Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

In my day, never was longer.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

This fight is for everything.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Republicans in disarray!

It could be worse. Vance could have said “post-menopausal sows.” Waiting for that audiotape to surface.

White supremacy is terrorism.

The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

You are here: Home / Politics / Crazification Factor / Bring On The Meteor

Bring On The Meteor

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In our afternoon open thread, valued and highly technically competent commenter dmsilev pointed to this piece by Beth Mole, writing in Ars Technica.

There is, it seems, an even dumber crowd than the flat earthers:

Listen up, sheeple: COVID-19 doesn’t exist. Viruses don’t cause disease, and they aren’t contagious. Those doctors and health experts who say otherwise don’t know what they’re talking about; the real experts are on Facebook. And they’re saying it loud and clear: The pandemic is caused by your own deplorable life choices, like eating meat or pasta. Any “COVID” symptoms you might experience are actually the result of toxic lifestyle exposures—and you have only yourself to blame.

As utterly idiotic and abhorrent as all of the above is, it’s not an exaggeration of the messages being spread by a growing group of Darwin-award finalists on the Internet—that is, germ theory denialists. Yes, you read that correctly: Germ theory denialists—also known as people who don’t believe that pathogenic viruses and bacteria can cause disease.

As an extension of their rejection of basic scientific and clinical data collected over centuries, they deny the existence of the devastating pandemic that has sickened upwards of 200 million people worldwide, killing more than 4 million.

As it happens, I’m working on a book right now, tentatively titled So Very Small* about the origins of germ theory and the perplexing difficulty humans have had in fully coming to grips with the discovery that we share the world with a whole universe of creatures that seem, but are not, so very distant from our daily experience.

Mole notes, entirely correctly, that doubters of germ theory were present from very early in its modern history–the period in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s when Pasteur and Koch and others established that microbes do indeed cause human (and animal) diseases, and that t his knowledge could be used to erect defenses against such scourges. I take the story a bit further back in time, but I see the same thing she does: the idea that humans could be brought low by something as insignificant as a bacterium or (even more diminutive) a virus so offends a certain kind of sensibility that no amount of evidence to the contrary penetrates.

Bring On The Meteor 1

That said, there are a lot of reasons why it took a long time to get from Leeuenhoek’s discovery of microbes (in the 1670s) to Pasteur. None of those obtain since he figured out how to prevent “diseases” of wine and to cure chicken cholera, and since his rival Koch demonstrated the mechanism of infection with anthrax. We really knew this stuff then, with a stunningly complete set of empirical observations and demonstrations to confirm the basic mechanism of infection in hand by sometime in the 1880s. There just hasn’t been any reason to doubt germ theory for a century and a half.

Except these bozos are sure that all such knowledge is just Big Science running it’s usual con:

If you are not convinced by the group’s ideas and point to medical experts who say wild things like “viruses can make you sick” and “protein is necessary for a healthy diet,” you are embarrassingly mistaken…”The germ theory is nothing but a massive profit driver for the disease industry,” germ theory denialist Nora Lenz said in a video hosted on the site. The group members know better, of course, because, you know, they’ve read a lot of stuff on the Internet—like a lot!

“There are people with masters [sic] degrees that fell for this pandemic charade,” one group member posted. “And there are high school dropouts that can see through all the deception of the media. That’s why being smart isn’t measured solely on being educated by colleges.”

Inevitable:

You can’t fix this. Some germ theory truthers will get sick and discover that no, it’s not what they ate (unless they chowed down on a great big whack of E. coli, of course), pasta doesn’t cause cancer and the rest of it. Or someone they love gets ill and in extremis they try an antibiotic, which (for a while yet) actually works and so on. Those may have near death (or deathbed) conversions.

But they’re going to have to come to it on their own. There’s no way to penetrate such a hermetically sealed worldview, or such utterly unmerited confidence in one’s own judgment, nor such disdain for just how amazing it is that humans have managed to wrest so much knowledge of nature from the terrifying ground of experience. The tragedy is that some of exactly these kinds of folk have seats in Congress.

