I feel that a brief invocation of the muse called Arrogance may serve me in good stead here. Oh we're familiar. With age we have become more so. I find increasingly often that knowing literary devices and strategies, human nature and the difference between valid syllogisms and spurious arguments with faulty or missing premises, is not satisfying enough when Arrogance is your muse. And I find this muse to be more easily invoked in tandem with another of my inspirations - alcohol.
I've developed a kind of grumpy, old mannerism of a Friday or Saturday night during which I go online and poke holes in people's annoyingly happy logic, be they friend, family or complete stranger. I've never been one to gain pleasure in others' discomfort. I never felt compelled to join into teasing of peers who were different in some way, having been the victim of such childhood cruelty myself. I've always hated waking people up preferring to allow them to remain in the safety of slumber as long as possible. But as I grow older and closer to (but not yet fully acquainted with) that ultimate of muses, Wisdom, I have found the advent of strength, or at least the lack of patience, to overcome my kindness and shake people awake.
Reality is tough. It's cruel. The young and the foolish build their defenses against these truths for half a life only to spend another half dismantling them. And if we're all honest (which we're not) we can admit to contributing more than a brick or plank or length of rebar to the construction of youthful palisades in the guise of kindness and protection only to render the construction more solid and difficult to demolish. Is it kindness or protective to tell youngsters to save their money in banks so they can be rich and successful, or that honesty is the best policy in a world in which rich and "successful" people get that way through fraud?
When those children get credit cards and shop online with them they'll find unexplained charges being deducted regularly, charges the bankers tell them cannot be blocked according to their co-conspiratorial policies. They'll find eventually that they're coming from a website where they shopped for Christmas gifts, or a campaign donation page for a candidate who promised to root out corruption, websites that contained, carefully hidden in jargon and sententious small print, automatic re-billing either monthly or weekly.
Are we consoling the young and innocent when this part of their defenses comes crashing down while at the same time losing a piece of our walls in the knowledge that we could have prepared them to deal with the destruction better or not have to go through it at all?
We teach the young to value their votes, obey the laws and respect the legislators and members in all aspects of the legal system. Then we they find out about SLAPP lawsuits and leaders and legislators creating laws with the apparent purpose of protecting scumbags like Bob Murray (and Donald Trump) by allowing them to just sue people and cost them lots of money for telling the truth about them. So again, is honesty the best policy? Should laws be obeyed? If the dishonest are protected and their protection is actively entrenched in the laws of the land, are we lying to the young?
I hope you watched both episodes of "Last Night Week Last Night Tonight." It's a great show! And I can't think of anything better to do when learning about such despicable (but successful) assholery than laugh about it. Indeed, it's often how I choose to point out weaknesses in logic exhibited online. Take this example for example:
When I saw this posted on a friend's Facebook page, I couldn't contain my desperation to add to it, "Yup. Sad what a lifetime of being lied to does to people. But the artist forgot the speech bubbles for the other extreme, the militantly positive. "We're not sinking. Everything is A O K!" "This is supposed to happen." "The ship isn't bringing us down, YOU are with all your negativity!" "What are you one of those anti-techers?"
Yes, that IS a reference to the term "anti-vaxxers" a term I think has been bandied about during flu seasons and now during the Covid 19 pandemic, a bit too peer-pressurishly. Flawed logic has been a weapon used in this pressuring of the public to get their jabs, and before you get worried, I intend to get mine as soon as I can, but I can't help but point out the harm people are doing to the cause of attaining herd immunity through immunization with the peer-pressure tactics and spurious arguments. What they are doing to those of us who recognize their faulty premises, is causing us to question whether people are purposely misleading us or whether they are too stupid to realize that that's what they are doing. In either case, it makes us LESS likely to do what they are trying to get us to do: get vaccinated.
Here's one example I've been given multiple times: Whenever anyone mentions the AstraZeneca vaccine and its link to blood clots, out come the experts who tell us that when you get Covid 19 you are 300 times more likely to get those blood clots. This is a stat a friend was given, not me. Unsupported and un-linked, but given with confidence nonetheless. I looked it up. Something people are far too unlikely to do before agreeing with stats they'd like to agree with, which my friend did. I found this study, which shows that in a study of half a million Covid patients, 39 per million got CVT, cerebral venous thrombosis - a rare kind of blood clotting. Now "cerebral" means the brain, so I'm assuming it's blood clotting in the brain being measured here, which means it's different from what happened to THIS guy. But this was the story being commented on. At any rate, the Oxford study showed that in 480,000 patients who had received the Pfizer/Moderna vax, only 4 per million got CVT. In AZ, which I guess were the other 20,000, it occurred in 5 per million. So you're about 10 times less likely to get the clots with Covid than after being Pfizerized, and about 8 times less likely than after AZ. Far from 300 times. So I continued searching.
