very important to a rather large segment of the country that it feel intellectually superior. He provokes them into talking about how superior they are, and that shores up his base.
One further dynamic.. people in the media and professional classes can be destroyed by using the wrong word or by speculating off-handedly. That is why they flip out when Trump does it. It's partially envy of his freedom.
if you look in getty there's a picture of trump looking at the TV monitor that says "Best Practices" and one of the things is saying to use "Commonly available disinfectants (Bleach and Isopropyl Alcohol) work to kill the virus.
The board is obviously talking about cleaning your living area/homes but uhhh the president thought otherwise.
> Given his mention of disinfectants at the same time, it's far more likely they just told him how they disinfect surfaces like doorknobs and countertops and he ran with it.
I mean even if UBI and/or ozonetherapy don't work at all and are wildly dangerous, at least Trump knew what they were, which makes him smarter than everyone posting about how they don't even know what he's talking about.
The exact quote from him was that the head of the Homeland Security's science and technology division told him they were going to test it:
"And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."
1) Trump knew about UBI, a fringe medical practice used primarily in Russia decades ago
2) Trump heard them talking just moments before about how UV light disinfects outdoor surfaces and kills the virus, and that using chemical disinfectants also killed the virus, and then proceeded to talk about how you could inject disinfectant or put UV light inside the body.
Occam's Razor would point us towards the latter. It's just a lot less convoluted to believe he was talking about the same topic the entire prior discussion had been around than to believe he's talking about an obscure and unproven medical practice decades removed from use.
But... that's not even a description of this technique. To be clear, this technique does not in any way involve putting a UV source inside the body. It's more like dialysis, in that it happens externally. The only similarity to what Trump was wittering on about is that it involves UV. It's very unlikely to have been what gave him the idea.
If you watched the whole clip, you would know 'disinfect' (verb) was used and not 'disinfectant' (noun) with respect to internal use. Very poorly articulated and easily capable of causing confusion, but broad media disingenuity is not helping anyone here.
“ Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. Supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? It would be interesting to check that. That you’re gonna have to use medical doctors with.”
It's a terrible quote, like listening to someone wonder out loud "why don't we just keep our fridge open to cool the house down?"
But using that quote to gleefully claim that Trump is suggesting that people inject themselves (which is all your see online right now, esp Twitter and Reddit) is a textbook case of the least charitable interpretation.
If anyone was actually concerned about people injecting themselves with Lysol, they wouldn't publish headlines that put those words in Trump's mouth because you certainly don't get that from listening to the video clip. He's telling his advisor to "look into it", some off-the-cuff dumb hunch.
This kind of coverage does nothing but drive media ad impressions and the division between the voters. It also secures a 2020 Trump victory by being so dishonest.
The problem with your metaphor is leaving the Fridge open to cool the house does not kill you (and the person wondering that is not holding a position of high prestige). People are actually worried about people injecting disinfectant.
“My concern is that people will die. People will think this is a good idea,” Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, told The Washington Post. “This is not willy-nilly, off-the-cuff, maybe-this-will-work advice. This is dangerous.”
And they have cause to be, after the last time Trump spoke about chloroquine and people listening to him consumed aquarium chemicals and died as a result.
The media has a responsibility to report information of medical experts and no responsibility to be charitable to the President to save him from embarrassment here.
That's simply not true. He clearly says "and then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, and is there a way we can do something like that with injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it [presumably the virus] gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number."
I thought the same as you. But when I watched it again, he was talking about how you can disinfect in under a minute. He clearly was talking about the point the previous person said about how rubbing alcohol killed the virus is 30 seconds. I don't think he's talking about people injecting alcohol or bleach into their blood, but it's very easy to misinterpret that, and what he was saying was dangerous.
The maker of Lysol had to release a public message stating 'we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).'
I can guarantee their comms department spent a long time looking at his speech and the fallout from it before deciding that they had to issue this to prevent people from dying.
> After he went to the mat for hydroxychloroquine, it's pretty natural for everyone to be skeptical
To be fair to the inarticulate speaker: evidence for the efficacy of chloroquines, sparse and vague though it may have been, was very much more convincing than this stuff. Chloroquines are existing drugs with a long history and a reasonably well understood mechanism of action.
This thing is pure experimental medicine. It wasn't practical at the time, didn't survive as a treatment, and everyone involved in the original research is retired or dead. That doesn't make it wrong, but this is a long way from being ready even for a study.
I'm not sure if it's simply that he has never faced the consequences of his words/actions, or if he's just incredibly stupid and irresponsible, but he doesn't appear to think before he speaks.
Almost as if he's using his "inside" voice on the outside - taking "thinking out loud" to a whole new level.
It's very weird for a person in his position, and I'm surprised so many support him (to the point of fanaticism) over in the US. It's like their egos are too deeply invested for them to cut their losses now. Whatever his supporters might say, the guy's a bit of a joke to us here in the UK.
I think the temptation is to assume that the president is at least of average intelligence. Unfortunately this leads to this strange apologist behaviour when he says something fricking stupid.
I don't think that Trump is stupid, I think he is completely handicapped by a massive case of narcissism rendering him incapable of seeing anyone else as his equal in any arena and taking any questioning as a personal insult. This is so complete in him that he thinks any idea that pops into his head is genius and expects everyone else to do the same as they are lessers. He also sees loyalty to him as the most important quality in any advisor. This leads to insane statements and total mismanagement of most things. This has also led to others recognizing this and understanding that they can personally profit from it by just going along with it. There are also true believers who follow him in much the same way cult leaders have always been able to convince people to do illogical things.
Can you please point out the timestamp when Trump attempted to clarify?
The closest I found was at ~31:00, some reporter asks for confirmation that there's no scenario in which disinfectants would be injected into the body. Bryan declines to comment, Trump responds with "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't work," which doesn't really provide any clarity.
And then at ~50:00 he asks Bryan to "talk to the medical doctors" to look at applying light and heat as a cure. Then he says "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I'm not a doctor, but I am a person with a very good you-know-what."
Some reporter suggests that the President of the United States should not spout random stuff and say "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't", Trump responds with "I'm the president, and you're fake news."
The people that are downvoting aren't interested in the actual facts or having an objective discussion about what he actually "meant". They just don't like Trump. Pretty sad for a forum with so many intelligent people on it.
Not only are there hundreds of doctors in the US who inject disinfectant into people to treat viruses already, there are medical textbooks about it and even an academy for certifying medical practitioners:
(Technically they advocate taking blood from people, infusing it with disinfectant, and then injecting the infused blood back into people, but close enough.)
I don't know to what extent it's safe or effective, but hundreds of thousands of people have done it without dying at this point and many of them credit it for having healed various problems, so that's something.
The FDA seems pretty set where the alternative medicine practice of ozone therapy falls in terms of both safety and effectiveness as a medical therapy.
> Ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy. In order for ozone to be effective as a germicide, it must be present in a concentration far greater than that which can be safely tolerated by man and animals.
The advisors mentioned the new results that the COVID-19 virus on surfaces is neutralized by disinfectants and direct sunlight in a few minutes. He then tried to 'help' by suggesting to put light and disinfectants in the bloodstream.
