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Comment by TimorousBestie | Hacker News Reader

This has to be a joke on the order of “lipstick parties” and “d&d is satanic,” right? I’m not saying the behavior in question _never_ happens, but surely the prevalence has been blown out of proportion.

There’s no drug I can think of that is present in the blood in such great concentrations that a transfusion would communicate the high, certainly not without killing the donator or the donatee. Nor does receiving mismatched blood result in anything resembling a high. I concede that the placebo effect can do many remarkable things.

However, given that NYT’s citations are decidedly hazy, I’m more inclined to believe this is a rumor that got too big for its britches. Maybe a pharmacist out there can convince me otherwise?

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Agreed, I'm totally convinced this is a weird media hysteria. This just cannot be true, it makes zero sense from the most basic level.

The article seems to mention that the only effect seems to be placebo.

Don’t forget, people were and still are taking horse dewormer for Covid, despite shitting out parasites not really fixing much other than a parasite problem.

If you mainline a half gallon of junkie blood, you should get a decent buzz. Just remember to check their blood type first, and to bring a large rug so you can dispose of their desiccated body afterwards.

The facts seem to be:

1. HIV in Fiji is up 10-fold from 2014 (that's a lot, but if the starting point was small, then it's hard to say)

2. 50% of people who contracted HIV said they shared needles (common issue, unrelated to "Bluetoothing")

3. "Bluetoothing" is a meme, and it sounds insane, and in some small sample in South Africa, 18% of drug users claimed to have done it.

4. In Pakistan, street vendors are selling pre-used heroin syringes (also insane - but needle sharing, not "Bluetoothing")

I mean, sure, this is news in the sense that it's insane. But the headline makes you wonder what's going on at the NYT.

> But the headline makes you wonder what's going on at the NYT.

Journalists getting news from tik tok.

When do we get the article about this article? That's more interesting, in a way.

  > given that NYT’s citations are decidedly hazy

It should be noted in context that NYT published known-fake Xray images recently. Like, so fake a layman could determine. I think that that newspaper's credibility, especially for sources, is beyond repair.

>known-fake Xray images recently. Like, so fake a layman could determine.

Skeptics SE seems unconvinced: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/57396

It doesn't have to be effective to gain popularity. Just the rumor could be enough to cause a small percentage of people to try it. Even a small percentage of people doing it could lead to a wider spread of disease, especially when they share needles with people who don't do blood sharing.

Why do you think the "d&d is satanic" thing was a joke? I remember growing up and that was going around, and it was very much not a joke. These people were serious about them thinking it was satanic. If you say it's a joke because it was laughably misguided, that's one thing I guess, but it was never a meme like joke. Just like the fear of backmasking in rock-n-roll music, these misguided people were very serious about it. I spent a lot of my teenage years with this crap, and it was only funny in how we made fun of the people with those beliefs.

The joke is the people. By believing so seriously like that or this, they place themselves in an outgroup and are made fun of as "those people" by the rest of society who aren't insane.

Another modern example would be people who genuinely believe that Portland is a fiery warzone.

You say things like this in a way that makes me think you underestimate them. These are the same type of people that elected the current administration. While their beliefs maybe a joke to you, when they get in to power, it won't be funny to you any longer. These same groups talked about the slow boring of hard wood that the reversal of Roe was going to be. This was late 80s and early 90s.

Continuing to ignore or make fun of people with polar opposite viewpoints as your own to the point you become complacent will lead to exactly the situation we are in now. I promise you the people you are making fun or are not complacent and are vigilantly being active in having things changed to their liking.

Treating someone as a joke maybe cool at parties of like minded people, but now we are where we are because too many did not take things seriously.

> While their beliefs maybe a joke to you, when they get in to power, it won't be funny to you any longer.

SMH It's not about being funny. It's about the seriousness of their opinion. Rational people think that people's irrational beliefs are as serious as a joke (unserious). This has nothing to do with the political power of the misguided, nor the results of their own poor reasoning. I feel like this is painfully obvious. It also feels a bit like being baited into spelling it out in the face of a politically motivated response.

SMH, the rational people that have checked out and allowed the according to you, irrational, to take over government. I understand you in your position of being "rational" think those with differing opinions are nothing but a joke. You've make that clear to the rest of us, yet you fail to see it as a negative about yourself. The lack of empathy for those with opposing views is why we are in the state we are today. People just want to make themselves feel good about their own decisions by belittling everyone else. It's just gross.

> SMH, the rational people that have checked out and allowed the according to you, irrational, to take over government.

This is not compelling as to why you have demonstrably misinterpreted the sentiment. It appears you are dead-set on trying to make some preachy political statement that falls utterly flat. Having exhausted that derail, you engage with some hand wavy personal attacks. Good luck with that.

My intent has not changed in this thread, just more details. I asked why you thought the "meme" was a joke, but then you said the people were the joke for holding the belief of the meme as real. You defining another person as a joke for their beliefs is just a bad way of attempting to resolve any issues. If you're one to just prefer to make fun of people then mission accomplished. If you're one that wants to understand the larger effects when everyone runs around just making fun of each other, then mission unaccomplished

No, you're misreading. Or misunderstanding. Or something.

Pointing out the nonserious joke that is the bedrock of far right ideology is something with a long and successful history.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/why-are-nazi...

Jokes can come into power. But that doesn't make them not jokes.

It absolutely is, but the “joke” is manufacturing consent for considering drug cartels as terrorists, and for considering wars for regime change in Latin America as dealing with terrorism.

Oh, yeah. Now that you mention it, that makes sense. Gross.

Especially since one can boof a few ounces of vodka to get drunk (or so I've heard). Sharing blood with alcohol in it makes no sense. But kids are stupid, so who knows.

https://old.reddit.com/r/alcohol/comments/1ce90yy/boofing/

Right on, but even if you take a liter of blood at 0.4% BAC (potentially fatal) and give it to a sober person who nominally has five liters already, that dilutes it down to an equivalent BAC of 0.06%, right? They’d have to be a real lightweight to feel anything. And that’s a full liter, not the tiny hypos in the article photos.

I dunno. Another 300ml of vodka can’t be that much more expensive than the apparatus needed to perform a blood transfusion.

It's just like how all that panic of "Powdered alcohol" was absurdly bullshit!

All the news and the company's marketing was implying it was more concentrated by being "dried", like you would concentrate all sorts of things.

Except alcohol is a liquid, and cannot be "concentrated". The powdered alcohol was alcohol soaked into maltodextrin (or similar). By definition, it is less potent. In fact, if you make some and actually try to do things like spike a drink, or even just try to make normal drinks from it, it was flat out useless and worse than just sneaking in a flask to somewhere.

The media that IMO kinda "debunked" the whole thing was WIRED

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XH_GD6TgTY&t=1s

Indeed this has to be ridiculous. Anyone who actually does this deserves whatever fate they receive. I don’t believe this is a thing. Shared needles? Sure. Transfusions? No.

They helped manufacture the Iraq war, sold a genocide the last 2 years, and helped push the fake shoplifting hysteria since Covid. No reason to believe NYT about anything.

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