My girlfriend already has telekinesis. All she has to do is visualize what she wants moved, express that desire verbally, and then I got move it for her, all without the power of her mind!
I wonder if a good bit of the "my child changed overnight" is from pain aggravating the pre-existing behaviors enough for the parents to notice it for the first time.
Maybe. I'm intrigued by another poster's comment that experienced medical professionals familiar with autism can diagnose the symptoms long before the parents have any clue. I can definitely imagine that's the case, especially since nobody really expects or even wants to think that their child might be autistic. So, the symptoms become noticeable to them for the first time, and they assume that means the symptoms and thus the disease only just started.
True, but since non-vaccinating idiots damage herd immunity and thus impacts everyone, what would it say about our evolutionary fitness when our children die from nearly forgotten diseases as an indirect effect of not making the issue idiot-proof?
As long as enough other people get their kids vaccinated, it's a winning risk-minimization strategy on the part of the parents who don't.
Well that's the whole problem, isn't it? This only works as long as the number of non-immunizing parents is very small. Once their numbers increase beyond a certain threshold, then the probability of an outbreak of a serious disease goes up tremendously, and by the very nature of the issue the disease will hit the non-immunized population first and hardest.
With Jenny Fuckface McCarthy appearing on fucking Oprah telling people not to vaccinate their kids, I think it's safe to say that they are not utilizing the strategy of keeping non-immunization to an acceptable minimum. This is clearly a movement.
If they succeed, then they will be the first to suffer the consequences of their stupidity. So... how is this a rational decision again?
And that wouldn't even bother me, except that it affects everyone who isn't an idiot too.
Why would you need to take them out? Wouldn't the smallpox outbreak do that for you? Since you seem to believe in the vaccine, you and the people you care about would be vaccinated and protected anyway.
That's not how vaccines work. Vaccines do not confer complete immunity to everyone who takes them. They confer pretty good immunity to most people who take them. They are only truly effective when everyone is vaccinated and it becomes difficult for the disease to get a foothold in the population and spread.
If smallpox broke out, the disease would spread through the non-vaccinated population readily, which would increase the exposure to the vaccinated population, overcoming the immunity of many. Who then would have a chance to spread it further. The herd immunity that vaccines provide would be broken.
So that's why I would need to take them out. Because their existence would endanger everyone who wasn't a suicidal idiot too.
I mean really, this doesn't produce any image at all. Yes, you can put it over a monitor of some kind
Uh yeah, that's kinda how "touchscreens" work.
I'm not aware of any kind of touch screen technology where the part that displays the image is also the part that is pressure sensitive. I could be wrong though. But I'm pretty sure that it's not the phosphors in a CRT are not used to detect contact, but we still call em 'touch screens'.
They didn't say it wasn't worn down. They said it was worn down less than the surrounding areas.
They said it was "raised well above the surface", which means that it wasn't worn down even after repeated application of the polish.
If it wasn't harder than the polish, then the fact that it was raised would mean it would be worn down faster than the areas around it, so that it would quickly become level with the rest. That's how polishing works.
It's harder. It wears more slowly. This has no relevance to whether or not it's harder than the polishing grit.
Yes it does, which is how the scientists came to suspect that this mineral was harder than diamond, and they turned out to be right. So, maybe you should reevaluate your thinking in light of that.
What they just said is, if you escape, it suggests that you were faster than the bear.
If there were a multitude of bears pursuing you all and repeatedly applied with the intention of consuming you all equally, with the common result that everyone who is slower than a bear is devoured regardless of their speed relative to each other, then that's exactly what it would imply.
That's what you're doing when you're polishing. Yes you can polish down softer materials more than harder ones, but then on the next pass the raised harder material, if softer than what you're polishing it with, should also be worn down.
That the scientists then studied the mineral based on this evidence, and then concluded that it was in fact a material "faster than a bear", suggests that you are off base.
If the headline was about a musician granting an interview, and the sub-header was "Famous performer never interviewed before", you wouldn't be scoffing "What? You mean no famous performer has ever been interviewed? Well I have a thousand back issues of Rolling Stone that would disagree!"
What they're saying is that they have discovered a crystalline carbon, and it is something never seen in nature before. The sentence is accurate.
Yes the truncated verbal style often used in headlines may have made it less clear than it could have been by the simple expedient of adding "This".
Nevertheless, this is a perfect example of why I find pedantry to be so useless outside of technical fields where precise meanings not only exist but are required. Because more often than not, pedantry is just a way to fail to understand what is being said.
