If anything, this thread may get some people to educate themselves by doing a bit more research and not just believe everything that we are supposed to hear from both sides of the story. I have certainly learned from the links provided by kundalinikat, thank you by the way!
I watched many conspiracy videos on Google and Youtube during a couple of days off work and no way are they all bullshit! There are so many cases of propaganda and smear campaigns used to achieve huge financial gains and/or control.
One thing I learned from those clips was to step back and look at both sides and try to understand why people would go to such efforts to put accross their message.
Concerning the documentary I linked in the OP, IF they are right, many millions of dollars in funding, many jobs, treatments etc. etc. will be lost or proven to be a fraud which equals lawsuits etc. etc. - certain Yaysayers have a big interest in building up the myth.
IF they are way off the truth, what do the documentarty makers have to gain from making such claims?
OK I answered that one for myself
here! - PUBLICITY, DVD Sales, Book sales, website hits = millions of dollars!!!
Thank you for your time!
dong,
You make a couple of reasonable points here, but there is one ingredient missing from your research process. The key point is that scientists do not come to individual conclusions by reviewing pro and con claims about anything using the process you are proposing. If that were true, the prevailing scientific opinion would be a kind of "political" one.
Secondly, the idea that the entire professional medical scientific community is "on the take", to the last man is absolutely ludicrous. Have you ever worked with scientists? I worked for 10 years in three different Universities for biology, chemistry, and physics departments. Let me tell you that there is no other institution in the world that has more independent, extremely critical, egotistical, contentious, and creative people. Every scientist I have ever met was out to prove that his own work is either showing something new, unique, or maybe revolutionary, and that the prevailing wisdom might be wrong. This is how you make a name for yourself in the scientific world. In other words, the scientific community is full of people just like you, who are not willing to take anything for granted.
Do you think you are the only person who might have an intellectual curiousity about the truth of this matter? Do you think that every scientist working in the field of HIV/AIDs research goes to work every day and quietly lives a lie because they are on the take?
However, there are two things they have that you don't have. One is that they know that the only reliable way to further anything in science is to publish data and to propose a theory through peer reviewed professional journals where each submission can be thoroughly criticized analyzed by other highly critical independent bastards who work in the field. Then, even that is not enough. Not only are the submitted articles reviewed as to their methodology (this is the ultimate "show your work" excercise), but results and conclusions are not acknowledged as significant until other workers at other institutions have duplicated it and found the same results, or have successfully used the work in work of their own.
The second thing that they have is sufficient trainiing in their field which allows them to properly analyze the work of others before they accept their findings.
Although this process seems restrictive, over the last 400 years, it is the most productive intellectual process that has ever been known in human history. And over the last 400 years, some of the most astonishingly useful theories have been completely supplanted by new and better ones in only a few generations.
Consider what kind of revolution had to have taken place for the scientifiic community to agree to replace that astounding intellectual achievement that was Newton's with something completely different. Or for something as outrageous as continental drift to revolutionize geology.
A good recent example is Dr. Lynn Margulis and her challenge to conventional Darwinian Evolution. I recommend studying the history of her quest to get biologists to take her endosymbiotic theory of evolution seriously. Dr. Margulis is in many ways a crackpot, but certain aspects of her work is genius and visionary.
The only way to sort out the crackpot stuff from the visionary stuff is to subject her work to the critical analysis of the mainstream community, counting on the fact that no matter how entrenched they might be for a while, the actual evidence cannot be denied.
This is what happened and an entire generation of biologists change their mind. They did so because their process compelled them to, even against their own personal opinions about endosymbiosis and Dr. Margulis. This sort of thing happens in small ways everyday in science and in big ways within the lifetime of most scientists. This is a process that forces people who have made a career on a particular theory have to admit they are wrong when faced with the rigorous work from someone who people think is a crackpot. Conversely, the same process will reject the new work from a Nobel Prize winner because it is not rigorous enough.
Dr. Margulis still thinks Neo-Darwinism is complete junk, and she is very vocal about it. But the professional community is compelled to accept her endosymbiotic challenge because the evidence is irrefutable when subjected to the rigorous process.
What is the difference between Dr. Margulis and the HIV denialists? The difference is that Dr. Margulis used the only process that is reliable, whereas the denialists take their case right to the public. They do this because they know they don't have a case. They do this because they really don't care what the scientific community thinks. They want to affect public policy directly. So they make flashy videos and endless innuendos about the dogmatic scientific community whose every member is on the take from some big pharmaceutical company.
Read the
wikipedia article on Dr. Margulis and think about Einstein and others who in only a matter of decades were able to completely overthrow or seriously contribute to theories that had been established for centuries.
Like I said before. In the great court of scientific inquiry, hucksters like Deuseberg and other science denialists are not in there submitting evidence. They are outside in the parking lot distributing leaflets. If you really want to know the truth, go and audit the court room. Don't read the leaflets.
I submit to you that if you had real evidence that HIV was not the cause of AIDS, and you worked through the mainstream scientific process, you would end up with a Nobel Prize. I also submit to you that every other scientist in the field is thinking the same thing and thinks it every day (as they about the stuff in whatever field they are working in).
In order for you to buy into HIV denailism, you have to buy into the fact that the scientific community is compromised. If you believe that, you are lost because now you are left with no process except "he said, she said". You would have to believe that scientists all around the world, down to the last man, have been "bought" by some major corporation, and these people from all walks of life, from all different political persusasions, backed by all sorts of different governments with their different agendas have agreed to live the lie everyday as they come to work and participate in a conspiracy.
If you believe this, you are eligible for a tin-foil hat to keep the UFOs away.