So please don't bring "rumors" into a discussion here. That's exactly the kind of harmful behavior the article is trying to fight against.
How did you determine them to be credible?
My assumption is that any citation to a rumor should be totally dismissed if these questions can’t be answered.
Now do this repeatedly during your long and illustrious career.
What you’re talking about would require a lot more than just one well meaning doctor.
“How it was said” was literally presented as unsubstantiated rumor. It’s not worth reflecting that when someone says “I heard a rumor that X…” it sounds like an unsubstantiated rumor. It’s just the basic structure of English language.
It is so emotionally charged though that there is and has been great hesitation to assign this cause of death because of the emotional effect on the parents.
If we had taken him home without knowing about the condition I'm pretty sure a 'SIDS' cause of death would have been one of the possible outcomes regardless of the actual cause (which would have been very hard to determine after the fact).
There are huge swaths of people doing the work required to make it better, every day. It's not as easy as turning a dial from "bad" to "good"
too many cooks in the kitchen
Prosecutors in America have one goal: close the case. At any cost, close the case. They are not interested in justice. They are not interested in finding the one who actually committed the crime. They are interested in closing the case. If that is “working as designed”, then we need to change the design.
There are of course ways to improve the legal system, more equal access to quality representation is my preferred improvement regardless of system, but you can't just look at one element of the system in isolation and declare the whole concept bad. That's "The CPU produces waste heat so we need to remove it completely" type logic where you find one thing that sounds unambiguously bad and ignore that it could be a symptom of great net positive function of that thing. Doesn't mean it's perfect either, just means it needs more than a shallow dismissal.
surely you don't actually believe that? I don't think the result of this is just 0 false positives. The result of that is a lot more crime, and a lot more injustice.
Unless the person above is, of course, an anarchist who has no answer for what to do about Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Phillip Garrido, or Brian Mitchell. I would say that as imperfect and heavily flawed as our system is, "Perfect is the enemy of good."
Nothing. Those people are one-in-a-million anomalies. If it weren't for the media hype surrounding them, their impact on society would be comparable to the impact of deaths from lightning strikes. What do we do about people being struck by lightning? Nothing.
Or what basically every prosecution does, when it knows that the science behind some things isn't airtight but still presents it in the best possible light to get a conviction.
Fiber analysis (e.g. carpets)
Holy cow is modern medicine still as smugly wrong as it’s always been. Every generation laughs at all the stupid stuff the previous generations believed, and then acts so confident that they’ve got it right this time.
And as a result you get unworthy nurses making moms feel intense shame for not “trying hard enough” to somehow magically produce milk.
Breastfeeding is one of the worst things hoisted upon mothers who are told "you must try no matter what" - seemingly ignoring the mental and physical health of the mother and the father all the while.
I want recommendations and best practices to change as our understanding of things improve though. The alternative would mean that either no more research is being done, or doctors are just ignoring anything they didn't learn while in school.
The training the she did is the possums program from Australia, if somebody wants to look it up I think some resources are available for free.
Really the advice given is simply ridiculous. I honestly think most men who's children have nursed can give better advice than the lactation consultants. One that always makes me roll my eyes is the idea that a breastfed child should eat for a few minutes and then be full for an hour or two. That is simply... Not how it works. Babies like eating and being with mom. Breastfeeding mothers should expect to be with their newborn all the time. We are lucky to know many breastfeeding mothers and I don't know any family where the baby is satiated after ten minutes. And yet... The professionals are convinced this is how it works
And medical incompetence by staff, not doctors, is also awful. My brother hated reading. He got glasses, still hated reading, my mother wondered why he could be so disobedient in that regard. They said, well, the prescription is right, he can clearly see fine. Turns out two years later that the lenses were installed on opposite sides. Right lens on left eye, left lens on right eye. A simple mistake, but the consequences...
I once proved that my wife got the wrong prescription by just holding her old and new glasses up at arms length and seeing that things looked way different through them. The glasses place agreed.
When you get a car engine rebuilt, do they just diagnose, replace parts and then never start the engine themselves to verify it actually works?
I don’t understand. You can’t just go to the store and buy infant formula?
