TRUTH OR DERP.

One of the great things about Daniel Dale the famous fact-checker is that he's very even-handed, and has no compunction about debunking things a liberal might like to believe but which are not so. Today he informs us that a study allegedly showing horse paste made 85% of its male human users sterile is not anywhere near adequate to prove the case -- small sample size, numbers misstated, etc.

I applaud this even though, as we all well know, conservatives operate very differently and are pushing horse paste (OK, ivermectin, though horse paste is funnier and appropriate) as a cure/preventive measure for COVID-19 despite having no proof or even reasonable hope for this. No rightwing-specific equivalent of Dale exists, so when rightwing celebrities falsely claim, for example, that the guy who won a Nobel Prize for formulating horse paste said it "cures" COVID-19, they are only fact-checked by outlets they don't read. 

And I applaud it even though wingnuts use the fact that liberals are more circumspect and likely to check and correct their own work as a cudgel against them. When Rolling Stone updated a story because they couldn't verify an Oklahoma doctor's claims that horse paste users were flooding the local ERs, every anti-"Fauciite" wingnut in Christendom acted as if it proved horse paste is good for COVID because anything liberals said had to be a lie. (They probably don't take corrections seriously because, being exclusively readers of right-wing publications, they've never seen one.) 

I don't applaud it because I think our sensitivity to what's true and untrue will convince conservatives to stop spreading bullshit -- they're too far gone for that. I mean it's good for our own self-respect. Not everything is politics, after all -- in fact very little is. There are people who are paid to spin the truth to give advantage to their candidates and policies, but for that kind of work I am not only not paid, but could not be paid enough. Think what constantly living according to those calculations, and having to support such absurdities, does to a person. It's not pretty, even if they get to wear pretty clothes. Like Lemmy said: Stay clean.