"the anti-Trump Republican faction look significant and of consequence when it is actually minuscule and impotent, and may thus cause the lumpen to rest easy"
Nope, you’re not the only one who sees it. And of course the tell is – although I’m not sure to what degree Douthat is aware of it himself, he may be high on his own Reasonable Conservative supply – whenever one of these “moderate” NYT conservatives tries to stake out what he regards as a centrist position in a column, it always winds up drifting rightward into woo by the end of the piece. When was the last time one of them changed his mind to hold a more leftward position on anything? I can’t recall it happening.
All you have to do is take the conservative Debate Me mania into a different realm to see how ridiculous it is: “Joe Smith, a plumber from New Jersey, believes the moon is made out of green cheese. But noted astrophysicist James Green disagrees. If ‘Doctor’ Green is so sure he’s right, why won’t he debate Joe about the issue?” Actually, I shouldn’t even use this example because we’re rocketing into Idiocracy at the speed of light, so this will likely be a real controversy in about two months.
Everyone knows you aren't a TRUE independent thinker coming to your beliefs from first principles unless you end up a conservative, just like every deep thinking intellectual above the right/left paradigm on Twitter.
2 + 2 = 5 and I, a self taught math savant, have the mathematical proofs to show it (waves sheaf of papers with squiggly lines, almost-numbers, and Greek-ish letters on them)! Big Math has been hiding the TRUTH in its Ivory towers all along!
LOL, I'd (consciously) forgotten all about Joe the Plumber and his 15 minutes. And I either never heard of his debunking or I forgot about it -- so he wasn't a real plumber? What was he, a Republican operative from Yale? Was his real profession running a meth lab? Dish me, baby.
His name is Sam Wurzelbacher, and he worked for a computer networking company. In a town hall with Obama, he complained that the plumbing company he wanted to -buy- made so much money that Obama would tax it at a higher rate. From there he became McCain's Joe the Plumber, the working class guy whose taxes would go up under Obama's plan.
Thanks. His working for a computer networking company is both boring and yet strangely funny. Like, he had a white collar job but was an *aspirational* plumber at heart. Follow your dreams, lol.
Ha, like the moon actually exists. Do your own research, dummy, it was destroyed by a government nuclear test gone horribly wrong, what we see in the sky is a projection created by the government to cover up its mistakes. Prove me wrong!
ARE WE DOING CONSPIRACY THEORIES AGAIN BECAUSE I HAVE IT ON GOOD AUTHORITY THE MOON IS BEING SEXUALLY MOLESTED IN THE BASEMENT OF A WASHINGTON DC PIZZA PARLOR EVEN AS WE SPEAK (SHOUT)
"Right now the main alternative theory [to this debate] seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements."
Five centuries of science say I'm wrong. Half a century of space travel says I'm wrong. All the so-called scientists say I'm wrong. Which all goes to show I MUST be right about the Earth actually being a big, flat terrarium dish that's carried around the Sun on the back of a giant tortoise. The fact that nobody from NASA will debate me simply reinforces the fact that they know I'm right, and they won't debate me because I will prove the Earth is flat and thus destroy their careers! This is just one more example of the intellectual quarantine that brave truth-tellers like myself must contend with constantly. None of these so-called experts is open to new thinking about the nature of Earth, or of tortoises, for that matter.
There’s a great documentary on Flat Earthers. Debate doesn’t sway them. More remarkably, when their own excellent experiment involving a laser and a distant target disproves their theory, they conclude the theory is correct and they just need to jigger it a bit to fit the results.
I dunno. Some people have an absolute contrarian streak. I don't think they realize the extent to which they are motivated by a need to feel special. Ohh *everybody* agrees on something? Well then an instant way to be smarter than everybody is to see it a different way. I suspect all their reasoning is motivated by panic that they are not Julius Caesar or Leonardo DaVinci or Aristotle.
Best was the guy who blasted off in his home-made steam-powered rocket ship so that he could see for himself if the earth was curved or not. Unfortunately, the rocket's parachute burned up on take-off, so he only discovered that the earth was very, very hard.
Gravity is only a theory, dummy. And like any theory, you can believe it or ignore it. (And like all valid theories, you may choose to ignore gravity, but gravity will most certainly NOT ignore you.)
Now I'm wondering about the approximately gajillion other things generally understood by scientists to be true. Are those getting the "intellectual quarantine" treatment too? Because people just point you to these things called "books" if you have questions? Where's the fun in that? Respect my unique learning style, libs!
As I watch the MAGA people I know "do their own research" into all sorts of things, I see their worlds slowly collapsing into idiocracy. It started with vaccines and is now migrating into all sorts of other places where it can do immediate harm.
Did you know that your tires really DON'T need treads? Blank rubber offers more contact area, and thus more traction!
Did you know that fluoride causes tooth decay? And brain tumors?
These and dozens of other lunatic "theories" now have to be taken seriously because they're really "brave truths" that science is trying to suppress.
