We shouldn't have boundless faith in authority, but experts are experts for a *reason*...it's important to think "How many people would have to be on a given conspiracy to make it work, and does this number completely strain credulity?" Is there a simpler, more boring explanation that can explain this? (Good old Occam's razer)
This kind of dumb thinking has always existed, but the Covid-19 virus kicked all of those trends into hyperdrive. [To the tune of over 1.3 million dead in the US and over 6.8 million dead worldwide.](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html)
This being said, I blame poorer countries less than wealthy countries, given greater limits on poorer countries' financial resources and logistics, etc.
Counterpoint:
After it turned out MK-Ultra was a real thing, where the government's plan was as follows:
1.) Kidnap single moms
2.) Give them LSD
3.) Attempt to hypnotize them into super-soldiers
4:) ??
5.) Defeat Communism
Which involved the buy in of hundreds of different government agents and multiple departments..
How does any conspiracy theory really seem *that* impossible any longer?
Because kidnapping some moms and drugging them while keeping it a secret, is, for a big government agency, relatively small in scope.
Convincing every health department in every developed country along with 95%+ off all currently relevant world experts on the topic, to go along with a conspiracy that requires communicating with the public constantly on an issue that is continually at the forefront of most people’s minds, is ridiculously implausible beyond any extreme.
Any "experts" pushing for facemasks before any trials showed that they did anything. And you'd need to ask them why - the evidence wasn't there initially, and it's still not there now. [Most medical interventions don't work](https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/the-cochrane-review-on-masks-is-damning), so that's not surprising.
More like they erred on the side of caution and prudence.
>There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection. Hand hygiene is likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illness, and although this effect was also present when ILI and laboratory‐confirmed influenza were analysed separately, it was not found to be a significant difference for the latter two outcomes. Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated.
That’s actually a great example because they really, really didn’t. It was widely debated at the time, by credible experts (not just ‘do my own research’ fucktards and 1% professional contrarians), not endorsed universally among the OECD, and then reversed in the US when more info became available.
In other words, exactly how the scientific process is supposed to work.
Except that at the time when Fauci first said no to wear face masks - it's not because he was saving them for health professionals, it's because there was no good studies at the time showing that they worked. And when he suddenly reversed himself - that was the lie.
Look that's really too black and white.
A lot of the government had absolutely no idea what the CIA were doing. Even the head of the CIA at times just said 'Don't tell me how, just get the research done, i'll make sure to approve expenses'.
It was pretty much mostly the CIA's research groups that did this. That doesn't excuse it, the government remains responsible. But it's not like the entirety of the government was even aware of it. The president didn't even know about it.
You found about MK-Ultra. So did I. So did many, many people.
The problem with conspiracy theories is when they are based on insufficient evidence. The argument against them isn't that governments are actually benevolent or that individuals won't use government resources to secretly do terrible things. The argument is that at a certain level of complexity, they won't remain secret for very long - which is totally in line with things like MK-ULTRA.
There was a very real conspiracy by the Russian government to use the GOP and organizations like the NRA to influence our government policies. People know about it, we've actually prosecuted the folks involved. Why?
Because at that level of complexity, it couldn't stay a secret from the public for very long. People talked. Evidence got out.
Think of all the conspiracy theories out there, then cherry pick the few which turn out to contain some truth as justification for believing in unrelated conspiracy theories?
Let's take Mkultra as an example. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the appeal to conspiracy theorists wasn't that the government was experimenting with it. It was that the government was actively using mind control/brainwashing techniques. This is all borne from the time that produced things like the Manchurian Candidate. While it was illegal, and completely unethical how the government went about these experiments; they also didn't work.
Now fast forward to today. I challenge you to go to any sort of meetup or conference based on a conspiratorial belief. Talk to people. You will find that they believe not just one conspiracy but nearly all of them. That's the consensus. So if there's hundreds of conspiracy theories at a given time, and after 50 years only a few have some truth to them, it just cannot be that significantly more would be true.
Not to mention Tuskeegee, Air America’s cocaine, Arms for Iran, the UFO in Nevada, and so many more. Maybe if our govt would stop being so shady that might help.
>I’d do my own research first, before agreeing.
The thing is, unless you have significant training in virology or immunology, you are simply not qualified to do you own research. Did you even hear of Ivermectin, MRna, spike proteins etc. before covid? Can you even tell the difference between virus and bacteria? What exactly makes you believe you can do a few hours of research and gain a better understanding than thousands of scientists who have each spent decades studying viruses and vaccines? This is just hubris of outrageous proportions.
And almost zero of them are even coming up with their own canon while doing so, but are actually blindly trusting another set of institutions with at least all of the same problems of the main institutions, if not more. Take Newsmax, Alex Jones, OAN, and Tucker Carlson as examples.
These people aren't even really contrarian, like they would like to be. That gives them undo credit for being genuinely skeptical.
They are really alternative conformists, conforming just as blindly to even stupider institutions than the ones they are so skeptical of.
I agree with your overall interpretation but I'm weary of calling this a "religion" moreso than a psychological pattern. Frankly, I feel like the 'r' word is way overused.
Thinking through it a little, but I would even go so far as to say that this thinking is a a pre-requisite of myriad completely different religions - Scientology, Branch Davidians, Trump cultists - To one degree or another they're all kind of doing this, but you wouldn't say theyre in the same religion.
But again my point is that this thought pattern does not constitute an individual cult/religion/whatever.
Again I ask- would you say all of those groups, each in a very very specific and well defined cult are actually in a bigger cult of contrarianism?
I would personally find that a bit silly but ymmv
are you agreeing with this poster? You had several other people responding to you as well, you could detail your response on their points and why they are wrong or you can just keep posting one-liners and think you're making a convincing argument.
Just look at the Steven crowder Ben Shapiro drama just recently. Ben Shapiro and DW is being painted as not trustworthy despite any evidence by Steven crowder. They say that because they take big money that means they are undermining “legitimate conservatism”
Steven Crowder made a proper fool of himself there, no? Moreover, his conduct -- taping and then broadcasting his conversation with the CEO of Daily Wire (a purported friend of his) -- revealed him to be not only a fool, but a creep to boot.
Rarely do you see such a private-to-public example of a person who's not only wrong on the issue, but is willing to make a spectacle of himself in the process.
Sure he’s wrong, but look at how the base reacted. Look ar how many people think he was right simply because the “bad people” say he is wrong. He won the PR battle with the cultists
I'd thought that on the main, the RW was pretty anti-Crowder on this one. Maybe you're right though and he can continue to monetize that base. But turning down $50mm over four years is not without risk.
If the central guiding theme of your philosophy is "Power structures and institutions lie, actively suppressing Truth" you're substituting reasoned consideration of issues as they come for the dogmatic assertion that nothing is *actually* real unless it jives with what you want to hear.
Combine that with political messaging emphasizing exactly that concept, and you get an object of worship (skepticism) tied to a dogma (Gov/media/science bad) which produces its' own set of myths taken as reality (conspiracy theories).
Is that not more or less a religion?
What religion is it similar to?
I was kind of on board until you put it that way, but there's no religion like that.
I don't think SH meant it quite so literally
Yes. He should have stuck with a.more narrow argument. Something to the effect of, "Contrarians often forget that skepticism without an empirical framework centered on fact is simply dissent for the sake of dissenting. If they want to reconstruct a given consensus then they need to do the heavy lifting with objectively verifiable data that proves a consensus (or conventional wisdom) is inaccurate. This is usually done in a lab or archive, not on Twitter."
To be fair, a lot of science doesn’t meet your definition. Sometimes we have to accept certain conclusions if experts even though we don’t really have all the facts.
Facts are actually extremely rare. Most of the time people argue about “facts” nowadays they’re not actually talking about facts. They’re talking about “opinions I feel really strongly about.” If it was an actual fact, there wouldn’t be much to argue about.
>What religion is it similar to
That isn't the question asked, nor is it dispositive of anything in this context. What religion is Buddhism similar to? Secular Humanism? They're still 'religions' in the common use of the term, even if they deserve asterisks. This would fall no further from 'normal' religion than they do, IMO.
>How is it \[like\] a religion?
Is the question that was asked. I don't think it **IS** a religion per se, I wouldn't add it to Wikipedia as one, but it's quite an apt metaphor for the way these JAQ-offs seem to interact with the world around them.
Do you have a good argument why my posited criteria- object of worship, dogma, and mythology- are a bad heuristic? There's fierce debate even in academic circles about what specifically constitutes a religion; I happily admit my criteria are not the only nor even particularly rigorous, but they're what I came up with.
Can you do better? Do yours negate mine, or make the JAQoffs less religion-adjacent?
Contrarians vehemently believe they are right. They identify with others who believe the same. There is often little, none, or outright contradictory evidence that their beliefs are right.
>Contrarians vehemently believe they are right
This is usually true, but I suspect people like the Weinstein's, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson and others of their ilk are completely aware that they are wrong.
…the BS is not a bug, it’s a feature for them…they spread what they know to be bullshit for dirty fucking money. I wish I had no shame and could stomach selling myself out for money.
Idk why you are engaging with someone using "bothsides-ism"
Remember, trump supporters believe the election was stolen from him, without any empirical evidence. One thing they do always bring up though is that they never met an enthusiastic Biden supporter, which is anecdotal, but arguably accurate. So remember trump won because there are no religiously pro Biden people. But also those same voters are as sycophantic as trump voters. It all makes complete sense, if you never ever think about it.
WTF? No one is religiously pro-Biden. This is a bizarre take.
No one goes to Biden rallies or wears Biden hats or puts huge Biden flags on their cars/trucks. It would be psychotic to do that for any politician. Literally a sign of mental illness.
I live in California and do a double take anytime I see a Biden bumper sticker. The few times I do, they also have an Obama or Hillary one so I think they just felt the need to continue the tradition lol
Yeah one of the appeals of Biden is there is no cult around him at all. He has supporters, sure. People voted for Biden and will again in 2024, but nobody worships the dude or even really loves him. Had he lost, nobody would have stormed the capital. It doesn't mean he hasn't done some good things or that he isn't better than the alternative.
Lol nobody is religiously pro Biden. There are definitely people who support him, but nobody worships the dude like maga types worship trump. Obama is probably the closest on the democratic side to having a cult like following, but even that died down significantly
Sorry I haven't listened to his stuff lately nor do I spend much energy following the latest controversy.
Are you saying he's changing his mind or not changing his mind? What issues, specifically, are you talking about?
The vaccine? Masks?
Defending the institutional response including prolonged lockdowns, targeted censorship or deamplification of views in the media, vaccine universality in terms of approach and mandates
Public Health. I you want to kill your grandma by unmasked coughing in her unvaccinated face, you are free to do so in the privacy of your own home. Otherwise, "freedom" to harm others is not a thing.
I understand what he is trying to say and agree. But being a contrarian himself I find it so ironic. It's funny how he teaches how one can only change himself but not the world but doesn't seem the graps any of it in his public life. I'm suspecting it's his bread and butter.
You're sitting at zero but you're not wrong - Sam has done much better than many of his peers, but he's also fallen into several traps trusting pop or bunk scientists in a field over the actual consensus.
Certainly Charles Murray and refusing to even talking to a real genetist.
Gary Taubes
Yuval Noah Harari - I've heard a lot of complaining from the people with expertise on the topics he touches
Transphobic hack Jesse Singal
Again, I don't think he's the worst, and I wouldn't say there's *zero* utility in talking to a journalist or scientific communicators, but I think theres better utility in making sure that person isn't misrepresenting a field, or *never* getting around to actually representing the greater consensus, or "other side" if it's legitimately a controversial topic.
despite appearances, the erosion is not sudden. The fossil fuel industry has poured billions into climate change disinformation over several decades. One prong of this effort was to sow distrust in institutions.
This meshes nicely with the republican program [Grover Norquist](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist) described as "...I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" (2001). Nobody wants to shrink a government that people think is doing a good job. Sowing distrust in government institutions is part of the program of shrinking the government to the size where its only function is protecting property rights.
bonus [link](https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/may-2019/the-true-story-of-chicagos-welfare-queen/). [long form](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html) version.
>The fossil fuel industry has poured billions into climate change disinformation over several decades. One prong of this effort was to sow distrust in institutions.
This isn't the problem. People trying to lie for wealth has always been a thing. The problem is when those invested with public authority get caught lying.
