The debate bros are getting wound up again

Here we go again. “Debate me!” shriek the loony antivaxxers; “Why should I,” say the scientists; “That proves you’re wrong,” whine the usual crowd of gullible idiots.

The inciting incident in this case was the king of the fuckin’ online idiots, Joe Rogan, who invited batshit anti-vaxxer loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr onto his show, listened to him respectfully, and then agreed thoroughly with him, to the point of telling respectable and highly qualified scientist Peter Hotez to come on his show and debate him.

Last Thursday, Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who inked an exclusive deal with Spotify for $200 million, hosted Kennedy for a three-hour conversation. Kennedy told Rogan’s more than 10 million listeners that “vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.” Rogan, a comedian and former host of Fear Factor, spent the entire episode validating Kennedy’s views. Kennedy was presented as a brave truth-teller, standing up to powerful forces. Anyone who doesn’t accept Kennedy’s conspiracy theories, according to Rogan, is unable to think for themselves.

Kennedy spent the better part of an hour rehashing an article he wrote in 2005, which falsely claimed that childhood vaccines are linked to autism. The article was so flawed it was ultimately retracted by the outlet that published it, Salon. “[C]ontinued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do,” Salon’s editor wrote.

In the piece, Kennedy relied extensively on the work of Mark Geier, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was revoked by Maryland in 2011. Geier pushed the vaccine-autism link as a frequent expert witness. He also misrepresented his credentials and developed “a ‘protocol’ for treating autism that involved injecting children with the drug that is used to chemically castrate sex offenders at a cost of upwards of $70,000 per year.”

Naturally, one of Rogan’s army of cranks showed up at Hotez’s house to taunt him.

A prominent vaccine scientist said he was accosted outside of his home after a Twitter exchange with podcaster Joe Rogan, who challenged him to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. over the weekend.

“I just was stalked in front of my home by a couple of antivaxers taunting me to debate RFKJr.,” Houston-based scientist Peter Hotez tweeted Sunday.

The debate bros were pissed off because Hotez turned Rogan down. Among those debate bros was Elon Musk.

“He’s afraid of a public debate, because he knows he’s wrong,” Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted in response to Rogan, who claimed Hotez’s response was a “non answer.”

“I will add $150,000 to @joerogan’s wager so now $250,000 can go to charity and the public can hear an open debate on an important topic,” billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman tweeted.

Refusing to debate an ideologue does not prove you’re wrong. That’s not how logic works. Upping the ante does not change the problem with debate. The simple fact is that RFK is a deluded kook with a whole battery of bad ideas in his head. He thinks WiFi causes disease, and Rogan agrees.

RFK Jr.: Wifi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.
Rogan: How does wifi open up your blood-brain barrier?
RFK Jr.: Now you’ve gone beyond my expertise.

Utterly nuts. Bonkers to the nth degree. These two guys might be qualified to operate a public circle-jerk, but they know nothing about the science, so what is to be gained by debating them? That is not a way to resolve any scientific issue. It has always been a problem that glib liars have an automatic edge in debate.

The Sophists highlight the problem with public debates: they are easily gamed with lies, rhetorical skill, and clever wordplay. In order for a debate to actually be worthwhile, both participants must be sincerely dedicated to finding the truth; if one side is not committed to the truth, they will have an advantage, because it is much easier to spout falsehoods than it is to refute them. The technique of spouting too many nonsense points to refute has its own name, called the Gish Gallop, after a young earth creationist who used the technique to criticize evolutionary theory.

The Gish Gallop is effective in live debates largely because the audience does not have enough specialized knowledge to ascertain the validity of a criticism. Science is hard, complicated, and nuanced; when a dishonest debater spouts a dozen nonsensical points, their opponent will not have time to adequately address each of these points. This can give an audience the impression, based simply on the volume of arguments on each side, that the dishonest debater has won the argument.

A live debate is also extremely limited because the participants do not have time to do research to respond to an opponent’s comment. Even experts in a field usually do not have all the relevant data for their field in their head to be recalled at a moment’s notice; again, the Gish Galloper has the advantage here, in that they are usually just providing a list of attacks and are not concerned with accuracy.

Rogan is a dangerous and malicious fraud with a gigantic audience and huge amounts of money, and there he is, spewing all this crap over the body politic, and they’re eating it up. We ought to be terrified. We also not to grant him a millimeter of respect and credibility.

