As a point of clarification, Darwin Awards are specifically for people who remove themselves (and, ideally, ONLY themselves) from the gene pool (either by destroying their ability to reproduce or dying) by doing something monumentally stupid. Additionally, the person in question must have attained the maturity (and not have atypical mental faculties) such that we can assume they should have known that they should not do what they did.

The point of natural selection is that those who fail the test don't get another chance or are quickly outpopulated by those who do better. Someone who falls for a scam is likely to fall for other scams in the future. Falling for MLM scams does not qualify as Darwinism, as it does not remove anyone from the gene pool (or even the pool of people who can participate in future iterations of the scenario) and is thus in no way "Darwinistic."

I agree that I miss the IMDB forums. They actually had useful information and interesting posts if you stayed away from "hot" forums and obvious troll posts.

I can't remember now exactly what the event was, but I distinctly remember thinking when it happened that the removal of the forums was a direct reaction to an event about negative consequences from social media that happened a month or two before the forums disappeared. There certainly did seem to be an uptick in trolling and flame wars on them just before they went away. I interpreted the press release at the time to be a rephrasing of, "You guys are some extremely toxic jerks. Screw this, it's not worth even the minimal effort of maintaining a message board if it's just going to be a PR nightmare waiting to happen as soon as some news outlet notices."

What surprised me is that I fully expected other sites to follow suit to protect themselves from public/legal backlash and practically none did. Then again, the public backlash against message boards died down and to my knowledge there haven't been significantly more major legal actions taken due to message board postings.

It was a sad day when the IMDB message boards went away, but I don't entirely think it was a terrible decision from their point of view.

I'm a little surprised you didn't come across that info before trying your VR headset with glasses on. Before I got an Oculus Rift S, I did a search to figure out if I could wear my glasses with it. The information I found was that depending on the thickness of your glasses, it is possible. But that it is very easy to scratch the VR lenses this way. Even if the glasses do fit while you're wearing it, you have a chance to scratch it every time you put the headset on or take it off. Like you, I ran across the generally accepted solution, which is to buy prescription lens inserts for your VR headset. Those things work great, and I highly recommend that anyone looking to own a VR headset who wears glasses in every day life utilize those.

This is true in much the same way that Pornhub can be a really valuable resource for adolescent mental health. Is it likely to turn out that way for the average teen? No. But that's not what I said, is it?

Highlighted the issue in bold. The problem is that there are a significant number of people taking their choice and saying "fuck you, I don't believe there's even a problem and will fight you if you try to address it." Freedom is, unfortunately, antithetical to mitigating virulent outbreaks when the existence of the virus is treated as a wedge issue.

Skepticism is fine. You shouldn't blindly trust any large group who has obvious additional motives such as monetary gain that could conflict with your own interests. You also shouldn't assume they will always act on those motives at the explicit expense of your shared interests. Reality exists between extremes.

If you insist on seeing people as un-nuanced evil, I insist on seeing you as un-nuanced crazy.

The funniest part of this is that even though your premise is wrong (those nations weren't by any means buffer nations UNTIL they were invaded and defeated by Germany, which was certainly a surprise to them and everyone else), you actually argued against your own original point anyway. Germany became a buffer nation between NATO and the USSR after it fell. And it realistically had no chance of actually defeating them. The invasion of the Soviet Union was a doomed, desperate attempt to force Stalin to capitulate quickly before attrition could set in or before he could prepare enough forces to thwart any German expansion Eastward. And Germany couldn't even muster the strength to invade across the English channel, much less cross the Atlantic to invade the US. It could sue for peace as the very best outcome. Therefore, by your own arguments, negotiations need not have been carried out with such a buffer nation.

I get that you want to be edgy and try to apply a revisionist history to the events of world war 2 where Germany was the wronged party or where the US is at least the bad guy, but your arguments aren't consistent and you ignore the state of the world prior to the second world war.

Poland, Ukraine, Norway, and The Netherlands (among others) would like a word with you about your poor understanding of history.

Sure, in much the same way that if you're being swept down a river, a piece of driftwood is a life saver. The point is, that isn't a good argument for making driftwood standard river crossing gear. Once your primary means of accomplishing a goal has a catastrophic failure, ANYTHING is better.

Try crypto! It's better than a Nigerian bank!

My opinion is that you should really be looking into and using COVID-ese. The revolutionary new drug that I have no (official) connection with that will definitely completely eliminate this pandemic if you would just push for FDA approval of on our behalf and either buy at the low price of $100 USD per dose or push for insurance companies to cover. Please note, this is not spam. It is information and opinion. You therefore may not censor it.

Absolutism is fun!

Wait a minute... *I'm* a mixture of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Ivermectin is people!

Why is that site taking studies that themselves admit that the outcomes are not statistically significant and showed no benefit of treatment and highlighting them as examples of effectiveness of treatment?

Example: The April 14th entry on Vitamin C of that site links to this article as a source. The article's conclusion states very clearly, "The combination of oral vitamins C (1000 mg daily) and E (400 IU daily) has no beneficial effect in COVID-19 patients." And yet, there is a big 46.3% down arrow next to it. And if you look at the data in the graphs up top, there it is. Hakamifard. 46% improvement.

It also treats meta-analyses of other studies as another value on top of the study's original value, skewing the reported efficacy of controversial treatments. All in all, I am not impressed by the site's methodology.

Sure, makes sense with the US unemployment rate dropping over the last 3 months. Oh wait...

Please don't let reality get in the way of your narrative though. It never has before.

Your definition of vaccine is too narrow. It's like saying injecting someone with the influenza vaccine when they are (unbeknownst to them at the time) already infected with influenza means you were injecting them with drugs instead of a vaccine. The state of the host body does not define the properties of the treatment.

In the case of cancer, shrinking and/or excising tumors is not the especially difficult part. The difficult part is preventing the cancer from metastasizing and halting it if it has started. That's where a vaccine becomes invaluable. If you could get the body to recognize those out of control cells while they are traveling and eliminate them via immune response before they have a chance to embed somewhere and form tumorous growths, you could drastically improve outcomes for cancer patients.

tl;dr - vaccines are not defined by their intent to prevent disease, but by their intent to train the body to fight the disease itself. The latter is typically what causes the former.