Millions of them. Oh, you've never heard of even one? Don't be daft. The neighbors who "moved away"; the co-workers who "got a new job"; your college friends you "lost touch with" -- grow up. Big Tread offed them all.
Did you know that your tires really DON'T need treads? Blank rubber offers more contact area, and thus more traction!
Certainly treadless designs offer more adhesion when it is dry out and the tire width is constant, but even with climate change many surfaces are not always dry.
Did you know that fluoride causes tooth decay? And brain tumors?
Fluoride has been shown to reduce production of sperm in human males
You mean I could have just been brushing my teeth every 15 minutes instead of wearing condoms?!?! Where was this information when I needed it 45 years ago?
Questions about science are always solved by public debates between scientists and non-scientists, right? Right? And don’t get me started on how Fauci personally kept poor Ross the Tosser from getting a proper diagnosis of Lyme disease, which according to my own research, which I did myself on the internet, is caused by — vaccines! Debate me, scientist scum!
C'mon! At least give Ouchy Fauci credit for all the money he raised with that big benefit concert with all the big stars singing daft songs about how we nix the ticks!
Also, according to Douchehat, the best way to debate is to admit your opponent is correct that science can't be trusted and then explain the science. I can't see what could go wrong.
Well Huxley did evolution a solid by overcoming Wilberforce in a discussion 163 years ago this Friday. Wilberforce asked Huxley on which side of his family was he descended from apes, Huxley responded with he would rather have an ape ancestor than a truth-hater such as Wilberforce
I'm trying to think of a modern scientific question that would benefit from this kind of treatment (public-policy questions related to science are another thing.) The problem is most modern science (like climate change) relies of massive data sets and statistical analysis of that data. "You didn't do the hypothesis testing right!" doesn't exactly make for riveting theater.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here but how are they managing to sell Vaccine Holocaust without millions of deaths? Or does every one of these people think, yeah, millions, just no one I know or have heard of.
No, no. Wait you don't understand that Big Pharma is claiming that those dead from Covid, are actually dead from the vaccines? Why look at Bill Gates!! Got you there.
Sorry, I'm a little slow, but wasn't the original story that those people all died in car accidents and the docs just wrote "Covid" on the death certificate to get some o' that sweet, sweet gummint cash? Now it's not car accidents, it's vaccines? Did the side effects just happen to hit them in the fast lane on I-90?
Recently I've been engaged in a very much dumbed-down variation of this, only here the issue is adopting zoning regulations in a town that is both rural agriculture and a bedroom community of a college town. The pro-zoners tend to be affiliated with the colleges; the antis are largely farmers with inherited acreage and the less-educated (also a developer with deep pockets). The FB postings used to be discussions about zoning; lately they've degenerated into heated ad hominem attacks and other rhetorical flourishes that educated people have been trained to regard as unfair, misleading, or irrelevant to logical debate. Zoning has become a stalking horse for the deep-seated resentments and animosity the less-educated locals have for the professoriate. It's a microcosm of what's been going on nationally since 2015 (e.g., since they haven't won at the ballot box, illegal/immoral tactics are justifiable) and it is really unpleasant to live in.
It is literally impossible to talk to these people. There is a primary today which will largely determine how the issue goes, and I can't wait for it to be over. I've never had enemies before — I haven't even met these people IRL! — but I do now.
Ugh, sorry you are going through this. You can never, ever "get to Yes" with people who are angry about one thing but using another thing as the pretext for their hostility. Too many layers of self-deception and passive-aggressiveness to penetrate. Good luck.
On the positive side, nothing gets the chucklefucks to support zoning than waking up one morning to find that Farmer Numbnuts has sold his 200 acres to Developer Dave, who is now building high-density condo units! OMG! There oughta be a law!
I have a now-former friend who is really into the whole "my property and nobody can tell ME wadda do with it!" Someone is now building a new airplane hangar next to his little on-airport clubhouse. The permit process took two years, with three open comment periods. He ignored every opportunity. But now, with all the permits in place and construction started, he's absolutely FUCKING OUTRAGED!!!!!! that this thing is being built with no input from him!<br>
He's managed to alienate just about everyone on the airport, and it has cost him my friendship after 25 years. NIMBY is never a good look when you refuse to participate in the ample public process.
Nice one. I had to re-read before commenting (that's about as high a compliment as I can give!).
Personally, I think that while the "it's all there on YT" crowd show a certain lack of mental gumption, the "science" gang tend to be rude, grooming pedophiles.
I'd like to see that Douthat/Hitchens debate (Hitchens was a wanker, but damn he could write and speak).
"I had to re-read before commenting (that's about as high a compliment as I can give!)." maybe I'm just not making myself clear enough to be understood the first time. Well, back to the drawing board!
This, like the self-deprecation/“no he really was senile” debate, will be another bone of contention for future literary criticism of the Edroso ouevre.
"The Republican Party and the conservative movement have trained millions of their most gullible adherents to believe that the 2020 election was stolen, that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring out of a pizza shop, and that COVID vaccination is the medical equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust (assuming, perhaps unfairly, that they believe the Holocaust happened), and if you say to these beliefs, “I’m sorry, buddy, but that’s insane,” then their insane ideas are your fault because you refused to pay homage to their skepticism by spending hours meticulously refuting their YouTube videos."