"Herd immunity" should be your google search term. It may not be flattering to think of the human population as a 'herd', but the concept applies.
Some small percentage of people who are vaccinated are not protected, true, but then... those people still exist even if someone doesn't choose to emulate them. so what?
Vaccinations aren't 100% effective in all cases, and this effectiveness isn't a binary "you're immune/you're vulnerable". It's going to depend on other factors like the strength of the person's immune system (since that's what is actually preventing infection), and how much of the disease they are exposed to. There's a difference between a few stray viruses passed on by someone whose body was in the process of wiping them out, versus exposure to someone in whom the viruses are multiplying like crazy, or a whole room full of the same.
So you can have someone who is ostensibly vulnerable to the disease, but the question is, where are they going to catch it from, when nearly everyone around them is not vulnerable to the disease? In this way, herd immunity protects even those for whom the vaccine is not effective, or who can't receive it for some reason, or, for that matter, the occasional person who refuses to get vaccines for their children at all. By having the "herd" as a whole immunized, it prevents the disease from getting a foothold in the population.
The problem occurs when a significant number of people don't get vaccinated. Then there's a population where the disease can get a foothold, and spread freely between members of this population. This increases exposure to the disease for those who are vaccinated, meaning the ones who are more vulnerable are more likely to catch it. This increases exposure to everyone else, and those who before had zero risk of catching the disease now may have some non-zero chance. And thus the disease spreads.
Vaccination is not a personal invulnerability shield. They are only truly effective if everyone is getting them.
I just thank the Lord above that this vaccine scare didn't start until well after smallpox was eliminated.
Though I doubt it's really much of a coincidence -- It makes sense that only after the horrible scourges that plagued humanity like smallpox and polio are distant memories would anyone even think to wonder if vaccines were bad for you.
I have never understood this "you're putting all of US at risk" argument.
Hope this helped! Encourage your neighbors to vaccinate their kids -- for your own kids' sake!
when i see idiots refusing to vaccinate their kids, i just want to grab them and shake the bastards while shoving pictures of the 1920's polio outbreak in their face.
Exactly. Oh man, we are so on the same page on this. These fools obviously have no idea of the kind of human suffering they are avoiding because of vaccines.
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
Except, no it can't. It could if it was elemental mercury, but it's not.
It's kinda like how chlorine gas is deadly, and mixing ammonia and bleach is a bad idea, but you can consume crazy amounts of sodium chloride and never experience symptoms anything like chlorine poisoning.
Also, consider that we are far more eager to diagnose autism and put a label on kids as its the only way to get help from the state. 30 years ago, we'd just call Johnny a lottle slow. Nowadays, he's ADHD, autistic, aspergers, something or other.
Yeah, that's a lot of it right there. The growth in autism is really a growth in understanding what it is and who has it.
Well then I'm definitely not saying anything about what you were thinking or theorizing as to what has really happened in your case. I'm sorry for hardship, but glad he's improving.
All I'm going to say is that if you took the vaccination out of the picture, that's not that atypical a story about autism -- a kid who seems normal at first but then between the ages of 1 and 3 suddenly seems to take a turn. It's a developmental disorder, it has a large genetic component, and is about neuron organization and development. The process is not instantaneous, even if symptoms seem to come about rapidly. No autism is not fully or even particularly well understood. It's just that "vaccination causes spontaneous autism" doesn't match anything that is known. It doesn't match any of the research that's been done on the very subject. The one study that supported the idea that there's any correlation at all has been shown to be a misconducted sham.
I have a relative who was a kid at a time when autism diagnoses were very rare because the disease really wasn't understood, so I don't know for sure... but for years he was withdrawn and silent, and when he tried to talk, it was in a weird language nobody but his parents could figure out. He would get obviously frustrated that he couldn't communicate, and then simply withdraw further. Today, he's out partying at college while he busts the curve in science class.
If he'd caught measles instead, who knows if he'd be around. So, I'm sorry, but as tragic as autism can be, and as tragic as the hypothetical reality where vaccines are causing it would be, the evidence for the risk of autism and the evidence for the risk of disease in the absence of vaccines is not even close to a tough call. We can talk all you want about the hypothetical dangers of vaccines and the need to improve them, and I'll be with you, until your advice is to not vaccinate. That I simply cannot support, and no amount of anecdotal evidence will sway me, because real evidence (like history) is so strongly opposed to that idea.
I mostly hate how all/.'s assume they know better than those "crazy dumb shits out there" when they themselves admit knowing little information..