If it’s any consolation, we also treat people horribly

Traffickers are overloading boats to enable people to flee terrible conditions in North Africa and the Middle East, with disastrous results.

In the early hours of Wednesday, 14 June, an old fishing vessel carrying up to 750 people capsized and sank 47 miles off the Greek coast.

So far 79 people have been confirmed as dead. Only 104 had been rescued by the time the search was called off, so it’s possible that more than 600 people have been lost in total. Survivors report that the boat sank “in minutes” in a place where the sea is four kilometres deep. It is unlikely the bodies, including up to 100 children, will ever be found.

The battered fishing vessel left from Tobruk, eastern Libya, and was heading for Italy despite Greece being a closer destination. The reason why is clear. In the past three years, Greece has enacted an increasingly harsh policy of pushbacks, making it almost impossible for asylum-seekers to arrive safely on Greek territory.

Many of the victims were Pakistani. You’ve got to wonder how bad life is in Pakistan that they would risk drowning or Greece, where the survivors have now been thrown into barren warehouses under armed guard. They must have been hoping to reach civilized Great Britain, that land of prosperity and liberty that would treat them with dignity and respect.

I’m joking, of course.

If any of the survivors of the shipwreck make it to Calais, and brave another crossing over the English Channel, their reception will be no better than in Greece. Starting later this month, the Home Office plans to house people seeking asylum in the UK onboard a barge that has been likened to a floating prison by multiple organisations, including MSF UK.

The Bibby Stockholm is a barge that has been designed for 220 people. Is currently being refitted in Falmouth to accommodate 500 asylum seekers. It has been the target of an ongoing resistance campaign led by local groups, with regular protests and actions linking up to the #NoFloatingPrisons campaign launched by my refugee support organisation Reclaim The Sea.

Prison hulks are a long and dishonorable tradition in English history. Respect history!

Don’t forget or forgive America, either — we’re pretty casual about wrecking countries outside our borders, creating the refugees that are fleeing to their oppressors.

Do not read this article

I’m serious. It’ll ruin your day. It will lower your opinion of humanity.

I’m sure there’s something more pleasant you can read to start your day.

OK, here we go. I warned you.

It’s monkey torture.

It’s a niche market on YouTube and the dark web, and in particular, Telegram, with it’s encrypted posts. People in places with lots of monkeys catch them, and then people in wealthy countries send them money with requests to do horrible things on video to them: hit them, stab them, drown them, decapitate them, throw them in a blender. By the way, these were all baby monkeys.

Kapetanich found half a dozen other monkeys on the YouTube like Mini. There was Monkey Ji, Baby Ciko, Chiro, Sweetpea, Mona — all baby long-tailed macaques being tortured on film. Some of the monkeys had developed physical tics from the stress. Monkey Ji was known for holding her head in her hands and rocking back and forth. Mini would grip her sides. The monkey haters in the comments loved it. “Abused multiple times a week since a baby. She has lived a TERRIBLE life,” someone wrote, approvingly, under a video of Mini. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a monkey more broken.”

By that point, hundreds of different YouTube channels were posting videos of baby macaques being abused. In some, the monkeys appeared to die on screen. “Watch them try to breathe while their idiotic brains shut down,” wrote one commenter. Lucy Kapetanich was horrified by what she saw. It hurt to watch as Mini’s owner cooed an Indonesian endearment — “sayang” — to her and then smacked her in the face. It all brought Kapetanich to tears more than once. But the monkey haters loved it.

“He sayang-ed Mini and then immediately smacked her!” wrote one, screen name “Grace”.

“Man I love those videos.”

You might wonder what kind of people get into this kind of stuff. One group on Telegram was called Ape’s Cage, and they seemed like ordinary people.

Ape’s Cage contained about 400 people. The cast of characters was a mixture of the strange and — even stranger — the seemingly normal, all known to one another by their screen names. There was the Torture King, who had invited Kapetanich in; there was “Sadistic”, a gas station attendant and grandmother in rural Alabama; there was “Bones”, a former US Air Force airman from Texas with a big collection of guns; and “Champei”, who caused chaos and infighting in every group he joined. There was “Trevor”, who couldn’t contribute during daytime hours because, “no phone at work, nuclear stuff”.

