A friend quit the CDC earlier this year. I asked why and she said that it was due to frustration at how little was being accomplished. “Ninety percent of the people there should be fired,” she said. Was that because she’s a Deplorable? Of course not! She even knitted a pussy hat and righteously protested Trump’s anti-women policies. She also does the No Kings and anti-ICE rallies.
Some fresh hysteria today about what Trump and RFK, Jr. have done to the beloved CDC. It seems that they’ve done about one third of the firing that my friend thought would make sense (but maybe not of the same people)?
It’s only white Boomers who love the bloated unproductive version of the CDC?
Also interesting, the NYT article contains a great example of begging the question, as the philosophers and logicians use the term:
For decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the undisputed global leader in public health.
(“a fault in a dialectical argument in which the speaker assumes some premise that has not been demonstrated to be true”)
Certainly, the Europeans and the Islamic Republic of the UK haven’t been enthusiastic about following some of the CDC’s headline recommendations, e.g., 78 COVID-19 shots by age 75 (vs. 1 in the UK), flu shots every year for healthy adults under 65 (vs. 0 in the UK).
If you need to lose friends quickly, incidentally, one good way to do it is by correcting anyone who says “That begs the question…” to mean “That raises the question…”.
> If you need to lose friends quickly, incidentally, one good way to do it is by correcting anyone who says “That begs the question…” to mean “That raises the question…”.
I don’t know…my wife corrected me about some picky terminology in set theory, and she then went from mildly annoying to hopelessly fascinating. It is interesting that in math, the technique of induction could be described as “begging the question”, at least at the base.