(I realize after writing this out that being at the mercy of your hospital sounds draconian, but it can be really really great if you have a good nurse or midwife. They teach you how to bathe and swaddle the baby, how to nurse, how to rock them to sleep, etc. All skills you’ll need once you leave)
It also has some similar pitfalls, as they are not necessarily specialists and it's still hard to disagree or do something else even if in your own home in the face of the supposed expert.
We had to worry about my wife dying because they wouldn’t suggest a C-section and we didn’t think to ask for one (her induction didn’t take for several days). We’re quite confident they’d have let her die before suggesting one. Thankfully, we thought better in time.
The other side is nursing is hard, and so it is easy to cheat and use formula when you could with a little effort nurse the baby just fine. (Nursing is generally slightly better for the baby, but the difference is tiny. Nursing is generally a lot better for the wallet though)
Indeed. And not just in relation to parenting. The average doctor is constantly trying to emulate TV doctors, just like the average police detective is influenced by what they see on CSI, and every archaeologist wants to be Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. It would be hilarious, if it didn't have such disastrous consequences for regular people every day.
Voltaire (1694-1778) wrote a satirical account of a medieval university's oral examination on medicine: the examiner asks why morphine puts people to sleep, and the student confidently replies that morphine has a "dormative essence". This is a bit like saying that things with an essence of gravity fall towards the earth, whereas things with an essence of levity float towards the sky. The examiner proudly accepts that answer and bestows upon the student the title of doctor.
This was very funny to anyone educated in the time Voltaire was writing, since they would have known that morphine puts people to sleep because... it has round molecules with no sharp edges...
It was Molière (<1622 - 1673), who wrote a play that featured an apothecary (explaining the functioning of opium to laymen), but no examinations.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medsch...
People will probably find it offensive but it does explain a lot about why the stuff being taught is almost always not questioned.
This post in particular:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101211180021/http://www.medsch...
Stay away from mommy blogs/forums. Those are the most toxic cesspools I've ever witnessed. Things are changing, some of the newer ones are not nearly as bad, but man the judgement is super real.
Nurses are one thing, but personally, the worst is family members who think they know better and don't understand the data and that times have changed.
FORMULA IS PERFECTLY FINE.
There are way too many instances of infants "failing to thrive" because their mothers are bullied into relying on breast milk which they simply aren't producing enough of.
I have not seen result like this obtained in a randomized, controlled trial, and it is almost certainly false as stated: you're almost certainly exaggerating for effect, but doing that in scientific context is bad intellectual hygiene.
All results of this sort that I have seen have been purely correlational, and as such suffer from selection bias. This might be true, but the evidence is far from conclusive, and if such consensus exists among medical professionals, it only shows how susceptible they are to groupthink and parroting the stuff they heard from the cathedra.
I've been there with my wife and I'm only the husband.
Everything you say is true, but by saying this and in this manner, you lack empathy. You sound just like the mommy blogs and their followers that I'm speaking against who spout facts with no room for life's situations. My wife sincerely believed she was less of a mother because of people like this.
I say it again: Formula is _perfectly_ fine. Use it a little or as a total replacement. You're not a lesser mother/parent for it.
Acknowledging that formula is a safe alternative and that you don't need to stress.
B. infantis and human milk oligosaccharides create a feedback loop that encourages the formation of a robust immune system during a critical period [1]. Some formulas contain b. infantis, and some contain 2'FL, the HMO present in breastmilk. The most robust strain is EVC001, which has been shown to be present at a year after 21 days of supplementation. In an observational study, it reduced the diagnosis of necrotizing enterocolitis in very low birth rate infants by 73% [2].
I wish this was common knowledge, but most formulas do not contain these (often they contain other pre and probiotics) and babies are missing out on the specific sugars and bacteria that we know impact the development of the immune system.
1. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00660-7 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35032555/
I've been as the husband there are all your facts don't allow for people's situations.
Formula is perfectly fine.
That's your assumption.
You're missing the point, which is that you can supplement formula with both 2'FL and b. infantis and get immune system outcomes that are more similar to those that occur while breastfeeding [1]. The fact that milk typically faciliates a cascade of changes that lay the foundation for a healthy immune system is not at odds with formula feeding. Formula is adequate macronutrition, but if we cannot be honest about the ways in which it is not on par with breastmilk, we will never close the gaps.
