Bispecific antibodies potently neutralize SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern

  "If you just read a Scissor statement off a list, it’s harmless. It just seems like a trivially true or trivially false thing. It doesn’t activate until you start discussing it with somebody. At first you just think they’re an imbecile. Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. Crescit eundo. You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion. Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else. Eventually even that doesn’t work, they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is. Finally, they don’t care about the Scissor statement anymore. They’ve just dug themselves so deep basing their whole existence around hating you and wanting you to fail that they can’t walk it back. You’ve got to prove them wrong, not because you care about the Scissor statement either, but because otherwise they’ll do anything to poison people against you, make it impossible for them to even understand the argument for why you deserve to exist. You know this is true. Your mind becomes a constant loop of arguments you can use to defend yourself, and rehearsals of arguments for why their attacks are cruel and unfair, and the one burning question: how can you thwart them? How can you convince people not to listen to them, before they find those people and exploit their biases and turn them against you? How can you combat the superficial arguments they’re deploying, before otherwise good people get convinced, so convinced their mind will be made up and they can never be unconvinced again? How can you keep yourself safe?"

They are striving to be role models, and they are role models for their followers, and this is clearly visible in changea in social interactions...

This is what we tell our children until they get old enough to process the adult world. Reality is... "it's complicated, ____ (son/daughter name here)." Our leaders (at least in the US) haven't been real role models for probably centuries... reality is the whole "virtuous king" thing has been aspirational since the ancient Greeks.

* find an expert who has apparently superior knowledge about a widespread problem afflicting his people

* immediately seek guidance from that expert and conscript him into solving that problem

* apply that guidance by directing resources to test the theory experimentally

* begin to hold that expert accountable when their experiment fails to follow that expert's predictions

* Stop seeking accountability and reverse course when it does produce results (despite this process being very public), and offer the expert the job of fixing more things.

Could you ask for more? Do you think the current democratic discourse is above or below this level?

Or non-democratic discourse for that matter. How did we deal with Lysenko's theories on crop yields?

edit: Nevermind I retract this. I think you're right about this paper in particular. I guess it comes down to whether a study involving weird things with gender hormones is "about gender"? But it still seems like the core debate is ultimately not very much attached to actual reality.

edit: It's like the "chemicals in the water that turn the freaking frogs gay" Alex Jones meme - if you thought "no that's nonsense there were no chemicals in the water" you would know less about Atrazine than Alex Jones did, despite Alex Jones also being wrong about what's going on with the frogs. The way in which you think that someone is wrong can also be wrong, even if that someone is in fact wrong.

I spent most of my childhood believing that homosexuality was unnatural, inherently sinful, and entirely unique to humans, because that's the spiel that the local Southern Baptist preachers were selling. The same is true for things we call "gender roles." Some male animals act in ways we once reflexively associated with females of their species, and vice versa.

I'll edit the comment to remove the reference to homosexuality, though, because that point wasn't especially clear or useful.

The word he used was transgender, and the studies were all for transgender health in a mouse model.

Critics are the ones bringing transgenic into the conversation, which neither matches what he said, or the majority of the studies.

It is as if Bob called the ocean blue, but Sally claims Bob really meant red, while simultaneously pointing out he is wrong because the ocean actually blue. It is a really weak criticism.

A more coherent response is simply: "Studying transgender health in mouse models is important, and those studies were a good use of money"