If you think life was better before vaccination, or would be better without them, then there's no if's and's or but's -- you're a crazy dumbshit who admits to knowing little information. Who is endangering everyone else. This is not tolerable.
So get your damn kids vaccinated. Once you do that, if you want to talk about maybe finding a way to take the aluminum out of vaccines so that the benefits of vaccines can be even better, then we can talk!
as someone who has done research in this problem, there are tons of things in vax's that don't need to be there.. Aluminum? Did you know that was in your vax?
Oh noes! Not the metal that is present in all the food you eat and the water you drink! That's obviously what's causing this problem with vaccines!
There are tons of preservatives that in small doses are fine, but when your kids get 3 - 8 vaccines in one visit, that starts to add up. Where does it stop? When do we let the human body do what it does?
When does it stop? It stops when our children are safe from measels, mumps, and rubella. It stops when we are assured that the diseases that ravaged our ancestors -- who would look on you with HORROR that you think you're better off risking getting these diseases -- will no longer plague us.
And hello? Letting the human body do what it does is what vaccines are all about. Let the immune system train itself to fight off the disease naturally. Oh, but you meant "let the body do what it does" without the influence of modern medicine. Well, in that case "what the body does" is maybe go blind, become sterile, or catch pneumonia and die.
And I'd say "you go on ahead and do that", but the problem is that your stupid choice affects me and my children. It affects everyone. You've done the research, eh? Ever come across the term "herd immunity"?
What about the kids who GET the vaccine and the infect other children (because the vaccine itself is contagious)????
Thankfully not much of a problem when everyone is getting vaccinated. Since rises in increases in incidents of measles and other disease can be directly associated with falling vaccination rates, I'm thinking maybe getting vaccinated is the better idea!
We're talking about profound changes in behaviour within a day of getting a vaccine. When your child stops talking right after injecting a bunch of live viruses into their body there is a tendency to blame it on the live viruses.
Who's talking about this? That post said a week, now it's the same day for a developmental disorder to suddenly transform the child? Are there any cases of this in any of the studies where children were given vaccines and then observed? No? Huh.
And since the effects of the live virus, and mercury poisoning (if it was the kind of mercury that could poison you) are well known, and aren't spontaneous autism, that leaves me with another hypothesis:
Parents ignored the symptoms before, but suddenly became aware when sensitized by fear of vaccines. Their fear and paranoia probably just make the child's already existent symptoms (i.e. introversion) worse.
Granted I have no evidence for this theory applying to any particular case, but it has one big advantage of at least being consistent with the existing scientific evidence.
Much like if they ate something that they never ate before then puked, there would be a tendency to blame the food for them getting sick.
Even if they'd been feeling a little queasy before but wrote it off as nothing. Even if it turned out that they had the flu and the food had nothing to do with it.
Yes, I know people have this tendency. However that tendency often leads to incorrect conclusions.
Herd immunity issues not aside, I'm all for remove these idiots from the gene pool before they have a chance to affect your and my evolutionary fitness.
Okay I don't really mean that (but ask me again if smallpox ever reappears and these idiots still won't get vaccinated).
It just pisses me off so much that these asstards are intentionally bringing down upon not just themselves but all of us a reality that's a thousand times worse than their most paranoid and exaggerated imaginings of what vaccines could be causing.
Yes there are many cases of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
It's a very common fallacy.
Our brains are highly optimized for pattern recognition. Unfortunately this ability is overzealous, and not something we can turn off. It takes reason, logic, and in some cases careful observation to discover how this ability has led us astray.
In any case, "I took my kid to see Avatar and a week later they were autistic!" is not in any way a scientific data point. It also doesn't even make sense -- autism is a developmental disorder. If your kid is showing signs of autism a week after you accidentally insulted a gypsy on the subway, then the developmental disorder was already present and the gypsy had nothing to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
You could re-watch the Matrix without the sequels!
What sequels?
You could re-watch Star Wars with the prequels first
What prequels?
*sigh* You know, you're right, I do wish we had this technology...
Yay for virtual telekinesis
My girlfriend already has telekinesis. All she has to do is visualize what she wants moved, express that desire verbally, and then I got move it for her, all without the power of her mind!
Well since they're tasked with enforcing Space Law, they'd obviously be a Space Law Enforcement Agency, or SLEO.
So you could have SLEOS in LEO, or SLEOS in GEO, SLEOS on a NEO, or SLEOS on a NEO in a Geo. Though that would be unwise.