1. https://www.nutraingredients.com/Article/2023/05/18/Abbott-s...
Oh do correct me if I'm wrong. I'd love to hear your personal experience. Anyway...
How can you close the gaps when the mother isn't producing milk?
I'm actually confused because you keep telling me it's better, with links and everything, but... It's simply non existent for a lot of mothers. Non producing or a bad latch is enough to put a newborn baby at risk after one week.
It's like you don't believe it's possible.
That's why you're just like the mommy blogs. "You must feed 'em breast milk. It's soooooo important"
We can close the gaps by subsidizing Evivo's EVC001 b. infantis and making it a standard that every formula contains 2'FL. Individuals can choose these formulas and purchase b. infantis already. If we were to make it so that all babies, not just NICU babies at hospitals aware of the research, get these two things, public health outcomes (especially those related to autoimmune conditions) should be better than if we continue allowing formula that is not as analogous with breastmilk. We can have better lactation support that is current and evidence based (such as that from ABM contributor Katrina Mitchell https://physicianguidetobreastfeeding.org).
Another reason mom blogs are toxic is because people read past others points when issues are really emotionally charged for them. Really sorry your wife struggled. Formula is fine, but there are reasons breastmilk is pushed, especially since milk is supply and demand and it's hard to identify those with true low supply and those whose bodies just haven't ramped up production yet. Hopefully as a model of immune system response and the impact of b. infantis and HMOs gains more awareness, there will be less pressure since we are assured babies are getting many of the same benefits.
They had no care for my wife's ability to heal, rest, or anything, just subjecting us to the worst kind of institutionalized checklist torture. The medical system cares for nothing other than preventing lawsuits and providing a place for doctors to do their 1 hr of work on their 18 patients a day.
Questioning witnesses is literally the DA's job. That doesn't magically stop being the case just because the witness is an expert. The DA is indeed qualified for this. You could even say it's one of the main reasons the DA exists.
The author of this post admitted that it took him countless hours to discover that medicine basically has this issue wrong and only after being particularly motivated to do so. If the DA has so much medical expertise that they know better than the doctors, then what exactly is he doing being a DA?
The idea that the main purpose of the DA is to know better than doctors is ludicrous.
So to be plain: No, DA's don't (and aren't supposed to) just take experts by their word. They ask clarifying questions, and often bring additional experts offering contradicting testimony.
Do you seriously think courts operate by "the doctor said so, case closed"? We wouldn't need courts if that were the case.
> Do you seriously think courts operate by "the doctor said so, case closed"? We wouldn't need courts if that were the case.
For certain things.. yes. If a doctor tells a jury that these injuries could only be sustained via shaking trauma, most juries will believe them over a rogue doctor or a non doctor. Doctors have some of the highest trust ratings of all professions. Attorneys have some of the lowest. That means convincing the jury the doctors are wrong.
The blame should lay at the feet of the medical professional bodies.
I think that's being way too charitable.
In a world where people are incarcerated on a scale unprecedented in all of human history, and where prosecutorial success is measured by number of scalps taken, the assumption that this is plain malice designed to let the state rob a few more individuals of their freedom makes much more sense than it all being just a big pile of incompetence and misunderstandings.
And crimes weren't solved, people not prosecuted, criminals not punished
For much of history life didn't even exist, that's not an argument for or against anything
Plus majority of it never went through tria, because trial is just too much risk. So, there are not all that many actual checks and balances
In other countries the clearance rates are as high as ever. The US is an exception in many aspects in the West, closer to third world countries depending on what metric you look at
> overall, findings showed that the clearance rate in Finland and Switzerland in the years of analysis was very high, in some years of the analysis even reaching 100 percent. Internationally, these rates are extraordinary high, even in comparison with other European countries such as Italy (67 percent and, later, 78 percent) , Estonia (80 percent), England & Wales (85 percent) and France (80 percent)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14773708187648...
Modern western police forces, with all their foibles, are far, far, far better than mob justice.