And Hotez is one of the principal scientists behind a no-patent vaccine that's saving the lives of millions of people all over the world without generating a dime of profit for Big Pharma. So yeah, guy's got more important things to do is putting it mildly.
"Hey, Dr. Salk, would you mind stepping away from that lil' vaccine-developin' hobby of yours, we've got an eminent public figure, a certain General Jack D. Ripper, who'd like to debate you on this question of the purity of our bodily fluids?"
I was today years old when I realized that "General Jack D. Ripper" was in actuality a stand-in for former Air Force General, and eventual George Wallace running mate, Curtis LeMay.
Thanks for tying Douthat's claim of "more moderate doubts" back to his Lyme disease. I didn't understand WTF he was talking about. BTW, which library is getting your papers for the scholars of Edroso studies to pore over?
Got only so far as "incipient senility" and had to commiserate, having immediately before checking in here inadvertently sent a text with fairly pithy instructions about a legal issue to who knows how many people who are NOT the intended recipient. I can't even blame it on thumbs. So my proposal is we hire children (probly the younger the better) to follow us olds around to intercede whenever we get close to any modern gizmo. As soon as we look like we might actually interact with said gizmo they are directed to yell at us "Not THAT button!"
It’s my opinion that that’s what kids are for. Now i know why geezers like Willie Nelson and Clint Eastwood have fathered children. It’s not vanity, just a need for security! I’m thinking of having lots more.
Yesterday I tried to send a text with a photo, which counts as "advanced texting" to me. Problem was, the instant I started to enter the words, the keyboard came up and obscured the little icon that you use to attach a photo. And I couldn't make the keyboard go away so I could see the little "attach photo" icon again, so I gave up. See, I'm an old, old man* who's used to computers, where a keyboard is a physical object on the desk in front of you, it doesn't come and go, sometimes obscuring other things on your screen. Fuck that bullshit, I say, everybody's gettin' email from now on whether they like it or not.
*Also old enough to remember when a phone was an object bolted to the wall of your kitchen, when the correct answer to "Where's your phone?" (a question I ask myself about a hundred times a day) would have been, "Right where it always is, dummy."
You know, for folks who're (as I firmly believe) totally obsessed with hierarchy as an absolute good, conservatives spend a whole lotta time these days of modern times disparaging authority in the form of the CDC or WHO or individuals like Fauci and Hotez.
But then I remember that those aren't natural authorities like cops and megachurch preachers and rich white conservatives, but false authorities, dirty eggheads with their books and their "facts", pretending that studying a subject for years makes you some kind of "expert" when we all know God meant the world to be simple enough that only robust farm folks who understand soil and sun and rain can truly be the experts.
(Also cue flashbacks to weedy know-it-alls in high school who'd rather read a book than go out drinking and are shit in gym class, overbearing teachers who think anyone actually CARES about geometry, and the dumb professor defeated by the clever student in every Chick pamphlet and Christian film.)
Also: "he thinks he's BETTER than ME!" and "I'm not a doctor, but I do look like one", the triumph of style over substance and of perception over fact)
They like their hierarchy simple, brutish, and violent. True authority comes not from wisdom and learning, but whether Daddy can make you go get the belt so he can beat you.
That's behind their whole "woke tech" bitchery. Those companies got big without polluting the earth or exploiting peasants -- so they were suspect right out of the gate -- but the fact that their products made it easier for exploited people to compare experiences *really* pissed them off.
Hey now. I read books rarely went out drinking and played football, basketball, ran track and played in the band in HS and played football in college. I was a * in gym class
Sorry you had that experience. I was generally the smartest girl in school and I know for a fact (having been told so several times, later) that people didn't bully me because they were afraid I would say something about them in front of others that would destroy them. Of course, I may have gotten away with more by being female.
The misconception with this debate idiocy, if it was made in good faith which I strongly doubt, is that one side deals with facts and such and the other with beliefs. By and by, facts have no power over beliefs so, you know, a debate such as Douthat and others propose (so to speak) is per se bullshit.
Anyway: speaking of bullshit, RFK It’s other positions are also bullshit.
Meanwhile, a related thought experiment: Who likely to commit to being the POTUS candidate for a third party run is likely to take more votes from Biden than from the GOP candidate. It’s early morning, pre-caffeine here, but no one comes to mind -- not to hurt the fee-fees of mainstream media’s finest political intellectuals.
TIL yesterday: Jimi Hendrix is buried in a Buddhist cemetery -- and a lovely, tranquil place it is.
You're 100% correct about the Great Debate Debate, but there's 1 more thing. Some Substaker or other wrote about the 1st "debate" between Hotez and Rogan (so now you know why he's refusing to pull the other finger), quoting Penn Gillette who said he organized it. Penn said he warned Hotez not to do it, because Rogan is (among other things) a professional stand-up comic, and knows how to use language to tap dance around his opponent. It's not a debate, it's a performance, and the professional performer will beat the amateur every time.
