Sing along mocking bird, you don't affect me

I want that specifically so people can make it a meme to post pictures of themselves showing me stuff. Like memes off their phone.

Or maybe things that they are proud of but don't have anyone else to show them to. Like your school graduation papers, this cool knitting project you finally finished, your baby who's never going to see their grandparents.

And I also want a clause that they will absolutely fucking never put those anti-homeless things of any kind on my damn bench. So if there's ever someone who's got nobody else to keep them company, they can at least spend the night with me.

Me: you will not earn what you desire by banging the cabinet door.

My cat: This is a test of wills, is it not? We shall see if your ability to put up with my incessant banging outlasts my eternal lust for snackie treats. Years of conditioning have hardened me for this purpose. bang bang bang

Me: ksst!

My cat, throwing herself to the ground like she's been shot: Oh! Oh I have been assailed in my own home! Have mercy, have pity! Surely in the cruel darkness of your heart there is some mote of goodness that might stay your hand! Do not strike me, I pray you!

Me: ok

vimes did not resign from his post in protest, observe the rest of the watch resign from their posts in protest, recruit them into a militia, sail to the country they were at war with, and attempt to arrest two different armies for disturbing the peace so you could sit here and call him a drama queen, as though drama was some myffic quality bestowed by an accident of birth and not the inherent right of every creatively petty and histrionic citizen of ankh-morpork 

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This is the best post I've ever seen in my entire life.

I wrote this up once before but it was for a fictional setting so it had a little bit of elaboration (it was "what if late-irc-english evolved for another 70 years in a world where the soviet union never collapsed?"), so here's the redacted version that's closer to real late-irc-english:

beginnings of sentences are not capitalized. proper nouns are not capitalized. capitalization is solely for emphasis and acronyms/initialisms

contractions have (often) lost their apostrophe. "i cant do that" or "youre joking!". "it's" and "its" have merged into "its"

periods don't end sentences, they separate them. you never need to end a sentence with a period unless you have another sentence on the same line without an linebreak

compound words are now nearly all closed, instead of open or hyphenated. the desert is called "icecream", people are "middleaged", and the beatles are an example of a "20thcentury" rock group. the exceptions are words that be offensive or misunderstood when made into a closed compound. they still say "trans woman" and not "transwoman"

speaking of gender stuff: the default pronoun is "they/them"

punctuation doesn't go inside quotes unless the quoted text has punctuation. periods or commas go after quotes: '"hello", they said to us both' and not '"hello," they said to us both"

they prefer emoticons to emoji. :) not 😊

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

They do not work on the same principle.

I can see how vaccines look like a "like treats like" situation, but in homeopathy "like treats like" is a kind of magical thinking.

Let's take an example from Chicken Pox, a virus for which there is an effective vaccine and for which there is a common homeopathic treatment.

Chicken pox infects people once, and it is extremely rare to get a second case because once you have had it, your body forms persistent antibodies against the varicella-zoster virus. When I was a kid, they didn't have a vaccine for this, so kids mostly got chicken pox once and it ran around whole schools and that was it. It's a virus that is fairly minor in children, though it can cause dangerously high fevers. Adults who get chicken pox typically get much sicker than children who get it, and it can lead to permanent harms like infertility in adults who get it. Because it can be so dangerous, we don't want people to risk getting it, so we vaccinate.

The way the vaccine works is that it takes a weakened form of the virus and introduces that into the body of a person with a healthy immune system. The immune system responds and the person who got the vaccine may get some minor symptoms, like a headache or a slight fever, but it will be nowhere near as severe as getting actual chicken pox would be. Because the immune system was exposed to the virus and responded, it now has antibodies against the virus that recognize the virus and respond immediately before it can start replicating in the body. If a person who has either previously had chicken pox or who has been vaccinated against it is exposed to the chicken pox virus, their body uses those antibodies to react to the virus and protect against a systemic infection.

Are you familiar with Star Trek? It's kind of like the Borg. You can't use the same attack pattern against the Borg multiple times because if you do, they'll recognize the pattern and will be able to defend against it. The virus is the attacker, and your immune system is the Borg. It knows what it's looking for and won't let anything get through its defenses.

Homeopathic remedies don't seek to prevent illness or provoke an immune response, they seek to cancel out something that is happening in the body.

For chicken pox, which produces itchy red bumps, homeopaths use Rhus Tox - a dilution of poison ivy, a plant that causes itchy red bumps if you encounter it in nature. The Rhus Tox didn't cause the chicken pox, it's not given to prevent the virus, it's from a plant that is completely unrelated to the virus that happens to produce some of the same symptoms as the virus when you touch it.

They don't even think that the Rhus Tox will provoke an immune response from your body like actually touching poison ivy would, they're attempting to use an unrelated compound (that is so diluted that it isn't even present in the preparation) in place of your immune system to attack the itchy red bumps.