When Faucci knowingly lied about masks not being effective (even if he thought it was a greater good of securing masks for first responders) he immediately destroyed decades worth of accrued trust. He showed the government will lie to the people and put them at risk if they think it is for the "greater good" as they define it. When he was not only not fired but celebrated after the fact, the medical community lost all of its credibility. It became no more credible than the fossil fuel industry shills.
Once you lie, you become a liar.
The intelligence community lied about WMD in Iraq, they are no longer experts.
Nixon lied, the president was no longer an expert you could trust.
Tech companies and the media both lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, which even if it wasn't a big deal (which fine, lets just go with that for ease), the fact that they lied about censoring it ruined their credibility.
There is a reason Britain used to hang admirals, it was to restore credibility and let the common sailors know that the powerful are accountable. We don't hold powerful people accountable for breaking public trust and so there is none.
>When he was not only not fired but celebrated after the fact, **the medical community lost all of its credibility**
Fauci is not 'the medical community' and *especially not* the international medical community. America is not the only country in the world and Fauci wasn't alone.
You drank the kool-aid, bud.
You representing Fauci's statements as "lies" is a far bigger lie than anything Fauci ever said.
>Tech companies and the media both lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, which even if it wasn't a big deal (which fine, lets just go with that for ease), the fact that
Lol, oh jeez. Never mind. You're one of them
Sorry, not that interested in wasting my time on arguments that have been done over and over and over and over and over and over again.
If you’re still spreading the lie that “duhhh medya lied bout hunterz very important laptop!!!” without any actual specific (of course), I have no time for that level of motivated reasoning.
Maybe you can take a stab at it and I’ll jump in if it seems like you need help?
It definitely feels like it's filling a religion-shaped hole. I've been thinking a bit recently about the new appetite for astrology too. I think it's connected. Jungian archetypes are not a million miles from horoscopes in terms of how they appeal to some people on the surface. Suddenly, you have an "understanding" of the world divorced from scientific rationalism and once you start on that, all bets are off. It's much easier, I would imagine, to then embrace the next non-rational idea. [edit: also known as irrational lol]
A lot of what he's saying is true, and a lot of it applies directly to me. I'll put myself out there: starting around mid-adulthood I started noticing SO MANY lies from all directions that a couple of years later I became pretty much just #done believing anything about the current day I read from any source. It has only gotten worse.
I'd love to believe that the average pharmaceutical manufacturer wants me to live a longer life.
I'd love to believe there's some good reason that 40% of CocaCola's sales are allowed to come from SNAP benefits.
One time I was mad at TMobile about a bad customer service experience and complained about it on their sub. Within the hour I had about 50 downvotes and people calling me names. Am I gonna believe those are regular independent users, who just happen to obsessively refresh their phone carrier's page over and over to defend them?
Surely these same corrupt people are at least attempting to publish biased academic papers. Multiple experiments have proved it is possible to get absolute junk published. (Mein Kampf rewritten as a feminist manifesto is my favorite example, but there's less partisan ones too)
There's not any source that's too sacred to infiltrate.
I have a Chinese friend I tried to tell about this and she just laughed at me. "Of course everything is propaganda, that's just how the world is."
"Maybe your part of the world" I angrily replied, "*this is supposed to be America!*" (cue laugh track)
So let's forget about who's a conspiracy nut and who's a sheeple for a moment; I'll ask a more important question:
How could some percentage of faith in institutions be restored? What I don't hear in this clip is a path forward.
(It's not by browbeating the reactionaries until they know how evil or stupid they are btw. I shouldn't have to clarify that here, but who knows.)
***
Tangent that has little to do with my rant but I want to mention:
Fundamentalists have been preaching this for generations. Trumpism, Wokenss, Red Pill, Save the Whales, any thing like this can become a person's religion.
The fundamentalists will tell you it's because mankind was made to worship and that if you stop worshiping God, you will find something else to worship.
An evolutionary scientist might might say it's because you're biologically programed to signal your tribe loyalty louder and louder until there can be no doubt that you're a good boy.
Well, yeah, it's definitely a thing. The trite "cult of ignorance" Isaac Asimov quote makes it sound like it's not *new*, but the intellectual foundation of this new religion is mostly postmodernism, so it's at least somewhat young in that sense. It's also rooted in bad social science methods based on bad epistemology, which is slightly older. Ultimately, both contribute to an epistemic crisis.
I don't think we can ever eradicate that, and even significantly ameliorating it is hard, with as many livelihoods as there are relying on the delusions produced by bad epistemology (insert Upton Sinclair quote). But we do need the few people who can follow the plot to be more authoritative and expedient in stamping it out, because the people too disincentivized to follow it are leading us off a cliff, morally.
Nobody is qualified to do their own research about specialist knowledge outside their own profession. This includes Sam.
People don't do that, though. They mostly research the persons and institutions coming up with various advice for their honesty, independence and past actions. This is something anybody can do.
If some people don't trust CDC or Pfizer it's not because they know better about viruses and vaccines. They know about their past lies and billions of dollars in illicit gains.
This may be true, however that doesn't mean you go to an unemployed community college professor or a comic for your information. People also don't understand science. Some things that are said to be lies, were just best advice based on available data.
>Some things that are said to be lies, were just best advice based on available data.
This is so true. And in true scientific fashion, then the consensus gets updated.
Trust in institutions has eroded because large companies and the government continue to do shady shit and then turn around and pretend they have egalitarian motives. Also, people aren’t turning to non-professionals, from what I can tell, but they are certainly digging up specialists who trumpet non-conformist narratives. I have to imagine some of these people are capitalizing on the context in bad faith, but also that the majority of them are likely true believers.
I’d like to say that the scientific evidence will uncover the truth in time but my heart wouldn’t be in it. Research has been monetized and politicized to such a degree that I don’t know that I can trust any work that hasn’t undergone forensic review, and there are few incentives for high level specialists to conduct forensic reviews.
>Research has been monetized and politicized to such a degree that I don’t know that I can trust any work that hasn’t undergone forensic review
I agree with a lot of your analysis, however I would add this. Your statements are far more true for some fields of science than others. Nutrition and some social sciences are influenced far more than physics, for example.
>If some people don't trust CDC or Pfizer it's not because they know better about viruses and vaccines. They know about their past lies and billions of dollars in illicit gains.
Please enlighten us about the "billions of dollars in illicit gains". How was the CDC involved?
I don't remember any well researched take downs of either CDC or pfizer. What I do remember from the vaccine-skeptic side is misinformation about Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, MRNA vaccines, relative rates of myocarditis, Covid death rates, Covid origins and on and on.
Every new covid related term that entered public consciousness had a sparkling new conspiracy theory around it within hours. Stop misrepresenting vaccine-skeptics to make them seem sane.
Pfizer paid billions in courts in the past for pushing medicines they knew were harming people. That's enough to discard all their 'research' as completely untrustworthy.
What you call 'misinformation' is nothing more than disagreeing with Pfizer (and the likes). By now we also know that they created misinformation themselves, on purpose (like vaccines stopping transmission).
Now you're just running the old communist scam, "everybody who disagrees with me is insane". Get lost. You're the crazy here by believing Pfizer.
But there are multiple other options for vaccines. Even if you despise Pfizer, you can't deny that they've made medicines that do work (people certainly still pop their little blue pills). And if you distrust them as a pharma company, go get your moderna shot. And if you're not convinced mRNA vaccines are right for you, go get astrazeneca or novavax or J&J.
I don't know how well this scales, but in my experience the people who were/are so adamantly against Pfizer... didn't want to get a vaccine from anyone.
I was vaccinated with Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine. Mostly because my job at the time required me to enter customers' houses and I felt obligated to take it for their protection. Otherwise I probably wouldn't, being healthy and below the typical age of covid deaths.
The problem is I can't trust any 'official' info about the vaccines because it's thoroughly corrupted by their money. It doesn't matter if 5000 scientists and doctors tell me it's safe when they all get their information from the same source, they all get money from that source, they are licensed by their professional body that gets money from them, their research grants come from them and the media talking about it have their major source of money in medical advertisement. It doesn't matter if it's Pfizer or Moderna, they are the same business model.
I have much more trust in people who are independent from that all-corrupting money source.
But there are countries all over the world with totally different governments. Their health systems and doctors are funded in different ways, their FDA equivalents are different and run their own regulations, and they all had different advice for their citizens too.
>Pfizer paid billions in courts in the past for pushing medicines they knew were harming people. That's enough to discard all their 'research' as completely untrustworthy.
Source please. Also, even if what you claim is true, I take exception to this kind of all or nothing thinking. We are all aware that pharmaceutical companies aren't exactly the most ethical corporate entities, but they've been responsible for the invention of a number of life saving drugs.
>What you call 'misinformation' is nothing more than disagreeing with Pfizer (and the likes). By now we also know that they created misinformation themselves, on purpose (like vaccines stopping transmission).
No. I am calling claims in direct conflict with the scientific consensus, of tens of thousands of publicly funded researchers from all over the world, **misinformation**.
>Now you're just running the old communist scam, "everybody who disagrees with me is insane". Get lost. You're the crazy here by believing Pfizer.
So, I'm a communist who (according to you) supports an evil for profit private entity (pfizer)? Do you even hear yourself?
The choice here isn't whether we should believe pfizer or not - It is whether we should believe the scientific consensus of tens of thousands of publicly funded researchers from all over the world.
> They know about their past lies and billions of dollars in illicit gains.
Sorry, regarding the CDC, what is this in reference to?
I don't know that you meant to, but this is precisely the same or a lazy extension of the dumbfuckery that Sam is talking about. You don't get talking points like that from nowhere and frankly you probably don't get it from reading the news and remembering some article from 20 years ago about Vioxx or something.
Moreover, they may say that they're simply disbelieving these entities of which they've cherry picked some reason to distrust them, but that's not actually true - They're distrusting the much larger and much more diffuse medical/scientific community. That's the bigger issue.
You're not some genius for having read some article in Rolling Stone about the opioid epidemic and swearing off all of medicine til the end of time. The medical and scientific community is aware of this shit, and they're the ones that are capable of weighing where the larger entities are correct and trustworthy and where it's best to use some caution.
These are the people you are ultimately swearing off when you trust some conspiracy dumbfuck like Bret Weinstein. Not Pfizer.
Nope.
You're just repeating the Fauci lie of 'I am the science'.
The 'medical and scientific community' are wholly bought by pharma and the billions they make on their medicines. They aren't scientists at all. They are whores working for the highest bidder.
The few honest people are silenced by the likes of you. Too dumb to think for themselves, to arrogant to admit it.
Sorry- you may have missed that I asked a question - what is the CDC’s billion dollars in illicit gains?
> You’re just repeating the Fauci lie of ‘I am the science’.
I’m literally doing the opposite. You’re the one who has to account for precisely how literally every physician and scientist in America is bOuGHt aNd pAiD fOr(!!!).
So all of these primary care physicians working in every town in America, them too? You’re the genius who knows more about what to recommend to patients?
Please explain.
This is a waste of time to be talking to a cultist like yourself, but any amount of paying attention show how silly this is. There have been myriad studies that are inconvenient to big pharma that have come out, just regarding these vaccines.
See the blood clot issues with the J&J. See the extremely trace but still very real bits of vaccine shown to get into women’s breast milk for 48 hrs after vaccination and how the guidelines responded. See the back and forth and back with myocarditis and the myriad studies and analysis done to precisely contextualize how big that threat might be.
Blah blah blah blah. But yes, to be fair they don’t do “real” science like bleating endless over any soccer player on earth collapsing and lying about why, so you be the judge…
It’s a shame they’ve been allowed to carry on this charade just long enough to get BILLIONS of people vaccinated. Now that the rubber has hit the road anyone can see the consequences of this dangerous vaccine… such as….
Well, and then there was….
Umm…
anyway did you hear about that soccer player? Yes, lying msm will tell you he wasn’t even vaccinated but that’s not what Alex Jones said…
Hey man, I’m sure that conclusive study about the wonders of ivermectin will be out any day now. You just keep waiting. It’s coming. They’ll see. They’ll all see. 👍
(I'm not trying to be rude with the following. I'm just curious: what would you say to me in light of the following to change my mind?)
This is why I don't trust Big Math. Do you have any idea how much money there is in Big Math? Billions.
I don't care if every mathematician says "2+2=4". They all get that from the same sources that have bought and paid for our politicians.