I suppose by definition a debate between someone who engages in facts and stuff and a believer is per se performative. I mean in this case, the only correct response, which the believers are incapable of accepting, is that every medication, vaccines included, have an adverse effect on a tiny number of people and that’s the price for saving a shit ton of lives. Of course, the heretic Xians to whom the GOP responds only believes in saving souls, lives not really.
Well, IMHO a debate by definition is a sort of performance, since there's a defined process (stage directions) and roles (in "formal" debates, which these showbiz debates pretend to follow) and an audience, whether trained judges in the formal debate, or looky-lous in the showbiz version. I've noticed that the Science side in these debates rarely bring up the microscopic side-effects angle and only glancingly when they do, because they realize it's a losing argument in the showbiz debate. The Belief side will take it as an admission of the dangerous toxicity of vaccines, and the audience will nod their heads. Point to Belief.
If you're "debating" someone whose response to facts and evidence is "It's all lies", why would you even need to be in the same room? Here, I'll send you an email with links to all the most recent studies on vaccine efficacy and safety, you send me back a one-line email that just says "It's all lies" and we'll be done with it, OK?
Had lunch with an old chum today, who described the gradual decay of another, much longer friendship with a colleague who has slippery-sloped himself into the Swamp. Said it was sad to watch but he's ok having one less friend given the circumstances.
Extremely well put, Roy! Now for my two cents: words have meaning and the words “Republican” and “conservative” no longer mean what they did even 50 years ago. “Republicans” are more rightly now “fascists” and “conservatives” are “pseudoconservatives.” The modern party of Trump et al has embraced fascism root and branch and there is nothing conservative about its radical dismantling of virtue and truth. I don’t expect anyone to switch usage, so I mentally make the changes as I read. The clarity that ensues is remarkable.
OK, but conservatism is at the root of it. Start with the idea that government shouldn't do much at all, and then how do you motivate people to get to the polls when you've already told them you're not going to do anything for them? Find someone they hate, and promise to make that person's life much, much worse. This is all conservatism's natural end state.
The beauty of the "well, no, I won't represent YOU per se...after all, what I'm planning to do is pretty much nothing, so whether you vote or not it's all one, see?" approach: fewer voters means less campaign cash spent on 'em, and more retained in what we charmingly refer to as 'coffers'...
Right!
Rab't!
"the anti-Trump Republican faction look significant and of consequence when it is actually minuscule and impotent, and may thus cause the lumpen to rest easy"
"Rest easy!" he purred to the lumpen
As their hearts were dang'rously pumpin'
And be not ye deceived
For ye have received
My wisdom – that must count for sumpen!
Right x 2.
Nope, you’re not the only one who sees it. And of course the tell is – although I’m not sure to what degree Douthat is aware of it himself, he may be high on his own Reasonable Conservative supply – whenever one of these “moderate” NYT conservatives tries to stake out what he regards as a centrist position in a column, it always winds up drifting rightward into woo by the end of the piece. When was the last time one of them changed his mind to hold a more leftward position on anything? I can’t recall it happening.
All you have to do is take the conservative Debate Me mania into a different realm to see how ridiculous it is: “Joe Smith, a plumber from New Jersey, believes the moon is made out of green cheese. But noted astrophysicist James Green disagrees. If ‘Doctor’ Green is so sure he’s right, why won’t he debate Joe about the issue?” Actually, I shouldn’t even use this example because we’re rocketing into Idiocracy at the speed of light, so this will likely be a real controversy in about two months.
Everyone knows you aren't a TRUE independent thinker coming to your beliefs from first principles unless you end up a conservative, just like every deep thinking intellectual above the right/left paradigm on Twitter.
2 + 2 = 5 and I, a self taught math savant, have the mathematical proofs to show it (waves sheaf of papers with squiggly lines, almost-numbers, and Greek-ish letters on them)! Big Math has been hiding the TRUTH in its Ivory towers all along!
Are you throwing down the debate gauntlet to SteveB? 'Cause I'll buy a couple tix...
Eh, close enough.
Not to mention the further ridiculousness when it turns out Joe the Plumber is neither a plumber nor a Joe.
LOL, I'd (consciously) forgotten all about Joe the Plumber and his 15 minutes. And I either never heard of his debunking or I forgot about it -- so he wasn't a real plumber? What was he, a Republican operative from Yale? Was his real profession running a meth lab? Dish me, baby.
His name is Sam Wurzelbacher, and he worked for a computer networking company. In a town hall with Obama, he complained that the plumbing company he wanted to -buy- made so much money that Obama would tax it at a higher rate. From there he became McCain's Joe the Plumber, the working class guy whose taxes would go up under Obama's plan.
Thanks. His working for a computer networking company is both boring and yet strangely funny. Like, he had a white collar job but was an *aspirational* plumber at heart. Follow your dreams, lol.
An artisanal plumber to fix your artesian well.
All my Artesians are already fixed, but the skeevy neighborhood dachshund needs fixing for sure...