In the video you can see that he already discussed with Deborah Birx about these ideas, and instead of her shooting them down, she just told him that she would consider them.
During the conference he was trying to bring back that conversation, putting her on the spot.
The scientist speaking before him was describing testing scenarios. If you have light you get one result, and then you inject disinfectant, you get a different result. So the scientist was saying the words inject disinfectant - except he didn't mean needles but someone assumed he did.
Unfortunately its like my older family members who read stuff on facebook and think its true, not really understanding that anyone can write something, no validation is being performed. Then my older family member is promoted to president by less than half of the population but still goes to facebook to get advice and ideas.
Note: I am typing this as I sit drinking my daily cup of Lysol. Invigorating and I don't have Covid-19. I have picked up an uncomfortable case of indigestion, but I'm sure it will pass.
The president was suggesting and shilling hydroxychloroquine for weeks based on the advise of the CDC? The president went on TV last night and mused about and got his staff to commit to investigating drinking / injecting / huffing disinfectant and putting 'powerful' light into bodies based on the advice of the CDC?
I really doubt that.
Now you may be right that he gets his info from advisors but the quality of advice is only as good as the advisors. Considering he has removed a vast number of competent experienced people and replaced them with sycophants with no experience may reduce that quality. His daughter and son in law are special advisors.
I think it's a reasonably safe assumption that the CDC didn't suggest to him that injecting disinfectant would be a good idea. Or tell him that promoting chloroquine would be a good idea, for that matter.
It's reasonably safe assumption that trump didn't suggest infecting disinfectant either, but you're giving the media the benefit of the doubt they don't deserve.
Maybe it was the same people that told Emanuel Macron that hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin was a promising treatment. You can't act like Trump is the only leader who talked about it. Macron went further than that, spending three hours talking to the researcher who proposed using it.
Macron went and spoke with the researcher to gain additional information. I don't see anything wrong with that. After meeting with the researcher, he did not go on social media and encourage its widespread use.
Trump has taken a very different approach. Trump has prevented a doctor from responding to questions about its use. Trump was actively saying we have no time for tests, lets just use it. It appears he also fired the director of the US health department’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority for not endorsing its use.
To say that meeting with a researcher to gather information is going further than publicly shilling for its use and cracking down on those in his administration who don't advocate for it is going further is very much not accurate.
Compare these two statement. Which one sounds like a cautious and sensible approach to a combination of drugs which have not yet been approved for use against a novel virus?
"Asked about the report, the presidential adviser said Macron had taken note of a certain number of elements presented by the professor and would give it careful consideration, in particular at a meeting with his scientific advisory panel.
Macron has yet to publicly share his opinion on the controversy."
"HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents)....."
He sits and watches a particular television station for _hours_ a day. To think that he listens to the CDC and not his friends on TV is extremely naive.
Noone said he’s getting it from Facebook. Just that they were noting the similarity.
Trump has been shown several times however to disregard expert advice and tweet or act based on input from Fox News, so in that way, it’s not really any different.
To act like he is only ever reporting information from experts is the real pure fantasy. He’s much more likely to be citing “opinion” peddlers instead.
You see this frequently on HN, where the president says something completely insane and lo and behold there's some obscure article on the front page supporting him.
I can not for the love of me understand why people are so apologetic for this asshole. It's pretty clear he's senile and mean and petty and has a fragile ego. He has similar thoughts and outbursts I would have had when I was 5 years old. It just can't wrap my head around this.
It's not like these people go around and make up excuses for everybody who says something silly.
It's just a form of trolling and gaslighting. Trump never mentioned this treatment. Everyone who watched him speak of ultraviolet light and disinfectant yesterday knew what he was saying and suggesting. The stupidity of the words were readily apparent.
Yet, here we are, being told that we're all morons because it's obvious that this treatment is what he was talking about. Even though he never mentioned this treatment, and there's no reason to think that he was talking about this treatment in particular.
Edit: Trump is claiming today that the question was just "sarcasm"...
The makers of Lysol also had to issue an official statement:
As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).
If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.
> there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, , because that minimizes the threat
In this case it's not typical incompetence of officials, it's an official with huge influence derived from their office endangering people by recommending injection of disinfectants into their bodies. That itself a huge threat.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. You're right.
Just to clarify one possible misreading of Chiang's point I noticed due to the way I excerpted his statement: he's not suggesting that incompetent officials should not be called out and held accountable.
He's saying rather if you're a fiction writer and you were trying to write a story about a plausible sci-fi pandemic and you added a character like Trump and depicted a scene like that press conference yesterday, you'd literally lose the plot and lose any serious reader. It would unsuspend disbelief.
Listen to the remarks, and its clear he never said anything about injecting disinfectant directly into a patient. It was part of a conversation he had with Dr. Bill Bryant, leader of science and technology at HHS, about using new information about how light, heat and humidity kill the virus. A reporter, Jonathan Karl of ABC brought up the question about injecting disinfectant, and he said "it wouldn't be through injection" and deferred to the experts. It's a shame the reporters insist on politicizing this.
"So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn't been checked but you're gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it'd be interesting to check that."
What does this mean? It certainly sounds to me like he is talking about using disinfectant to clean the virus out of the lungs.
Ok, I listened to Bill Bryan's prior comments again, and I still do not understand what President Trump was saying if not suggesting using light and disinfectants inside the human body. Bill Bryan was obviously not using the word "inject" to refer to injecting anything into the human body, but it certainly sounds like President Trump was ("inside the body", "through the skin"?)
He was speaking in the context of on-going research. Not a how-to guide for people dealing with it. He's not a scientist, but he very clearly deferred to the scientist on how it would be done.
> it's clear he never said anything about injecting disinfectant directly into a patient
Here's what Donald Trump said:
> And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number
Here's what your source had to say about what Donald Trump said:
> spoke about the use of ultraviolet light to fight the virus and an injectable disinfectant that would clean your lungs
The ongoing research Bryan was discussing was not medical research, and had nothing to do with the human body, and yet Donald Trump certainly said someting about injecting disinfectant directly into a patient (or at the very least, it isn't clear that he didn't say that).
So, what's your point? You really think he was suggesting that people drink cans of lysol to clean their lungs? That's absurd, and I think you know it. It just feels like senseless nitpicking to me. There's multiple avenues of research into this. Some more promising than others. He said, "it seems interesting to me", and left it at that. Nothing about that should strike anyone as inappropriate, when it was said for the sole purpose of trying to promote a guarded optimism around the matter. Too many seem to want to promote panic.
> Listen to the remarks, and its clear he never said anything about injecting disinfectant directly into a patient.
does not seem to be correct. That's it.
> You really think he was suggesting that people drink cans of lysol to clean their lungs? That's absurd, and I think you know it
No, I think he was suggesting that using disinfectants as a treatment for COVID-19 is worthy of investigation based on the findings that lysol kills coronavirus.
It's just people playing "get Trump." Nothing wrong with lateral thinking. UV and disinfecting agents kill the virus on surfaces - OK, is there some way we can use that to kill the virus inside the body? I bet chemotherapy sounded crazy the first time someone suggested it.