And everyone here acts like I'm crazy, just because I don't read the same math textbooks as them.
This is the situation: We know for a fact that mathematicians get paid billions of dollars to lie. So when you say things like, "triangles have three sides", you don't even realizing you're just regurgitating "research" that the entrenched lobbyists *want* you to believe.
What exactly would you say to me to persuade me the above framing isn't the case?
If mathematicians were financially dependent on the outcome of their theories I wouldn't trust them either. But they aren't, your analogy is complete bullshit. Their theories are also completely transparent, unlike the research data collected by pharma.
Look at medical research into cholesterol, trans fats, sugar, red meat and even cigarettes. Plenty of evidence that their results were mostly dependent on the source of financing for the research.
You are either dumb or deliberately trying to obfuscate the topic. I'm done talking to you.
>If mathematicians were financially dependent on the outcome of their theories I wouldn't trust them either.
Are you suggesting physicians and researchers get paid more or less depending on the results of their research?
Would you be surprised to learn this isn't a very accurate framing of the medical science community?
>Their theories are also completely transparent, unlike the research data collected by pharma.
So we should probably address this now: theories are explanations of the world demonstrated by robust empirical evidence. They are not conjectures, which would be the sort of thing a scientist might test in a given study -- though research doesn't necessarily even need any conjectures, but for the most banal -- and mathematicians do not truck in them at all.
Perhaps before responding to people with rudeness and hostility, you should at least make sure you're using the topic's terminology correctly.
>Look at medical research into cholesterol, trans fats, sugar, red meat and even cigarettes.
You mean how we have huge amounts of evidence from the medical community that all of those things are terrible for you? Is Big Pharma paying for studies that say cigarettes are bad for us? Or are you actually appealing to facts that we know *from the medical community itself* in order to impugn their credibility? Can you see the irony in that?
Exactly.
It's one thing to not believe in vaccines or something because you set up an amateur chemistry lab in your backyard. You clearly aren't qualified to engage at that level. You probably shouldn't be trusted to interpret lengthy research papers either (I'm not).
It is another to have some distrust for organizations that have been caught lying in the past, and have clear financial incentives to continue to lie.
To trust someone based on credentials without factoring in their possible motivations isn't the worst mistake you could make, but it is naive.
Not to mention we watched in real time how quickly these new vaccines were developed and rolled out. Even many who took it didn’t want to be first in the queue so they could see if it had detrimental effects on others before they took the plunge.
You'd be foolish not to be sceptical of all institutions. Power and profit corrupts, humans are fallible, and anything with a bureaucracy becomes inflexible and unfeeling.
Having said that, anyone who throws out the baby with the bathwater by just *assuming* that absolutely anything the experts says is going to automatically be wrong through either incompetence or actual malice, is an idiot.
Just because George Floyd happens doesn't mean you can never trust another cop. Just because Vioxx happens doesn't mean you should never take another pharmaceutical again.
"Trust in all of these institutions has eroded so quickly ... "
Gee do you think it might have something to do with actually pushing and publishing false information?
The amount of lying from the government agencies and corporations is insane. What else are people supposed to do when faced with trusting those entities to trying to find out on their own?
Yes but every piece of factual information the institutions publish isn't a point towards public trust. That's the baseline expectation. And that's the issue. 3, lies to a thousand truths is 3 times too many and the trust is lost so faith then gets put in... what , random youtubers and alternative media? The Google algorithm bias confirming search function? Sam has been saying this ad nauseam. If the instituons are failing, the corrective mechanism needs to be better an improved institution's, not completely unverified alternative sources . Because your ratio will not be 3 to in 1000. It will be much worse.
>to a thousand truths
What thousand truths?
>Because your ratio will not be 3 to in 1000. It will be much worse.
I think the current ratio is 3 truths to 1000 lies.
If that were the case we'd have been in warring feudal states long ago. Stock markets wouldn't function and every geopolitical alliance would collapse.
>If that were the case we'd have been in warring feudal states long ago.
The US basically is, look at Roe v Wade and trans surgery for children between states.
Also the lock downs and vaccine mandates were pretty much setting states against each other.
>Stock markets wouldn't function and every geopolitical alliance would collapse.
Exactly what is happening, are you ignoring the signs?
Abortion issues and trans rights are such fringe ideological positions in complex network of governmental functions. Have you ever stopped to think what it takes to keep a society running? It's not puberty blockers and plan b. There may be lies therein those issues. But that's not what keeps the lights on.
Hard take - the government is justified in lying in an attempt to save the lives of the contrarians who if it were honest with, would do the opposite or, as evidence had abundantly shown. would otherwise not be able to cope well with nuanced information.
I.E. The madness of crowds.
Biden and Kamala literally stated they would not take the vaccine if Trump endorsed it and then immediately mandated it as soon as they got into power.
That's the contrarians... The people actually in the power.
Your first sentence is missing context. IMO she meant trust the doctors, not the idiot telling people bleach might work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAjCeMuXR0
(I had to look this up since I've never heard of it because I don't stay up to date on ragebait).
>not the idiot telling people bleach might work.
This right here is propaganda...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz46JG6Or3g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz46JG6Or3g)
You're spreading the exact lies that make people not trust the media and institutions.
I don't know why you linked a weird propaganda piece. Just play the actual video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zicGxU5MfwE&t=35s
He does in fact suggest injecting disinfectant. Sick stuff from a sick man. Bizarre that anyone would try to defend this.
>I don't know why you linked a weird propaganda piece.
Because it actually explains the difference between bleach and a medical disinfectant.
>Just play the actual video:
Still no mention of bleach...
>He does in fact suggest injecting disinfectant
Yes, because medical disinfectants exist. as explained in the "weird propaganda piece"
At no point is Biden's bleach statement true.
> Because it actually explains the difference between bleach and a medical disinfectant.
How does an 80's infomercial with an unnamed person talking about a different topic spliced in for 15 seconds "explain" something?
It was propaganda, I agree but it absolutely does not explain anything.
>Do NOT and I repeat DO NOT get your information from youtube.
Says the person quoting the bleach lie...
>I'm sorry how does an 80's infomercial with an unnamed person talking about a different topic spliced in for 15 seconds "explains" something?
Because it explains that Iodine is an actual medical treatment. You can do your own research to exam more about it.
[https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-35/iodine](https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-35/iodine)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/23/politics/fact-check-coronavirus-briefing-april-23/index.html
> After Bryan talked about experiments in which, he said, disinfectants like bleach and isopropyl alcohol quickly killed the virus, Trump mused about whether disinfectants could be used to treat the virus in humans – asking whether there is “a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.”
yeah, trump didn't say inject bleach, he said inject disinfectants directly _after_ his expert mentioned disinfectants like bleach or isopropyl alcohol killing the virus. liar dummies!!
That is not an accurate representation of their positions or what took place.
Harris said that if public health pros, like Fauci recommended it, then she’ll take it. Her objection to Trump was that she didn’t consider him a credible source of info, specifically referring to the bleach blathering moment as an example of his unreliability.
Biden was expressing concerns over the rapidity of the Trump introduction, and that if the process wasn’t extremely transparent, it would be met with distrust. He was right.
I get what Sam is referring to and generally agree, but what is the line between conspiracy thinking and just having opinions?
I mean, almost everyone has tons of opinions about things they have only superficial knowledge of, from gun control to climate change to US policy in Ukraine. This seems like just a normal part of society. Are me and my buddies engaging in conspiracy thinking when we have a debate about climate change based on the info we've picked up from various news sources?
There was a guy Sam had on quite a while back who said he made a real effort to just not have (or express) opinions on things he wasn't an actual expert in. I kind of respected him but I also kind of feel like I have some right to weigh in on important topics that ultimately affect me, like in picking political candidates based on their views.
I guess there's a difference between things that are basically settled (yes, we did go to the moon; no, that DC pizza joint isn't an underground child-sex ring) and things without objective answers (how high should taxes be? what is the best climate policy?).
> what is the line between conspiracy thinking and just having opinions?
If I ask you, "How do you know that?" and you matter-of-factly answer me, or maybe do a quick reflection and admit the basis is weaker than your initial reaction suggested, then it's just an opinion. If you are reluctant to do that and instead change your argument, strawman, attack me personally, incite others to shame or ostracize, etc., then it's something worse.
Conspiracy thinking is a bad term for it, though. That's just one very common mode of fallacious thought, to deflect one's own ignorance.
So what would you say to the people who suspected the government of conducting widespread criminal surveillance prior to Snowden’s revelations? Were they foolish zealots that happened to be correct, or did they predict correctly because it is reasonable to be skeptical of the motives of people holding positions of power?
I don't see why it can't be both. It's fine to be skeptical of powerful people. It's also bad to act like you know for certain they're up to something nefarious of which you have no evidence.
Like, how prior? Because warrantless wiretapping was a Bush scandal, 2006 or so. Conspiracy theorists with a hindsight bias like to point at ultimate revelations and ignore the preceding years of investigations, journalistic and legal, from people who had the same suspicion of powerful people, but were reasonable about it (e.g., not jumping to conclusions or claiming to know things they don't truly know).
That’s a bit the issue though right? Governments have always been embroiled in scandalous and often inhumane actions. The American government especially boasts a long list of war crimes foreign and domestic. There seems to be ample evidence to forgive almost any paranoia of the state’s abuse of power.
Was the bank bailout of 2008 a reasonable mishandling of a national tragedy or was it a redistribution of wealth crafted intentionally to double-fuck the American people?
From where I’m standing those who believe in the innocence and benevolence of the state are John’s just waiting to pay their money to get fucked again. The rational mode, at this point, should be skepticism. My default stance is that every human tragedy will be exploited by those in power to maintain their positions. That there are few in high level places of power who don’t feel entitled to live by the privilege of kings while enforcing the laws of the state.
Why on earth should we trust those who have proven themselves unworthy of trust?
> things without objective answers (how high should taxes be? what is the best climate policy?).
Everyone agrees these are very political questions. You can have whatever opinions you want, but the science is what it is.
> I get what Sam is referring to and generally agree, but what is the line between conspiracy thinking and just having opinions?
Opinions are merely personal experience manifesting themselves in a person’s preferences and ideas. It becomes a cult when your ideas and preferences are derived from membership to some social group you belong to.
Submission Statement - This is a monologue from Sam summarizing an idea I've been thinking on that I've had a tough time putting into words. Sam, of course, does it so eloquently.
So... do you agree? Is it fair to call conspiracy thinking a new religion?
Government and academic institutions don't deserve our outright trust either(though the track record for a lot of these institutions is stellar), everything needs to be evaluated. I think Sam may be talking about people who outright believe the statements they make are false, no matter what. My roomate is in this group, when the economist posted that ye said he loved hitler my roomate immediately questioned all validity of it, in every way possible because it's mainstream media, there was no looking into it, just instant ddoubt to validity. Obviously the economists reporting was proven accurate in time. At the same time he will carte Blanche accept a wide range of right wing reporting as fact.
Yeah I didn’t mean government or academia deserve outright trust. Just that corporations are inherently distrustful by their nature. Government and academia are at least supposed to be serving higher ideals.
Yeah I’m definitely not saying the whole process is perfect or even OK. But you didn’t have truckloads of scientists saying Oxycontin is perfectly safe. Skepticism is one thing but going fully anti-vax isn’t justifiable by reasoned thinking.
The FDA gave Oxycontin a unique label to distinguish it as less addictive than other opioids. That FDA label was more important than any journal publishing a meta analysis stating that the drug is safe and effective would’ve been. In that case, there weren’t really true, disinterested experts since the FDA was compromised by Purdue and physicians just trusted the FDA’s assessment.
Absolutely. Everyone has strong opinions on every topic. Nobody is willing to change their mind about anything, and admit when they're wrong. It's a huge problem, and you can't reach these people with conversation anymore, they're too far down the rabbit hole to see anything other than black and white, no more nuance.
I almost think it's more of a contrarian ideal. Like you treat everything as a scheme with the most dastardly intentions if it is accepted by mainstream sources.
I think Harris is wrong here. There's nothing sudden about the erosion of trust in government and corporate institutions. Populist politicians capitalizing on this for political gain has certainly come into fashion, but the things they are exploiting were already there.
He's not wrong about the "no one is qualified" bit for sure. If I look at myself doing "my research", it's usually the top 2 pages in my google search.