Ha, like the moon actually exists. Do your own research, dummy, it was destroyed by a government nuclear test gone horribly wrong, what we see in the sky is a projection created by the government to cover up its mistakes. Prove me wrong!
Sadly, there are those out there who claim the Moon is nothing but a hologram.
Sadly/hilariously
"The tide comes in, the tide goes out, you can't explain that."
ARE WE DOING CONSPIRACY THEORIES AGAIN BECAUSE I HAVE IT ON GOOD AUTHORITY THE MOON IS BEING SEXUALLY MOLESTED IN THE BASEMENT OF A WASHINGTON DC PIZZA PARLOR EVEN AS WE SPEAK (SHOUT)
So THAT's why we never see it during the day...
With those sexy sexy craters, who could resist?
My name's the Moon, I live upstairs from you
Oof.
Mooned by SteveB.
Oof.
Is that on the second floor?
"Right now the main alternative theory [to this debate] seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements."
Five centuries of science say I'm wrong. Half a century of space travel says I'm wrong. All the so-called scientists say I'm wrong. Which all goes to show I MUST be right about the Earth actually being a big, flat terrarium dish that's carried around the Sun on the back of a giant tortoise. The fact that nobody from NASA will debate me simply reinforces the fact that they know I'm right, and they won't debate me because I will prove the Earth is flat and thus destroy their careers! This is just one more example of the intellectual quarantine that brave truth-tellers like myself must contend with constantly. None of these so-called experts is open to new thinking about the nature of Earth, or of tortoises, for that matter.
Now I have doubts!
Trust the Nescience!
Take the Nescience plunge!
There’s a great documentary on Flat Earthers. Debate doesn’t sway them. More remarkably, when their own excellent experiment involving a laser and a distant target disproves their theory, they conclude the theory is correct and they just need to jigger it a bit to fit the results.
They are trolls. Has nothing to do with the shape of the planet. Has everything to do with putting something over on the nitwits.
I dunno. Some people have an absolute contrarian streak. I don't think they realize the extent to which they are motivated by a need to feel special. Ohh *everybody* agrees on something? Well then an instant way to be smarter than everybody is to see it a different way. I suspect all their reasoning is motivated by panic that they are not Julius Caesar or Leonardo DaVinci or Aristotle.
Didn't know you'd met my brother-in-law.
"I'm right and everyone else is wrong" is a particular type of White Man Subset.
Best was the guy who blasted off in his home-made steam-powered rocket ship so that he could see for himself if the earth was curved or not. Unfortunately, the rocket's parachute burned up on take-off, so he only discovered that the earth was very, very hard.
He proved gravity was real enough, but does he get credit for that? Nah, all the credit goes to some dumb Brit and his stupid apple.
NUH-HUH, gravity is a LIE, stuff falls to Earth because of DENSITY!
Gravity is only a theory, dummy. And like any theory, you can believe it or ignore it. (And like all valid theories, you may choose to ignore gravity, but gravity will most certainly NOT ignore you.)
"Governments are in charge of the law. And no law on Earth is more basic than the law of gravity."
--from the bulldada UFO movie "Overlords of the UFO"
I do not believe we know exactly how gravity works. Gravitons have been postulated by not observed
Ignorance of the law is no ex--
Sorry, this just in. Apparently ignorance of the law actually IS now an allowable excuse.
"We just need to add more epicycles!"
Now I'm wondering about the approximately gajillion other things generally understood by scientists to be true. Are those getting the "intellectual quarantine" treatment too? Because people just point you to these things called "books" if you have questions? Where's the fun in that? Respect my unique learning style, libs!
As I watch the MAGA people I know "do their own research" into all sorts of things, I see their worlds slowly collapsing into idiocracy. It started with vaccines and is now migrating into all sorts of other places where it can do immediate harm.
Did you know that your tires really DON'T need treads? Blank rubber offers more contact area, and thus more traction!
Did you know that fluoride causes tooth decay? And brain tumors?
These and dozens of other lunatic "theories" now have to be taken seriously because they're really "brave truths" that science is trying to suppress.
The tread lobby has even committed murder to keep the truth hidden.
Millions of them. Oh, you've never heard of even one? Don't be daft. The neighbors who "moved away"; the co-workers who "got a new job"; your college friends you "lost touch with" -- grow up. Big Tread offed them all.
EXACTLY. And if you still can't name one, that just proves the extent of the coverup. Big Tread never rests.
Big Tread murdered my Canadian girlfriend!
You are a hero for coming forward.
Ran right over them, it did.
hence, obviously, 'don't tread on me!'
Did you know that your tires really DON'T need treads? Blank rubber offers more contact area, and thus more traction!
Certainly treadless designs offer more adhesion when it is dry out and the tire width is constant, but even with climate change many surfaces are not always dry.
Did you know that fluoride causes tooth decay? And brain tumors?
Fluoride has been shown to reduce production of sperm in human males
You mean I could have just been brushing my teeth every 15 minutes instead of wearing condoms?!?! Where was this information when I needed it 45 years ago?
