Clever_Clover [she/her]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • so what i don’t understand is how prions can be resisted

    basically all prion diseases that we know of are not curable and have a 100% fatality rate

    and whether the epidemiology of a prion disease is about who ingests/receives an incorrectly folded protein

    well, it can depend on some things, like for example if there was a difference in how well your body worked without that certain protein being functional compared to another person who is less resilient when this particular protein doesn’t work well, it’s kind of the reason why the incubation period varies so widely, the build up and conversion from good proteins to misfolded ones isn’t instant and takes time, so until that build up gets to a level where it causes symptoms we just don’t know that the person has anything wrong with them

    or about individuals with particularly… foldable? proteins getting a prion and developing an illness that others wouldn’t.

    there’s variation between people of course, but no if a prion is a certain protein and you expose it to proteins of the same kind it makes them misfold, maybe certain people have a different variation of that protein that does the same job but is structured a little differently so it’s not as susceptible or at all even, but that’s speculation on my part, I haven’t read deeply into this particular topic, generally speaking research into prion disease is still very inadequate, it’s very rare, and is always fatal, so it’s kind of hard to do research on

    i’m particularly confused because the immune system isn’t involved, is it?

    yeah the immune system can’t really fight it typically, because the protein matches the ones that the body uses, there isn’t much to tip it off since the immune system doesn’t look at protein folding, it looks at what proteins, sugars, and other molecules something has, in fact, the immune system can actually help the prion disease move into the body and reduce the incubation period as was seen in this study on rats, https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1006/clim.2000.4875

    oh also, not every exposure would mean 100% getting infected, especially since the propagation of the misfolding isn’t instant and takes time, so if those proteins get disposed of and replaced before they can spread (as the body naturally does dismantle and rebuild lots of proteins) then you wouldn’t get infected

    though keep in mind that these are rare diseases, that affect like 1-2 people per million worldwide every year, some of those cases are due to infection (acquired), some are due to genetic issues that are inherited, meaning the body itself makes misfolded proteins sometimes due to genes being coded with a bad mutation in the area that codes for that protein, and some are just sporadic, meaning one protein just decides to misfold because it got built slightly wrong cause that person is extremely unlucky and then it spreads

    more reading here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4890484/

    generally speaking, not something you wanna ever risk the chance of making more common


  • first of all, the game is alright, and second there isn’t actually any sex, it’s just a horror game with an extremely abusive manipulative sister/brother dynamic where there are a lot of fucked up things that happen like eating the neighbor, sacrificing souls to a demon, etc, near the end of the game there’s a choice you can make that is that the sister gets more serious about making sure her brother is only hers and that implies incest, for some reason people on twitter got really mad at the inclusion of incest as a topic when it’s very obviously not an endorsement but a bad theme like all of the others the game gets into


  • testing for prions, especially for ones that you don’t know of yet (which can develop at any time in any person due to the nature of prions, but that’s very very rare) is extremely difficult, when mad cow disease is detected in a cattle herd you cull the herd, it isn’t worth it, the risk is far too high, and prions cannot be removed through anti-biotics or any kind of treatment, the only way to destroy them is denaturation through burning

    prions are misshapen proteins that ‘spread’ in that when they touch the normally shaped proteins of the same kind they can cause them to become misshapen in the same way too, and being misshapen means this protein can’t do its job, and when it’s job is keeping your brain working or doing other important biological functions, you can see where issues arise

    someone who was healthy at the end of their life may have prions in their body that were dormant and did not show symptoms, the longer you live the more likely you are to have proteins become misshapen, most are harmless and wouldn’t spread anyway, and most people die without developing anything to do with prions because of just how unlikely it is to happen

    but in the rare chance someone’s body produces a misfolded protein that is both infectious and affects an important biological function then that extremely small chance would be buried in the ground or incinerated the majority of the time, but if more people practiced cannibalism then that protein would have a field day as it spread to the first person and then through blood contact spread to others, because a lot of prion disease is slow acting and/or has a very long incubation period (multiple years)

    so not practicing cannibalism makes it a lot less likely for an untreatable deadly prion disease to materialize









  • Private chats are only censored if you are using weechat to talk to someone since they just suspend you if you break their rules

    If you’re using other ways to communicate, say through matrix or most other things, a firewall can’t do shit, and this is ignoring the fact that many people in China use vpns (they aren’t illegal to use) to bypass all blocks on western services (whatsapp or whatever)

    and keep in mind that things are blocked with a denylist, not an allowlist, so if for example I hosted a small irc server (oreven something like a lemmy instance) anyone in China could easily connect to it and exchange messages, unless it gets reported somehow and then blocked, which is unlikely if we’re talking about something relatively obscure like irc or lemmy

    Basically, practice good opsec, I don’t like the NSA having my messages in the same way that I don’t like any government having them.









  • if everybody votes, the government represent the interests of the whole population

    This is simply false, representatives in the majority of neoliberal ‘democracies’ are not held accountable to the wishes of the people they are representing, and cannot be removed from their position with a simple majority from those who elected them, so then these people look towards those with influence (corporations, rich capitalists, etc) and then do things to please those groups in order to gain favor with them, like campaign donations, lavish luxurious trips and vacations, positive coverage in capitalist owned media, etc

    (still disregarding lobbying)

    Lobbying is not the only lever of power the capitalist class uses, the private ownership of mainstream media by capitalists means that all of their coverage would push capitalist interests, campaign ‘donations’ and funding is also used for control, to choose the candidates who represent your interest as a capitalist the best to win, and the candidates themselves are more likely to win if they come from a rich well connected upperclass background (meaning they are most likely capitalists themselves)

    Regulatory capture is also a thing

    There’s also the fact that capitalists also fund think tanks to publish studies that support their interests (no matter how far from the truth they have to stray) and are then used to support legislation that is in their favor (see global fossil capital and climate change), there’s also lots of astroturfing that goes on

    And if lobbying were the issue, we could just ban it…

    Even if you outlaw lobbying capitalists will still control the government in a myriad of other ways, capital flight being an example I didn’t mention in this reply yet,but this one is very strong and the US/WTO/IMF enforce it on as many countries as they can, the only way to have actual democracy is through forceful suppression of the capitalist class, only then you could imagine having a government actually controlled by the people while still having a capitalist market and a capitalist class