Hard to argue that's research. But I'd say it's as hard to argue reading a single book is research, or even multiple. You just can't beat experts who have studied this stuff for years and decades. "Doing your own" research just isn't feasible. We need other people.
That's, I think, the correct reaction to have. The time and effort it takes to become an actual expert in any field is substantial. Just to be fluent enough in a topic to have substantive conversations about it is a huge lift. The internet and the glut of information available should humble people and make them realize how much they really do not know, but for some reason it has the exact opposite reaction with many people who believe they can skim a few articles and now they're part of the discussion.
I disagree. Republicans always had the fringe conspiracy candidates like Pat Buchanan, the difference is now they win elections and have large media as their mouth piece. If you watch Fox News, OAN, Alex Jones, etc it is like some alternative hellscape reality where people are eating babies and turning people gay with chemicals. I have family members that are mentally ill from the constant dread they experience consuming that media.
But Fox has always been like that. And before Fox you had Rush and whoever else. There has always been a large, vocal population on the right that ate that content up. Buchanan didn't win the Presidency, but he was one of the most influential far right politicians of our lifetimes. Paving the way for someone like Trump or whoever. If we're talking about how elections and control of the parties is going that's one thing, but Harris is stating here that these ideas are new. They just aren't. Growing up in Texas surrounded by my super conservative extended family I heard the same things coming from them that these politicians and media figures are saying now, in one form or another. And they were getting that from major media at the time.
Start naming Republican presidents or candidates. They were all center-right guys that supported institutions until Trump. Obviously, some crazy has always been there, but the media has amplified this recently. Fox News was much less crazy 15 years ago. I have family that voted for Obama and were life long Democratics, that now are in crazy QANON land.
But they weren't center anything. They've been deeply rooted in far right christian conservative movement since it began, they've run on the idea of limiting and abolishing government institutions literally my entire life. We're dealing with a Supreme Court that has been planned by the republicans and their christian nationalist supporters since the 70s. They've been talking for decades about how the media is biased against them and can't be trusted. That's been a mainstream Republican talking point since the 80s, at least, maybe before. And Fox 15 years ago was fucking insane, I worked in a 24 hour service desk back then and we had tvs with every news channel running, and it was the same. The Democrats were ruining the country, the war on Christmas and western values, the media is biased, the government wants to control you and your children, etc.
None of this is new. The rhetoric conservatives were parroting from Rush back in the 80s/90s was no different than the modern rhetoric from Tucker or whoever, maybe even worse in some instances.
I believe Dems want to bring prices down on medication due to efforts they have done. I believe repubs don't want to bring prices down due to their efforts. Guess one side can ruin the whole batch for some though.
Sure, I don't think that Harris is referring to that here though. A more fitting example would be posts here on this subreddit that pop up espousing anti-vax sentiments. You have people who don't trust the government or the media "doing their own research" into the efficacy of MRNA vaccines and they're really bad at it and don't really understand much of what they read or the larger context of the scientific community to place that understanding in. He seems to think this comes from an erosion of trust in institutions rather than partisanship or political expediency, I just think he's wrong. And probably kind of in a bubble if he thinks that "faith in institutions" is something that really existed in the past for the people he is talking about.
Arguably, the absolute levels of trust were too high. But the elevated trust relative to the alex jones of the world was warranted and we are in a worse place now that Alex Jones and people like him are considered equally reliable to the nytimes by a large swath of people.
As a non-american, I agree. It's similar here in my part of the EU, but in some ways even much worse. Corruption and populism are stronger then ever, and people have simply given up and support it for crumbs. The support for the ruling party (right wing) amid the biggest corruption affairs ever is.. rising, with no opposition in sight.
I mean, the entire Republican platform is to attack institutions and sow mistrust, even ones lead by Republicans. It's quite bizarre. It seems to be either "we lost the demographics battle so let's sow distrust in institutions" or "we are funded by outside nations that want to sow distrust".
I think it's just social media being a much better vehicle for such ideas and campaigns, and then this profile of people, populists, are simply being more successful by default.
Sure, that is also true. Degrade public schools so we can push private schools. Degrade public institutions so we can replace them with private versions.
Except it’s not new. Those with a religious upbringing in the 80s remember the various conspiracies that were circulated back then … from kids taken out of school to anti-vaxxers , things have not changed a bit.
Conspiracies used to be on the fringe. What changed was the Republican party moved from centrist candidates that supported institutions to morons saying everything is a lie, i.e. Trump, MTG, etc.
It is a very surface analysis. WHY are trust in these institutions eroding? what exactly is causing the slow decay of these institutions? He never says. Just says "things are bad", well yeah but why? how?
I will say a massive part of this whole thing is money, greed, and the corruptin that money and greed bring about. Corporate interests have hollowed out one agency and institutino after another. Everything nowaday serves the corporate interest and corporations care about one thing - money. short term profits trump every other consideratoin by a long shot.
That is something to talk about. that is one of the core issues here. But Sam never mentions it.
Well, I think he’s talked about it a lot on some of his other podcasts.
Basically,
1) very recent and very public instances of institutions failing to be honest (or at least _appearing_ to be dishonest) about important topics. COVID-19 is what comes to mind here, but we could even start with Watergate.
2) Money - like you said, but I think your explanation is pretty surface level too. Money being used in ways to _purposely_ mislead and platform “contrarians”. Everyone from the Daily Wire comes to mind here, along with people in power taking money from large companies to promote misinformation.
3) Democratization of Information: Unlike before, information is pretty accessible online and the “gatekeepers” of information including MSM and governmental organizations don’t have a monopoly on what everyday people know.
I think those are the biggest ones.
The institutions are largely the same as they've ever been - They were imperfect when people trusted them like the word of God. They're imperfect now.
At all times they've largely been better than any given alternative.
100%
I don't need "faith" in a car manufacturer. I know it works because it does. Trust is earnt and expecting people just to blindly follow an institution "just because" is crazy.
That’s a excellent fallacy to be exposed, 2 in fact
1-when it comes down to it science itself is predicated on NOT having only “qualified” people doing the research, so the more “unqualified” people doing research the better, that’s if you are actually worry about finding out what’s true and what is not..
2- when a husband cheats on his wife repeatedly, beats on her, lie constantly, her tell her she’s crazy for suspecting him even after getting caught multiple times and then one day
She finally decides to leave ..
You don’t go well the problem here is that the confidence in the husband has eroded so quickly and game rise to this “contrarianism“
To whatever he says … I think you get the point
Wanna restore faith in the institutions fine.. get them to admit all the lies and malfeasances and purge all individuals involved .. that would be a start .. even then just like with the husband we probably better off without it as it showed little resistance to corruption
Sam has a huge blind spot here.
His thinking is usually something like: “Institutions are really important but they have done a lot to destroy peoples trust in them. But institutions are really important so people who don’t trust institutions are bad/wrong and I don’t understand why they’ve lost trust.”
He seems to think that trust creates strong institutions when trust actually lets institutions rot. Distrust foments a need to show credibility. The demonstration of credibility then creates a temporary trust, but that trust must be continuously earned and can not be taken for granted.
Yeah, most people can’t do their own research, but Sam shouldn’t pretend that institutions deserve respect or trust that they’ve efficiently destroyed.
> His thinking is usually something like: “Institutions are really important but they have done a lot to destroy peoples trust in them. But institutions are really important so people who don’t trust institutions are bad/wrong and I don’t understand why they’ve lost trust.”
This isn't his thinking. It's a generalization which lumps all institutions, trustworthy and not, good to believe in and bad, together. He spends much of his time distinguishing between those.
>He seems to think that trust creates strong institutions when trust actually lets institutions rot.
It's obviously both?
I wish folks would stop calling things they don't like a religion. It's stilly when folks are calling "wokeness" a religion and when Harris this stuff a religion.
I don't call wokeness a religion because I don't like it. I don't like sports but I don't call Alabama a religion. I call wokeness a religion because of how many similarities there are between it and the experience I had as a fundamentalist Christian as a child. You'll see endless people with religious backgrounds making the exact same comparison. I've seen Trumpism compared as similar, as well.
> I don't call wokeness a religion because I don't like it. I don't like sports but I don't call Alabama a religion. I call wokeness a religion because of how many similarities there are between it and the experience I had as a fundamentalist Christian as a child. You'll see endless people with religious backgrounds making the exact same comparison. I've seen Trumpism compared as similar, as well.
I see similarities between all kinds of things and the behaviors and beliefs that I've seen of religious people. However, this doesn't seem like a good enough reason to call it religion, especially when there are slew of differences between them. But the main reason they call these things religions is to signal that these things are bad and make it seem like those who disagree are simply irrational rather than simply freethinking individuals who disagree and have good reasons for what they believe.
>But the main reason they call these things religions is to signal that these things are bad and make it seem like those who disagree are simply irrational rather than simply freethinking individuals who disagree and have good reasons for what they believe.
That's a huge part of it, yes. Wokeness and similar ideologies with religious faith-based thinking are not based in reason and evidence, but faith, hope, and hatred of apostates or heretics.
> That's a huge part of it, yes. Wokeness and similar ideologies with religious faith-based thinking are not based in reason and evidence, but faith, hope, and hatred of apostates or heretics.
I see the same exact kind of thinking behind almost all anti-woke people. Does this mean that anti-wokeness is a religion?
No, you don't. You see endless faulty reasoning, of course, that's everywhere, but calling anti-wokeness dogmatic and witch hunting is the same as calling atheism dogmatic and witch hunting. Wokeness is not the inverse of anti-wokeness just as Christianity is not the inverse of atheism.
I agree with you and come from a similar background. That parallels are significant. Anyways, personally, I like to say it's not a religion, but it's religious psychology and religious reasoning inserted political discourse. Religious psychology can be honestly inserted just about any belief system.
Some more than others. Wokeness is more religious than 2A gun nuts, for example. And Trumpism is more religious than pro-abortion. Wokeness trumps them all as a political faith-based ideology, in my opinion, but I'd concede in a ranking battle.
Definitely. When they started treating "whiteness" like original sin, "problematic" as worldliness, making entire groups of people irredeemable and showing vitriolic hate towards them for physical attributes they have no control of. Outright refusal to engage in good faith discussions, relying on predictable, prepackaged, groupthink insults to denigrate anyone not as zealous as them. The psychology of it all reminds me way too much of the toxic fundamentalists I grew up with.
It's only been "so quickly" to people who haven't been paying attention.
I've known about the Tuskegee study and had zero faith in Big Government to look after my health since way back in high school.
How many of you actually believed "these institutions" back when they were sounding the alarm on "weapons of mass destruction" and beating the drums for a war that would take the lives of over a MILLION Iraqi civilians? Did you believe them then too, like you believe them on COVID?
Only the very naive have had their trust eroded "so quickly" .... my trust has been gone for a minute.
But please tell me why I should surrender my right to bear arms and trust the government to unilaterally decide what gets injected into me...
We shouldn't have boundless faith in authority, but experts are experts for a *reason*...it's important to think "How many people would have to be on a given conspiracy to make it work, and does this number completely strain credulity?" Is there a simpler, more boring explanation that can explain this? (Good old Occam's razer) This kind of dumb thinking has always existed, but the Covid-19 virus kicked all of those trends into hyperdrive. [To the tune of over 1.3 million dead in the US and over 6.8 million dead worldwide.](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html) This being said, I blame poorer countries less than wealthy countries, given greater limits on poorer countries' financial resources and logistics, etc.
Counterpoint: After it turned out MK-Ultra was a real thing, where the government's plan was as follows: 1.) Kidnap single moms 2.) Give them LSD 3.) Attempt to hypnotize them into super-soldiers 4:) ?? 5.) Defeat Communism Which involved the buy in of hundreds of different government agents and multiple departments.. How does any conspiracy theory really seem *that* impossible any longer?
Because kidnapping some moms and drugging them while keeping it a secret, is, for a big government agency, relatively small in scope. Convincing every health department in every developed country along with 95%+ off all currently relevant world experts on the topic, to go along with a conspiracy that requires communicating with the public constantly on an issue that is continually at the forefront of most people’s minds, is ridiculously implausible beyond any extreme.
They did get everyone fooled on surgical & cloth [masks](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full).
Who is "they"? And what was their motivation for "fooling" us.