Unless you're talking about space, where it is usually associated with Low Earth Orbit.
If there were only some contextual clue as to which acronym expansion was appropriate. If only...
They might be showing off but they certainly aren't showing off their intellect...
As an AC once so eloquently put it: "Gee, I wish I was so smart that I didn't understand that."
Hehe.
I wonder if a good bit of the "my child changed overnight" is from pain aggravating the pre-existing behaviors enough for the parents to notice it for the first time.
Maybe. I'm intrigued by another poster's comment that experienced medical professionals familiar with autism can diagnose the symptoms long before the parents have any clue. I can definitely imagine that's the case, especially since nobody really expects or even wants to think that their child might be autistic. So, the symptoms become noticeable to them for the first time, and they assume that means the symptoms and thus the disease only just started.
True, but since non-vaccinating idiots damage herd immunity and thus impacts everyone, what would it say about our evolutionary fitness when our children die from nearly forgotten diseases as an indirect effect of not making the issue idiot-proof?
As long as enough other people get their kids vaccinated, it's a winning risk-minimization strategy on the part of the parents who don't.
Well that's the whole problem, isn't it? This only works as long as the number of non-immunizing parents is very small. Once their numbers increase beyond a certain threshold, then the probability of an outbreak of a serious disease goes up tremendously, and by the very nature of the issue the disease will hit the non-immunized population first and hardest.
With Jenny Fuckface McCarthy appearing on fucking Oprah telling people not to vaccinate their kids, I think it's safe to say that they are not utilizing the strategy of keeping non-immunization to an acceptable minimum. This is clearly a movement.
If they succeed, then they will be the first to suffer the consequences of their stupidity. So... how is this a rational decision again?
And that wouldn't even bother me, except that it affects everyone who isn't an idiot too.
Why would you need to take them out? Wouldn't the smallpox outbreak do that for you? Since you seem to believe in the vaccine, you and the people you care about would be vaccinated and protected anyway.
That's not how vaccines work. Vaccines do not confer complete immunity to everyone who takes them. They confer pretty good immunity to most people who take them. They are only truly effective when everyone is vaccinated and it becomes difficult for the disease to get a foothold in the population and spread.
If smallpox broke out, the disease would spread through the non-vaccinated population readily, which would increase the exposure to the vaccinated population, overcoming the immunity of many. Who then would have a chance to spread it further. The herd immunity that vaccines provide would be broken.
So that's why I would need to take them out. Because their existence would endanger everyone who wasn't a suicidal idiot too.
You said it.
Depresses the hell out of me, though.
I mean really, this doesn't produce any image at all. Yes, you can put it over a monitor of some kind
Uh yeah, that's kinda how "touchscreens" work.
I'm not aware of any kind of touch screen technology where the part that displays the image is also the part that is pressure sensitive. I could be wrong though. But I'm pretty sure that it's not the phosphors in a CRT are not used to detect contact, but we still call em 'touch screens'.
They didn't say it wasn't worn down. They said it was worn down less than the surrounding areas.
They said it was "raised well above the surface", which means that it wasn't worn down even after repeated application of the polish.
If it wasn't harder than the polish, then the fact that it was raised would mean it would be worn down faster than the areas around it, so that it would quickly become level with the rest. That's how polishing works.
It's harder. It wears more slowly. This has no relevance to whether or not it's harder than the polishing grit.
Yes it does, which is how the scientists came to suspect that this mineral was harder than diamond, and they turned out to be right. So, maybe you should reevaluate your thinking in light of that.
What they just said is, if you escape, it suggests that you were faster than the bear.
If there were a multitude of bears pursuing you all and repeatedly applied with the intention of consuming you all equally, with the common result that everyone who is slower than a bear is devoured regardless of their speed relative to each other, then that's exactly what it would imply.
That's what you're doing when you're polishing. Yes you can polish down softer materials more than harder ones, but then on the next pass the raised harder material, if softer than what you're polishing it with, should also be worn down.
That the scientists then studied the mineral based on this evidence, and then concluded that it was in fact a material "faster than a bear", suggests that you are off base.
If the headline was about a musician granting an interview, and the sub-header was "Famous performer never interviewed before", you wouldn't be scoffing "What? You mean no famous performer has ever been interviewed? Well I have a thousand back issues of Rolling Stone that would disagree!"
What they're saying is that they have discovered a crystalline carbon, and it is something never seen in nature before. The sentence is accurate.
