Listen, if you watched Bret’s Ivermectin video and you still have any respect for his understanding of science… 😩. The dude doesn’t understand basic science. He may as well be wearing a white coat and a stethoscope. He’s a cosplay scientist.
Like the bald entrepreneur explains he heard a story from his carpet cleaner that he had a heart attack two minutes after getting the Pfizer vaaccine and the cleaner’s wife got a shakey hand after hers. He says this would be impossible if the vaccine was safe .
How is anyone with a basic understanding of science nodding along to that? 1) it’s second hand anecdotes, that they didn’t verify, 2) even if true there is no evidence of a causal relationship, 3) it is perfectly possible for the claims to be true and the vaccines to be safe.
Let me elaborate: let’s say the house cleaner was unlucky and did have a heart attack just after the vaccine. He is shocked at this and talks with his wife about how she is feeling. She didn’t have a heart attack but now she’s worried, and she did notice her hand was shaking…
…recently, and wasn’t that after she got the vaccine? Viola! You now have the ingredients for the story and no one is intentionally lying it’s just people drawing unwarranted conclusions based on bad reasoning. If any of the vaccines did routinely cause immediate heart attacks..
…then we would know about it. Think about what happened with the J&J vaccine when they detected some extremely rare adverse reactions. Remember the abundance of caution? If there was a spike in immediate heart attacks doctors and public health officials would notice.
They haven’t noticed because it doesn’t happen and it doesn’t even mechanically make sense. How would an mRNA vaccine generate an immediate heart attack? And this is just one basic point. The video is 3hrs of getting this stuff wrong.
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Here’s one example of a claim that @BretWeinstein & @HeatherEHeying made that doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny. In the video below they claim that the CDC is artificially reducing positive tests for vaccinated people by using different PCR thresholds.
They cite this document as evidence. Claiming that it shows they are using a more stringent 28 PCR cycle threshold to identify positive cases for the vaccinated, as opposed to the more common ~35 cycles. More cycles = more chance to detect virus. cdc.gov/vaccines/covid…
But this is simply misreading the document. This is not the threshold for a positive result, it’s the threshold for sending a specimen for genetic sequencing to identify the variant. Presumably because above that the sample is hard to extract a reliable sequence from.
Eric frames it as a virtue that he will continue to promote anyone, regardless of what they do or say, as long as they broadly fit within his self referential network. His obsession with cliques & self aggrandizing might be the first documented case of permanent teenage angst.
There is such a cloying desperation here that it’s almost tragic. But the depressing thing is that it seems to work with so many people. Eric might be recognized as a delusional narcissist in private DMs by people like Sam Harris, but they won’t ever say that publicly.
Somewhat depressingly it is probably the self serving right wing partisans, like Rubin, that Eric is still desperately pandering to, who can be most forthright in their criticism because Eric’s faux centrist patronage doesn’t bring them much.
No, Taibbi has this completely wrong (shocking I know...).
If anyone spends time looking critically into Bret's content you quickly realise it is extremely similar to Alex Jones act just with a superficial veneer of scientific credibility.
... that Bret interviews are mostly fringe conspiracy theorists. See for example his fawning interview with Geert Vanden Bossche, who claims the vaccines are likely destroying natural immunity, or the recent horror show with 'serial entrepreneur' Steve Kirsch who talked about...
...miscarriages after vaccination with babies heads being split in two.
Bret is the opposite of a careful scientist. He is a conspiracy theorist who just knows how to sound like a scientist.
Hence he claims to have had a Nobel prize discovery that was silenced, to have...
He would have expected Bret Weinstein to platform a fringe academic who is promoting unfounded fears about the vaccines?!? Am sure he will provide suitable critical pushback.
Ok so #CynicalTheories Chapter 2: Applied Postmodernism. This chapter out of the gate feels thick with hyperbole. We are told: “The postmodernists sought to render absurd our ways of understanding, approaching, and living in the world and in societies.”
The heavily anthropomorphised ‘Theory’ is also up to no good. Bored with its adolescent stage of deconstructing everything, it has now entered its moody teens & wants to mess things up properly.
Lest the anthropomic metaphor be too subtle we get treated to an extended Agent Smith-esque rift on how postmodernism is actually like a contagious virus that mutates into new forms. Why do I get the feeling this is a James-heavy section & he was smirking all the time he wrote?
So kicking off the chapter by chapter #CynicalTheories review/reaction-a-thon with a look at the Introduction. There’s quite a lot of ground covered over 9 pages so strap in.
The introduction starts with a rousing paean of ‘liberalism’ defined as a political philosophy that advocates political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, universal human rights, legal equality, freedom of expression, respect for viewpoint diversity & debate...
...respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, & freedom of religion.
And this is contrasted against the opposing (evil) systems of ‘theocracy, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, fascism, and other forms of discrimination’.