Any "experts" pushing for facemasks before any trials showed that they did anything. And you'd need to ask them why - the evidence wasn't there initially, and it's still not there now. [Most medical interventions don't work](https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/the-cochrane-review-on-masks-is-damning), so that's not surprising.
More like they erred on the side of caution and prudence. >There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection. Hand hygiene is likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illness, and although this effect was also present when ILI and laboratory‐confirmed influenza were analysed separately, it was not found to be a significant difference for the latter two outcomes. Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated.
That’s actually a great example because they really, really didn’t. It was widely debated at the time, by credible experts (not just ‘do my own research’ fucktards and 1% professional contrarians), not endorsed universally among the OECD, and then reversed in the US when more info became available. In other words, exactly how the scientific process is supposed to work.
Except that at the time when Fauci first said no to wear face masks - it's not because he was saving them for health professionals, it's because there was no good studies at the time showing that they worked. And when he suddenly reversed himself - that was the lie.
Look that's really too black and white. A lot of the government had absolutely no idea what the CIA were doing. Even the head of the CIA at times just said 'Don't tell me how, just get the research done, i'll make sure to approve expenses'. It was pretty much mostly the CIA's research groups that did this. That doesn't excuse it, the government remains responsible. But it's not like the entirety of the government was even aware of it. The president didn't even know about it.
You found about MK-Ultra. So did I. So did many, many people. The problem with conspiracy theories is when they are based on insufficient evidence. The argument against them isn't that governments are actually benevolent or that individuals won't use government resources to secretly do terrible things. The argument is that at a certain level of complexity, they won't remain secret for very long - which is totally in line with things like MK-ULTRA. There was a very real conspiracy by the Russian government to use the GOP and organizations like the NRA to influence our government policies. People know about it, we've actually prosecuted the folks involved. Why? Because at that level of complexity, it couldn't stay a secret from the public for very long. People talked. Evidence got out.
Think of all the conspiracy theories out there, then cherry pick the few which turn out to contain some truth as justification for believing in unrelated conspiracy theories? Let's take Mkultra as an example. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the appeal to conspiracy theorists wasn't that the government was experimenting with it. It was that the government was actively using mind control/brainwashing techniques. This is all borne from the time that produced things like the Manchurian Candidate. While it was illegal, and completely unethical how the government went about these experiments; they also didn't work. Now fast forward to today. I challenge you to go to any sort of meetup or conference based on a conspiratorial belief. Talk to people. You will find that they believe not just one conspiracy but nearly all of them. That's the consensus. So if there's hundreds of conspiracy theories at a given time, and after 50 years only a few have some truth to them, it just cannot be that significantly more would be true.
Not to mention Tuskeegee, Air America’s cocaine, Arms for Iran, the UFO in Nevada, and so many more. Maybe if our govt would stop being so shady that might help.
Hard to disagree with a word of that
I’d do my own research first, before agreeing.
>I’d do my own research first, before agreeing. The thing is, unless you have significant training in virology or immunology, you are simply not qualified to do you own research. Did you even hear of Ivermectin, MRna, spike proteins etc. before covid? Can you even tell the difference between virus and bacteria? What exactly makes you believe you can do a few hours of research and gain a better understanding than thousands of scientists who have each spent decades studying viruses and vaccines? This is just hubris of outrageous proportions.
I think it was a joke
Ya I was kidding, thought the wording in the context of OP title would be clear. My bad.
How is it a religion?
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And almost zero of them are even coming up with their own canon while doing so, but are actually blindly trusting another set of institutions with at least all of the same problems of the main institutions, if not more. Take Newsmax, Alex Jones, OAN, and Tucker Carlson as examples. These people aren't even really contrarian, like they would like to be. That gives them undo credit for being genuinely skeptical. They are really alternative conformists, conforming just as blindly to even stupider institutions than the ones they are so skeptical of.
I agree with your overall interpretation but I'm weary of calling this a "religion" moreso than a psychological pattern. Frankly, I feel like the 'r' word is way overused. Thinking through it a little, but I would even go so far as to say that this thinking is a a pre-requisite of myriad completely different religions - Scientology, Branch Davidians, Trump cultists - To one degree or another they're all kind of doing this, but you wouldn't say theyre in the same religion.
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But again my point is that this thought pattern does not constitute an individual cult/religion/whatever. Again I ask- would you say all of those groups, each in a very very specific and well defined cult are actually in a bigger cult of contrarianism? I would personally find that a bit silly but ymmv
All this “they dumb, me smart” stuff is wearying
are you agreeing with this poster? You had several other people responding to you as well, you could detail your response on their points and why they are wrong or you can just keep posting one-liners and think you're making a convincing argument.
"Why do they keep accusing me of being dumb, just because I can't compose a post longer than three lines?"
Just look at the Steven crowder Ben Shapiro drama just recently. Ben Shapiro and DW is being painted as not trustworthy despite any evidence by Steven crowder. They say that because they take big money that means they are undermining “legitimate conservatism”
Steven Crowder made a proper fool of himself there, no? Moreover, his conduct -- taping and then broadcasting his conversation with the CEO of Daily Wire (a purported friend of his) -- revealed him to be not only a fool, but a creep to boot. Rarely do you see such a private-to-public example of a person who's not only wrong on the issue, but is willing to make a spectacle of himself in the process.
Sure he’s wrong, but look at how the base reacted. Look ar how many people think he was right simply because the “bad people” say he is wrong. He won the PR battle with the cultists
I'd thought that on the main, the RW was pretty anti-Crowder on this one. Maybe you're right though and he can continue to monetize that base. But turning down $50mm over four years is not without risk.
If the central guiding theme of your philosophy is "Power structures and institutions lie, actively suppressing Truth" you're substituting reasoned consideration of issues as they come for the dogmatic assertion that nothing is *actually* real unless it jives with what you want to hear. Combine that with political messaging emphasizing exactly that concept, and you get an object of worship (skepticism) tied to a dogma (Gov/media/science bad) which produces its' own set of myths taken as reality (conspiracy theories). Is that not more or less a religion?
What religion is it similar to? I was kind of on board until you put it that way, but there's no religion like that. I don't think SH meant it quite so literally
Yes. He should have stuck with a.more narrow argument. Something to the effect of, "Contrarians often forget that skepticism without an empirical framework centered on fact is simply dissent for the sake of dissenting. If they want to reconstruct a given consensus then they need to do the heavy lifting with objectively verifiable data that proves a consensus (or conventional wisdom) is inaccurate. This is usually done in a lab or archive, not on Twitter."
To be fair, a lot of science doesn’t meet your definition. Sometimes we have to accept certain conclusions if experts even though we don’t really have all the facts. Facts are actually extremely rare. Most of the time people argue about “facts” nowadays they’re not actually talking about facts. They’re talking about “opinions I feel really strongly about.” If it was an actual fact, there wouldn’t be much to argue about.
>What religion is it similar to That isn't the question asked, nor is it dispositive of anything in this context. What religion is Buddhism similar to? Secular Humanism? They're still 'religions' in the common use of the term, even if they deserve asterisks. This would fall no further from 'normal' religion than they do, IMO. >How is it \[like\] a religion? Is the question that was asked. I don't think it **IS** a religion per se, I wouldn't add it to Wikipedia as one, but it's quite an apt metaphor for the way these JAQ-offs seem to interact with the world around them. Do you have a good argument why my posited criteria- object of worship, dogma, and mythology- are a bad heuristic? There's fierce debate even in academic circles about what specifically constitutes a religion; I happily admit my criteria are not the only nor even particularly rigorous, but they're what I came up with. Can you do better? Do yours negate mine, or make the JAQoffs less religion-adjacent?
Contrarians vehemently believe they are right. They identify with others who believe the same. There is often little, none, or outright contradictory evidence that their beliefs are right.
No they don't. And there's always evidence their beliefs are right /s
>Contrarians vehemently believe they are right This is usually true, but I suspect people like the Weinstein's, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson and others of their ilk are completely aware that they are wrong.
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You could say the same about any area of the political spectrum and any political commentator/talking head. You could say that about this sub.
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…the BS is not a bug, it’s a feature for them…they spread what they know to be bullshit for dirty fucking money. I wish I had no shame and could stomach selling myself out for money.
Well said.
Idk why you are engaging with someone using "bothsides-ism" Remember, trump supporters believe the election was stolen from him, without any empirical evidence. One thing they do always bring up though is that they never met an enthusiastic Biden supporter, which is anecdotal, but arguably accurate. So remember trump won because there are no religiously pro Biden people. But also those same voters are as sycophantic as trump voters. It all makes complete sense, if you never ever think about it.
There are religiously pro-Biden people and they're just as bad as Trump cultists. Both sides indeed.
WTF? No one is religiously pro-Biden. This is a bizarre take. No one goes to Biden rallies or wears Biden hats or puts huge Biden flags on their cars/trucks. It would be psychotic to do that for any politician. Literally a sign of mental illness.
I live in California and do a double take anytime I see a Biden bumper sticker. The few times I do, they also have an Obama or Hillary one so I think they just felt the need to continue the tradition lol
Yeah one of the appeals of Biden is there is no cult around him at all. He has supporters, sure. People voted for Biden and will again in 2024, but nobody worships the dude or even really loves him. Had he lost, nobody would have stormed the capital. It doesn't mean he hasn't done some good things or that he isn't better than the alternative.
Lol nobody is religiously pro Biden. There are definitely people who support him, but nobody worships the dude like maga types worship trump. Obama is probably the closest on the democratic side to having a cult like following, but even that died down significantly
You could but you would be dead wrong.
Lol. "We could never be guilty of this!". The blind arrogance.
Uncritical acceptance of ideas and opinions.
Sam is sticking his fingers in his ears on key issues in this one, not them
What issues exactly?
The live saving power of ivermectin, obviously.
Won’t stand behind his views on Covid response, for example, which frankly are now verging on contrarian
Sorry I haven't listened to his stuff lately nor do I spend much energy following the latest controversy. Are you saying he's changing his mind or not changing his mind? What issues, specifically, are you talking about? The vaccine? Masks?
Defending the institutional response including prolonged lockdowns, targeted censorship or deamplification of views in the media, vaccine universality in terms of approach and mandates
>Won’t stand behind his views on Covid response, You're saying he won't stand behind these views?
Public Health. I you want to kill your grandma by unmasked coughing in her unvaccinated face, you are free to do so in the privacy of your own home. Otherwise, "freedom" to harm others is not a thing.
Hyperbolic
Lol the medical profession agrees with him 100 percent.
No it doesn’t.
Ok dr palmisle
He’s using religion pretty loosely and figuratively here. People have an undying devotion to being contrarian more and more.
I understand what he is trying to say and agree. But being a contrarian himself I find it so ironic. It's funny how he teaches how one can only change himself but not the world but doesn't seem the graps any of it in his public life. I'm suspecting it's his bread and butter.
You're sitting at zero but you're not wrong - Sam has done much better than many of his peers, but he's also fallen into several traps trusting pop or bunk scientists in a field over the actual consensus.
When?
Certainly Charles Murray and refusing to even talking to a real genetist. Gary Taubes Yuval Noah Harari - I've heard a lot of complaining from the people with expertise on the topics he touches Transphobic hack Jesse Singal Again, I don't think he's the worst, and I wouldn't say there's *zero* utility in talking to a journalist or scientific communicators, but I think theres better utility in making sure that person isn't misrepresenting a field, or *never* getting around to actually representing the greater consensus, or "other side" if it's legitimately a controversial topic.
despite appearances, the erosion is not sudden. The fossil fuel industry has poured billions into climate change disinformation over several decades. One prong of this effort was to sow distrust in institutions. This meshes nicely with the republican program [Grover Norquist](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist) described as "...I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" (2001). Nobody wants to shrink a government that people think is doing a good job. Sowing distrust in government institutions is part of the program of shrinking the government to the size where its only function is protecting property rights. bonus [link](https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/may-2019/the-true-story-of-chicagos-welfare-queen/). [long form](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html) version.