Are people even aware of history, and how absolutely bloody it was, with an immense lack of personal rights?
Fixing what's broken now is good. Trying to pretend it is worse than what was before, is absolutely absurd and laughable.
Foucalt has his critics, but it's not immediately obvious that the massive incarceration problem in some Western nations is better than public execution at the whim of monarchs. And some forms of torture, Foucalt argued, have changed from the theatrical and public to the more subdued torture of everyday lives of prison inmates.
So, one may perceive incarceration as an improvement.
> As the global population grew 21 per cent, between 2000 and 2019, the number of prisoners worldwide jumped by more than 25 per cent, according to the UNODC data.
So, worldwide trend is upward.
> While Northern America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe have experienced a long-term decrease in imprisonment rates of up to 27 per cent, other regions and countries, such as Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, have seen up to 68 per cent growth over the last two decades, the study revealed.
So apparently your definition of “western countries” includes sub-Saharan Africa but excludes most of Europe and all of Australia and New Zealand?
Overall your own source supports their point and contradicts your own.
To be honest the text you are quoting doesn't talk about Western Europe at all, and I think if you exclude Western Europe, then "Northern America + Eastern Europe" is most of what remains of "western countries". Australia and New Zealand, while part of western countries, are so small that they are basically insignificant for statistics.
The data in the source[0], though, says the number of prisoners in Europe as a whole (as well as Northern America) has decreased (Figures 10, 12, and 13) confirming what GP said. Eastern Europe is quoted specifically because the decrease has been much more important (basically, the numbers are becoming similar to Western Europe).
There's no question that the trend in the West has been a decrease in incarceration rate, with Australia and New Zealand clear outliers.
[0]https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics...
Regardless, cherry-picking even such an incredibly gerrymandered “West” ignores the entire point of the source: the human population in prison has risen faster than the human population itself… pointing to minor improvements in the world’s largest prison state and what remains of the ex-Soviet gulag system states while ignoring considerably larger regressions in, for example, a nation colonized specifically to be a prison does nothing to contradict that fact.
If you consider "the West" to be (as is commonly admitted) Europe, Northern America, Australia and New Zealand (with maybe Japan included) then incarceration rates have decreased in the West. Even if they have increased in minor countries (AU + NZ).
You're getting stuck on a sentence of the summary that talks about a subset of the data, but I'm not sure why. I also have no idea what you mean about a "nation colonized to be a prison", but honestly this looks to me as if you're just trying to push some idea without vocalizing it, which is a bit off-putting. If you're talking about the US, then yes it does have a much higher incarceration rate than anywhere else in the West, but it's a clear exception within the West and it is still decreasing.
That's a lot of work, a lot of malice, a lot of hate, from a lot of people, for a very meagre result.
If that's how you view your government you must live a really painful existence
That's the banality of evil.
Power is not a meagre result. For those people who live by it, it is the ultimate goal, and they will use any means to obtain and expand it, no matter the cost to others.
"The state" doesn't benefit in any way from locking people up. In fact, it costs them money (both directly and in lost taxes from the lost salaries and wages of those incarcerated).
An argument could be made that prosecutors benefit from higher incarceration rates through the incentives you described. And an argument could definitely be made that private corporations paying well-below-market rates for prison labour benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...
We got 800,000 or so right now. Fight unemployment? Lock more people up.
Except they can force people to pay them more, all they need is plausible justification (like combating crime, or terrorists, or drugs, or viruses, or whatever the current societal scare happens to be about).
Of course it makes much more sense that there was a massive conspiracy across the medical, legal, prison industry, and press to put more people in prison. Rather than some doctors and legal professionals assuming SIDs was a simple explanation for a not very well understood medical phenomenon probably with many causes.
Not like it hasn't happened before. And you're overestimating the required massiveness of the conspiracy IMO.
This is only true, because prior to these times, people were killed instead. Or beaten to within an inch of their lives. Local "justice", lynching, mob action, used to be far, far more common.
And of course, many people used to be worked to death. Or sold into slavery. Or die from horrid conditions in jail. Or forced into the foreign legion.
While I agree that something may be wrong in the US, there are many regions in the world where the above still happens.