All I’m going to add is that it has never mattered whether you believe in Darwin (or any of the rest of modern biology). The question has always been, does natural selection believe in you.

FAFO.

*From this Hillaire Belloc poem. Do click–it’s a hoot.

Image: Jan Vermeer, The Geographer, 1669. It has been suggested that Leeuenhoek was the sitter for Vermeer’s natural philosopher in this painting and his The Astronomer. Most biographers of either man question that, though it is true that they may have known each other.  They did live in the same neighborhood, and Leeuenhoek was the executor of the painter’s will.  That does not in itself imply a close relationship, as by that time, he was a Delft city official, and may have been charged with settling Vermeer’s estate as an official obligation, not a personal one.

Reader Interactions

199Comments

  2. 2.

    Baud

    The scientists will tell you that a meteor killed off the dinosaurs.  Wrong. It was Facebook.

  6. 6.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    I can remember reading Microbe Hunters when I was (I think) in junior high school and found it fascinating.  Pasteur and Koch are real heroes and saved probably millions from death and disease.

  10. 10.

    Baud

    OT SPOILER

     

     

     

    TOKYO — The U.S. women’s water polo team has won gold for the third Olympics in a row, handily beating Spain in the gold medal match thanks to aggressive offense and a goalie who made block after block.

    Ashleigh Johnson, the first African American woman to make a U.S. Olympic water polo team, blocked 11 out of 15 shots from Spain during her time in goal – a rate of 73%. The main goalie for Spain blocked 19% of the shots, and the final score was 14 to 5.

     
    https://www.npr.org/sections/tokyo-olympics-live-updates/2021/08/07/1025740454/water-polo-tokyo-olympics-gold-goalie-ashleigh-johnson

  13. 13.

    H.E.Wolf

    Thanks to a homework assignment in elementary school, I remember van Leeuwenhoek also for his work with spectacle lenses, which seemed just as marvelous (in the old sense of the word) as his research on microbes.

    He lived to age 90, which is not bad for someone born in 1632. :)

    I’m not giving up on humanity:  there are always van Leeuwenhoeks to restore one’s optimism. Very often under-reported (especially if female and/or non-white), but definitely in existence.

  18. 18.

    dr. bloor

    You can’t fix this.

    Empirical question.  Let’s have Ms. Lenz and her fellow cultists line up for voluntary injections of live ebola, and see what happens.

  19. 19.

    TM

    Unfortunately for us all this sort of Darwin-award “common sense” populism is fuel to political forces that thrive on polarization, and the oxygen for the resulting fire comes from right-wing media, especially but not exclusively Fox.  Rick Pearlstein describes the birth and growth of this political complex in his two books Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge (on Reaganism).  Also unfortunately, when well-informed liberals mock or laugh or gasp in horror, that feeds right into the doom loop of polarization.  The point isn’t that liberals need to be nice, or sympathetic, to such destructive nonsense, but rather, that the right-wing politics of polarization has built liberal disdain into its own functioning as a vital moving part.

    I guess the solution isn’t to rebut (they’re not listening) or ridicule (they feed off that) such people, but to disempower them politically.

  20. 20.

    Raoul Paste

    I heard an ad on the radio for a local mental health facility, claiming that one in five Americans is mentally ill

    That seems pretty high, but it would explain a lot

  21. 21.

    Ken

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: There’s a part of me that believes these people can’t really think that way.

    Yeah, but how could you show that?  Strap them into some Saw-like device where to get loose, they have a choice of spraying COVID solution up their nose or hacksawing off a leg, and see which they choose? I’m told by people I trust that this would be morally questionable.

  22. 22.

    Brachiator

    Of course it should be noted that Pasteur was not just fighting the ignoramuses. He also fought learned scientists who were wrong.

    And I think we call it germ theory in part because it comprehensively accounts for earlier beliefs and observation even though it may disprove them.

  23. 23.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Adam L Silverman:   On the subject of prayers:  Is God unaware of a situation that needs fixing until someone prays for it?  Or is he aware, but indifferent until convinced otherwise?