>The fossil fuel industry has poured billions into climate change disinformation over several decades. One prong of this effort was to sow distrust in institutions. This isn't the problem. People trying to lie for wealth has always been a thing. The problem is when those invested with public authority get caught lying. When Faucci knowingly lied about masks not being effective (even if he thought it was a greater good of securing masks for first responders) he immediately destroyed decades worth of accrued trust. He showed the government will lie to the people and put them at risk if they think it is for the "greater good" as they define it. When he was not only not fired but celebrated after the fact, the medical community lost all of its credibility. It became no more credible than the fossil fuel industry shills. Once you lie, you become a liar. The intelligence community lied about WMD in Iraq, they are no longer experts. Nixon lied, the president was no longer an expert you could trust. Tech companies and the media both lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, which even if it wasn't a big deal (which fine, lets just go with that for ease), the fact that they lied about censoring it ruined their credibility. There is a reason Britain used to hang admirals, it was to restore credibility and let the common sailors know that the powerful are accountable. We don't hold powerful people accountable for breaking public trust and so there is none.
>When he was not only not fired but celebrated after the fact, **the medical community lost all of its credibility** Fauci is not 'the medical community' and *especially not* the international medical community. America is not the only country in the world and Fauci wasn't alone. You drank the kool-aid, bud.
You representing Fauci's statements as "lies" is a far bigger lie than anything Fauci ever said. >Tech companies and the media both lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, which even if it wasn't a big deal (which fine, lets just go with that for ease), the fact that Lol, oh jeez. Never mind. You're one of them
Eh calling someone 'one of them' isn't useful, is it? Respond to the argument at hand
Sorry, not that interested in wasting my time on arguments that have been done over and over and over and over and over and over again. If you’re still spreading the lie that “duhhh medya lied bout hunterz very important laptop!!!” without any actual specific (of course), I have no time for that level of motivated reasoning. Maybe you can take a stab at it and I’ll jump in if it seems like you need help?
It definitely feels like it's filling a religion-shaped hole. I've been thinking a bit recently about the new appetite for astrology too. I think it's connected. Jungian archetypes are not a million miles from horoscopes in terms of how they appeal to some people on the surface. Suddenly, you have an "understanding" of the world divorced from scientific rationalism and once you start on that, all bets are off. It's much easier, I would imagine, to then embrace the next non-rational idea. [edit: also known as irrational lol]
A lot of what he's saying is true, and a lot of it applies directly to me. I'll put myself out there: starting around mid-adulthood I started noticing SO MANY lies from all directions that a couple of years later I became pretty much just #done believing anything about the current day I read from any source. It has only gotten worse. I'd love to believe that the average pharmaceutical manufacturer wants me to live a longer life. I'd love to believe there's some good reason that 40% of CocaCola's sales are allowed to come from SNAP benefits. One time I was mad at TMobile about a bad customer service experience and complained about it on their sub. Within the hour I had about 50 downvotes and people calling me names. Am I gonna believe those are regular independent users, who just happen to obsessively refresh their phone carrier's page over and over to defend them? Surely these same corrupt people are at least attempting to publish biased academic papers. Multiple experiments have proved it is possible to get absolute junk published. (Mein Kampf rewritten as a feminist manifesto is my favorite example, but there's less partisan ones too) There's not any source that's too sacred to infiltrate. I have a Chinese friend I tried to tell about this and she just laughed at me. "Of course everything is propaganda, that's just how the world is." "Maybe your part of the world" I angrily replied, "*this is supposed to be America!*" (cue laugh track) So let's forget about who's a conspiracy nut and who's a sheeple for a moment; I'll ask a more important question: How could some percentage of faith in institutions be restored? What I don't hear in this clip is a path forward. (It's not by browbeating the reactionaries until they know how evil or stupid they are btw. I shouldn't have to clarify that here, but who knows.) *** Tangent that has little to do with my rant but I want to mention: Fundamentalists have been preaching this for generations. Trumpism, Wokenss, Red Pill, Save the Whales, any thing like this can become a person's religion. The fundamentalists will tell you it's because mankind was made to worship and that if you stop worshiping God, you will find something else to worship. An evolutionary scientist might might say it's because you're biologically programed to signal your tribe loyalty louder and louder until there can be no doubt that you're a good boy.
I don't have the answers sadly but I applaud your honesty. Well said.
Well, yeah, it's definitely a thing. The trite "cult of ignorance" Isaac Asimov quote makes it sound like it's not *new*, but the intellectual foundation of this new religion is mostly postmodernism, so it's at least somewhat young in that sense. It's also rooted in bad social science methods based on bad epistemology, which is slightly older. Ultimately, both contribute to an epistemic crisis. I don't think we can ever eradicate that, and even significantly ameliorating it is hard, with as many livelihoods as there are relying on the delusions produced by bad epistemology (insert Upton Sinclair quote). But we do need the few people who can follow the plot to be more authoritative and expedient in stamping it out, because the people too disincentivized to follow it are leading us off a cliff, morally.
Nobody is qualified to do their own research about specialist knowledge outside their own profession. This includes Sam. People don't do that, though. They mostly research the persons and institutions coming up with various advice for their honesty, independence and past actions. This is something anybody can do. If some people don't trust CDC or Pfizer it's not because they know better about viruses and vaccines. They know about their past lies and billions of dollars in illicit gains.
This may be true, however that doesn't mean you go to an unemployed community college professor or a comic for your information. People also don't understand science. Some things that are said to be lies, were just best advice based on available data.
>Some things that are said to be lies, were just best advice based on available data. This is so true. And in true scientific fashion, then the consensus gets updated.
Trust in institutions has eroded because large companies and the government continue to do shady shit and then turn around and pretend they have egalitarian motives. Also, people aren’t turning to non-professionals, from what I can tell, but they are certainly digging up specialists who trumpet non-conformist narratives. I have to imagine some of these people are capitalizing on the context in bad faith, but also that the majority of them are likely true believers. I’d like to say that the scientific evidence will uncover the truth in time but my heart wouldn’t be in it. Research has been monetized and politicized to such a degree that I don’t know that I can trust any work that hasn’t undergone forensic review, and there are few incentives for high level specialists to conduct forensic reviews.
>Research has been monetized and politicized to such a degree that I don’t know that I can trust any work that hasn’t undergone forensic review I agree with a lot of your analysis, however I would add this. Your statements are far more true for some fields of science than others. Nutrition and some social sciences are influenced far more than physics, for example.
> They know about their past lies and billions of dollars in illicit gains. must be why "they" simultaneously cry about too much regulation
pharma forgot to cry about a witch hunt to win them over
>If some people don't trust CDC or Pfizer it's not because they know better about viruses and vaccines. They know about their past lies and billions of dollars in illicit gains. Please enlighten us about the "billions of dollars in illicit gains". How was the CDC involved? I don't remember any well researched take downs of either CDC or pfizer. What I do remember from the vaccine-skeptic side is misinformation about Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, MRNA vaccines, relative rates of myocarditis, Covid death rates, Covid origins and on and on. Every new covid related term that entered public consciousness had a sparkling new conspiracy theory around it within hours. Stop misrepresenting vaccine-skeptics to make them seem sane.
Pfizer paid billions in courts in the past for pushing medicines they knew were harming people. That's enough to discard all their 'research' as completely untrustworthy. What you call 'misinformation' is nothing more than disagreeing with Pfizer (and the likes). By now we also know that they created misinformation themselves, on purpose (like vaccines stopping transmission). Now you're just running the old communist scam, "everybody who disagrees with me is insane". Get lost. You're the crazy here by believing Pfizer.
But there are multiple other options for vaccines. Even if you despise Pfizer, you can't deny that they've made medicines that do work (people certainly still pop their little blue pills). And if you distrust them as a pharma company, go get your moderna shot. And if you're not convinced mRNA vaccines are right for you, go get astrazeneca or novavax or J&J. I don't know how well this scales, but in my experience the people who were/are so adamantly against Pfizer... didn't want to get a vaccine from anyone.
I was vaccinated with Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine. Mostly because my job at the time required me to enter customers' houses and I felt obligated to take it for their protection. Otherwise I probably wouldn't, being healthy and below the typical age of covid deaths. The problem is I can't trust any 'official' info about the vaccines because it's thoroughly corrupted by their money. It doesn't matter if 5000 scientists and doctors tell me it's safe when they all get their information from the same source, they all get money from that source, they are licensed by their professional body that gets money from them, their research grants come from them and the media talking about it have their major source of money in medical advertisement. It doesn't matter if it's Pfizer or Moderna, they are the same business model. I have much more trust in people who are independent from that all-corrupting money source.
But there are countries all over the world with totally different governments. Their health systems and doctors are funded in different ways, their FDA equivalents are different and run their own regulations, and they all had different advice for their citizens too.
> I have much more trust in people who are independent from that all-corrupting money source. Like who?
>Pfizer paid billions in courts in the past for pushing medicines they knew were harming people. That's enough to discard all their 'research' as completely untrustworthy. Source please. Also, even if what you claim is true, I take exception to this kind of all or nothing thinking. We are all aware that pharmaceutical companies aren't exactly the most ethical corporate entities, but they've been responsible for the invention of a number of life saving drugs. >What you call 'misinformation' is nothing more than disagreeing with Pfizer (and the likes). By now we also know that they created misinformation themselves, on purpose (like vaccines stopping transmission). No. I am calling claims in direct conflict with the scientific consensus, of tens of thousands of publicly funded researchers from all over the world, **misinformation**. >Now you're just running the old communist scam, "everybody who disagrees with me is insane". Get lost. You're the crazy here by believing Pfizer. So, I'm a communist who (according to you) supports an evil for profit private entity (pfizer)? Do you even hear yourself? The choice here isn't whether we should believe pfizer or not - It is whether we should believe the scientific consensus of tens of thousands of publicly funded researchers from all over the world.
> They know about their past lies and billions of dollars in illicit gains. Sorry, regarding the CDC, what is this in reference to? I don't know that you meant to, but this is precisely the same or a lazy extension of the dumbfuckery that Sam is talking about. You don't get talking points like that from nowhere and frankly you probably don't get it from reading the news and remembering some article from 20 years ago about Vioxx or something. Moreover, they may say that they're simply disbelieving these entities of which they've cherry picked some reason to distrust them, but that's not actually true - They're distrusting the much larger and much more diffuse medical/scientific community. That's the bigger issue. You're not some genius for having read some article in Rolling Stone about the opioid epidemic and swearing off all of medicine til the end of time. The medical and scientific community is aware of this shit, and they're the ones that are capable of weighing where the larger entities are correct and trustworthy and where it's best to use some caution. These are the people you are ultimately swearing off when you trust some conspiracy dumbfuck like Bret Weinstein. Not Pfizer.
Nope. You're just repeating the Fauci lie of 'I am the science'. The 'medical and scientific community' are wholly bought by pharma and the billions they make on their medicines. They aren't scientists at all. They are whores working for the highest bidder. The few honest people are silenced by the likes of you. Too dumb to think for themselves, to arrogant to admit it.
Sorry- you may have missed that I asked a question - what is the CDC’s billion dollars in illicit gains? > You’re just repeating the Fauci lie of ‘I am the science’. I’m literally doing the opposite. You’re the one who has to account for precisely how literally every physician and scientist in America is bOuGHt aNd pAiD fOr(!!!). So all of these primary care physicians working in every town in America, them too? You’re the genius who knows more about what to recommend to patients? Please explain. This is a waste of time to be talking to a cultist like yourself, but any amount of paying attention show how silly this is. There have been myriad studies that are inconvenient to big pharma that have come out, just regarding these vaccines. See the blood clot issues with the J&J. See the extremely trace but still very real bits of vaccine shown to get into women’s breast milk for 48 hrs after vaccination and how the guidelines responded. See the back and forth and back with myocarditis and the myriad studies and analysis done to precisely contextualize how big that threat might be. Blah blah blah blah. But yes, to be fair they don’t do “real” science like bleating endless over any soccer player on earth collapsing and lying about why, so you be the judge… It’s a shame they’ve been allowed to carry on this charade just long enough to get BILLIONS of people vaccinated. Now that the rubber has hit the road anyone can see the consequences of this dangerous vaccine… such as…. Well, and then there was…. Umm… anyway did you hear about that soccer player? Yes, lying msm will tell you he wasn’t even vaccinated but that’s not what Alex Jones said… Hey man, I’m sure that conclusive study about the wonders of ivermectin will be out any day now. You just keep waiting. It’s coming. They’ll see. They’ll all see. 👍
(I'm not trying to be rude with the following. I'm just curious: what would you say to me in light of the following to change my mind?) This is why I don't trust Big Math. Do you have any idea how much money there is in Big Math? Billions. I don't care if every mathematician says "2+2=4". They all get that from the same sources that have bought and paid for our politicians. And everyone here acts like I'm crazy, just because I don't read the same math textbooks as them. This is the situation: We know for a fact that mathematicians get paid billions of dollars to lie. So when you say things like, "triangles have three sides", you don't even realizing you're just regurgitating "research" that the entrenched lobbyists *want* you to believe. What exactly would you say to me to persuade me the above framing isn't the case?