Sure, for a kid in third grade. But any grown up should know that UV is somehow linked to skin cancer and that disinfectants have those strange scary warning symbols on them, indicating they are rather unsafe things to use inside bodies.
I mean, happy for him to have those discussions with the experts (as long as it's not me sitting there), but do not do this on live TV.
Radiation also causes cancer, yet we have radiotherapy. I mean this is really basic, think-a-tiny-bit-below-the-surface stuff that anyone not afflicted by TDS seems capable of.
If anything, TDS is the continued mental gymnastics required to paint his actions in anything resembling a positive light.
The man was literally following up on a conversation about UV and bleach being used as disinfectant on surfaces and then suggested that they might be a good for use on humans. Chemotherapy would sound crazy on it's face - and in a lot of ways it still is, people do die from chemo - but the push for further research for chemo was done by scientists and researchers who had a grasp on why and how it could be of use as a treatment.
It's also disingenuous to compare chemotherapy with injecting disinfectant. It is trivially easy for someone to inject themselves with disinfectant. It is not trivially easy for someone to give themselves chemotherapy. Trump's verbiage here is also the same as his playbook on chloroquine over the past few weeks - frame things as questions to be asked, but then pepper it all with words like "great" and "powerful"
It's the same way he operates on every single subject he's a fan of but can't come outright and say that he likes and wants you to think that way or believe in it. This is nothing new, and neither are the backflips and contortions people go through to try and justify it.
And, fundamentally, your entire argument falls apart now that Trump himself is claiming it was just a sarcastic joke, and that he was never ever suggesting that it's something we should do or even research. He's trying to walk back the statement and pretend he didn't mean anything by it at all except to be mocking because of how stupid the comment was.
So just to clarify, your position is that Trump literally told people to inject themselves with disinfectant? And that this was part of some plan of his, something from his playbook?
Trump said it was a joke today - if you saw the original video he sort of chuckled when he followed up on the UV treatment idea with the suggestion that disinfectant could be used inside the body, turning to his team and saying "but you'd have to use medical doctors for that". Maybe that's what he was referring to, or maybe it was some later exchange. Regardless, the original context was simply that scientists presented some findings about what kills the virus, and Trump followed up with some questions about whether they could lead to some new types of treatment. That's it. The rest is a game of Get Trump.
Do you recall the last time a head of state discussed on live TV the usefulness of bathing in the reactor pool of a live nuclear reactor to cure cancer? I don't.
Funny thing is, this would actually be pretty save [1], especially compared to anyone ingesting disinfectants. And it's orders of magnitudes easier to access disinfectants than reactor pools [2].
But notice that Trump didn’t suggest that anyone bathe in reactor pools, instead he asked the scientist if it would be possible to harness UV radiation for some kind of treatment.
That sort of spitballing and lateral thinking is great in a brainstorming session around a table. These press conferences are meant to be public service announcements/Q&A sessions.
If chemotherapy had been suggested by the president at the time going on TV and saying "it might be a good idea if people drank poison", _with no basis for that assumption_, then, well, yes, that would have been pretty crazy, and would have lead to a lot of unnecessary death.
Also, of course, lobotomies probably sounded crazy the first time someone suggested them. And as it turns out, they were. For everything that sounds crazy and works, there are a lot of things that sound crazy and prove to be crazy.
But he didn't say that. He had a scientist up to announce promising results, and he suggested some avenues for further research or invention. At no point did he turn to the camera and say "so you see folks, if you're worried about the coronavirus, just reach into your kitchen cupboard and pour yourself a nice glass of bleach." I don't know why you're pretending otherwise.
It is not the president’s job to suggest avenues for further medical research on live TV, especially if the suggestions are stupid and life-threatening.
We already have enough on our hands with the pandemic, so let’s try to avoid getting more people in the ER.
Who said it’s not the president’s job to show scientific progress to the public and engender discussion of new ideas? I realise many people are very used to dry, carefully stage-managed government briefings written in ObamaScript, but being spontaneous and discursive has its advantages.
Many medical interventions are dangerous by nature - doesn’t and shouldn’t stop people discussing new possibilities for investigation, which is what happened here.
You're offering up a very charitable interpretation to a man that has been saying to take chloroquine and asking "What have you go to lose?" for several weeks now, despite the fact that we know that while chloroquine is relatively safe for most people, there are serious potential side effects including blindness and heart failure that can occur. So, the answer for to his question is "my sight" and "my life", which are, at least in my opinion, significant enough things to risk that he should't be telling people to take the drug.
Why would we expect this to be anything more than more of the same? I know in HN we are supposed to give each other the benefit of the doubt, but we're well beyond benefit of the doubt here - you're asking us to check our critical thinking skills at the door and to ignore past actions - from the very recent past!
You say I'm being very charitable. This is what I see:
- President brings scientist on stage to talk about new findings that will help combat COVID-19. Why? Because it's important to show people that progress is being made and we're not in a hopeless situation.
- President follows up with the scientist with questions about possible therapies that could be developed. He uses words like 'would it be possible to', 'could we somehow', 'and 'it would be interesting to check that.'
To me that's just a natural reading, given the context. Your reading appears to be:
- President brings scientists on stage to talk about findings
- President recommends that people inject themselves with Dettol (motive unclear)
The problem is that's a ridiculously uncharitable interpretation. I mean, is that what you actually believe the president was thinking?
The (hydroxy)chloroquine is example is also a non-issue. Trump correctly pointed out that this was a low-cost, long circulated drug with well understood risks, and that even if we don't yet know for sure if it works, if patients are dying from the virus, it makes sense for doctors to try it. I'm glad he shone a spotlight on it.
>The problem is that's a ridiculously uncharitable interpretation. I mean, is that what you actually believe the president was thinking?
Yes. If not outright recommending it, bringing it up as a somewhat viable possibility. Poison control hotlines have been fielding hundreds of calls asking if it is safe to ingest or inject disinfectant.
>The (hydroxy)chloroquine is example is also a non-issue. Trump correctly pointed out that this was a low-cost, long circulated drug with well understood risks, and that even if we don't yet know for sure if it works, if patients are dying from the virus, it makes sense for doctors to try it. I'm glad he shone a spotlight on it.
Those well understood risks include heart failure and blindness. Trump asked "What have you got to lose?" when saying "I think you should take it", and the answer is my sight and my life. There was no solid medical evidence at that time that chloroquine had any impact on coronavirus in vivo, and what we're finding now is that the null hypothesis is still the best supported in that regard, and that it causes an increase in all cause mortality, to the point where several studies have had to stop because the people they were giving hydroxychloroquine people were dying from heart failure, and the best completed study we have showed a nearly 3x increase in all cause mortality among those taking hydroxychloroquine vs. the control.
It was reckless and irresponsible, exactly like this.
>(motive unclear)
The motive is extremely clear. Trump is worried about a wrecked economy ruining his re-election chances. He wants to open the economy back up to improve his chances, so getting people to believe that we have a plethora of solutions to novel coronavirus helps him achieve that goal.
