So, our friend "will", is one of the most stubborn, dishonest arguers around. Peruse his tweets if you like: @su3su2u1. If you hear him tell it, he's here to find arguments to convince his family to get vaccinated.
What really attracted my attention though, is that he didn't seem to want my help in that regard. Very, very strange.
So "Will" seems to have about 562 tweets, oldest one in mid-august. But until very recently I had him muted for much earlier time-wasting, so he's most likely deleting his tweets periodically.
What's wrong with this picture? 7 year old account, just 4 followers. Last public tweet, echoing Kavanagh.
Who are his followers? Kavanagh and UberFeminist.
His 3 likes this year? Kavanagh and UberFeminist.
What of his tweets? Most of the time amplifying Kavanagh's "arguments". Sometimes freelances on his own, mostly to annoy @EduEngineer or people who reply to my threads.
The last week I watched him claiming that Bret Weinstein and Andrew Wakefield were basically the same, and waste unthinkable amounts of @imursuperherooo's time. Always with unsubstantiated claims, always shifting goalposts.
But the last straw for me is that he accused me of getting some facts about Edward Jenner wrong in a now deleted tweet. Apparently he was not rejected, and in fact the Royal Society ended up publishing him a few months later.
Then he proceeded to build a whole rant on the back of his amazing discovery.
Except he was wrong about that, as I demonstrated, based on the royal academy itself. Oops. His reaction?
He deletes the tweet wrongly accusing me and doubles down! The fact that none other than Kavanagh stepped in to help him out with extra insults, which should surprise nobody of course.
So I am forced to admit it. I wasted my time. I may have been the cause for others wasting their time. This time I'm not muting. This troll's crossover with my timeline ends the way the other trolls' did.
And what do we do when Twitter gives us trollemons? We make trollemonade! In particular, we donate to the FLCCC, which I have on good authority is Will's least favorite charity in the whole wide world. The donation page is here: covid19criticalcare.com/network-suppor…
And with a few clicks you get to not only feel good about helping Frontline doctors, but also extra awesome for giving trolls the middle finger. Because spiteful altruism is the best kind of altruism.
What about our Trollemonade? Apparently it's highly concentrated and seriously addictive. 🤣
Will, the FLCCC is grateful for the contributions you have inspired.
Upon request of @april_harding I will attempt to list some off-the-cuff principles for how my 🧵s come together.
I'm sure others do it differently, this is about how I do it.
That's right. It's a 🧵 about 🧵s.
1. Understanding the medium is important. A thread is not a blogpost. As much as possible make each tweet stand out as a stand-alone idea. The best part about threads is that each tweet can reach different people and generate different conversations.
2. The characters are limited, but you have attachments, QTs, links, etc. Try as much as possible to cite your sources and give people a path to learn more about each of your claims.
A partially effective measure will not only select for the subset of the problem it doesn't address, but the very existence of the measure can worsen the problem by creating the impression it's under control, encouraging people to let their guard down.
1. ADE:
A partially effective vaccine will not only select for the subset of the variants it doesn't kill, but the very presence of antibodies can worsen the infection by giving the virus the body's own signature, encouraging cells to let their guard down.en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-…
2. Journalistic best practices not only select for the subset of disinformation they don't address, but their very existence can worsen the problem by creating the impression journalistic outlets have disinformation under control, encouraging people to let their guard down.
I think I know why I was uncomfortable about this one. Her tweet is built on a false fact claim. The evidence is not being hidden, it's right there. So in this case inversion is not making a symmetric tweet. The response is genuinely superior, since it's actually true. Huh.
... And I think this may be the first #tweetInversion that will exceed the original in likes, and it's going to do it in less than an hour. This is somewhat confirmatory of my suspicion above.
I've started trying something that may look irritating, but is testing a hypothesis. Namely:
If a tweet, with minimal modifications, can become a perfectly coherent reply to itself, then the original is vacuous meta-commentary that can be discarded without further consideration.
I've been noticing quite a few of these on-high "pretending to be wise" kind of quips that sound wise until one realizes that they are entirely free-floating and cannot be distinguished from their negatives, which also sound just as wise.
It's perfectly possible that I myself have written stuff like this in the past, though I usually try to write with reference to facts, such that a simple reversal wouldn't work. I'll continue to investigate and refine the hypothesis.
The paper in the Lancet by the ex-FDA official had a fascinating figure in it. The reason it's fascinating is that it showed how vicious Gamma really is (chart B).
The reason this is of interest is that the TOGETHER trial took place in Brazil, during a period of very high prevalence of the Gamma variant. bmj.com/content/374/bm…
As such, attempting to compare results from that trial, with other studies elsewhere is bound to show worse results. Vaccines show 10-20% worse performance against gamma than alpha.