    On the topic of blowing up the Sun:  I can think of a few ways.  First, fill space with oxygen and strike a match.  Second (this one is more likely to succeed I think), reverse the effects of the Ideal Gas Law where the core of the Sun collapses in response to more heat, rather than expanding.  That should trigger an unstable fusion reaction, bringing down the whole star.

  26. 26.

    Sure Lurkalot

    Ooh, can’t wait to read Tom’s book!

    This post reminds me of another book, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, about the assassination of James Garfield. What killed Garfield…not Guiteau’s bullet, but his doctors who infected him trying to remove it, as they paid no heed to Joseph Lister’s germ theory. But Wikipedia lists assassination as the cause of Garfield’s death…

  29. 29.

    Josie

    @Raoul Paste: ​
     My youngest son would agree with that. He told me this afternoon that he thinks these people are not necessarily stupid or evil; they are mentally ill and probably can’t help themselves. I had never looked at it quite like that before. It’s a really disturbing thought.

  30. 30.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Ken: @Dorothy A. Winsor:  DAW’s right.  And we have a simple way of discerning this: all these jokers, they have *parents* and those parents (and elders) overwhelmingly vote with their feet for the germ hypothesis: they get the shot.  COVID *is* that Saw-like device, so to speak.

    The rest are just gaslighting us.

  31. 31.

    scav

    @Jerzy Russian: I’ve rather the impression that their God is generally indifferent, indifferent even to most prayers — it’s got to be the right kind of people’s prayers.  See also God always being behind the winning plays of their sportsball team.  He’s basically at their back and call.

  34. 34.

    Meyerman

    Sounds a lot like Peter Duesberg, who was a real-life professor at UC Berkeley, but denied that HIV caused AIDS. (It had to be the recreational drug use in the gay community.)

    I teach high school biology and I have always thought that my students hear, but don’t truly understand that microbes are everywhere and that they more varied and important than the organisms they can see. Likewise, I think that most people do what their doctor tells them to defeat an infection, but they don’t really believe that their is a pitched battle going on inside them.

  36. 36.

    CaseyL

    A cartoon a few weeks ago noted that the entire US is cursed because the whole country is built on (stolen) Indian burial grounds.

    That sounds about right to me.  Certainly the current hellscape makes a good argument for there being something deeply, intrinsically, terribly wrong with an awful lot of Americans.

  37. 37.

    Snarki, child of Loki

    Don’t inject the germ-deniers with Ebola.

     

    Use flesh-eating bacteria. Makes for a better example pour encourager les autres

  38. 38.

    Another Scott

    @H.E.Wolf: +1

    While information is moving faster all the time, I take comfort in the fact that many/most of these insanities seem to have peaked by the time the mass-market press gets ahold of them.

    E.g. Beware of stockmarket bubbles when your shoeshine boy is giving you stock tips.  Similarly, TV shows about flipping houses.

    That’s not to say that all of this stuff is not dangerous – of course it is.  It’s just that there’s a small minority of people that are susceptible to this stuff and as long as they don’t have power over the rest of us we’ll be Ok.

    Forward!!

    (Thanks, Tom.  Good luck with the manuscript!!)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  40. 40.

    Ruckus

    @ruemara:

    Some have. They were born with normal intelligence, they may have received a rational education, but along the way their brain got lost, or the drugs were too good or the whole religion thing fell on them and gave them a stroke. Or a combination of all of that. But many humans just can not relate to being part of the whole, a tiny blip that exist for a human lifetime, which is about a mili second in the history of the universe. They can’t believe they really are that small, that there are lifeforms that can not be seen with the naked eye and that to the rest of the universe, that they are that invisible as well.

  41. 41.

    Yutsano

    I took microbiology in college. I had never had a science fascinate me so much to the point I came this close to switching majors*. The main point I learned is that microbes are everywhere. That and macrophages are the coolest killers in existence. When we lose antibiotics our only saviour might just be the humble macrophage.

  42. 42.

    Another Scott

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: People compartmentalize.

    “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

    ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  45. 45.

    Ken

    @Jerzy Russian: Charles Stross in Iron Sunrise has a third way to blow up a sun, also based on currently-impossible physics. The effect is to replace the core of the star with an equal, but much smaller, mass of iron. The remainder of the star falls into that, reaching an appreciable percentage of lightspeed before reaching it, and producing effects not too different from a supernova.