OK, if you actually think the president was recommending that people start injecting themselves at home, rather than asking a scientist if there could be experiments to develop a new treatment, then we’re simply not experiencing the same reality, so not much point in discussing further.
Trump never suggested people should start injecting any chemical in their bodies. It was the MEDIA that told people that Trump suggested they inject chemicals in their body. If anyone actually injects chemicals in their body, it is likely because the media told them Trump told them to. So the blood will be on the media's hands.
> I can't help thinking that this may have been the subject of the rambling, inarticulate speech recently given by POTUS?
No, this is another example of the media taking his ramblings and trying to clean it up and make sense of it. If that had been the ONLY idea he pushed in that press briefing then I might be more willing to believe that but he followed up with injecting disinfectants so I think it's pretty clear he was just spewing a stream of consciousness.
> After he went to the mat for hydroxychloroquine, it's pretty natural for everyone to be skeptical, though.
To be fair I think the jury is still out on hydroxychloroquine. Trump pushed it because he thought it might a miracle drug that would save the economy and his reelection. That's all true but it can also be true that hydroxychloroquine can work for some people (people without heart conditions and when combined with other drugs like zinc and/or azithromycin, we need more GOOD studies: random, double-blind, high number of people, drug administered early not as "last-ditch"). I hope this whole incident is going to shine a light on a number of "academics" like the ones involved in the unforgivable VA hydroxychloroquine "study". Of course we should also blame the press for treating it as fact but I digress.
By know we do know hydroxychloroquine is pretty effective right? I mean all studies (and even before those with other coronaviruses) have been pretty positive save one from the virus' motherland.
The small studies were flawed too. We are witnessing incompetence across the board.
The treatment in the "good" studies that, let's be real, most people are gunning for because they go against the president's tweet, they administered the drugs to critically ill patients. The original proposed mechanism of action is solid, came from a Dutch paper in reference to SARS, and ideally the treatment is administered sometime before the patient is already dying.
Just look at what's going on on this website! Anything remotely supportive of Trump is automatically voted down. This is a board of learned professionals who have clout and their lack of objectivity is representative of academia and industry at large right now. Let's not pretend you could openly support Trump at almost any major institution right now.
And this isn't about Trump. This is about getting over petty rage and not leaving treatments on the table to stick it to the man.
There are large studies on this ongoing. If they show something, well, fine, that's good. Until then, no-one should be promoting a dangerous drug to members of the public.
Telling your populous, at a time when you are holding daily updates, there there is a promising drug or vaccine that scientists are researching, is an appropriate step towards maintaining some degree of hope. We cannot be liable for the 1/10e-6 percent of the population that takes this as a suggestion to self medicate with acquarium cleaner.
People have gotten absolutely desperate to interpret everything he says or does in the absolutely worst way.
I didn't say he spoke appropriately. I said the topic was appropriate. Most of the flak is from people claiming he is putting others in danger (asinine claim that denies adults agency by the way) by bringing up a potential treatment. But don't let that stop you from finding alternative ways to focus on only the negative aspects of the tweet.
I mean Jesus Christ people, this is literally evidence that he is listening to his experts because he clearly rambles like he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Let me repeat that for those of you who will silently downvote: the fact that he's bringing up these treatments upon questioning from reporters, and deferring to experts in real time, is evidence that he's listening to experts, which is exactly what his critics want him to do!
This bias is infuriating. Apparently Trump critics are incapable of seeing shades of grey.
This is not an accurate characterization of the studies.
The well conducted studies that show chloroquine as having an affect on novel coronavirus have all be in vitro. The in vivo studies that have been done that showed anecdotal evidence of effect were poorly conducted, including doing things such as excluding people from the results that died from cv19 while taking chloroquine.
Better in vivo studies have showed that hydroxychloroquine on it's own had no impact on whether or not someone needed to go on a ventilator, and resulted in a nearly 3x increase in all cause mortality. Hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin did not show a significant increase in all cause mortality, but also had no statistically significant impact on whether or not the patient would need to go on a ventilator, and overall mortality was similar to the control group.
Other studies have had to halt due to the number of patients dying due to cardiac issues.
If anything, all large studies with proper controls are showing that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are ineffective at treating cv19 at best, and deadly in their own right at worst.
>“I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that,” he said.
>“So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body,” the president said Thursday.
Yes, I'm sure he meant nebulized hydrogen peroxide. He's definitely not just an idiot.
It's amusing watching people like you furiously google for anything that could possibly explain the steady stream of idiocy that comes from this guy.
>“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”
I think you're right about that one, unfortunately.
Here, how about a quote about blessings?
>“When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed,” he said. “I think in terms of ‘let’s go on and let’s make it right.'”
There was a study fairly recently showing that sunlight (UV) kills the virus. I suspect he just saw that, or maybe it was on Fox News, and he picked it up from there. Similarly, there were some preliminary studies that showed effectiveness of HCLQ, which he latched onto and ran with.
No, if you watch the clip the speaker before him mentioned how long the virus survives under UV and disinfectants. He literally just took that and went "well maybe we can put them in the body?"
It's pretty interesting that as soon as a certain famous snake oil peddler starts yammering about his n-th insane theory, HN immediately jumps on it and starts serious consideration and deliberation. It's very much the same way he ended up with billions worth of free coverage during the campaign because the media could not help themselves but constantly entertain and discuss his ramblings.
Occam's Razor: He's just a senile old coot full of quack theories about everything. There's tons of people like him, you don't have to waste your time on them.
Please don't post like this. Your comment got upvoted to the top of the thread, of course, and sat there accruing mass, choking out interesting discussion. Now that I've marked it off topic, consider that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22968349 is now the top subthread. That's the difference between HN functioning well and functioning poorly.
Most of the damage is caused by the upvotes and replies, but that's what happens when you post something trollish to an inflammatory topic.
Edit: on closer inspection, 22968349 is not so great either because if there's anything interesting to discuss about blood irradiation, it's probably not related to Covid-19.
You know, It's pretty frustrating to be accused of trollishness about a simple opinion which is sincerely held, widely shared and well-founded. If an older relative of yours told you to irradiate your blood against a virus and try ingesting some disinfectants, wouldn't you worry about their mental state at least a little bit?
To be honest, baiting people into discussing this quackery is the actual troll here and I'm genuinely interest why people take the bait. When the media does this, the simple explanation is that they're optimizing for ads. Great, that makes sense, but what's happening here? It's not like this is an astro-turf either, the discussion looks back-and-forth. Is asking people for introspection trolling?
When you call me a troll, you're not calling me a troll in the classical sense of someone posting crap to get a rise out of people. What you're trying to get at is something more subtle - the way a person has an allergy, this particular community has outsized reactions from otherwise very benign opinions, and that I should be aware of these allergies and know not to post them here. But these are not obvious allergies at all and very much at odds with a place that considers itself a place to satiate your intellectual curiosity.
> To be honest, baiting people into discussing this quackery is the actual troll here and I'm genuinely interest why people take the bait. When the media does this, the simple explanation is that they're optimizing for ads. Great, that makes sense, but what's happening here?