So I'm going to go over this in a few brief points:

Vaccines are preventative ONLY, they are not a treatment for illness or symptoms of an illness

Vaccines work by introducing your immune system to a partial, weakened, or dead virus so that your immune system can form antibodies against that virus and prevent that virus from replicating in your body when it is later exposed to a whole/strong/live virus.

Different vaccines have different levels of effectiveness and produce different lengths of immunity; this is for a number of reasons, but if you get a measles shot as a kid you may only ever need one booster, while you need a flu shot every year and a tetanus shot every decade. All of them work the same way, though: they show your immune system what a virus looks like so that your immune system can kill the virus.

That is why immune compromised people sometimes can't be vaccinated, or why vaccines don't work as well for them or may need higher doses or more boosters. Because they don't have a healthy immune system, weakened viruses like the ones in the chickenpox virus might be too strong for their immune system to fight, and even if it doesn't get them sick, their bodies may not be able to produce enough effective antibodies to protect them from the virus in the future. That's part of why it's important for as many people to be vaccinated as possible; the more people who are vaccinated, the harder it is for viruses to spread, and vulnerable people like immune compromised people or babies too young for vaccination won't be exposed to deadly viruses.

Homeopathy, on the other hand, aims to treat symptoms of an illness that a person is already experiencing.

Homeopathic treatments do not aim to provoke an immune response, they aim to cancel out a symptom with a cure.

Dilution is a very important part of homeopathy, with homeopaths claiming that the more diluted a preparation is the stronger it is. This is simply incorrect; I don't know how to make a more logical explanation of that, it is just wrong that less of a substance causes more of a response.

Homeopathy says "like treats like" and that may seem like using a vaccine with a weak virus to prevent infection from a strong virus, but their version of "like" is different - Rhus Tox (poison ivy) is supposed to be "like" chicken pox because both cause itching. Rhus tox is also supposed to treat PCOS, erectile dysfunction, uterine prolapse, sunken eyes, nausea, and backache. "Like" can have an extremely broad meaning in homeopathy, which should be cause for suspicion.

Drinking peppermint tea when you have a sore throat isn't going to make your sore throat go away faster, but it might provide some relief from the pain.

A heavily spiced tea isn't going to cure anything, but it might give some temporary relief from a stuffy nose.

No soup is going to cure your illness, but it will give your body some much needed vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes that will help it fight off the illness and recover more quickly.

And sometimes things just straight up do nothing but make you emotionally feel better - that's okay, too. Just know what are realistic expectations for what you're doing.

Homeopathy is *very specifically* the dilution of substances in water to use water's memory to treat illnesses on the principle of like treats like. Calling drinking tea for a sore throat "homeopathy" is like calling stretching "chiropractic" or calling all massage "acupressure."

In the last decade or so people (largely people who want homeopathy to be taken more seriously) have been expanding the use of "homeopathy" to cover more and more home remedies and CAM practices, it's important to know what the actual meaning is so that people don't start to conflate "drinking tea" with "drinking water that was once near a leaf of poison ivy" because it legitimizes the latter.

People who have had a cold and felt better after having some warm soup (clear liquids! vitamins! minerals! protein! rehydration and nutrition, which you need when you're sick and will make you feel better!) who think of that as "homeopathy" are going to see people discussing homeopathy as a scam, quack practice that does tremendous harm and they'll think "what is that person talking about? homeopathy is just putting lemon and honey in tea for a sore throat, it's fine" which will make them more resistant to criticisms of actual homeopathy and will perhaps make them adversarial toward discussions of evidence-based medicine.

This is semantic creep that needs to be firmly addressed; that was NOT a common definition of "homeopathy" when I started getting deep into exploring the world of CAM and quack medicine fifteen years ago, and I'm a bit concerned that it has spread as far as it already has.

It actually did help my little sister a bit sometimes, probably from the placebo effect, because we'd been doing this basically her whole life, pretty much. It never did fuck all for me, but I had remembered going to the doctor as a little kid and getting medicine that actually worked when I was sick, like cough syrup, and I'd been pretty sure at 8 when we switched to a homeopath that it was bullshit, because it didn't make any sense.

Homeopathy is *very specifically* the dilution of substances in water to use water's memory to treat illnesses on the principle of like treats like

"Like treats like" for homeopathists means that if you have a headache, you can put a droplet of cauliflower juice (because cauliflowers kinda look like brains, right? Therefore it must cure head pain!), diluting that drop of juice in a bottle of water, diluting a drop of that in a new bottle of water, and repeating this dilution process a hundred more times. This is the "water's memory" — it's diluted so much that there's literally not a single molecule of the original juice left in the solution that you will finally drink.

If that sounds like the stupidest bullshit you've ever heard? Congrats, you have an accurate understanding of homeopathy.

Vaccines are preventative ONLY, they are not treatment for illness