Hm, sounds like an assertion that ought to be checked by a historian, possibly ACoUP's blog? (Yes, the one who writes about Rome, he is sometimes featured in HN). He specializes in demolishing misconceptions people/Hollywood have about history.
For example, many historians have been writing, recently, about how medieval society was far less brutish and cruel than portrayed in pop culture. There were laws, rights the monarch gave their subjects, culture, etc. Lots of what we "know" about the middle ages from Hollywood is simply wrong.
Why would we have to? We can just hire M. Rossant.
I think the most productive thing I can at least try to do is to raise awareness among lawyers, doctors, and all professionals involved. No one has the time to dig into it as much as I did, but perhaps I can organize and present our current knowledge as clearly as possible. The book is one little step in this direction.
If you have the requisite "knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education" you can testify as an expert. No need to be a lawyer, don't need to be a doctor.
You gave yourself that knowledge and your knowledge exceeds that of the typical "they shook the baby" expert. I'd go with you any day.
Or do you have _evidence_?
Race is culture. There is no scientific or biological basis for the racial classifications we use. That whole framework was invented by European slave traders and imperialists to justify white supremacist ideology. At one point, Irish and Italian immigrants to the US weren't considered white. Whether Jews are white or not depends on one's opinion of them (they tend to become less white the more paranoid people become of them.) Greeks wouldn't be considered white by many people yet many white people also hold up ancient Greece as the bedrock of "white culture," which as a concept doesn't even really make sense. "Asian" defines half the human population, so broad as to be nearly useless. "Black" is a whole can of worms. None of it is scientific or objective, all of it is a social construct.
Now you do. In the ideology of racism (from the 19th century to the Nazis and beyond) not only Romanians and Danes are of different races, but also Nordic/Germanic/Anglosaxon are of different race to Italians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and so on, including of course the Irish. With a long history of those (and more) not considerd "white" in the US, and being persecuted by the KKK and others.
>Conflating racial prejudice with cultural prejudice is a cheap trick.
Yes, god forbid we condemn prejudice as racial when in fact it's just prejudice because of their "inferior" culture.
Of course, though, those two go hand-in-hand historically. For example, according to Nazi racism, Jews had a "damaging influence" on German culture, they promoted various forms of decadence and so on. And of course every modern racist would say they don't hate blacks as a race, just black culture and crime and so on.
There may be some overlap between systemic racial mistreatment and child abuse - however the nuances seem to set them far apart. I believe conflating the two makes it harder to get the full measure of each.
It's not that they can't be compared. It's that they ought to be fully considered in isolation first.
The term is used to describe the stages a country has been through, and there’s plenty of evidence that as countries develop further, the nature of those developments may or may not be beneficial.
Brexit, online safety and other forms of “progress” come to mind.
The (darkly) funny thing in the case of Germany is that this lack of diversity in education has created a generation with the fertility rate of South Korea (ie dying).
In this case, the state creating a monoculture that results in the ‘destruction’ of the existing state goes to show why evolution values diversity far more than monocultures.
any evidence of that?
I don’t think it was supposed to be aspirational.
Note that I carefully did not say anything about what abuse is. Unfortunately there is no agreement and I don't want to get into that debate (it is well worth having, but it would change the direction I'm trying to go here).
Homeschooling is debatable, if the children are evaluated to be equal to their regular schooled peers, I don't think the child should be taken out of the family environment, but should be subject to further wellness checks by social workers.
A challenge is where the ripped-off children wind up, a foster home system with it's own abuse issues.
Given a more developed country, I'd presume there are more people willing to adopt/do foster care for the right reasons and the social workers can regularly check upon the welfare of the child, thus there can be legitimate reasons to lower the threshold of taking a child out of a family setting vs a less developed country.
Did you mean: richer?
> good education, infrastructure, medical care, human rights, clean environment
I don't know for sure (never been to Saudi Arabia), but I'm guessing they check off all the boxes except for human rights[1]. (About a clean environment--I imagine they'd be as clean as Abu Dhabi or Dubai (the UAE) which were a lot cleaner imo or on par with Western cities.
I guess this is a matter of subjective matter, but is _human rights_ a dimension a country has to have in order to be considered developed?