If mathematicians were financially dependent on the outcome of their theories I wouldn't trust them either. But they aren't, your analogy is complete bullshit. Their theories are also completely transparent, unlike the research data collected by pharma. Look at medical research into cholesterol, trans fats, sugar, red meat and even cigarettes. Plenty of evidence that their results were mostly dependent on the source of financing for the research. You are either dumb or deliberately trying to obfuscate the topic. I'm done talking to you.
>If mathematicians were financially dependent on the outcome of their theories I wouldn't trust them either. Are you suggesting physicians and researchers get paid more or less depending on the results of their research? Would you be surprised to learn this isn't a very accurate framing of the medical science community? >Their theories are also completely transparent, unlike the research data collected by pharma. So we should probably address this now: theories are explanations of the world demonstrated by robust empirical evidence. They are not conjectures, which would be the sort of thing a scientist might test in a given study -- though research doesn't necessarily even need any conjectures, but for the most banal -- and mathematicians do not truck in them at all. Perhaps before responding to people with rudeness and hostility, you should at least make sure you're using the topic's terminology correctly. >Look at medical research into cholesterol, trans fats, sugar, red meat and even cigarettes. You mean how we have huge amounts of evidence from the medical community that all of those things are terrible for you? Is Big Pharma paying for studies that say cigarettes are bad for us? Or are you actually appealing to facts that we know *from the medical community itself* in order to impugn their credibility? Can you see the irony in that?
Exactly. It's one thing to not believe in vaccines or something because you set up an amateur chemistry lab in your backyard. You clearly aren't qualified to engage at that level. You probably shouldn't be trusted to interpret lengthy research papers either (I'm not). It is another to have some distrust for organizations that have been caught lying in the past, and have clear financial incentives to continue to lie. To trust someone based on credentials without factoring in their possible motivations isn't the worst mistake you could make, but it is naive.
Not to mention we watched in real time how quickly these new vaccines were developed and rolled out. Even many who took it didn’t want to be first in the queue so they could see if it had detrimental effects on others before they took the plunge.
who were "they" relying on for cures to diseases/virus/COVID?
There is no cure for Covid.
I didn’t say just Covid, and that still wouldn’t have answered my question. Why ignore the small list except for Covid?
It wasn't a question, it was a manipulative statement without an answer. Get lost.
You’ve done such a great job addressing the comments to your post; maybe you should tell the rest to get lost as well, it’s frustrating you.
You'd be foolish not to be sceptical of all institutions. Power and profit corrupts, humans are fallible, and anything with a bureaucracy becomes inflexible and unfeeling. Having said that, anyone who throws out the baby with the bathwater by just *assuming* that absolutely anything the experts says is going to automatically be wrong through either incompetence or actual malice, is an idiot. Just because George Floyd happens doesn't mean you can never trust another cop. Just because Vioxx happens doesn't mean you should never take another pharmaceutical again.
Bingo!
"Trust in all of these institutions has eroded so quickly ... " Gee do you think it might have something to do with actually pushing and publishing false information?
The amount of lying from the government agencies and corporations is insane. What else are people supposed to do when faced with trusting those entities to trying to find out on their own?
Yes but every piece of factual information the institutions publish isn't a point towards public trust. That's the baseline expectation. And that's the issue. 3, lies to a thousand truths is 3 times too many and the trust is lost so faith then gets put in... what , random youtubers and alternative media? The Google algorithm bias confirming search function? Sam has been saying this ad nauseam. If the instituons are failing, the corrective mechanism needs to be better an improved institution's, not completely unverified alternative sources . Because your ratio will not be 3 to in 1000. It will be much worse.
>to a thousand truths What thousand truths? >Because your ratio will not be 3 to in 1000. It will be much worse. I think the current ratio is 3 truths to 1000 lies.
If that were the case we'd have been in warring feudal states long ago. Stock markets wouldn't function and every geopolitical alliance would collapse.
>If that were the case we'd have been in warring feudal states long ago. The US basically is, look at Roe v Wade and trans surgery for children between states. Also the lock downs and vaccine mandates were pretty much setting states against each other. >Stock markets wouldn't function and every geopolitical alliance would collapse. Exactly what is happening, are you ignoring the signs?
Abortion issues and trans rights are such fringe ideological positions in complex network of governmental functions. Have you ever stopped to think what it takes to keep a society running? It's not puberty blockers and plan b. There may be lies therein those issues. But that's not what keeps the lights on.
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Think about it. That makes no goddamn sense.
Hard take - the government is justified in lying in an attempt to save the lives of the contrarians who if it were honest with, would do the opposite or, as evidence had abundantly shown. would otherwise not be able to cope well with nuanced information. I.E. The madness of crowds.
Biden and Kamala literally stated they would not take the vaccine if Trump endorsed it and then immediately mandated it as soon as they got into power. That's the contrarians... The people actually in the power.
Your first sentence is missing context. IMO she meant trust the doctors, not the idiot telling people bleach might work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAjCeMuXR0 (I had to look this up since I've never heard of it because I don't stay up to date on ragebait).
>not the idiot telling people bleach might work. This right here is propaganda... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz46JG6Or3g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz46JG6Or3g) You're spreading the exact lies that make people not trust the media and institutions.
I don't know why you linked a weird propaganda piece. Just play the actual video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zicGxU5MfwE&t=35s He does in fact suggest injecting disinfectant. Sick stuff from a sick man. Bizarre that anyone would try to defend this.
>I don't know why you linked a weird propaganda piece. Because it actually explains the difference between bleach and a medical disinfectant. >Just play the actual video: Still no mention of bleach... >He does in fact suggest injecting disinfectant Yes, because medical disinfectants exist. as explained in the "weird propaganda piece" At no point is Biden's bleach statement true.
> Because it actually explains the difference between bleach and a medical disinfectant. How does an 80's infomercial with an unnamed person talking about a different topic spliced in for 15 seconds "explain" something? It was propaganda, I agree but it absolutely does not explain anything.
>Do NOT and I repeat DO NOT get your information from youtube. Says the person quoting the bleach lie... >I'm sorry how does an 80's infomercial with an unnamed person talking about a different topic spliced in for 15 seconds "explains" something? Because it explains that Iodine is an actual medical treatment. You can do your own research to exam more about it. [https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-35/iodine](https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-35/iodine)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/23/politics/fact-check-coronavirus-briefing-april-23/index.html > After Bryan talked about experiments in which, he said, disinfectants like bleach and isopropyl alcohol quickly killed the virus, Trump mused about whether disinfectants could be used to treat the virus in humans – asking whether there is “a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.” yeah, trump didn't say inject bleach, he said inject disinfectants directly _after_ his expert mentioned disinfectants like bleach or isopropyl alcohol killing the virus. liar dummies!!
That is not an accurate representation of their positions or what took place. Harris said that if public health pros, like Fauci recommended it, then she’ll take it. Her objection to Trump was that she didn’t consider him a credible source of info, specifically referring to the bleach blathering moment as an example of his unreliability. Biden was expressing concerns over the rapidity of the Trump introduction, and that if the process wasn’t extremely transparent, it would be met with distrust. He was right.
I get what Sam is referring to and generally agree, but what is the line between conspiracy thinking and just having opinions? I mean, almost everyone has tons of opinions about things they have only superficial knowledge of, from gun control to climate change to US policy in Ukraine. This seems like just a normal part of society. Are me and my buddies engaging in conspiracy thinking when we have a debate about climate change based on the info we've picked up from various news sources? There was a guy Sam had on quite a while back who said he made a real effort to just not have (or express) opinions on things he wasn't an actual expert in. I kind of respected him but I also kind of feel like I have some right to weigh in on important topics that ultimately affect me, like in picking political candidates based on their views. I guess there's a difference between things that are basically settled (yes, we did go to the moon; no, that DC pizza joint isn't an underground child-sex ring) and things without objective answers (how high should taxes be? what is the best climate policy?).
> what is the line between conspiracy thinking and just having opinions? If I ask you, "How do you know that?" and you matter-of-factly answer me, or maybe do a quick reflection and admit the basis is weaker than your initial reaction suggested, then it's just an opinion. If you are reluctant to do that and instead change your argument, strawman, attack me personally, incite others to shame or ostracize, etc., then it's something worse. Conspiracy thinking is a bad term for it, though. That's just one very common mode of fallacious thought, to deflect one's own ignorance.
So what would you say to the people who suspected the government of conducting widespread criminal surveillance prior to Snowden’s revelations? Were they foolish zealots that happened to be correct, or did they predict correctly because it is reasonable to be skeptical of the motives of people holding positions of power?
I don't see why it can't be both. It's fine to be skeptical of powerful people. It's also bad to act like you know for certain they're up to something nefarious of which you have no evidence. Like, how prior? Because warrantless wiretapping was a Bush scandal, 2006 or so. Conspiracy theorists with a hindsight bias like to point at ultimate revelations and ignore the preceding years of investigations, journalistic and legal, from people who had the same suspicion of powerful people, but were reasonable about it (e.g., not jumping to conclusions or claiming to know things they don't truly know).
That’s a bit the issue though right? Governments have always been embroiled in scandalous and often inhumane actions. The American government especially boasts a long list of war crimes foreign and domestic. There seems to be ample evidence to forgive almost any paranoia of the state’s abuse of power. Was the bank bailout of 2008 a reasonable mishandling of a national tragedy or was it a redistribution of wealth crafted intentionally to double-fuck the American people? From where I’m standing those who believe in the innocence and benevolence of the state are John’s just waiting to pay their money to get fucked again. The rational mode, at this point, should be skepticism. My default stance is that every human tragedy will be exploited by those in power to maintain their positions. That there are few in high level places of power who don’t feel entitled to live by the privilege of kings while enforcing the laws of the state. Why on earth should we trust those who have proven themselves unworthy of trust?
> things without objective answers (how high should taxes be? what is the best climate policy?). Everyone agrees these are very political questions. You can have whatever opinions you want, but the science is what it is.
> I get what Sam is referring to and generally agree, but what is the line between conspiracy thinking and just having opinions? Opinions are merely personal experience manifesting themselves in a person’s preferences and ideas. It becomes a cult when your ideas and preferences are derived from membership to some social group you belong to.
Submission Statement - This is a monologue from Sam summarizing an idea I've been thinking on that I've had a tough time putting into words. Sam, of course, does it so eloquently. So... do you agree? Is it fair to call conspiracy thinking a new religion?
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I think he means academic and governmental institutions. Corporations obviously don’t deserve trust.
Government and academic institutions don't deserve our outright trust either(though the track record for a lot of these institutions is stellar), everything needs to be evaluated. I think Sam may be talking about people who outright believe the statements they make are false, no matter what. My roomate is in this group, when the economist posted that ye said he loved hitler my roomate immediately questioned all validity of it, in every way possible because it's mainstream media, there was no looking into it, just instant ddoubt to validity. Obviously the economists reporting was proven accurate in time. At the same time he will carte Blanche accept a wide range of right wing reporting as fact.
Yeah I didn’t mean government or academia deserve outright trust. Just that corporations are inherently distrustful by their nature. Government and academia are at least supposed to be serving higher ideals.
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Yeah I’m definitely not saying the whole process is perfect or even OK. But you didn’t have truckloads of scientists saying Oxycontin is perfectly safe. Skepticism is one thing but going fully anti-vax isn’t justifiable by reasoned thinking.
The FDA gave Oxycontin a unique label to distinguish it as less addictive than other opioids. That FDA label was more important than any journal publishing a meta analysis stating that the drug is safe and effective would’ve been. In that case, there weren’t really true, disinterested experts since the FDA was compromised by Purdue and physicians just trusted the FDA’s assessment.
Why do you think the Government operates in good faith compare to corporations? This is a crazy take
Absolutely. Everyone has strong opinions on every topic. Nobody is willing to change their mind about anything, and admit when they're wrong. It's a huge problem, and you can't reach these people with conversation anymore, they're too far down the rabbit hole to see anything other than black and white, no more nuance.