  48. 48.

    piratedan

    As if as a nation… we’re all suffering various degrees of a shared psychotic break… is it the loss of understood norms politically by the election of a black man or something insiduously added to McDonald’s fries?

  50. 50.

    MobiusKlein

    @dr. bloor: I imagine many of the folks staying behind are worried about looting and theft when they leave their home unguarded.   But bringing their guns to meet the Deputies is nuts – are they planning to shoot the flames?

  51. 51.

    dr. bloor

    @Snarki, child of Loki:

    Come sit by me.

    @Meyerman:

    I teach high school biology and I have always thought that my students hear, but don’t truly understand that microbes are everywhere and that they more varied and important than the organisms they can see.

    One nit I have with how the pandemic is framed–and it’s not about everyone else, it’s about me–is that media talk about how the virus is “clever,” or has “outsmarted us,” or “remains a step ahead of us.”  It invites the Dunning-Krueger crowd to comfort themselves in the belief that of course they’re smarter than a virus.*

    The proper analogy is air.  If you’re breathing oxygen, you’re probably getting a side order of virus.

    *Testable hypothesis.

  56. 56.

    Netto

    The tragedy is that some of exactly these kinds of folk have seats in Congress.

    Another tragedy is that most of these people will, through the counterintuitivity of statistics, survive their delusions and keep saying “I told you so” for decades.

  58. 58.

    jl

    @Adam L Silverman: ” How did the horses perform? ”

    Olympics got woked and wrecked when they kicked out rich man’s horse polo in 1920s. I haven’t watched it on TV ever since

    Edit: 1936

    Edit: Best Olympics was 1936. Woke Bohemian (hippie) Indian Clubs originally from India (heathen) was kicked out and rich man’s horse polo was in.

  59. 59.

    Ken

    @dr. bloor:  It invites the Dunning-Krueger crowd to comfort themselves in the belief that of course they’re smarter than a virus.

    It seems to me this is the ultimate “the fox knows many things, the hedgehog only one” situation. The virus’s one and only trick is to take over our cells and use them to make more virus.

  63. 63.

    Raven

    Artemis update. This doggie I’d stunningly affectionate after what has been done to her. Also she hopped into the van and noses it when we go out and she easily climbs onto the couch and is now lying between up and getting double goo goo.

  64. 64.

    jl

    As for disease: it’s always obviously been miasmas and unbalanced humours.

    I shudder to think how bad the deadly Chinese bioweapon, but also fake hoaxed up with only a 0.000000000000000000001% mortality rate covid pandemic would have been if Trump hadn’t spread a lot of black bile to counterbalance it.

    Also: why does no one mention the vile plot to suppress the Baud XXXX!! stale beer cure. Secret is to crumble in some pringles.

  65. 65.

    Ruckus

    @Meyerman:

    If you take the median person’s level of intelligence half the world is dumber than that. I have no real idea what that level is but if you want to teach people about things that they can not see, a large portion of that lower group is not going to be able to understand at all, they don’t have the capability.

    I once taught a black man with a 4th grade 1950s Louisiana education trigonometry. It only took a couple of months part time. He wasn’t dumb at all just uneducated. I’ve seen people with high school educations, in a college setting who could not grasp mathematics past what that black man had gotten in 4 yrs as a kid. They were educated but dumb.

    Part of that is the world we live in, part of it is that a lot of people can not grasp that which they can not see. They only believe what they are told by someone they trust and they have to see the proof or it doesn’t exist. Theories or concepts that they can’t see can’t exist in their worlds.

  66. 66.

    eddie blake

    i dunno. i know a lot of mentally ill people. i dunno that ANY of them disbelieve microbial theory or think the world is flat

    eta- crazy people are CRAZY, they’re not necessarily STUPID.

  69. 69.

    CaseyL

    @Raven: You must be in love, because the last part of that last sentence is a great representation of someone dissolving into puppy-love gibberish.