I found the 8-10 times stats reinforced by the University of Minnesota, who also cited the above study. However, what I like about this study is the "cautions and context" section in which they mention that the authors could not verify the accuracy of the CVT diagnoses because scanning the veins in the brain can be time-consuming and challenging. They also said that the risks of blood clots in relation to the AZ vax were NOT looked at. Hmmm... interesting. THEN, Kevin McConway, a doctor from the UK says something that muddles this information even further, while at the same time bringing up the very point that was being avoided by all of the people citing this study. He says, ""The researchers are not claiming that vaccines do not increase the risk at all compared to the risk in people who have not been vaccinated and have also not had COVID-19—but they say the CVT risk in people who have had COVID-19 is about 100 times the risk in the general population," he said. "I do think this puts things into context."
So he somehow ??? goes from 8-10 times, up to 100 times more likely. I guess he feels this exaggeration is excused by previously mentioning the syllogistic weakness, and the thing that has everybody smart enough to understand it, mistrusting it, the fact that the study doesn't show that people WITHOUT Covid are less likely to get blood clots when vaccinated. What he doesn't say is what we all know: they're NOT. They are less likely to get the blood clots if they don't get Covid and if they don't get vaccinated. But I guess a lot of people felt they needed to be purposely misleading and present the spurious argument that people WITH Covid are more likely to get blood clots than are people who got the vaccine. It's not wrong, it's just beside the point. Perhaps it's because of that that people say, "What the hell, blow the stats up a bit."
Are they really doing the efforts at herd immunity through vaccination a favour with this behaviour? I don't think they are. What they are doing is making people FURTHER mistrust the medical profession, the scientists, the doctors as well as the people who are aggressively pushing the vaccines. And I have to mention THAT as well here. I've heard a LOT of people intimating or even overtly saying that if you don't get vaccinated, you're stupid. Really? If anything, the above information shows that even the doctors DON'T KNOW. They hate admitting that, but it's true. It also shows that they are okay with misleading the public. Probably because of those vacations and other free shit Pfizer paid for when the doctors chose to recommend their products. The science is not yet on the side of the pro-vaxers, even though they are fond of claiming it. Nor is the history, as I outlined in my last post. I hope eventually it will be. It looks positive, but rushing it does not help.
Once again, I understand the desire to be positive. I too wish I could give all my friends and family, and even strangers nothing but good news, but I question whether this is the best course of action. It may sound arrogant and elitist, but sometimes I think a dose of reality, not kindness, is the best medicine. And I, for one, would appreciate it if people tried to be more honest regarding the general corruption in the world rather than trying to shelter me from it with obviously flawed information and arguments. I think there are a lot of people like me and we're not well loved by a lot of easily convinced cheerleaders of unresearched information. Maybe when I can learn to access the muse of Wisdom, I'll stop arguing with those people, but until then, I guess I'll continue with my self-sabotagery.
Today is Saturday. I'll probably have a few beers tonight and go online. Anybody who hasn't already blocked or de-friended me wanna chat?
The following are a couple of cartoons I've seen that don't really tell the whole story. I guess they're accurate for some, but not all unvaccinated people are stubborn, stupid, red (MAGA?)hat-wearing, fat assholes. Maybe characterizing them as such isn't helping? This isn't the worst I've seen either. I saw a meme with the inference that since some people are not doing what the government tells them they should, I guess they won't be obeying traffic lights any more. Those were installed by government and are also suggestions. Another was a meme with a "doctor" holding up a picket sign that says, he's a doctor and he sees a lot of people refusing Covid19 vaccinations. What he DOESN'T see is polio and measles (or two things that vaccinations have wiped out via herd immunity). Vaccines work! Well, yes, they do! Assuming people who don't want the Covid vax yet are anti-every other vaccine doesn't work though. Reign in your enthusiasm there, "Doc." That's not the best bedside manner I've ever seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment