[HN Gopher] Peter Buxtun, whistleblower who exposed Tuskegee syp...
___________________________________________________________________
Peter Buxtun, whistleblower who exposed Tuskegee syphilis study,
has died
Author : racional
Score : 229 points
Date : 2024-07-16 03:17 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Buxtun
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
| rectang wrote:
| > _Buxton himself could be self-effacing about his actions,
| saying he did not anticipate the vitriolic reaction of some
| health officials when he started questioning the study's ethics._
|
| Humans relentlessly believe themselves to be just and righteous.
| To maintain that self-sense, they will gladly deceive themselves
| -- and often much worse.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Yip, I think this is the main moral to be taken from this
| incident, and many like it. It's not like the people carrying
| out these experiments were just sadistic racists. They probably
| saw themselves as being able to, in the long run, save far more
| people and create a greater, safer, and healthier society for
| everybody, being able to eventually treat not only syphilis but
| any other disease which may manifest similarly.
|
| About the time somebody starts arguing that the ends justifies
| the means, something has probably gone wrong. Because the
| "ends" people envision quite rarely come to pass, yet the means
| of trying to pursue those ends _do_ , with 100% certainty,
| happen. So most often you end up with all the evils, and none
| of the utopian justifications at the end of the road.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Sounds like a lot of startups.
| max_ wrote:
| I don't think a racist ever thought about themselves as
| racists.
|
| Racism is usually a notion of people having an explanation
| for why they behave towards another race.
|
| There are always explanations. I don't think there is any
| racist that doesn't have an explanation.
|
| For American slavery it was that "African Americans" are just
| animals, not human. So it made sense to use/teat them like
| donkeys or vermin.
|
| In Nazi Germany, the explanation was that Jews are veramin
| and so veramin needs to be exterminated.
|
| In South Africa it was a "scientific" theory they had called
| Holism [0] which basically described that everything should
| be kept in its place hence apartheid policies.
|
| In Gaza the explanation is religious i.e God have us land X,
| and this we need to cleanse the land of it's "invaders".
|
| Also, look at caste systems in India. They have explanations
| of why they do that. They don't see themselves as racist.
|
| The explanations still occur today using "statistics",
| "data", & "science" with stuff like IQ "research" & "race
| realism".
|
| "Racist" is something we project on people.
|
| But racists always think they actually have a Nobel or
| logical cause for thier activities.
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism_and_Evolution
| echoangle wrote:
| What's your definition of racism? White supremacists are
| certainly racist and would probably tell you that they are
| racist, too. That's their whole message. Nazi Germany
| Leaders would probably have been ok with having been called
| racist, too. They were talking about being superior than
| other races all the time.
| max_ wrote:
| I think a black man declaring all white people evil
| vampires is racist.
|
| But we seldom call oppressed minorities racist.
|
| My definition of racism is the application racial
| stereotypes to individuals & groups
| bbarnett wrote:
| For me, it depends upon how the 'groups' part is applied.
|
| An example that seems sexist: women love shoes.
|
| However, this isn't sexist... it's simply statistically
| true. Where *isms come into play, where sexism occurs, is
| seeing the individual and then thinking "Ah, a woman...
| clearly she _must_ love shoes ".
|
| Applying group derived statistical fact to individuals is
| where racism, sexism occurs.
|
| Another example, black people in America show lower
| outcomes on IQ tests. There is a lot of debate as to why,
| whether it is genetic (an example, do Black people have
| less incidents of autism? Autism is often correlated with
| mental issues, but also conversely with higher test
| scores in some areas.) But really, it doesn't matter
| _why_. Whether it is genetic, whether it is cultural, or
| what.
|
| What matters is that we understand the group statistic
| exists, but that no matter _what_ we do not simply apply
| such thought processes to the individual. After all, a
| few percentage in group testing has no basis for
| determining if the person in front of me is capable or
| not.
|
| I've met (as an example) some very unintelligent white
| people, and some very intelligent black people, a few
| percentage difference as a group is not relevant here.
|
| Yet if we pretend group differences don't exist, how can
| we possible try to fix it.. if it is cultural? Or worse,
| what if it is environmental, such as... poor nutrition
| which hurts brain development during youth? Such things
| can be fixed, yet if we pretend there is no difference,
| how can we try to fix it?
|
| So again, the primary must be to treat individuals as
| just that, and treat groups as just that, otherwise.. how
| are we being fair?
| somenameforme wrote:
| To me racism has a pretty simple litmus test - would you
| treat an individual of another race, but in an otherwise
| identical background situation differently? If yes, then
| it's probably racist. If not, then it's probably not. So
| Tuskegee has some interesting backstory. It was inspired by
| a similar experiment that was carried out in Norway that
| followed the progression of untreated syphilis in thousands
| of people over decades. [1]
|
| That study provided extensive data and information on the
| progression of syphilis, but at the time it was believed
| that syphilis affected different races in different ways.