If human rights is indeed a dimension that needs to be satisfied, would that mean that the brutal treatment of black and brown minorities in the US by the police would make the U.S. a country that's not developed?
Also, Western European countries also have a track record that has historically surpassed world records for brutality. For example, Belgium[1] was chopping off the hands of African tribal people they had forced into labor (effectively enslaved), Germany murdered 6 million innocent Jewish people[2] and had a habit murdering people even before the Nazis in its colonies as well[3], the British were responsible for numerous famines in India as well as famine in Ireland as well as other atrocities[4], the French committed atrocities[5], so did the Netherlands and the Dutch with the East India Company[6], and Spain and Portugal (along with England and others) were highly culpable in the murder of millions of Native Americans[7].
Did these actions, at least temporarily, render these Western European countries as "not developed" countries?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_genocide
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...
[5] https://newlinesmag.com/newsletter/the-dark-legacy-of-french...
[6] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/10/dutch-colonial-history-...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Indigenous_peoples
> like Saudi Arabia is rich but not developed imho > good education, infrastructure, medical care, human rights, clean environment
Saudi Arabia's record on human rights is truly horrible (for example, recently they've started murdering refugees[0]), but the idea of whether a country is "developed" seems to be highly subjective, imho. I don't know for sure (never been to Saudi Arabia), but I'm guessing they check off all the boxes except for human rights[1]. (About a clean environment--I imagine they'd be as clean as Abu Dhabi or Dubai (the UAE) which were a lot cleaner imo or on par with Western cities. I guess this is a matter of subjective matter, but is human rights a dimension a country has to have in order to be considered developed? If human rights is indeed a dimension that needs to be satisfied, would that mean that the brutal treatment of black and brown minorities in the US by the police would make the U.S. a country that's not developed?
I'm asking this since Western European countries also have a track record that has historically surpassed world records for brutality. For example, Belgium[1] was chopping off the hands of African tribal people they had forced into labor (effectively enslaved), Germany murdered 6 million innocent Jewish people[2] and had a habit murdering people even before the Nazis in its colonies as well[3], the British were responsible for numerous famines in India as well as famine in Ireland as well as other atrocities[4], the French committed atrocities[5], so did the Netherlands and the Dutch with the East India Company[6], and Spain and Portugal (along with England and others) were highly culpable in the murder of millions of Native Americans[7].
Did these actions, at least temporarily, render these Western European countries as "not developed" countries?
[0][a] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/21/saudi-arabia-mass-killin...
[0][b] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/world/middleeast/saudi-ki...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_genocide
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...
[5] https://newlinesmag.com/newsletter/the-dark-legacy-of-french...
[6] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/10/dutch-colonial-history-...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Indigenous_peoples
This wasn't SBS though, she just kept adopting out her kids to devote more time to her drug habits.
Who has more authority over their children and in which domains?
Medical providers, can they ruin kids' lives in various ways? It's easy to manipulate worried parents.
Schools, do teachers have authority over their classroom, how much? Can they override parents, for example when rescuing them from anti-LGBT?
Nobody trusts churches anymore, so that's not really a problem.
Honest question, trying to parse your statement (and bear in mind I don't live in Europe, so I'm surely missing the obvious): do you mean that in Denmark there is a bias against Eastern Europeans, such as Romanians?
Edit: excellent, got a downvote for asking an honest question and clarifying why I wrote it. Is this an example of the fine discourse we are supposed to have here? This is an honest question, I'm neither European nor a native English speaker and I have difficulty parsing the sentence I quoted. How on earth does this warrant downvotes?
I don't think the term Roma has a bad association, because in my experience nobody but the most woke even know it. That is the PC term. People I've encountered just use gypsy or their local equivalent.
I'm sure that you're not doing that here, but unfortunately people with genuinely honest questions have become collateral damage caused by disingenuous actors, especially among people with itchy downvote-trigger-fingers.
Thankfully people have responded and now I both understand the sentence and they why!
If the same "tactic" is used, why not come up with a good counter? A point stands whether it's being asked disingenuously or not.