Stop right there, mister! And just what was it about 45 years ago that required massive amounts of toothbrushing? HMMM?!
Questions about science are always solved by public debates between scientists and non-scientists, right? Right? And don’t get me started on how Fauci personally kept poor Ross the Tosser from getting a proper diagnosis of Lyme disease, which according to my own research, which I did myself on the internet, is caused by — vaccines! Debate me, scientist scum!
They want you to think it’s TICKS. Yeah, right, pull my other one, Soros.
C'mon! At least give Ouchy Fauci credit for all the money he raised with that big benefit concert with all the big stars singing daft songs about how we nix the ticks!
Don't you remember Lyme Aide??!!
Mmmmm . . . Lyme Aid!
Nothing more refreshing on a summer day than a Sonic Lyme Aid.
Lyme Aide?!?!?!
All those marks you've given me? Here, have them back along with a bunch of others I have lying around.
Ticked you off, did I?
Also, according to Douchehat, the best way to debate is to admit your opponent is correct that science can't be trusted and then explain the science. I can't see what could go wrong.
Can't we just be reasonable and meet halfway? The vaccine only kills 50% of the people who get it.
Well Huxley did evolution a solid by overcoming Wilberforce in a discussion 163 years ago this Friday. Wilberforce asked Huxley on which side of his family was he descended from apes, Huxley responded with he would rather have an ape ancestor than a truth-hater such as Wilberforce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Oxford_evolution_debate
I'm trying to think of a modern scientific question that would benefit from this kind of treatment (public-policy questions related to science are another thing.) The problem is most modern science (like climate change) relies of massive data sets and statistical analysis of that data. "You didn't do the hypothesis testing right!" doesn't exactly make for riveting theater.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here but how are they managing to sell Vaccine Holocaust without millions of deaths? Or does every one of these people think, yeah, millions, just no one I know or have heard of.
No, no. Wait you don't understand that Big Pharma is claiming that those dead from Covid, are actually dead from the vaccines? Why look at Bill Gates!! Got you there.
Oh shit what a fool I’ve been!
Bill Gates is dead?
Didn't you LISTEN to 'We Are The World' backwards??!! How much clearer do we have to make it????!!!!
Sorry, I'm a little slow, but wasn't the original story that those people all died in car accidents and the docs just wrote "Covid" on the death certificate to get some o' that sweet, sweet gummint cash? Now it's not car accidents, it's vaccines? Did the side effects just happen to hit them in the fast lane on I-90?
It wouldn't be legit conspiracy theorizing if the original story didn't get tossed aside as soon as the second draft came out.
Recently I've been engaged in a very much dumbed-down variation of this, only here the issue is adopting zoning regulations in a town that is both rural agriculture and a bedroom community of a college town. The pro-zoners tend to be affiliated with the colleges; the antis are largely farmers with inherited acreage and the less-educated (also a developer with deep pockets). The FB postings used to be discussions about zoning; lately they've degenerated into heated ad hominem attacks and other rhetorical flourishes that educated people have been trained to regard as unfair, misleading, or irrelevant to logical debate. Zoning has become a stalking horse for the deep-seated resentments and animosity the less-educated locals have for the professoriate. It's a microcosm of what's been going on nationally since 2015 (e.g., since they haven't won at the ballot box, illegal/immoral tactics are justifiable) and it is really unpleasant to live in.
It is literally impossible to talk to these people. There is a primary today which will largely determine how the issue goes, and I can't wait for it to be over. I've never had enemies before — I haven't even met these people IRL! — but I do now.
Ugh, sorry you are going through this. You can never, ever "get to Yes" with people who are angry about one thing but using another thing as the pretext for their hostility. Too many layers of self-deception and passive-aggressiveness to penetrate. Good luck.
True in private life as in politics!
Do NOT get me started about bike lanes...
Goddamn government tellin' me where to ride my bike! What do you mean by "Excuse me sir, this is a Walgreens"?
Bike lanes are important! Where else am I supposed to walk when bicyclists crowd me off the sidewalk???
On the positive side, nothing gets the chucklefucks to support zoning than waking up one morning to find that Farmer Numbnuts has sold his 200 acres to Developer Dave, who is now building high-density condo units! OMG! There oughta be a law!
Or even worse: A WIND FARM. Someone get me the heavy hand of the state to regulate private-property rights NOW!
I have a now-former friend who is really into the whole "my property and nobody can tell ME wadda do with it!" Someone is now building a new airplane hangar next to his little on-airport clubhouse. The permit process took two years, with three open comment periods. He ignored every opportunity. But now, with all the permits in place and construction started, he's absolutely FUCKING OUTRAGED!!!!!! that this thing is being built with no input from him!<br>
He's managed to alienate just about everyone on the airport, and it has cost him my friendship after 25 years. NIMBY is never a good look when you refuse to participate in the ample public process.
VOX POP etc.:
The pro-zoning vote won by a 2 to 1 landslide. This is the only public place I can gloat, so I'm gloating. : )
Gloating so hot we can see the warm spot FROM SPAAAAACE!!!