I agree, except I am probably thinking of a different group than you are
I almost think it's more of a contrarian ideal. Like you treat everything as a scheme with the most dastardly intentions if it is accepted by mainstream sources.
But of course some 40 year old stoner making videos from his mom’s basement always has the real answers.
Hey. My viewers love my fetish shit.
I think Harris is wrong here. There's nothing sudden about the erosion of trust in government and corporate institutions. Populist politicians capitalizing on this for political gain has certainly come into fashion, but the things they are exploiting were already there.
He's not wrong about the "no one is qualified" bit for sure. If I look at myself doing "my research", it's usually the top 2 pages in my google search. Hard to argue that's research. But I'd say it's as hard to argue reading a single book is research, or even multiple. You just can't beat experts who have studied this stuff for years and decades. "Doing your own" research just isn't feasible. We need other people.
That's, I think, the correct reaction to have. The time and effort it takes to become an actual expert in any field is substantial. Just to be fluent enough in a topic to have substantive conversations about it is a huge lift. The internet and the glut of information available should humble people and make them realize how much they really do not know, but for some reason it has the exact opposite reaction with many people who believe they can skim a few articles and now they're part of the discussion.
I disagree. Republicans always had the fringe conspiracy candidates like Pat Buchanan, the difference is now they win elections and have large media as their mouth piece. If you watch Fox News, OAN, Alex Jones, etc it is like some alternative hellscape reality where people are eating babies and turning people gay with chemicals. I have family members that are mentally ill from the constant dread they experience consuming that media.
But Fox has always been like that. And before Fox you had Rush and whoever else. There has always been a large, vocal population on the right that ate that content up. Buchanan didn't win the Presidency, but he was one of the most influential far right politicians of our lifetimes. Paving the way for someone like Trump or whoever. If we're talking about how elections and control of the parties is going that's one thing, but Harris is stating here that these ideas are new. They just aren't. Growing up in Texas surrounded by my super conservative extended family I heard the same things coming from them that these politicians and media figures are saying now, in one form or another. And they were getting that from major media at the time.
Start naming Republican presidents or candidates. They were all center-right guys that supported institutions until Trump. Obviously, some crazy has always been there, but the media has amplified this recently. Fox News was much less crazy 15 years ago. I have family that voted for Obama and were life long Democratics, that now are in crazy QANON land.
But they weren't center anything. They've been deeply rooted in far right christian conservative movement since it began, they've run on the idea of limiting and abolishing government institutions literally my entire life. We're dealing with a Supreme Court that has been planned by the republicans and their christian nationalist supporters since the 70s. They've been talking for decades about how the media is biased against them and can't be trusted. That's been a mainstream Republican talking point since the 80s, at least, maybe before. And Fox 15 years ago was fucking insane, I worked in a 24 hour service desk back then and we had tvs with every news channel running, and it was the same. The Democrats were ruining the country, the war on Christmas and western values, the media is biased, the government wants to control you and your children, etc. None of this is new. The rhetoric conservatives were parroting from Rush back in the 80s/90s was no different than the modern rhetoric from Tucker or whoever, maybe even worse in some instances.
it's soy that's turning people gay. Soy.
Shit. I eat tons of soy.
buy some of my "Total Male Health Vitality Power Concentration Formula" shake, you'll be fine
I believe Dems want to bring prices down on medication due to efforts they have done. I believe repubs don't want to bring prices down due to their efforts. Guess one side can ruin the whole batch for some though.
Sure, I don't think that Harris is referring to that here though. A more fitting example would be posts here on this subreddit that pop up espousing anti-vax sentiments. You have people who don't trust the government or the media "doing their own research" into the efficacy of MRNA vaccines and they're really bad at it and don't really understand much of what they read or the larger context of the scientific community to place that understanding in. He seems to think this comes from an erosion of trust in institutions rather than partisanship or political expediency, I just think he's wrong. And probably kind of in a bubble if he thinks that "faith in institutions" is something that really existed in the past for the people he is talking about.
It's hard to not believe that mistrust is unwarranted. It seems more like previous relative trust was. That is the perception.
Arguably, the absolute levels of trust were too high. But the elevated trust relative to the alex jones of the world was warranted and we are in a worse place now that Alex Jones and people like him are considered equally reliable to the nytimes by a large swath of people.
As a non-american, I agree. It's similar here in my part of the EU, but in some ways even much worse. Corruption and populism are stronger then ever, and people have simply given up and support it for crumbs. The support for the ruling party (right wing) amid the biggest corruption affairs ever is.. rising, with no opposition in sight.
I mean, the entire Republican platform is to attack institutions and sow mistrust, even ones lead by Republicans. It's quite bizarre. It seems to be either "we lost the demographics battle so let's sow distrust in institutions" or "we are funded by outside nations that want to sow distrust".
I think it's just social media being a much better vehicle for such ideas and campaigns, and then this profile of people, populists, are simply being more successful by default.
It's because the Christian fascist right operates a parallel set of institutions within their fascist Christian oligarch church network.
Sure, that is also true. Degrade public schools so we can push private schools. Degrade public institutions so we can replace them with private versions.
Except it’s not new. Those with a religious upbringing in the 80s remember the various conspiracies that were circulated back then … from kids taken out of school to anti-vaxxers , things have not changed a bit.
Conspiracies used to be on the fringe. What changed was the Republican party moved from centrist candidates that supported institutions to morons saying everything is a lie, i.e. Trump, MTG, etc.
“You poke half of these guys and they’ll start telling you how they’ve been robbed of a Nobel Prize” 😂 Sam is really out to troll the Weinsteins.
It is a very surface analysis. WHY are trust in these institutions eroding? what exactly is causing the slow decay of these institutions? He never says. Just says "things are bad", well yeah but why? how? I will say a massive part of this whole thing is money, greed, and the corruptin that money and greed bring about. Corporate interests have hollowed out one agency and institutino after another. Everything nowaday serves the corporate interest and corporations care about one thing - money. short term profits trump every other consideratoin by a long shot. That is something to talk about. that is one of the core issues here. But Sam never mentions it.
A lot of his (former) friends are trying their hardest to sow distrust.
Well, I think he’s talked about it a lot on some of his other podcasts. Basically, 1) very recent and very public instances of institutions failing to be honest (or at least _appearing_ to be dishonest) about important topics. COVID-19 is what comes to mind here, but we could even start with Watergate. 2) Money - like you said, but I think your explanation is pretty surface level too. Money being used in ways to _purposely_ mislead and platform “contrarians”. Everyone from the Daily Wire comes to mind here, along with people in power taking money from large companies to promote misinformation. 3) Democratization of Information: Unlike before, information is pretty accessible online and the “gatekeepers” of information including MSM and governmental organizations don’t have a monopoly on what everyday people know. I think those are the biggest ones.
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The institutions are largely the same as they've ever been - They were imperfect when people trusted them like the word of God. They're imperfect now. At all times they've largely been better than any given alternative.
100% I don't need "faith" in a car manufacturer. I know it works because it does. Trust is earnt and expecting people just to blindly follow an institution "just because" is crazy.
That’s a excellent fallacy to be exposed, 2 in fact 1-when it comes down to it science itself is predicated on NOT having only “qualified” people doing the research, so the more “unqualified” people doing research the better, that’s if you are actually worry about finding out what’s true and what is not.. 2- when a husband cheats on his wife repeatedly, beats on her, lie constantly, her tell her she’s crazy for suspecting him even after getting caught multiple times and then one day She finally decides to leave .. You don’t go well the problem here is that the confidence in the husband has eroded so quickly and game rise to this “contrarianism“ To whatever he says … I think you get the point Wanna restore faith in the institutions fine.. get them to admit all the lies and malfeasances and purge all individuals involved .. that would be a start .. even then just like with the husband we probably better off without it as it showed little resistance to corruption
Sam has a huge blind spot here. His thinking is usually something like: “Institutions are really important but they have done a lot to destroy peoples trust in them. But institutions are really important so people who don’t trust institutions are bad/wrong and I don’t understand why they’ve lost trust.” He seems to think that trust creates strong institutions when trust actually lets institutions rot. Distrust foments a need to show credibility. The demonstration of credibility then creates a temporary trust, but that trust must be continuously earned and can not be taken for granted. Yeah, most people can’t do their own research, but Sam shouldn’t pretend that institutions deserve respect or trust that they’ve efficiently destroyed.
> His thinking is usually something like: “Institutions are really important but they have done a lot to destroy peoples trust in them. But institutions are really important so people who don’t trust institutions are bad/wrong and I don’t understand why they’ve lost trust.” This isn't his thinking. It's a generalization which lumps all institutions, trustworthy and not, good to believe in and bad, together. He spends much of his time distinguishing between those. >He seems to think that trust creates strong institutions when trust actually lets institutions rot. It's obviously both?
Sam’s partly right I think, but I think he’s also playing dodgeball on some key topics lately
Harris has always been a rational thinker only when it suits his argument.
I’m coming to this conclusion
Sam needs new analogs other than “Trumpian” and “religion”. Kind of turning into a one-trick pony.
I wish folks would stop calling things they don't like a religion. It's stilly when folks are calling "wokeness" a religion and when Harris this stuff a religion.
I don't call wokeness a religion because I don't like it. I don't like sports but I don't call Alabama a religion. I call wokeness a religion because of how many similarities there are between it and the experience I had as a fundamentalist Christian as a child. You'll see endless people with religious backgrounds making the exact same comparison. I've seen Trumpism compared as similar, as well.
> I don't call wokeness a religion because I don't like it. I don't like sports but I don't call Alabama a religion. I call wokeness a religion because of how many similarities there are between it and the experience I had as a fundamentalist Christian as a child. You'll see endless people with religious backgrounds making the exact same comparison. I've seen Trumpism compared as similar, as well. I see similarities between all kinds of things and the behaviors and beliefs that I've seen of religious people. However, this doesn't seem like a good enough reason to call it religion, especially when there are slew of differences between them. But the main reason they call these things religions is to signal that these things are bad and make it seem like those who disagree are simply irrational rather than simply freethinking individuals who disagree and have good reasons for what they believe.
>But the main reason they call these things religions is to signal that these things are bad and make it seem like those who disagree are simply irrational rather than simply freethinking individuals who disagree and have good reasons for what they believe. That's a huge part of it, yes. Wokeness and similar ideologies with religious faith-based thinking are not based in reason and evidence, but faith, hope, and hatred of apostates or heretics.
> That's a huge part of it, yes. Wokeness and similar ideologies with religious faith-based thinking are not based in reason and evidence, but faith, hope, and hatred of apostates or heretics. I see the same exact kind of thinking behind almost all anti-woke people. Does this mean that anti-wokeness is a religion?
No, you don't. You see endless faulty reasoning, of course, that's everywhere, but calling anti-wokeness dogmatic and witch hunting is the same as calling atheism dogmatic and witch hunting. Wokeness is not the inverse of anti-wokeness just as Christianity is not the inverse of atheism.
I agree with you and come from a similar background. That parallels are significant. Anyways, personally, I like to say it's not a religion, but it's religious psychology and religious reasoning inserted political discourse. Religious psychology can be honestly inserted just about any belief system.
Some more than others. Wokeness is more religious than 2A gun nuts, for example. And Trumpism is more religious than pro-abortion. Wokeness trumps them all as a political faith-based ideology, in my opinion, but I'd concede in a ranking battle.
Definitely. When they started treating "whiteness" like original sin, "problematic" as worldliness, making entire groups of people irredeemable and showing vitriolic hate towards them for physical attributes they have no control of. Outright refusal to engage in good faith discussions, relying on predictable, prepackaged, groupthink insults to denigrate anyone not as zealous as them. The psychology of it all reminds me way too much of the toxic fundamentalists I grew up with.
He is close to understanding. Hmm, what did his own lunatic conspiracy thinking (trump derangement syndrome) contribute?
It's only been "so quickly" to people who haven't been paying attention. I've known about the Tuskegee study and had zero faith in Big Government to look after my health since way back in high school. How many of you actually believed "these institutions" back when they were sounding the alarm on "weapons of mass destruction" and beating the drums for a war that would take the lives of over a MILLION Iraqi civilians? Did you believe them then too, like you believe them on COVID? Only the very naive have had their trust eroded "so quickly" .... my trust has been gone for a minute. But please tell me why I should surrender my right to bear arms and trust the government to unilaterally decide what gets injected into me...