I imagine it's a feeling of "I'm smart enough to rise above partisan politics" or "I'm smart enough to go against the status quo." In other words, people who believe they're smart enough to avoid getting manipulated, when in fact it's not a matter of smarts at all.
Right, I'm using the word "trollish" in the sense of the effects the post had. That's the only thing that can be observed and the only thing that matters for moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (I was careful not to call you a troll; this is about posts, not persons.)
"Asking people for introspection" is a skewed way of describing your original comment. If that was your intent, you should go about it in some way that isn't guaranteed to start a flamewar. I don't think these "allergies" are in any way obscure.
Ditto for "very benign opinions". If that was your intent, you should not be breaking the site guidelines.
Edit: I realized that it might be helpful if I mentioned the other aspect of why I posted what I did. You have a long history of breaking the site guidelines. We've asked you many times to stop that. If this weren't a longstanding pattern I'd probably have reacted differently, but it is a longstanding pattern, so please fix it.
It is not the only the only thing that can be observed or that matters for moderation. You prioritization of civility above all else is being exploited by trolls, something I've pointed out on many occasions.
This paper goes into considerable detail about how the suppression of disputes actually fosters an increase in bad behavior by preventing community members from repelling raids by trolls. By not allowing anyone other than yourself to call out bullshit, you're soliciting more of it. You acknowledged above that this is an inflammatory topic but you are spending your efforts on restraining the very people pointing that out.
My point there was narrow: originally the word "troll" referred to intent (the intent to derail discussion, or whatever). But we can't observe intent, so that isn't a useable concept for moderation. If you try to moderate a site like HN and use the word "troll" in that original sense, people simply reply that it wasn't their intent to wreak havoc, as if that settles the issue. Actually it doesn't settle it. If someone starts a flamewar and the thread goes to hell, does it matter if they intended to? The house has burned down either way.
After a while it dawns on you (me) that whatever someone's inner state is when they post doesn't much matter anyhow—what matters are the observable effects that a post produces. Those are what we react to and base moderation on. When I say that a post was trollish I mean it had that sort of effect on the thread, intentionally or otherwise. I was hoping that linking to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... would make this point clear and that I could get away with just referring to it, but maybe not.
This is a narrow point since it's about the use of a particular word, but it's a word that gets a rise out of people (ironically, I suppose?) and tends to make them feel like they're being personally deemed a "troll", when the point is about posts, not persons. I mostly use the word "flamebait" as a way to just avoid the issue.
Re "prioritization of civility above all else", that's not my view at all and it's a misrepresentation of how we moderate HN. If you said "prioritization of intellectual curiosity above all else", we would actually have something to discuss. Maybe you disagree that that should be the goal? Maybe you think we do a shitty job of it, in this case or even in every case? All that is fine, but being argued with about something that we neither think about nor try to do feels weirdly disconnecting.
"Not allowing anyone other than yourself to call out bullshit" strikes me as a bizarre thing to say. Users do that on HN all the time, which is why the site survives. We ask them to do it while remaining within the site guidelines, which is not only possible but more effective.
Dan, when you keep saying things like 'HN is not for internet ragewar', manually moving the top comment because it's contentious, and saying users should know better, that's the prioritization of civility I'm talking about.
In terms of "prioritization of intellectual curiosity above all else" then you are just opening the door to disingenuous bait posts, glib hyper-pedantry, sealioning, and various other trolling tactics. Of course HN exists for intellectual curiosity, but if that's the only mode of operation then it can be gamed, and it is.
Search on 'guidelines' in this thread and you can see people using the 'good faith assumption/strongest possible interpretation' guidelines to bait others. You're arguing that bullshit is called out on HN all the time, but you shut down people doing so in anything other than polite terms.
Regarding that paper, I urge you to pay particular attention to the comparison of successful vs. unsuccessful defensive strategies, and the fact that successful ones are correlated with higher use of anger words. Your antipathy to flames is what the posters of flamebait rely on to deploy more and more of it. Even if you kick accounts that regularly post flamebait, there's little cost to creating a new one and resuming the practice.
Much like forests, the occasional fire can significantly improve the quality of the overall environment. If you suppress fires so diligently that brush is allowed to build up, then the result can be catastrophic. In this metaphor, the brush is bad-faith discussion and wilfully fallacious arguments.
I think you need to be a bit more hands-off about this and accept that a certain amount of conflict and aggression in fact contribute to sustainability. While that might deter some obscure-but-interesting posts like the one today, the fact is that they will be just as interesting on their merits if posted in a week or two after the news-of-the-day focus has moved elsewhere.
I don't think you're characterizing HN accurately. If you want to convince me, I'd need to see more convincing examples.
The lesson in this case is not that a generic flamewar about Trump belongs at the top of the #1 thread on HN. If the argument is that I shouldn't have moderated that, I disagree and am pretty sure the community would disagree.
Rather, the lesson in this case is that, because the topic was attracting attention because Trump, this was the worst possible moment for HN to be discussing ultraviolet blood irradiation. A curious discussion was not possible. Thus I downweighted the submission off the front page at the same time as I moderated that flamewar.
I think your fire analogy is off. A better one would be fires in a city, and those don't promote quality. Quite the opposite.
We've been having this argument for several years and there is more trolling than ever. In past email conversation i've given you examples of people organizing on 8chan to target threads here. You always end up saying you need more convincing examples. Fine, if you want to wallow in toxicity at source go look at kiwifarms.net or /tech/ forums on imageboards for examples of both targeting HN stories directly and general discussions of waging cultural warfare in the social space around technology.
I think your fire analogy is off. An occasional conflagration in a highly-populated city doesn't do anything to promote the quality of the environment. Quite the opposite.
Since I made an explicit analogy to a forest, rewriting it to be about something else kind of makes my point for me.
> In past email conversation i've given you examples of people organizing on 8chan to target threads here
When? I don't remember that, and I just searched the email archive and didn't find it. I found a mention of 8chan, but not with examples, and certainly not with links to people organizing to target threads here—which is hardly something we would be disagreeing about. Obviously that's abusive.
Hold on a second. You said you emailed me examples. I ask when, because none of your emails contained anything like that, and your response is "Do you really need to be spoon fed?" That doesn't seem right.
I can't find anything about HN at your third link. The others don't seem to contain much, but I'll take another look tomorrow.
(p.s. HN's software autokilled your comment for what I hope are obvious reasons.)
Why pretend that Trump _isn't_ spreading damaging misinformation during a pandemic? I don't see why HN needs to have some false sense of neutrality to be "functioning well".
What HN needs in order to function well is not be taken over by political rage-threads, which are not about intellectual curiosity (for one thing, they're all the same).
* An ignorant authoritarian with an obvious agenda sets the discussion topic
* We discuss said topic without mentioning his ignorance, authoritarianism, or agenda
The topic effectively becomes "laundered"? Much like OP, I've seen this over and over again. Trump (or similar) says something batshit insane, a "well, maybe..." topic gets bumped to the front page, political discussion gets culled from the thread, topic gets somewhat normalized. And so the koo-koo express keeps chugging towards the cliff.