According to Wikipedia, as to the distribution of this condition,
> The birthmark is prevalent among East, South, Southeast, North and Central Asian peoples, Indigenous Oceanians (chiefly Micronesians and Polynesians), certain populations in Africa, Amerindians, non-European Latin Americans and Caribbeans of mixed-race descent.
So you can see how, in a Western European nation, even if no-one is being biased in the sense of "hating foreigners", the false accusations would cluster in "non-indigenous" populations, for want of a better word (I originally had "immigrants" then realised that isn't the correct split I'm looking for.). Personally I believe there is no defense for doctors, courts and social workers not knowing about this and checking for it before making any accusations.
This doesn't seem to apply to Romanians / Eastern Europeans specifically, unless they have partly Asian ancestry, but it does show that there are conditions that can be mistaken for abuse that appear in some cultures more than others.
I'm guessing if some kind of Commanche social worker turned up to look at a case of blue spot, they'd go "Yeah that's a birthmark, about half our children have it, our nation even has legends about it. Have a nice day!".
It's the classic "N guilty men" problem, aka Blackstone's ratio: if you risk putting one innocent person in jail, how many guilty people you need to catch to make it morally justifiable? 5, 10? 100?
You have to pick a number, or else no kind of criminal justice can exist.
It's more likely that a fall (or being thrown) would cause the symptoms.
In any case, these situations are extremely rare, much more than those involving any kind of head impact.
If toyota cars unintentionally accelerate and kill people, but sometimes people mistakenly accelerate and kill people. If I am driving a toyota and accelerate and kill a person, if 100% of all cops/investigators believe the first case doesn't exist, and the second case is the only possible answer, I will be thrown in jail without a second thought; my life is destroyed, and it wasn't even my fault.
But more than that, we don't even know what the ratios are, is it 90% / 10%? is it 10% / 90%? is it 50/50? Because everyone believes it is 0%/100% we can't make the "N guilty men" decision at all, so we need a hard stop, evidence, and re-start.
I know you were downvoted, but I think your thoughts are exactly the problem I am trying to point out. So thank you for commenting on it.
What a leap (the kind the article is calling out by the way). Do you really think all causes for toddler skull fractures are a societal problem?
If a child has a serious injury the circumstances should be examined, as it should be quite rare for children to have serious injuries.
That's why places have Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committees.
Fractures among children: incidence and impact on daily activities
https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/4/3/194
wherein we discover that kids 0-12 break bones at an incidence of 128 per 10,000. Over 12 years that's more like 1536 or about 15% of kids if injuries were evenly distributed, although they probably aren't. Still in the right ballpark.
So serious injuries among kids are incredibly common.
If we launch investigations and get it right 95% of the time we will none the less fuck up millions of kids lives. We would probably be better off selectively investigating when there is at least some reason to believe something is afoot instead of every injury.
But yes, we should investigate why the child broke their arm. Does that need to be an in-depth investigation? Not usually. But it's important to understand why these things happen; that's where the data for the study you cited comes from.
Just to defuse this a bit. My #4 used to collect skull fractures. He'd slip away in a nanosecond and would be 50' above us two heartbeats later. We put him in a padded helmet for a year or so. It stayed on sometimes.
As an adult he can still disappear in an empty room.
Thousands upon thousands. By some estimates upwards of 10% of incarcerated individuals. The situation is just accepted. The general consensus is always that locking up too many people is better than than too few. It is on defense attorneys to check on the system.
Also, the Innocence Files is a must-watch on Netflix [3].
[1] https://innocenceproject.org/
Now it’s important to understand what is meant when people reference incarceration numbers. A lot of these are people awaiting trial on charges they will be found guilty of but receive minimal sentences via plea bargaining. Another large portion are illegal immigrants that are awaiting processing for either integration or deportation.
So if you erase those 2 groups it’s mainly violent people. There’s an abundance of violent people in the USA compared to Western Europe and certainly Asia I’d say.
Sigh.
Sadly, that varies enormously with the social status and wealth of the accused.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0...
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1440-1754....
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12024-014-9600-5
[4] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/143/5/e20183...
It is the perfect combination of crap.
Cyrille Rossant may save a lot of lives, in both parents and children, if this becomes common knowledge.