    @HumboldtBlue: What I meant was, What emergency room visit? What happened? Are you OK?

  72. 72.

    Raven

    @CaseyL: It may be so but we informed the adoption folks that we were just going to foster here, not adopt. Because there was so much publicity surrounding her plight there are people lined up wanting her. She’s going to grow quite a bit with proper nutrition and we have to find a smaller dog.

  74. 74.

    Ken

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: You are possibly a little scary.

    Only on the internet, but that’s to be expected. There are any number of studies showing that people’s personas shift online, becoming generally coarser, ruder, and more prone to violent (and racist, misogynist, etc.) speech.  Basically it’s everything people feared of movies, jazz, comic books, rock and roll, and video games, except for real this time.

  75. 75.

    Ruckus

    @Yutsano:

    I think it may have been at some point in time and may return to that in the future, but there is no doubt that while statistically significant at one point in time, it is a variable, based upon a number of factors. It is obviously a larger fraction at the moment, I’d say something around 44% with a hard bottom of maybe 34%. They’ve seen people like themselves placed in charge so the fringe now “thinks’ that it’s OK to accept the theories of rank stupidity.

  77. 77.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Ken:   Replacing hydrogen nuclei by iron nuclei in the core would certainly destabilize the Sun.    Whether it “blows up” in such a way to answer that girl’s prayer would require more investigation, or if you are God, experimentation.

  83. 83.

    Raven

    @MagdaInBlack: There is no question we both are but, after the last year with Lil Bit and Bohdi, we are very realistic about our abilities now and in the future.

  86. 86.

    gwangung

    @Ken: 

    There are any number of studies showing that people’s personas shift online, becoming generally coarser, ruder, and more prone to violent…speech.

    Hey! I resemble that remark!

  87. 87.

    Peale

    In the past 7 days, I’ve learned of the existence of groups of people who don’t believe:

    *that viruses can cause disease

    *that China exists (destroyed in 1952)

    *that the Roman Empire ever existed. (But the Byzantine empire continues to exist in secret)

    I’m not lying. I’m just going to start a movement that just affirms there are no cats. See if I can turn a profit.

  89. 89.

    Jerzy Russian

    On the topic of meteors, do we want a very large one (say 20 lm in diameter) that will completely devastate the Earth’s surface, as a series of much smaller ones (say 100 meters across)?    The former will certainly eradicate the stupid, but the latter can perhaps be targeted in certain areas with excess stupid.

    The current surveys are pretty thorough, and the census of bodies larger than about 1 km are pretty complete.  It will be a long time before the Earth meets one of these. On the other hand, the census of much smaller bodies still needs work…

  91. 91.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Jerzy Russian: I make no great pretensions to understand how the Deity, under anyone’s individual understanding or any specific religion’s understanding, operates.

  94. 94.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Peale:   If I may ask, what do they call that place where there is a large wall?  One can travel there (in the Before Times at least) and see this wall.    My friends call this place “China”, but in retrospect they are all brainwashed sheeple.

  98. 98.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Raoul Paste: @dr. bloor: @Josie: You see this in Mike Lindell. Leaving his addictive personality aside, he’s clearly manic. And to top it all off he’s convinced that the Deity is talking to him. Mike Pence has this same problem; he too believes the Deity is talking to him.

    There are two questions I always think should be asked when people state this:

    1. Does the Deity sound like you when it speaks to you?
    2. Does the Deity ever tell you not to do something you want to do?

    No one ever seems to ask those questions.

  99. 99.

    CaseyL

    @HumboldtBlue: Whew!  Not fun, but not disastrous.  Except for the bill, apparently.  Please tell me you have insurance.

     

    @Raven: Being able to love a dog with a horrific history, and restore that dog’s ability to trust and love, and then letting that dog go to someone else is one of the highest, kindest, most heroic callings around.

  100. 100.

    Ken

    @Peale: If you really want to worry about all these lunatics sharing their ideas on the internet, imagine if Neil Gaiman’s “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” was how the universe actually worked.

    (Netflix is adapting the Sandman; there’s probably a story idea there, where the show exposes enough people to the concepts of Gaiman’s universe that it bootstraps itself into existence on their belief.)