I partly agree but would put it differently. When an obscure topic (like ultraviolet blood irradiation) is connected to some trigger in the daily news, people will end up arguing about the daily news rather than delving into the obscure topic. So from an HN point of view, that's the worst time for the topic to appear. HN should be countercyclical instead. This case has made that even clearer to me than it already was.
At the same time, HN is not for internet ragewar and users here should know enough not to feed those flames.
I have no idea on his current mental capabilities, but I want to remind everyone that is trying to diagnose him that he has a well documented and lifelong battle with a speech impediment. Stammering, stuttering, or mixing up words is more likely to be a sign of that condition than of dementia.
Speech impediments can often take a substantial amount of effort and concentration to combat. They also aren't necessarily something that is overcome and then you are "fixed" and never have to think about again. They can often resurface when tired, stressed, drunk, or otherwise not at peak mental ability. The guy is obviously 12 years older than he was in 2008 and is likely more stressed and working harder as presidential nominee than he did as a nominee for VP. Like I said before, I don't know his mental capabilities and maybe there is some underlying problem there. However lots of the evidence I see can easily be attributed to that previously disclosed condition which by itself provides no indication of a lack of intelligence or coherence.
They don't. All of the "evidence" here is cherry-picked clips where Biden stumbles for 2 seconds within an hour-long speech. Even now, Biden's a far better speaker than all the people snidely passing these clips around.
And that's the sad state of the US right now. Still can't believe how the media black listed Bernie unless it was to discuss anything negative, no matter how minute.
Who is also rapidly approaching 80. It's really sad that the whole political establishment in the US is so old. Pelosi, McConnell, Trump, Biden. And they don't let young people come up. With "young" I mean 50 and still at the peak of their abilities and not going downhill.
He is, apparently, now claiming he was being 'sarcastic', thus indicating that he also has no idea what the word sarcastic means.
> There's tons of people like him, you don't have to waste your time on them.
Unfortunately, the broader 'you' (society) _kind of does_; I know this is nonsense, but lots of people don't, and when he's promoting dangerous behavior that's a problem (see chloroquine).
This "famous person" was selected to serve as the head of state by the citizens of the country with the second largest nuclear weapons arsenal. His pronouncements have the force of official public policy.
Just because some of his trial balloons are abandoned to drift away on the winds of public ridicule does make it OK. What of the fact that his tweets are often followed up with orders that do have the force of law?
This was me throwing peanuts at a thread that I had hoped would get flagged into the abyss anyway, and already by my reading contained a lot of ironic Friday afternoon eye rolling. A certain sense of gallows humor here, I felt.
I can see my comment is pretty damaging if it gets any actual views (which I didn’t expect it to, but that’s no excuse!)
In another setting it might make a good womp womp dad joke — as intended — but not here.
That isn't how the Electoral College works these days. It varies by state, but generally each candidate chooses their own slate of Electors who are loyal to the candidate, and upon winning a plurality of votes, that candidate's entire slate of Electors are made, by state law, the Electors for that state.
It's important to note that in no possible way can Electors be considered elected representatives. This often isn't even public information available prior to the election, and your ballot contains none of the names of these Electors. Your vote for presidential candidate A, is really a vote for presidential candidate A's slate of chosen and loyal Electors.
This is in contrast to Federalist 68, which describes a system whereby non-politicians chosen by the people from among the people, at a state level, are to become the Electors for that state. The intent was to make the College both a deliberative body, and external to state politics.
In practice, Federalist 68's vision of how the Electoral College would work never happened. Early on in the country's history the president was indirectly chosen by state legislatures choosing the Electors.
In any case, what we have today are arguably the absolute worst people possible chosen to be Electors: party loyalists. In most states they are even required by law to be non-deliberative, i.e. not vote their conscience but strictly for the candidate who selected them. Since none of the details of how the Electors are chosen or the process they use to make decisions is constitutional law, the states can change how it works.
In the US, the public doesn't vote for the president directly. They elect electors for their state who then vote for the president. This system is called the electoral college and the net result is that a candidate can win the popular vote (the majority of voters voted for them) without winning the presidency. This has happened many times in US history, and it happened most recently in 2016.
1867: Tilden (4,288,546) - Hayes (4,034,311) - Hayes wins.
1888: Harrison (5,443,892) - Cleveland (5,534,488) - Harrison wins.
2000: Bush (50,456,002) - Gore (50,999,897) - Bush wins
2016: Clinton (65,853,514) - Trump (62,984,828) - Trump wins.
To further confuse the issue, 2 Republican electors and 5 Democratic electors _voted for other candidates_ in 2016, though it wasn't significant in the end.
In the American electoral system, you don't technically vote for the president; you vote for the electors who elect the president. This almost never matters, except quite often.
As the head of the executive branch, that's exactly how it works.
Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. Public statements in the official capacity as president are absolutely policy statements for the executive when they aren't affecting independent bodies like the Department of Justice. The Department of Health and Human Services isn't an independent body, and so the president's statements in a damn press briefing are policy positions.
This is like saying that a CEO's press statements somehow aren't policy positions of the company.
Many people have been trying to figure out if that's true or not.
Like all the times the President has announced a new policy on Twitter, but none of the people who would be responsible for implementing it knew about it or understood the specifics of what he actually wanted to happen.
You don't actually have to listen to this person if the things they say are reliably without merit. Our nuclear weapons have nothing to do with the situation, and I don't imagine there is any risk of that situation changing.
He also won, with fewer votes than his competition, while only half of eligible voters cast ballots.
You're allowed to view this person as illegitimate. Sometimes the situation necessitates that we do that.
> He also won, with fewer votes than his competition, while only half of eligible voters cast ballots.
I don’t think that’s right. The presidential vote count in the 2016 election was 304 Trump to 227 Clinton [0]. And all 50 states voted. What system are you going by?
> You're allowed to view this person as illegitimate
Yes, you are. The constitution grants all sorts of protections from the government for ideas right or wrong. However... If you are using said constitution’s rules for how STATES vote for president, not people vote for president...
I think it's pretty clear "votes" meant what's known in the US as "the popular vote," not "electoral votes," particularly since it's impossible, under the US election system, to win the presidential elections with fewer electoral votes than the opponent.
But that’s not the voting system we use. So, no, Trump didn’t win with fewer “votes” if we’re at all being intellectually honest about what votes matter.
This site is all about intellectuals being honest and arguing in good faith using the steel man method right?
Edit: “Stop” what? Are the rules of this site not steel man arguments with intellectual honesty? I’m genuinely confused and not trolling at all - where I have posted something incorrect? Because Dang, if the content isn’t correct, why is the post now flagged? If it’s correct info and -10 or so... isn’t that a problem that creates an echo chamber?
> as soon as a certain famous snake oil peddler starts yammering about his n-th insane theory
You mean Donald Trump or Michael R. Hamblin? Because if it's the first (as a comment downthread implies) then I must've missed a big story, and if the second, then I personally haven't heard this name before.