Nice one. I had to re-read before commenting (that's about as high a compliment as I can give!).
Personally, I think that while the "it's all there on YT" crowd show a certain lack of mental gumption, the "science" gang tend to be rude, grooming pedophiles.
I'd like to see that Douthat/Hitchens debate (Hitchens was a wanker, but damn he could write and speak).
"I had to re-read before commenting (that's about as high a compliment as I can give!)." maybe I'm just not making myself clear enough to be understood the first time. Well, back to the drawing board!
Seriously, I meant it as a compliment!
This, like the self-deprecation/“no he really was senile” debate, will be another bone of contention for future literary criticism of the Edroso ouevre.
Fret not, Roy – it gets no clearer than this:
"The Republican Party and the conservative movement have trained millions of their most gullible adherents to believe that the 2020 election was stolen, that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring out of a pizza shop, and that COVID vaccination is the medical equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust (assuming, perhaps unfairly, that they believe the Holocaust happened), and if you say to these beliefs, “I’m sorry, buddy, but that’s insane,” then their insane ideas are your fault because you refused to pay homage to their skepticism by spending hours meticulously refuting their YouTube videos."
Obscurity worked for Jesus!
Where the hell was he all those years in the desert – hard to hide out there!
I'm sure one of the keys to becoming a respectable virologist involves not pissing away your time talking to assholes on the internet.
I too would like to be counted among those who don't give a fuck what Ross
(Please, for the love of God. Don't) Douthat says.
And Hotez is one of the principal scientists behind a no-patent vaccine that's saving the lives of millions of people all over the world without generating a dime of profit for Big Pharma. So yeah, guy's got more important things to do is putting it mildly.
"Hey, Dr. Salk, would you mind stepping away from that lil' vaccine-developin' hobby of yours, we've got an eminent public figure, a certain General Jack D. Ripper, who'd like to debate you on this question of the purity of our bodily fluids?"
I was today years old when I realized that "General Jack D. Ripper" was in actuality a stand-in for former Air Force General, and eventual George Wallace running mate, Curtis LeMay.
They needed him to make Wallace look sane by comparison.
Nah. LeMay would never let his own personal hair get mussed...
As Mark Twain said: "Don't wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it." (Apologies to actual pigs.)
Be kind to our cloven hooved friends
For a pig could be somebody's mother!
Reinforcing my eternal reflex to blame the parents for improper fetchins up.
Thanks for tying Douthat's claim of "more moderate doubts" back to his Lyme disease. I didn't understand WTF he was talking about. BTW, which library is getting your papers for the scholars of Edroso studies to pore over?
Baltimore County Public Library; 9685 Honeygo Boulevard; Perry Hall, MD or perhaps
The Enoch Pratt Free Library, Herring Run Branch; 3801 Erdman Avenue
Baltimore, MD
We got one a those 'little free library' squirrel nests up the street...
Got only so far as "incipient senility" and had to commiserate, having immediately before checking in here inadvertently sent a text with fairly pithy instructions about a legal issue to who knows how many people who are NOT the intended recipient. I can't even blame it on thumbs. So my proposal is we hire children (probly the younger the better) to follow us olds around to intercede whenever we get close to any modern gizmo. As soon as we look like we might actually interact with said gizmo they are directed to yell at us "Not THAT button!"
It’s my opinion that that’s what kids are for. Now i know why geezers like Willie Nelson and Clint Eastwood have fathered children. It’s not vanity, just a need for security! I’m thinking of having lots more.
Carry On Spawning
Breed late in life and you’re set.
"Sugar, Daddy?", she said, slightly aggressively.
Yesterday I tried to send a text with a photo, which counts as "advanced texting" to me. Problem was, the instant I started to enter the words, the keyboard came up and obscured the little icon that you use to attach a photo. And I couldn't make the keyboard go away so I could see the little "attach photo" icon again, so I gave up. See, I'm an old, old man* who's used to computers, where a keyboard is a physical object on the desk in front of you, it doesn't come and go, sometimes obscuring other things on your screen. Fuck that bullshit, I say, everybody's gettin' email from now on whether they like it or not.
*Also old enough to remember when a phone was an object bolted to the wall of your kitchen, when the correct answer to "Where's your phone?" (a question I ask myself about a hundred times a day) would have been, "Right where it always is, dummy."
Oh for the days when I could subscribe to your mimeographed newsletter!
You know, for folks who're (as I firmly believe) totally obsessed with hierarchy as an absolute good, conservatives spend a whole lotta time these days of modern times disparaging authority in the form of the CDC or WHO or individuals like Fauci and Hotez.
But then I remember that those aren't natural authorities like cops and megachurch preachers and rich white conservatives, but false authorities, dirty eggheads with their books and their "facts", pretending that studying a subject for years makes you some kind of "expert" when we all know God meant the world to be simple enough that only robust farm folks who understand soil and sun and rain can truly be the experts.
(Also cue flashbacks to weedy know-it-alls in high school who'd rather read a book than go out drinking and are shit in gym class, overbearing teachers who think anyone actually CARES about geometry, and the dumb professor defeated by the clever student in every Chick pamphlet and Christian film.)