And it wasn’t just Americans, there were dedicated members in Europe and Australia. Among the cruellest contributors to the group was “The Immolator”, a 35-year-old woman who loved birds and lived with her parents in the English midlands.

The good news is these people were also rather stupid: they left clues to their identity all over the place, were freely talking about their personal life, their homes, their jobs, what they did in their spare time when they weren’t watching someone take a power drill to a baby monkey. In the US, distributing animal torture porn videos is illegal, and some are now facing prison time. The police will sporadically crack down on this stuff, and some of the social media organizations are committed to removing torture porn. Some.

In a statement, YouTube told us that animal abuse had “no place” on the platform and the company was “working hard to quickly remove violative content”. “Just this year alone, we’ve removed hundreds of thousands of videos and terminated thousands of channels for violating our violent and graphic policies,” the statement said. Telegram told us it was “committed to protecting user privacy and human rights such as freedom of speech”, adding that its moderators “cannot proactively patrol private groups”.

Of course Telegram is committed to free speech über alles. That’s much more important than the ongoing suffering of a lot of “tree rats.”

Humans just kind of suck.

One of our submarines is missing

It’s a submersible, actually, but that doesn’t fit the song as well.

A small group of wealthy tourists went on an outing to dive down to the wreck of the Titanic, and they haven’t come back up yet.

A search and rescue operation is underway for a missing submersible operated by a company that handles expeditions to the Titanic wreckage off the coast of St John’s, Newfoundland, in Canada.

The vessel has up to 96 hours of life support, officials said Monday.

That 96 hour number is a comforting fiction, so I won’t be waiting on tenterhooks for a happy ending. The Titanic wreck is about 3800 meters down. When things go wrong at that depth, they go catastrophically wrong. To lose both radio contact and the ability to rise to the surface suggests a major disaster.

But maybe there will be a rescue in the next day or two, and then I can point and laugh at the 3 tourists who spent a quarter million dollars each to experience what must be the most terrifying thrill ride ever.

The rich are bad everywhere

I couldn’t get past the opening paragraphs of this article.

While thousands of Ukrainians were fleeing their submerged homes after a catastrophic dam explosion last week, high-society Russians gathered for a glitzy restaurant festival in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, just 500 miles away from the devastating flooding.

The event, called Gastreet, saw some 5,000 citizens pay up to $2,000 dollars for the opportunity to listen to some of Russia’s top businessmen, restaurant owners, and influencers over the course of five days. The event also included concerts, lavish nightlife experiences, and gourmet dinners.

If there’s one thing that was made clear at the Sochi resort, it’s that no amount of Western sanctions, Kremlin restrictions, or spillover violence within Russia can stop the country’s rich and famous from living large—despite the raging war in neighboring Ukraine.

Ummm, yes? Is this news? Do you think this is a Russian phenomenon? People are starving in the US, and we still have our Met Galas. America continues to bomb Afghanistan with drones, it’s just too boring to make the news, while influencers get paid to pose with beer brands. Our public schools continue to get almost daily visits from fanatics with assault rifles, while a reality show called Bridezillas has been running on cable for almost 20 years.

Any time you have colossal economic disparities, you’re going to get these kinds of contrasts. Neither the oligarchs of Russia nor the investment bankers of America are going to feel any pain, and they’re all going to frolic in the wreckage of other people’s suffering.

The Right-Wing Recipe

The way conservatives have promoted stupid ideas on social issues to become the dominant narrative in the news is simple and interesting…and horrifying.

  • Start with a cranky, bigoted idea that few people like.
  • Create a group with a catchy name that does sound like something they’d like: Moms for Liberty, for instance, or The American College of Pediatricians. They sound sensible and reasonable, right?
  • Find your few fellow like-minded cranks and bigots, and get them to sign up for your group. All it takes is a few to seed your cause.
  • It used to be that you’d fire up your fax machine, but nowadays it’s even easier: get on Facebook. Facebook lets any ol’ crap get through.
  • Start spamming the media with press alerts. Eventually, some gullible newspaper or television network — like Fox News — will invite you on. You’ll find more cranks and bigots.
  • Eventually, a billionaire — a demographic that’s particularly rich in idiots — will find you and throw money at you, and you’re a success.

It’s been happening. The anti-choice movement in this country is driven by a small number of cranky zealots who have mastered this recipe, as illustrated by The American College of Pediatricians.