Yes the truncated verbal style often used in headlines may have made it less clear than it could have been by the simple expedient of adding "This".
Nevertheless, this is a perfect example of why I find pedantry to be so useless outside of technical fields where precise meanings not only exist but are required. Because more often than not, pedantry is just a way to fail to understand what is being said.
Hm, I think an experiment involving replacing your lotion with a diamond polishing paste would put the lie to your boast!
what is this "all of us" stuff?
"Herd immunity" should be your google search term. It may not be flattering to think of the human population as a 'herd', but the concept applies.
Some small percentage of people who are vaccinated are not protected, true, but then... those people still exist even if someone doesn't choose to emulate them. so what?
Vaccinations aren't 100% effective in all cases, and this effectiveness isn't a binary "you're immune/you're vulnerable". It's going to depend on other factors like the strength of the person's immune system (since that's what is actually preventing infection), and how much of the disease they are exposed to. There's a difference between a few stray viruses passed on by someone whose body was in the process of wiping them out, versus exposure to someone in whom the viruses are multiplying like crazy, or a whole room full of the same.
So you can have someone who is ostensibly vulnerable to the disease, but the question is, where are they going to catch it from, when nearly everyone around them is not vulnerable to the disease? In this way, herd immunity protects even those for whom the vaccine is not effective, or who can't receive it for some reason, or, for that matter, the occasional person who refuses to get vaccines for their children at all. By having the "herd" as a whole immunized, it prevents the disease from getting a foothold in the population.
The problem occurs when a significant number of people don't get vaccinated. Then there's a population where the disease can get a foothold, and spread freely between members of this population. This increases exposure to the disease for those who are vaccinated, meaning the ones who are more vulnerable are more likely to catch it. This increases exposure to everyone else, and those who before had zero risk of catching the disease now may have some non-zero chance. And thus the disease spreads.
Vaccination is not a personal invulnerability shield. They are only truly effective if everyone is getting them.
I just thank the Lord above that this vaccine scare didn't start until well after smallpox was eliminated.
Though I doubt it's really much of a coincidence -- It makes sense that only after the horrible scourges that plagued humanity like smallpox and polio are distant memories would anyone even think to wonder if vaccines were bad for you.
I have never understood this "you're putting all of US at risk" argument.
Hope this helped! Encourage your neighbors to vaccinate their kids -- for your own kids' sake!
when i see idiots refusing to vaccinate their kids, i just want to grab them and shake the bastards while shoving pictures of the 1920's polio outbreak in their face.
Exactly. Oh man, we are so on the same page on this. These fools obviously have no idea of the kind of human suffering they are avoiding because of vaccines.
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
Except, no it can't. It could if it was elemental mercury, but it's not.
It's kinda like how chlorine gas is deadly, and mixing ammonia and bleach is a bad idea, but you can consume crazy amounts of sodium chloride and never experience symptoms anything like chlorine poisoning.
Also, consider that we are far more eager to diagnose autism and put a label on kids as its the only way to get help from the state. 30 years ago, we'd just call Johnny a lottle slow. Nowadays, he's ADHD, autistic, aspergers, something or other.
Yeah, that's a lot of it right there. The growth in autism is really a growth in understanding what it is and who has it.
Well then I'm definitely not saying anything about what you were thinking or theorizing as to what has really happened in your case. I'm sorry for hardship, but glad he's improving.
All I'm going to say is that if you took the vaccination out of the picture, that's not that atypical a story about autism -- a kid who seems normal at first but then between the ages of 1 and 3 suddenly seems to take a turn. It's a developmental disorder, it has a large genetic component, and is about neuron organization and development. The process is not instantaneous, even if symptoms seem to come about rapidly. No autism is not fully or even particularly well understood. It's just that "vaccination causes spontaneous autism" doesn't match anything that is known. It doesn't match any of the research that's been done on the very subject. The one study that supported the idea that there's any correlation at all has been shown to be a misconducted sham.
I have a relative who was a kid at a time when autism diagnoses were very rare because the disease really wasn't understood, so I don't know for sure... but for years he was withdrawn and silent, and when he tried to talk, it was in a weird language nobody but his parents could figure out. He would get obviously frustrated that he couldn't communicate, and then simply withdraw further. Today, he's out partying at college while he busts the curve in science class.