Also: "he thinks he's BETTER than ME!" and "I'm not a doctor, but I do look like one", the triumph of style over substance and of perception over fact)
Get away from me with that stethoscope!
But it's fresh out of the refrigerator!
We keep it on the shelf next to the anal thermometer!
They like their hierarchy simple, brutish, and violent. True authority comes not from wisdom and learning, but whether Daddy can make you go get the belt so he can beat you.
In our house it was the wooden spoon.
Hairbrush!
Eewwwww! You stir your soup with that spoon?
No, but pa sure stirred the kids!
That's behind their whole "woke tech" bitchery. Those companies got big without polluting the earth or exploiting peasants -- so they were suspect right out of the gate -- but the fact that their products made it easier for exploited people to compare experiences *really* pissed them off.
Hence Elmo's sabotage and so much else.
"cue flashbacks to weedy know-it-alls in high school who'd rather read a book than go out drinking and are shit in gym class"
I hated high school, and this was *so* me. (I spoke maybe two sentences in four years.)
Hey now. I read books rarely went out drinking and played football, basketball, ran track and played in the band in HS and played football in college. I was a * in gym class
Sorry you had that experience. I was generally the smartest girl in school and I know for a fact (having been told so several times, later) that people didn't bully me because they were afraid I would say something about them in front of others that would destroy them. Of course, I may have gotten away with more by being female.
One of them being "Here." every damn day...
couldsta woulsdta shouldsta
The misconception with this debate idiocy, if it was made in good faith which I strongly doubt, is that one side deals with facts and such and the other with beliefs. By and by, facts have no power over beliefs so, you know, a debate such as Douthat and others propose (so to speak) is per se bullshit.
Anyway: speaking of bullshit, RFK It’s other positions are also bullshit.
Meanwhile, a related thought experiment: Who likely to commit to being the POTUS candidate for a third party run is likely to take more votes from Biden than from the GOP candidate. It’s early morning, pre-caffeine here, but no one comes to mind -- not to hurt the fee-fees of mainstream media’s finest political intellectuals.
TIL yesterday: Jimi Hendrix is buried in a Buddhist cemetery -- and a lovely, tranquil place it is.
You're 100% correct about the Great Debate Debate, but there's 1 more thing. Some Substaker or other wrote about the 1st "debate" between Hotez and Rogan (so now you know why he's refusing to pull the other finger), quoting Penn Gillette who said he organized it. Penn said he warned Hotez not to do it, because Rogan is (among other things) a professional stand-up comic, and knows how to use language to tap dance around his opponent. It's not a debate, it's a performance, and the professional performer will beat the amateur every time.
I suppose by definition a debate between someone who engages in facts and stuff and a believer is per se performative. I mean in this case, the only correct response, which the believers are incapable of accepting, is that every medication, vaccines included, have an adverse effect on a tiny number of people and that’s the price for saving a shit ton of lives. Of course, the heretic Xians to whom the GOP responds only believes in saving souls, lives not really.
Well, IMHO a debate by definition is a sort of performance, since there's a defined process (stage directions) and roles (in "formal" debates, which these showbiz debates pretend to follow) and an audience, whether trained judges in the formal debate, or looky-lous in the showbiz version. I've noticed that the Science side in these debates rarely bring up the microscopic side-effects angle and only glancingly when they do, because they realize it's a losing argument in the showbiz debate. The Belief side will take it as an admission of the dangerous toxicity of vaccines, and the audience will nod their heads. Point to Belief.
If you're "debating" someone whose response to facts and evidence is "It's all lies", why would you even need to be in the same room? Here, I'll send you an email with links to all the most recent studies on vaccine efficacy and safety, you send me back a one-line email that just says "It's all lies" and we'll be done with it, OK?
Had lunch with an old chum today, who described the gradual decay of another, much longer friendship with a colleague who has slippery-sloped himself into the Swamp. Said it was sad to watch but he's ok having one less friend given the circumstances.
Extremely well put, Roy! Now for my two cents: words have meaning and the words “Republican” and “conservative” no longer mean what they did even 50 years ago. “Republicans” are more rightly now “fascists” and “conservatives” are “pseudoconservatives.” The modern party of Trump et al has embraced fascism root and branch and there is nothing conservative about its radical dismantling of virtue and truth. I don’t expect anyone to switch usage, so I mentally make the changes as I read. The clarity that ensues is remarkable.
OK, but conservatism is at the root of it. Start with the idea that government shouldn't do much at all, and then how do you motivate people to get to the polls when you've already told them you're not going to do anything for them? Find someone they hate, and promise to make that person's life much, much worse. This is all conservatism's natural end state.
The beauty of the "well, no, I won't represent YOU per se...after all, what I'm planning to do is pretty much nothing, so whether you vote or not it's all one, see?" approach: fewer voters means less campaign cash spent on 'em, and more retained in what we charmingly refer to as 'coffers'...
Put me down for paleoconservative...