I'm guessing most HNers are like me: drawn to interesting ideas that seem to make sense on the surface. Here, UV light is a known and powerful disinfectant (and seemingly very much underused in this pandemic), ionizing radiation is commonly used in medicine, and applying it as a blood filter sounds like a plausible idea - so overall, sounds like a compelling reason to check out the article and the comment section.
Look, nobody is convinced that this was posted here in good faith, nor do we have any reason to believe that people like you who are pushing for a "discussion" about this are motivated by anything other than supporting Donald Trump's declarations.
If this technology were effective, we would already be using it. This isn't some secret cure that we forgot about - it's an ineffective treatment that we did away with.
Focusing on this topic isn't for the benefit of COVID-19 patients during this crisis - it's for the benefit of Donald Trump's reelection as he gambles on snake oil cures for this virus.
So maybe ask yourself what you care about more: Human life, or politics?
A function of these press conferences is that he is communicating to the American people. Not the time or the place to "ask questions" about "injecting disinfectants" or spitballing with his advisors.
(Following a discussion of viral half-life on surfaces when exposed to UV):
"So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn't been checked but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting."
He asked a question about an unsubstantiated theory that nobody was talking about in the medical field.
Even if he was "normal" politician, we shouldn't be listening to politicians about medical advice, and they shouldn't be pushing pseudoscience contrary to what medical professionals and virologists are saying.
Asking loaded questions about pseudoscience, that implies that there is some sort of promise in it, absolutely counts as peddling it.
Ever thought that perhaps presidents get a quick rundown of what potential cures the US government is looking at? And this is fairly standard practice, and as mentioned below there might be some legitimate ideas to use UV.
The fact that he went off script and talked about things that aren’t confirmed and are speculation is not good, but he did say it was speculation.
Yes he should be more responsible in his comms as president, but your attitude of automatic dismissal and thinking he’s an idiot is exactly why he managed to get elected under the radar.
Things that aren't effective or practical are retired.
This is just someone trying to make the president seem less stupid but of course there is no way he's ever read anything about blood radiation and all the failed experiments over the years.
Almost the entire briefing was about UV light killing viruses. Ultraviolet light is classified as a non-chemical disinfectant, and Trump was asking if we can bring it into the body. In his comment he said "The whole concept of the light that kills under one minute, thats pretty powerful". Nowhere anywhere did he suggest injecting chemicals. In fact, it was one of the dumb reporters that asked him a question about injecting bleach, not Trump. It's like people are not even watching the same press briefing. This media manipulation is getting blatant and outright mad, and I am watching people all around me hypnotized by it. What the heck is going on?
If you look at how Trump talks you can see a pattern where he likes to repeat ideas that he's heard about and then hype them.
My hunch is that he heard about this as a potential treatment from some doctor/advisor and then put his usual spin on it. This could work, it could be great, it's very promising, why don't we try it?
Considering how much weight the words of a president have I wonder if some of his underlings will now go out and spend energy on investigating these ideas. Throwing out such ideas during a lunch with colleagues is fine and fun but doing this during a national press conference aimed to inform the public seems highly irresponsible. I watched the process conference where we he talked about the idea of putting light into people because it may be an idea. If I was one of the medical advisors I would have had to work really hard not punching him in the face so he shuts up.
> Considering how much weight the words of a president have I wonder if some of his underlings will now go out and spend energy on investigating these ideas
In fact it was reported last week that Rick Bright was fired from HHS because he tried to resist the chloroquines spin and push traditional vaccine development instead. It seems almost certain that significant bandwidth will be tied up in the bureaucracy because of the desire in the executive branch to provide evidence backing up POTUS statements.
Honestly I suspect he just saw a news article about UV sterilisation of a room or something and got confused. And Dunning-Kruger did the rest.
Like, confusion over this is not uncommon; elderly people trying to ingest disinfectants, say, is A Thing, and weird health claims for UV/sunbed aren’t new. It’s just that most senile people don’t really have the platform to promote it.
I think it seems like a direct path between hearing what kills the virus outside the body (light, heat, disinfectant) and then saying OK, how do we get those things inside the body? Then ignoring potential bad consequences of what happens when you get those things in your body.
This is a good take. I'm genuinely sorry you're being downvoted. Anything remotely positive about Trump is just destroyed and it's absolutely ridiculous. There's no objectivity - people online interpret everything he does in the absolutely worst way.
Honestly. Maybe I should've put the line in there that I deleted calling him an idiot. Because apparently I need to be clear, I think this is complete idiocy. But there are always 2 sides to every coin.
He habitually demonizes and belittles others for political gain, often in the crudest terms, and then whines about how unfairly he is treated. Objectivity does not require blinding oneself to context.
>Objectivity does not require blinding oneself to context.
That's not context. The fact that he acts like a child does not justify exaggeration or sensationalism. And the press has undeniably been antagonistic going back to election season - he just seems to be the first president to fight back, however crudely.
And objectivity requires normalizing context for emotional influence. That means not being blind to context, but inhibiting your hatred momentarily to examine whether the media is also behaving unbecomingly.
The record of his public behavior is most certainly context. I didn't say he was childish, but that he was aggressive; and to the extent that the press has been antagonistic, maybe because that's because he began his campaign that way.
Here's an excerpt from his announcement speech: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.
People like you have have lots of problems. You're bringing drugs. You're bringing crime. You're rapists. And some of you, I assume, are good people.
How do you feel to find yourself as the subject of such rhetoric? I'm guessing, not very good. You're probably feeling something along the lines of 'what did I do to you, I'm just living my life and you come along and start saying these things about me.' And before he announced his entry to the political field on that occasion, he had many times solicited attention online by making unilateral aggressive personal attacks on other public figures. What he's 'fighting back' against appears to the plain reports of his own behavior. At press conferences, when he's asked how his rhetoric comports with previous and recent statements of his that appear contradictory, he frequently complains about 'nasty questions' and engages in direct personal attacks.
And objectivity requires normalizing context for emotional influence. That means not being blind to context, but inhibiting your hatred momentarily to examine whether the media is also behaving unbecomingly.
What hatred? And which unbecoming media behavior are we talking about? I formed my negative opinion of Trump's remarks at his press conference yesterday based upon listening to them on the White house's youtube channel. I don't have a cable TV subscription so I don't rely on second-hand interpretations by news anchors or pundits. Seems like you might be experiencing a little cognitive bias of your own.
>How do you feel to find yourself as the subject of such rhetoric
I'm the son of immigrants and if anyone implied that most of the immigrants from my third world country of origin were, let's say, underachievers, I wouldn't have any problem with it, because this hypersensitivity to anything remotely critical of people from other nations or cultures is an inane western cultural norm. I assure you that liberal white people are far more offended on anyone's behalf than actual minorities.
>How do you feel to find yourself as the subject of such rhetoric? I'm guessing, not very good. You're probably feeling something along the lines of 'what did I do to you, I'm just living my life and you come along and start saying these things about me.'
This is absolutely childish reasoning. What Trump says about the general state of immigrants coming from my country of origin does not reflect on me personally.
Moreover, what he's saying is objectively true, in that the people crossing the border illegally are not exactly doctors and scientists with post graduate degrees. They are mostly a burden on our infrastructure and all that about how they contribute more than they take is absolute hogwash...but that's another discussion.