If he'd caught measles instead, who knows if he'd be around. So, I'm sorry, but as tragic as autism can be, and as tragic as the hypothetical reality where vaccines are causing it would be, the evidence for the risk of autism and the evidence for the risk of disease in the absence of vaccines is not even close to a tough call. We can talk all you want about the hypothetical dangers of vaccines and the need to improve them, and I'll be with you, until your advice is to not vaccinate. That I simply cannot support, and no amount of anecdotal evidence will sway me, because real evidence (like history) is so strongly opposed to that idea.
Anyways there seems to be lots of evidence that whatever was wrong with the first versions of MMR has been fixed now.
Well, there's a lot of evidence that there's no problem now, at least.
Anyway, score one for rationality. Please vaccinate your kids!
I mostly hate how all /.'s assume they know better than those "crazy dumb shits out there" when they themselves admit knowing little information..
If you think life was better before vaccination, or would be better without them, then there's no if's and's or but's -- you're a crazy dumbshit who admits to knowing little information. Who is endangering everyone else. This is not tolerable.
So get your damn kids vaccinated. Once you do that, if you want to talk about maybe finding a way to take the aluminum out of vaccines so that the benefits of vaccines can be even better, then we can talk!
as someone who has done research in this problem, there are tons of things in vax's that don't need to be there.. Aluminum? Did you know that was in your vax?
Oh noes! Not the metal that is present in all the food you eat and the water you drink! That's obviously what's causing this problem with vaccines!
There are tons of preservatives that in small doses are fine, but when your kids get 3 - 8 vaccines in one visit, that starts to add up. Where does it stop? When do we let the human body do what it does?
When does it stop? It stops when our children are safe from measels, mumps, and rubella. It stops when we are assured that the diseases that ravaged our ancestors -- who would look on you with HORROR that you think you're better off risking getting these diseases -- will no longer plague us.
And hello? Letting the human body do what it does is what vaccines are all about. Let the immune system train itself to fight off the disease naturally. Oh, but you meant "let the body do what it does" without the influence of modern medicine. Well, in that case "what the body does" is maybe go blind, become sterile, or catch pneumonia and die.
And I'd say "you go on ahead and do that", but the problem is that your stupid choice affects me and my children. It affects everyone. You've done the research, eh? Ever come across the term "herd immunity"?
What about the kids who GET the vaccine and the infect other children (because the vaccine itself is contagious)????
Thankfully not much of a problem when everyone is getting vaccinated. Since rises in increases in incidents of measles and other disease can be directly associated with falling vaccination rates, I'm thinking maybe getting vaccinated is the better idea!
We're talking about profound changes in behaviour within a day of getting a vaccine. When your child stops talking right after injecting a bunch of live viruses into their body there is a tendency to blame it on the live viruses.
Who's talking about this? That post said a week, now it's the same day for a developmental disorder to suddenly transform the child? Are there any cases of this in any of the studies where children were given vaccines and then observed? No? Huh.
And since the effects of the live virus, and mercury poisoning (if it was the kind of mercury that could poison you) are well known, and aren't spontaneous autism, that leaves me with another hypothesis:
Parents ignored the symptoms before, but suddenly became aware when sensitized by fear of vaccines. Their fear and paranoia probably just make the child's already existent symptoms (i.e. introversion) worse.
Granted I have no evidence for this theory applying to any particular case, but it has one big advantage of at least being consistent with the existing scientific evidence.
Much like if they ate something that they never ate before then puked, there would be a tendency to blame the food for them getting sick.
Even if they'd been feeling a little queasy before but wrote it off as nothing. Even if it turned out that they had the flu and the food had nothing to do with it.
Yes, I know people have this tendency. However that tendency often leads to incorrect conclusions.
Herd immunity issues not aside, I'm all for remove these idiots from the gene pool before they have a chance to affect your and my evolutionary fitness.
Okay I don't really mean that (but ask me again if smallpox ever reappears and these idiots still won't get vaccinated).
It just pisses me off so much that these asstards are intentionally bringing down upon not just themselves but all of us a reality that's a thousand times worse than their most paranoid and exaggerated imaginings of what vaccines could be causing.
There are many cases like this.
Yes there are many cases of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
It's a very common fallacy.
Our brains are highly optimized for pattern recognition. Unfortunately this ability is overzealous, and not something we can turn off. It takes reason, logic, and in some cases careful observation to discover how this ability has led us astray.
In any case, "I took my kid to see Avatar and a week later they were autistic!" is not in any way a scientific data point. It also doesn't even make sense -- autism is a developmental disorder. If your kid is showing signs of autism a week after you accidentally insulted a gypsy on the subway, then the developmental disorder was already present and the gypsy had nothing to do with it.