A small group of conservative doctors has sought to shape the nation’s most contentious policies on abortion and transgender rights by promoting views rejected by the medical establishment as scientific fact, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post that describe the group’s internal strategies.

The records show that after long struggling to attract members, the American College of Pediatricians gained outsize political influence in recent years, primarily by using conservative media as a megaphone in its quest to position the group as a reputable source of information.

The organization has successfully lobbied since 2021 for laws in more than a half-dozen states that ban gender-affirming care for transgender youths, with its representatives testifying before state legislatures against the guidelines recommended by mainstream medical groups, according to its records. It gained further national prominence this year as one of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit to limit access to mifepristone, a key abortion drug.

They’re a tiny group, barely qualified to pontificate on the subjects they promote, and is dominated by ideological opposition to abortion, birth control, homosexuality, and trans care. That’s the glue that holds them together, rather than an honest medical consensus.

Records from early 2022 show membership of the American College of Pediatricians at about 700 people — just over 60 percent of whom self-identified as possessing medical degrees, including some holding prominent positions as hospital chiefs and a state health commissioner. The group, citing privacy, would not comment on the size or makeup of its membership.

It’s a religious organization.

Joseph Zanga, founder of the American College of Pediatricians, who had led the American Academy of Pediatrics in the late 1990s, described the splinter organization as “a Judeo-Christian, traditional-values organization” in a 2003 interview with the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, which promoted conversion therapy. His organization’s core beliefs are “that life begins at conception, and that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors in the adoption and raising of children,” he said at the time. Zanga declined a Post request for an interview.

They followed the Right-Wing Recipe, though, and got picked up by the worst of the worst of media, convincing audiences that they are legitimate and credible, when they are not.

The group found an eager audience through conservative media, including the Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham shows on Fox News, the documents detail. Since 2016, the American College of Pediatricians has been mentioned in more than 200 articles published by conservative news sites such as Breitbart, Daily Wire, the Epoch Times, the Washington Examiner, the Blaze and the Gateway Pundit, according to a Post analysis. Its profile has continued to rise. The volume of articles mentioning the group during the first four months of 2023 was five times that of the same period in 2020, according to GDELT’s online news database.

“They’re part of a coordinated, politically motivated anti-science ecosystem,” said Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine and an expert in misinformation.

One more element to add to the formula: when their strategems are revealed and exposed, it is an attack on them, and they can then deploy the “silent majority” gambit.

“There’s a silent majority out there that stands with us,” she said. “This act has awoken a sleeping giant.”

The numbers may say they’re a loud minority, but they can always claim that the majority of Americans are with them, they just don’t say it aloud. This was also a popular excuse from the early days of the internet: “the lurkers support me in email,” even when they didn’t, but how could you check?

Today I learned about Gell-Mann Amnesia

Why didn’t I know this term before? It’s useful.

The phenomenon of people believing newspapers on topics which they are not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they are knowledgeable about.

It’s also amusing, because the term was coined by Michael Crichton, who is a prime example of a beneficiary of the Gell-Mann effect — people think he’s credible on the things he wrote about, which he wasn’t.

This video creator also discusses what she calls Mann-Gell Amnesia, where a genuine expert gets all hung up on an irrelevant error in minor simplifications, not recognizing that science communication often involves making simplifications that need to be later corrected, as people get deeper into a topic.

It’s a long video, but hang in there for her explanation of why Michio Kaku is dead to her.

Happy Father’s Day for those of you who have fathers you respect

I don’t have a father anymore, and I miss him all the time. If you got one, give him a call!

I spent the weekend with my daughter and granddaughter (National Grandparents Day is on Sunday, 10 September, my wife’s birthday, so that’ll be easy to remember), and Skatje fixed a delicious dinner of fish and mushrooms, while Iliana made festive mudcakes. I haven’t heard from my oldest son yet, but that’s better than what my other son did — he called to tell me he’s going camping at the Mora Campground near La Push, and he didn’t invite me! I’m very upset. I love that part of the world.

He also reminded me of one time I was camping out that way with my brother, Jim, and how we got soaked in the constant rain there and drove into Forks to get cheeseburgers. It’s weird how the older you get, the more associations every bit of dirt on the planet acquires, and everything keeps bringing back old memories.

Anyway, Jim’s dead now too, and he left behind 3 kids who I hope are all remembering him today.

Now I need to go recover from hours of driving and an exhausting 4 year old.