| And black Americans had (and still have) infection rates
| dramatically higher than other major groups. So this meant
| that studying this exact group could not only be overall
| most impactful on a population basis, but was also the
| least well understood group (as the Norwegian study
| presumably lacked much of anybody of African ancestry) and
| so the most most likely to yield novel/informative science.
|
| So if these individuals had otherwise been just another
| subgroup of whites (but one still had reason to think
| syphilis might affect them differently than e.g.
| Norwegians), would we still have carried out this
| experiment? It's impossible to say for certain, but I think
| the answer is probably yes. Not only was such
| experimentation already happening across the globe,
| including in relatively homogeneous societies, but there
| have been all sorts of other US government driven
| experiments on the population where white groups were just
| as readily experimented on like MKUltra [2], Operation Sea
| Spray [3], and so on endlessly.
|
| [1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii
| /002196... (note the date on the paper)
|
| [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
|
| [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
| mandmandam wrote:
| Did you ... Did you just try and. use MK Ultra and
| Operation Sea-Spray to claim the Tuskegee experiments
| weren't racist? :o
|
| Systemic racism in medical research cannot be justified
| by comparing it to other unethical experiments... Really
| would have thought that was obvious?
|
| Also, even the analogies are terribly flawed. The Oslo
| experiments involved retrospective examination of medical
| records and autopsies, not the withholding of treatment.
| And Tuskegee victims were not informed of the real nature
| of the study - a clear ethical violation which
| disproportionately targeted a vulnerable racial group.
| somenameforme wrote:
| That is not what happened in Oslo. This is the lead
| paragraph of the abstract of the paper from it:
|
| ----
|
| Nowhere in the world is there a more unique opportunity
| to learn what happens when early syphilis goes untreated
| than from the files of Boeck of Oslo, Norway. His
| scientific conviction as to the inadequacies of the
| specific treatment of the day led him to withhold
| treatment from approximately 2,000 patients with primary
| and secondary syphilis during the twenty-year period,
| 1891-1910. Community protection from infection was aided
| by the hospitalization of these patients until all traces
| of the disease had disappeared (from 1 to 12 months,
| average 3.6 months). In 1929, his successor, E.
| Bruusgaard, reported on a follow-up study of 473 of these
| patients and provided information on the outcome of
| untreated syphilis, which has formed the basis for
| prognostic statements on syphilis for more than twenty-
| five years.
|
| ----
|
| In Oslo the patients were both hospitalized and then had
| treatment withheld. His successor then carried out a
| retrospective study on what happened. It's unclear what
| the patients were told, but I suspect it was not 'We're
| going to hospitalize you for months, but not treat you.'
| mandmandam wrote:
| This is a side-point, quite apart from the fact that you
| claimed Tuskegee wasn't racist because MK-ULTRA also
| affected white people. I really hope you think that one
| over, because it's a truly horrid and utterly
| indefensible take.
|
| And you're still _very_ wrong on this side-point, because
| from 1891 to 1910, _there was no known effective
| treatment for syphilis_. Whereas during Tuskegee
| (1932-1972), penicillin was both widely available for
| most of that time and known to be effective.
|
| I don't know why you're making these awful comparisons,
| but I'm interested how you formed these views. Did you
| hear these arguments on a podcast somewhere, or are they
| your own? ... And why on Earth would you think Peter
| Buxtun's death was the appropriate time to bring them
| up??
| somenameforme wrote:
| When one looks at history, it's like we're on a loop. And
| I think a big part of that is because we fail to ever
| "really" learn from the past. And I think one part of
| that is demonizing the past with labels, instead of
| actually trying to understand what really happened and
| why. Because when we overly demonize things it makes it
| impossible to imagine any reasonable person, let alone
| ourselves, ever engaging in anything even remotely awful
| - 'it could never happen again.' But of course it will,
| and it won't just be "evil" people doing it.
|
| So to your post here - you're again factually mistaken.
| There were indeed numerous treatments for syphilis in the
| 19th century, as the paper specifically mentions
| treatment being withheld should have clued you into.
| These treatments had significant side effects, but such
| is often the nature of medicine. What would you think of
| a doctor that intentionally withheld chemo or other
| similarly dangerous treatments to thousands of cancer
| patients, to instead observe what happened to them absent
| treatment? That is what happened in Norway, and again I'm
| sure the doctor had the best of intentions, presumably he
| was working to develop a more effective treatment.
|
| If you have any factual or logical arguments I'm more
| than happy to hear them, and indeed perhaps there is
| something I am not considering. But I find the appeals to
| emotion and bias mixed with a healthy helping of ad
| hominem and straw man quite silly, and I will not engage
| with that.
| mandmandam wrote:
| The guy claiming the Tuskegee experiments weren't racist
| is also now claiming the moral high ground.
|
| I'm out.
| bbarnett wrote:
| It's not clear to me if people in this thread are
| differentiating between "certain categories of humans
| have specific genetic vulnerabilities" and "we're going
| to be racist without logical or researched cause".
|
| It actually _hurts_ people to not take into account their
| genetic background, an example is sickle cell anemia,
| which originates primarily in black people, who have a
| family tree from Africa.
|
| Why? Well, even though it causes severe issues, it also
| protects from malaria parasites! There was an
| evolutionary derived pressure to spread this in that
| population group. And, during covid this caused
| additional problems for those with sickle cell. It also
| highlighted how Italians, most specifically those in
| Sicily have a strong likelihood of having sickle cell,
| primarily due to the endless, centuries long Roman
| occupation of Africa.
|
| Women and men are physically different, and have
| different issues to account for (osteoporosis a great
| example here). Men often have too much iron, where as
| women too little. Treating everyone the same would mean
| not treating anyone correctly.
|
| So, yes.. there are racial and sexual differences to take
| into account during studies, and medical treatments. As
| with everything, the true way to behave is often neither
| extreme.
|
| No one should be mistreated during treatment, and
| treatments should not be racist... while understanding
| that racism isn't "different genetic groups of humans are
| predispositioned for certain conditions".
| mandmandam wrote:
| No one is saying that all people are genetically the
| same. No one is arguing that sayig "different genetic
| groups of humans are predispositioned for certain
| conditions"is racist, or that medical treatment needs to
| ignore biological differences.
|
| What is being claimed by OP is that since atrocities were
| _also_ inflicted on white people during unethical medical
| experiments such as MK ULTRA, withholding known treatment
| from a specific racial group in Tuskegee without their
| consent can 't be called racism (which is so absurd that
| maybe that's where you got confused?).
|
| Hope that clears things up for you.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| That's not really why the study was conducted on African
| Americans.
|
| > The conception which lay behind the U.S. Public Health
| Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee in 1932, in which 100%
| of its participants were poor, rural African-American men
| with very limited access to health information, reflects
| the racial attitudes in the U.S. at that time. The
| clinicians who led the study assumed that African-
| Americans were particularly susceptible to venereal
| diseases because of their race, and they assumed that the
| study's participants were not interested in receiving
| medical treatment.[4][45]
|
| > Taliaferro Clark said, "The rather low intelligence of
| the Negro population, depressed economic conditions, and
| the common promiscuous sex relations not only contribute
| to the spread of syphilis but the prevailing indifference
| with regards to treatment."[45] In reality, the promise
| of medical treatment, usually reserved only for
| emergencies among the rural black population of Macon
| County, Alabama, was what secured subjects' cooperation
| in the study.[4]
|
| I mean the other racist part was the fact that
| penicillin, which is still a standard treatment of
| syphilis today, was developed while the study was ongoing
| and yet there were still three more decades that it ran.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| >> Taliaferro Clark said, "The rather low intelligence of
| the Negro population, depressed economic conditions, and
| the common promiscuous sex relations not only contribute
| to the spread of syphilis but the prevailing indifference
| with regards to treatment."...
|
| This is a fairly sickening mindset. I hope I am never not
| sickened by it.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Strange. I have no problem reading it as a literal
| description with no bigotry or racism implied.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| If it were about J.R.R. Tolkien's orcs, then I might
| agree. When _basic observation_ disproves 3/4 of your
| "literal description" about a racially-defined
| population... those "facts" probably didn't originate
| from honest mistakes.
|
| It's possible to be racist while using objective
| language: there's an entire Wikipedia article on
| scientific racism.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What was the basic observation that disproves it?
|
| It was a statement about a specific group of people in a
| specific situation. I assume most of it was based in
| contemporary reality.
|
| You could probably say the same thing about other places
| today and be correct.
|
| I think the part that you're missing is that it wasn't a
| statement about blacks in general, but a particular
| community of incredibly poor people with zero education.
| syphilis was in fact rampant in that community, and I
| imagine that with zero access to healthcare or even
| detection, they were fairly fatalistic about it. People
| were more likely to have it than not have it by a huge
| margin.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You're asking me to provide a recorded observation, as
| evidence that the people recording "facts" didn't make
| observations. My theory (as stated) doesn't expect that
| evidence to exist! If this were debate club, that would
| be a foul.
|
| Fortunately for my ELO rating, they did make observations
| that contradicted their bigotry. Per the great-
| grandparent:
|
| >> _In reality, the promise of medical treatment, usually
| reserved only for emergencies among the rural black
| population of Macon County, Alabama, was what secured
| subjects ' cooperation in the study._
|
| (Racists always do this. Such comorbidities are part of
| why we have a special name for this special category of
| "being wrong".)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >You're asking me to provide a recorded observation, as
| evidence that the people recording "facts" didn't make
| observations. My theory doesn't expect that evidence to
| exist!
|
| I Don't understand either if your statements. You said
| the characterization of Marcon County was obviously
| wrong, but say there's no possible evidence way they
| could have known this.
|
| >reality, the promise of medical treatment, usually
| reserved only for emergencies among the rural black
| population of Macon County, Alabama, was what secured
| subjects' cooperation in the study
|
| What are you trying to say here? Is this bad? They gave
| medical care to people who wouldn't have it otherwise.
|
| Getting Medical Care is a reason people of all Races
| enroll in clinical trials and it's still true today
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Normally you need to confirm a stereotype with data, not
| verify it after the fact.
|
| The treatment funding ran out during the study period, so
| this stopped being a benefit but the study continued
| anyways.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| They had a positive belief. Conventionally, people come
| to positive beliefs after observing evidence*. I'm
| accusing them of _not doing this_. They _absolutely could
| have_ known better; they simply chose not to look.
|
| *: Exception: beliefs about Other Groups of People, which
| are conventionally formed by looking at Our Group of
| People, then inventing ways that Other Groups of People
| are different and/or worse.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| OK, I see what is going on. I believe they were likely
| correct and basing their opinion directly from
| observational data. Syphilis was rampant and education
| was extremely low.
|
| You think they were wrong, and assume observational data
| would refute it.
| somenameforme wrote:
| In looking up more information on this topic in general.
| I came upon this [1] paper on the Tuskegee Study. It's an
| absolutely encyclopedic work that covers the historical
| context, parallel programs, and much more with an absurd
| level of detail and sources galore. So for instance I
| also thought that no subjects in Tuskegee received
| penicillin. It turns out this is incorrect and by 1952
| 27.5% had! [2]
|
| Another really interesting datum is that Georgia in 1945
| started carrying out widespread syphilis testing, on the
| scale of hundreds of thousands of people, reaching 89%
| testing coverage in one local jurisdiction (which is
| where I _assume_ Tuskegee was located). The interesting
| thing is that 30% of black individuals and 3% of white
| individuals tested positive for syphilis. People wouldn
| 't have known the exact numbers back when this the
| Tuskegee study started (in 1932), but with such
| ridiculously high rates of infection, they'd have had a
| general idea.
|
| How do you think that would shape your views of a people
| when the Overton Window was wide open? Do you honestly
| think you'd still have been standing on a moral pedestal?
| _This_ is why I think it 's important to try to do more
| than just demonize the people involved. Because
| demonizing them isn't hard. They deserve it, and worse.
| But at the same time when we demonize them, it's so easy
| to miss the lessons to be learned because, after all, we
| aren't demons so surely we couldn't go down the same path
| again. Yet we almost certainly will if the only lesson we
| take away is 'don't be evil', because what we see as evil
| after the fact is not what people, good normal and
| "moral" people, perceive to be evil in the present.
| That's history in a nutshell after all.
|
| [1] - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedici
| ne/fullar...
|
| [2] - https://sci-
| hub.ru/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
| (gotta love 70 year old papers being paywalled...)
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Probably like 2/3 of the people I know that I would
| consider to be racist or hold racist beliefs would call
| themselves racist, or at least say that they have some
| racist beliefs.
|
| Probably half the other 3rd are predominantly those that
| are racist specifically toward white people.
|
| When you create a space where people can be sincere, you
| would be surprised how self-aware they can be. At least I
| am.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| I take that as part of the point they were making: white
| supremecists, for example, claim white people are
| superior. Their actions are logical in some sense if you
| accept their premises that a) race is a useful
| classification akin to species and b) there is some
| inherent difference between races.
|
| To be clear personally I think the science has
| definitively debunked not only supremacy of any race but
| even race as a concept which is really all about skin
| tone and facial features... many people's DNA doesn't
| even match their supposed "race" because the
| categorization of race is akin to color of coat in dogs:
| a very superficial trait useful as a visual descriptor
| but not useful for segmenting individuals into groups.
|
| Not to mention the whole story of homosapiens is freeing
| us from biological evolution. The idea that someone's
| biology inherently limits their worth or makes them not
| an equal member of humanity is in some sense the most
| perverse denial of our very nature.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think when trying to debate something, the idea should
| be to try to convince the other person. That sounds
| stupidly obvious, but it's really not. Imagine you're
| debating somebody over something and resorted to an
| argument over the exact meaning of terms that, to people
| who might not share your worldview, would be completely
| obvious. It's unlikely you'd really be persuading them of
| anything.
|
| I think the more salient point is that _even if_ you
| assume clear racial distinctions, and even substantial
| racial differences, that still does not justify any sort
| of racial ideology. The movie Gattaca works as an oddly
| perfect metaphor for racial ideologies and its problems.
| Gattaca was about genetics, but it 's not a coincidence
| that it fits perfectly with race, as it's literally the
| exact same problem.
|
| Just because somebody is a part of a group with some sort
| of a negative correlation, does not mean that person will
| _inherently_ let that trait dominate them. Incidentally
| the reverse is also true - just because somebody may e.g.
| have a high IQ does not mean they will inherently be
| knowledgeable or wise. It 's okay to consider group
| tendencies, but at the end of the day individuals are
| able to rise far above or fall far below their
| "expectation", and so it's important to judge each person
| not by the makeup of their genetics, but by the content
| of their character.
| Izkata wrote:
| Supremacy sure, but not its existence, more like the
| opposite: Ancestry DNA tests wouldn't work if there was
| no basis for it.
| LanceH wrote:
| > They probably saw themselves as being able to, in the long
| run, save far more people and create a greater, safer, and
| healthier society for everybody
|
| It's easy to view this as bad in this article's case, but
| nobody views their version of getting to play god when it
| comes to politics so long as their side is in charge. And the
| funny thing about this statement is how volatile a reaction
| it will get from both sides who think assume I'm supporting
| one or the other.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _It 's easy to view this as bad in this article's case,
| but nobody views their version of getting to play god when
| it comes to politics so long as their side is in charge_
|
| This is just lazy rhetoric. Some political groups go murder
| crazy as soon as they gain power, while others don't.
| Obviously not everybody is equally bad as everybody else.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Yes, and the more you convince people that everyone is
| equally bad, the more you empower bad actors. If there is
| no profit in being good and there is profit in being bad,
| being good is for suckers.
|
| If everyone's a thief, you'd better start stealing.
| Otherwise you're just a victim.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| In fantasy arguments I have in my head about someone
| justifying their bad behaviour with "but everyone does
| it", my reply would be, "most people I know don't do it,
| so it's definitely not everyone, just people like you".
| DFHippie wrote:
| "Everyone does it" translates to "I don't think I will
| suffer consequences from doing it". It's a justification
| based on self-interest, not ethics.
|
| It looks like they are applying a version of Kant's
| Categorical Imperative, which is roughly "what if
| everyone did it?" The justifier is saying everyone _does_
| do it and everything is fine. The proof is in the
| pudding. But as you say, if literally everyone did it,
| they wouldn 't be having this conversation with you. So
| what they mean by "everyone" is "enough people that I'm
| safe".
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > Because the "ends" people envision quite rarely come to
| pass, yet the means of trying to pursue those ends do, with
| 100% certainty, happen. So most often you end up with all the
| evils, and none of the utopian justifications at the end of
| the road.
|
| So what you basically say is that we should always follow the
| path of least evil _at the current moment_. It 's strange to
| me to think that someone would say that this is indeed the
| optimal way to minimize evil.
| thephyber wrote:
| In _Beyond the Curve_ a writer put it succinctly:
|
| > Nobody thinks they are the Ursula of their story.
|
| I think it is the human condition that our ego protects itself
| by denying truth in order to "protect" our psyche from
| acknowledging that we may have done something extremely morally
| compromising.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| I wonder if Ursula von der Leyen thinks she is the Ursula of
| her story?
| neilv wrote:
| That might be too generous. What if the vitriolic reaction was
| due to the threat of _external_ repercussions from that
| information being revealed, rather than threat to _internal_
| self-image?
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| It's a good thing we don't have labs that do these amoral
| experiments currently. It's always by sheer luck that such
| atrocities always happen in the past.
| hiatus wrote:
| We have known this for ages, hence the adage, "The road to Hell
| is paved with good intentions."
| anitil wrote:
| For some context on the Tuskegee "experiment" I'd recommend the
| two-part series from "You're Wrong About" [0] [1]. Buxtun shows
| up in the second episode. What I hadn't remembered is that it was
| 6 years from when he first raised his concerns until they were
| taken seriously.
|
| [0] Part 1
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/1CSuf2U9vM5sYru8RwsqFB [1] Part
| 2 https://open.spotify.com/episode/6GveYHXn6CdkHoGOZTYv0j
|
| Apologies for the spotify links, I couldn't find their hosted
| version
| astura wrote:
| >Apologies for the spotify links, I couldn't find their hosted
| version
|
| They are right here:
|
| https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/1112270/5330092-tuske...
|
| https://yourewrongabout.buzzsprout.com/1112270/5418709-tuske...
| anitil wrote:
| Thankyou! I'm not sure how I missed them, I got to their
| website, clicked 'Episodes' expecting to see them, but missed
| the link to buzzsprout
| prettyStandard wrote:
| I can second these episodes, and the podcast series in general.
| It's very informative about things that have been
| "misremembered". Other good series were the OJ Simpson trial,
| Monica Lewinsky, the Satanic Panic, and of course the
| McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit.
|
| Just recently on Hacker News I saw someone making jokes about
| this lawsuit being spurious.
|
| Oh gosh, now I'm on a tangent.
|
| Rather than defend "this was not spurious" I'll just say that's
| how our legal system is set up. The legislative branch is not
| interested in making reasonable laws, and/or creating capable
| regulating bodies like most other modern countries. Your
| recourse here is to sue, hopefully there is an appropriate
| decision, and it's taken as precedent. Of course we've gone
| further in that direction in recent history.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I don't know if it is fair to say people "misremembered" the
| details of the McDonald's coffee lawsuit. As the news media
| and pop culture weirdly seemed to go out of their way to
| paint McDonald's as the victim and the woman as negligent,
| people never knew the correct details at the time to begin
| with.
| burningChrome wrote:
| I was a college student at the time and never saw it that
| way.
|
| I remember in the media there were vigorous debates over
| this as being "frivolous" but I remember all my friends
| were on the victims side. Spending days in the hospital to
| get skin grafting because their coffee was too hot I think
| far exceeded what someone would classify as "frivolous". I
| also remember several news reports about how they found out
| through court documents McDonald's had over 700 reports of
| burns between 1982-1992 which to me was completely shocking
| and proved they knew their coffee was way too hot.
|
| Now you see all the warnings on the labels, most of the
| bigger chains have cardboard sleeves so your hands don't
| get too hot holding it. McDonald's has since reduced the
| temperature of their coffee as well.
|
| The only thing I didn't accurately remember was several
| people told me that the lady initially won her lawsuit, but
| lost on appeal and McDonald's didn't have to pay her
| anything. In actuality, she won a sizeable award from the
| jury, but it was greatly reduced by the judge and then
| before an appeal, McDonald's finally settled out of court.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Resta
| u...
| gosub100 wrote:
| The media also follow trends. I remember all through the
| '90s there was a trend of reporting frivolous cases as
| news, probably for sensationalist purposes. The ones I
| remembered were "prisoner sues because his ice cream
| melted", burglar sues after falling out of rafters". These
| type of stories were popular on morning radio programs.
|
| What I want to know is if Ms Liebeck just got lumped into
| that fad, or if there was economic pressure from McD's to
| weaken her case. McDonald's advertising spend was HUGE back
| then, of course on the same media channels that reported
| about her.
| ksenzee wrote:
| > he legislative branch is not interested in making
| reasonable laws, and/or creating capable regulating bodies
| like most other modern countries
|
| That's the point of a common-law system. Not that I'm
| defending Congress and how little they get done--I'm not,
| they're terrible right now--but we don't have case law
| because Congress is terrible. We have case law because that's
| how our legal system is meant to work. The legislation lays
| out the theory, and the details get worked out by judges
| after theory meets practice. It's not somehow inferior to
| civil law, just different.
| Retric wrote:
| Common law doesn't require lawsuits to cover issues like
| this.
|
| It's hard to sue a company when they follow quantitative
| guidelines. However terms like 'due caution' punt issues to
| the courts who then come up with a meaningful standard.
| dbspin wrote:
| Unfortunately 'creating capable regulating bodies' is no
| longer possible, in the binding opinion of the Supreme Court.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supreme-
| court...
| mercutio2 wrote:
| I loved the first 20-30 episodes, but at a certain point I
| got the feeling they had a very significant axe to grind on
| their supposedly impartial revisiting of some of the events
| they were looking at.
|
| When they started talking about health outcomes, especially,
| their tone of "we know what's obviously true, our outgroup is
| stupid" got too strong for me and I stopped listening.
|
| I'd be interested to know if they've toned that down, at all.
| anitil wrote:
| I had some hesitation about recommending them because of
| this, but going from memory I think it was a good couple of
| episodes
| hannob wrote:
| I had learned about this in the Pandemia podcast last year,
| unfortunately only available in German. But I thought for all the
| German-speaking HN readers I could share, it's worth listening
| to: https://superelektrik.de/pandemia/syphilis-geschichte-
| eines-...
|
| Pandemia is a podcast started during the Covid pandemic, but
| regularly covering all kinds of diseases and health issues.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| As non-American, it's a strange feeling to see all these
| discussions about racism. It took me a while to understand that
| the whole perception of the issue is just completely different.
| Swizec wrote:
| I've lived here for ~10 years and I'm still learning. The base
| realization is that if you come from a mostly homogenous (or
| openly racist a la apartheid) background, you simply can't
| understand how American style racism works.
|
| In my home country we have so few black and asian people that
| exact numbers can't be reported in the census because it would
| be considered personal information. Sure we have racism but
| it's purely of the "fear of new/unknown" kind. Anything more
| than that we learned from american media.
|
| A better analogy, if you come from such a background, might be
| to replace racism with ethnicism. We're really good at
| ethnicism in Europe in a way that's a lot more similar to how
| america does racism.
| graemep wrote:
| Its not quite that. The US is also different from other
| countries with large non-white minorities. I think you are
| right that race, ethnicity and other things (such as caste)
| are much the same thing: you are classified by some group you
| are born into, and you and your descendants cannot move out
| of. However it is also different in every culture.
|
| It look me a long time to understand how the US is different
| from countries I know (which are definitely not homogenous,
| though some are fairly openly racist). I could see race was
| much more ingrained in the culture compared to the UK, but
| did not understand why. The insight for me (mostly thanks to
| Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste) is that race in American is a
| caste distinction: it is a hierarchy rather than just
| hostility to the outsider.
|
| I wrote a blog post on this:
| https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
| iftheshoefitss wrote:
| I would posit it's not a caste system similar to India's
| caste system or old school feudalism. Being an outsider
| definitely plays a part for instance the treatment of
| Italian immigrants. In my experience if you're part of a
| certain group you might or will get mistreated but if
| you're part of that group and also an outsider oof you're
| in for one tortured existence. Which is kind of
| contradictory because the USA is one of the few places that
| openly welcomes outsiders (like you don't see migrants
| trying to go to China or Russia) but at the same time if
| you're deemed persona non grata like for whatever reason
| the land will mess with your life, health and so on unlike
| any other place
| graemep wrote:
| How is it not a caste system? A caste system can ALSO be
| hostile to outsiders on an ethnic or religious basis
| (plenty of examples of both in South Asia!) in addition
| to the caste system.
|
| Feudalism is not a caste system. In a feudal system
| people can move up and down to some extent, and over
| generations people can move a lot. It was possible for
| people to marry to at least some extent. There is no
| notion of pure blood or pollution.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228717335_Was_th
| ere...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| In a caste system, your "worth" is decided at birth based
| on what caste system you are born into, and your
| opportunities and relationships are determined by that.
|
| The US has some of the highest rates of interracial
| marriages, relationships, etc. in the world. Mobility in
| America is driven by socioeconomic class, not race, and
| gender plays a heavy role in educational success in some
| races (more than race itself), but not others, for
| various historical reasons.
|
| In order to cast U.S. racial relations into a type
| "caste" system, you'd have to stretch the definition of
| caste so thin that it wouldn't have any meaning.
| alan-hn wrote:
| Rich African Americans are still looked down on by some
| in comparison to rich whites. There is not as much
| mobility as you would think
| graemep wrote:
| It was historically a caste system though, especially in
| the South up to the sixties, and there are remnants of
| that. No doubt it is a weakened caste system, and
| hopefully dying one, but it still seems present.
|
| Americans seem to still, at the least, attach a lot of
| importance to race, and to classifying people by race. It
| is seen as fundamental to who people are: a lot of
| Americans who seem fine with someone self-identifying
| their gender find it far harder to accept someone self-
| identifying their race. Why not? A lot of people report
| assumptions are made on the basis of race. In a lot of
| conversations I have with Americans about race seem to
| assume that people are likely to be overtly treated
| differently on the basis of their appearance.
|
| I do not know the US so maybe I am out of date or have
| read the wrong things but I find it a lot harder to
| understand the importance Americans (not just racists,
| but people trying to be anti-racist too) attach to race
| if I am wrong.
| ksenzee wrote:
| > maybe I am out of date or have read the wrong things
|
| No, I think you have a better grasp on it than most
| people outside the US. Americans really want to believe
| we don't have a caste system, because it's antithetical
| to our origin story and what we feel is true about
| ourselves, but we absolutely do. So if you listen to us
| talk, you'll think we don't have a caste system. If you
| watch our actions, you'll see we still do.
| rincebrain wrote:
| If I were to wildly speculate, I might guess that many
| Americans think of gender as being about presentation and
| experience, while "race" is almost entirely about shared
| experience - which, yes, is often informed by reactions
| to one's appearance, or lack thereof, but that's not the
| identifying characteristic.
|
| So it comes across as similarly distasteful to someone
| claiming to be "long lost Uncle Eddie", because they saw
| your family through the glass at a holiday and liked what
| they saw - since you weren't here for a billion shared
| little experiences, and there's no claim that you were
| from the same grandparents or similar, it rings hollow
| and like you want something from it.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > The US has some of the highest rates of interracial
| marriages, relationships, etc. in the world
|
| This is a fairly recent development. As recently as 1995
| (1 generation ago), the majority of Americans disapproved
| of interracial marriages.
| iftheshoefitss wrote:
| I think this is still the case opinions regarding stuff
| like this isn't just voiced in public anymore so it gives
| the appearance of shifting stats
| jajko wrote:
| Oh we have quite a bit of racism in Europe too, just go to
| eastern part. People are not so vocal about it, unless in
| 'their' circles.
|
| Sure, its all mixed together with fear of different
| religions, xenophobia which I would say is still dominant
| force, and its targeted way more on black people rather than
| east asians, but these days its there, even on places that
| had 0 of it due to literally 0 exposure to other races few
| decades ago. I personally saw first black person in person as
| a teenager for example.
|
| Big parts of societies are quite radicalized if you care to
| look closely enough, which many don't and consider Europe
| some form of uniform hippie paradise. But then you can't
| escape the reality of ie string of victories of more or less
| extreme right winders all getting the vote 'to stop
| immigration'. Whole Brexit was fueled mainly by such
| xenophobia, it would be insignificant fart in the wind
| without this.
|
| My personal opinion is that before countries like Germany
| decided to allow unregulated immigration en masse and try to
| push rest of EU in same direction without asking, serious
| discussions should have taken place for a long time and
| explained to common folks why, in what form, for how long,
| how will it affect them, how will state protect them etc.
| Instead, at least eastern part went through shock therapy and
| hence often seen kneejerk reaction of refusing everything.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Oh we have quite a bit of racism in Europe too,
|
| Just mention Romanians and Europeans can pretty quickly get
| a sense of how racism works in the US
| renewiltord wrote:
| For European racism, just bring up the Roma and wait for a
| European to say things that no one in any American city would
| say.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| It's different.
|
| Europeans are proud of hating gypsies, we just don't bring
| this up around Americans because of how poorly they react
| when we show them our point of view. Racism and pedophilia
| are two most sensitive topics for Americans, who feel like
| they're on the holy mission to free the world from these
| two evils.
| archagon wrote:
| If you're ever "proud" of hating someone, you should go
| see a therapist. (Or a priest.)
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Of course any exercise in explaining our point of view is
| futile, because, again, the idea that there might be some
| truth to racism is literally the most taboo topic of your
| culture, so there's no way you'd ever agree with me to
| any degree, and any consensus is non-negotiable.
|
| It's like trying to explain to an Arab shepherd that his
| religion might be wrong. Or to a Japanese that smoking
| weed isn't much of a deal. These ideas simply go against
| core values of their cultures, and no argument will make
| them change their mind.
|
| So we just nod and smile "ah yes amerika good racism bad
| what else do you want to hear"
| archagon wrote:
| It's possible to criticize culture without being racist
| or resorting to virulent, gleeful hate. Have you met any
| actual Romani aside from the occasional panhandler? You'd
| think Europeans would welcome the ones that try to escape
| their culture, and yet they face roadblocks and
| discrimination along every step of the way. Instead of
| hate, why not try a little empathy or even pity for
| people born into unfortunate circumstances? Your
| mentality is despicable, period, even without the
| American racial lens. (And for what it's worth, I was
| born in Europe and am very much familiar with this
| bullshit first hand.)
|
| So feel free to continue nodding and smiling. We can see
| right through it. Rest assured that it reflects far more
| poorly on you than the Romani, whatever their flaws may
| be.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > why not try a little empathy or even pity for people
| born into unfortunate circumstances?
|
| Because this comes at a societal cost we cannot afford.
| Simple.
| archagon wrote:
| This kind of thinking is how we got the Holocaust.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| So you just smile and nod, but inside you think "American
| racism may be bad, but _our_ racism is true and based on
| evidence "?
|
| I mean, look, if you want to condemn Romani _culture_ ,
| sure, I can at least listen. (There are some in the US
| who think "all cultures are equally good"; I am not among
| them.) But if you want to condemn Romani because of their
| race or ethnicity, and say there's "some truth to the
| racism", then I'm going to condemn _you_ as a racist. And
| to the degree that 's part of your culture, I'm going to
| condemn your culture.
|
| And yes, that's not negotiable.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > And yes, that's not negotiable.
|
| This is also why I'm very skeptical of modern
| progressivism. It's not like people became more aware,
| because they still have a set of beliefs they don't
| question, it's just that those beliefs changed. Which
| means that they might, and probably will, change again in
| the future. If it took 60 years to go from "racism is
| best" to "racism is the worst" without any fundamental
| change to how we create our social norms, then it's not
| outrageous to claim that within another 60 years we might
| go back to "racism is best".
| spacechild1 wrote:
| > Europeans are proud of hating gypsies
|
| What are even talking about? Please don't extrapolate
| your own views on the population of a whole continent.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You know, PG said you can disagree with downvotes but if
| someone says something that they honestly believe and not
| just to make controversy I think I'd rather upvote them
| so I can see the post.
|
| So up you go.
| tokai wrote:
| Wonder why the US thought they needed to continue this experiment
| when they had access to the results and researchers of Unit
| 731[0], that did extensive research on syphilis. Kinda makes one
| think that the racial aspect was the point.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#American_grant_of_imm...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| As discussed elsewhere, one reason is that at the time Syphilis
| response was significantly different in Africans. Trials like
| this had been previously run on Europeans, and 731 would
| presumably include east Asians and ran for a handful of years,
| not decades.
|
| Unlike Unit 731, they didn't infect anyone and it was an
| observational study.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> Kinda makes one think that the racial aspect was the point.
|
| Interesting to note that the lowest C19 vaccine rates were in
| the African American communities. A lot of media outlets have
| speculated the primary reason for their vaccine hesitancy was
| this experiment and not trusting the government.
|
| In Tuskegee, Painful History Shadows Efforts To Vaccinate
| African Americans https://www.npr.org/2021/02/16/967011614/in-
| tuskegee-painful...
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> A lot of media outlets have speculated the primary reason
| for their vaccine hesitancy was this experiment and not
| trusting the government._
|
| Combined with the much more recent incident in Pakistan where
| the CIA staged a fake hepatitis vaccine program to help
| locate Osama Bin Laden, leading to the resurgence of polio in
| the country.
|
| The US government just can't help itself in abusing vaccine
| programs for shady purposes.
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