>What he's 'fighting back' against appears to the plain reports of his own behavior.
>I formed my negative opinion of Trump's remarks at his press conference yesterday based upon listening to them on the White house's youtube channel.
Do you honestly think it's reasonable that some 95% of headlines about Trump are negative? Do you truly believe that every single thing he does is negative? I challenge you to find a single positive headline from CNN or MSNBC or the like from the last few years that isn't an editorial.
>Seems like you might be experiencing a little cognitive bias of your own.
My cognitive bias is that statistically for Trump to make the wrong call as often as the media claims he does, he'd have to do so deliberately. As in it would take effort and skill to be wrong this often.
>What hatred
Please. You want to pretend people online aren't rabidly against Trump? Even this latest gaffe, coverage of which is exclusively negative, could trivially be interpreted as listening and deferring to suggestions from experts. But you won't find that valid take on "reputable" media.
My own experience is substantially at odds with yours, but perhaps your attitude magically protects you from bias, assuming you get the chance to pre-empt it.
That's an elegant sidestep from suggesting I'm biased by media framing to being biased by simply being online. Go on complaining about the media though.
He’s never once faced any consequences of his words or actions. In fact, he’s only ever been rewarded for behaving the way he does.
Why wouldn’t he just say whatever pops into his head, regardless of whether it’s remotely plausible at all?
I think there’s almost no forethought given to a lot of his words/actions. Nobody could set up a long game like this for 70+ years to become President.
We already have a sizeable population of bleach-drinkers in the US, and he just encouraged them to mainline it. Given that his strongest base is the conspiracy-minded, which has a significant overlap with the bleach drinking and antivax movements, it seems like "idiot" to encourage them to kill themselves. But given how unshakable the misinformation machine is, I suspect that his base will only be strengthened by this move (the deaths will be covered in mainstream media but it's so easy to denounce such reports as conspiracy) -- "savant", then?
Oh wait, you mean because he kinda-sorta had a similar suggestion to this absurd medical practice? No. His goal is to stay in power.
Why don't you use the most good-faith interpretation of the comment, which was that it was a tongue-in-cheek characterization of how foolish people might misinterpret the president's careless remarks?
"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning?"
Bleach, isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide...
Whichever disinfectant he was suggesting injecting into the body, it's not a good idea.
Immediately following someone stating that disinfectants like alcohol and bleach can destroy the virus, the president did say it's worth trying out injecting disinfectants. [1]
He didn't specifically say "mainlining bleach", but he was referencing injecting one of the aforementioned disinfectants. It's kind of hard to say he didn't.
He used the term "disinfectant" immediately after talking about UV light, which is a most definitely a well known disinfectant. However, he was also obviously not being clear, but never mentioned any other specific disinfectant. Therefore, the only good faith interpretation, after considering context and applying a modicum of critical thought, is that he was referring to the UV light when he used the term.
> And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning.
He's clearly talking about two things - one sentence is about light, "And I then I see the disinfectant"... - and you simply can't "inject" light.
He's not clearly talking about anything, which is the problem, and the reason a good faith interpretation based on context is important.
You can inject light via fiber optics. We all know 'inject" isn't the right term, but it's how he was using it.
Regardless, and most importantly, he never specified any disinfectant, so in the context, he meant UV light. No contortion necessary. It's all there in the quote you provided.
> Trump’s eyebrow-raising query came immediately after William N. Bryan, the acting undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security, gave a presentation on the potential impact of summer heat and humidity, which also included references to tests that showed the effectiveness of different types of disinfectants. He recounted data from recent tests that showed how bleach, alcohol and sunlight could kill the coronavirus on surfaces.
> Bryan said bleach killed the virus in about five minutes and isopropyl alcohol killed it in 30 seconds. In tests, sunlight and high temperatures also appeared to shorten the virus’s life on surfaces and in the air, Bryan said.
It appears that your charitable "good faith" interpretation is in fact wrong, as Trump now claims he was sarcastically asking the question to rile up reporters:
So for all this talk about examining context and intentionally interpreting the President's comments in an unfavorable light, he was in fact being disingenuous and sarcastic. He wasn't "merely" asking a question. He was trolling. BTW, this is why people are so eager to not take him at face value.
Immediately after Bryan provided the context that you just noped, Trump said:
> And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning.
You're saying he's saying "nothing" but in fact he's suggesting that disinfectant injections are worth trying
There's a difference between good faith interpretation and examining probable outcomes. When I said that he's encouraging folks to mainline bleach, it was firmly in the latter category. Trump's history of fraud, deception and doublespeak inclines me not to apply good faith to him. But to that point, I don't think he's malicious, I think he's reckless and purely self-serving.
>We already have a sizeable population of bleach-drinkers in the US, and he just encouraged them to mainline it
Discussing potential treatments with, as he said, "medical personnel", is nowhere near advising people to drink bleach.
The fact that a person would ingest a known and clearly dangerous chemical simply because Trump said the word disinfectant is a reflection on the individual, not a valid reason to censor the president. If people are ignorant enough to go from "president mentions potential treatment" to "I must inject myself with bleach" then, frankly, the heard needs to be culled. Arguably the way we've coddled such people for decades is part of the reason we're in this sorry state, but that's another discussion. In any case the number of people who actually go on to do such a thing will be negligible if not zero. This is pure sensationalism.
You speak of misinformation but you are consuming the very same, only oblivious to it because of your bias. How often do people actually look at the primary source, i.e. the interview? Because by the time anything is filtered through the media it is nearly always exaggerated and misreported. Even this example - the guy is rambling like an obvious idiot, that's clear and more than enough to report on. But then we go and have the media holding him liable for the poor choices of others, for discussing a potentially medical treatment? This happens literally every time he talks.
We're way past the point of justifying faith in any of our popular media.
So I woke up to some “news” about said ridiculous statements and said snake oil sales. So as I do now, I went and got the actual source and not the media interprition of it.
Because I saw him ask questions to his medical professional and make very general statements that are objectively true but at worst impractical or irrelevant.
Did you not see I already posted that link, except mine has more context?
I see him ask his medical professional to confirm they are indeed looking into various options. Are you perhaps looking intentionally for the worst possible take and using that in place of an objective fact?
Do you HONESTLY think the president was asking Dr. Birx to inject bleach or isopropyl alcohol into coronavirus patients? Like really honestly? Or are you just hopeful to imply that to hurt Trump?
Because that just wasn’t my take watching the full stream. You are obviously free to believe whatever makes you feel good.
This wouldn’t even be the first time that he’s mentioned convalescent plasma therapy which it would not be unfair to describe as “injecting blood into someone to clean the virus from them”
It is incredibly strange and scary to me that not everyone is on the same page here. If you want to be generous you could say that the president was fatigued and had a 'brain fart' conflating the two. But this wasn't an issue with being articulate or not, or off the cuff or not, or how prescriptive he was. The man clearly thought that disinfecting surfaces relates to treating people. I find it terrifying that our leader could make such a mistake, especially at this stage of the pandemic.