  102. 102.

    Adam L Silverman

    @dr. bloor: No, no he has not.

    What’s the most interesting about what happened at Mann Gulch is that it is a case study in both organizational failure in the face of multiple external events and an inability to properly establish and train coherent small teams, which, in turn negatively impacted the small team of smoke jumpers operations.

  103. 103.

    Raven

    @CaseyL: It hasn’t taken much, we’re treating her like we have treated all of our dogs. What is stunning to us is how receptive she is.

  104. 104.

    Dan B

    @Raven: Seems like Artemis recognizes some caring* souls.

     

    *Other Jackals may disagree……

     

    I hope she doesn’t have triggers from PTSD.

  106. 106.

    Ken

    @Adam L Silverman: 3. Does the Deity tell you the same things it tells the other guy?

    This is similar to my preferred approach to prayer in schools: OK, everyone who wants this, get together and agree on the prayer.  As a start, try to agree on the list of the Ten Commandments, and the wording of the Lord’s Prayer.

  108. 108.

    JR

    Pasteur can be forgiven, perhaps, for throwing in with Louis Napoleon, the Trump of his time.

  109. 109.

    Raven

    @Dan B: She’s pretty noise sensitive and sudden movements can startle her but she’s wagging and nosing me for cookies.

  117. 117.

    Dan B

    @Raven: Pretty common triggers in animals that have not been abused.  It sounds like she may get over these in time.

     

    We have two formerly feral cats.  Being homed in Covid means they will probably never trust any humans but us.  They love getting picked up and cuddled and make burbling noises.  They also know how to manipulate us, always a good sign for cat mental well being.  Not always for our well being.

  118. 118.

    piratedan

    OT: while I am not a Chevy person, i do have to say kudos to their Silverado commercial with Walter… the nothing special about him cat

  119. 119.

    Adam L Silverman

    @zhena gogolia: Trying to cool down enough from lifting weights and walking the dogs in the heat and humidity so I can take a shower without sweating through it.

  120. 120.

    Tom Levenson

    @JR: There has long been a lot of go-along-to-get-along tendency in French science. See Laplace and LeMaitre w. Napoleon, Leverrier with the revoking 1848 and after and so on. What’s notable is that mostly succeeding governments find a way to ignore such errors when the new broom sweeps. Excepting Lavoisier, of course.

  126. 126.

    Another Scott

    @Adam L Silverman: Made me look.

    This Bloomberg BW story from 2017 reminds me of stories that preachers tell. :-/

    One of my old bosses, who had lots of great stories and was always interesting to talk with, told me that he went through some preacher training when he was a young adult. He said it was kinda scary how easy it was to convince some people that he had a “gift” for talking with/hearing the deity. That it would have been very easy to take advantage of young women… He left it behind.

    I wouldn’t trust anything Lindell says about anything, myself. His manic behavior may be an act too.

    YMMV.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  127. 127.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    The most horrifying/fascinating part of all this is, there are a lot of people who are playing along who, under Socratic questioning, would admit this is all BS, but it’s not like Covid-19 is really *dangerous*.  Or, to put it another way, there are a lot of people lying to themselves, because they’re so into owning the libs, that they don’t bother to stop and think of… well, don’t bother to stop and think about *reality* for a moment. Because they don’t have to! 500 deaths a day? Just a number, not 500-10,000 tragedies, the loss of a real, wonderfully unique, and uniquely wonderful, human being, and those who mourn.

    Damn shame there isn’t more Socratic questioning. There are a lot of people who will be carrying a lot of guilt, and some really horrible memories, someday in the not distant future. Hopefully, it’s before the American holocaust.

  130. 130.

    Steeplejack

    @MobiusKlein:

    They’re planning to shoot the deputies if the deputies try to make them leave. (Or that’s the impression they want to give.)

  132. 132.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @TM: I guess the solution isn’t to rebut (they’re not listening) or ridicule (they feed off that) such people, but to disempower them politically.

    No, they hate ridicule, what they want to is rage or debate from the left. They want to present themselves as the bold truth talkers to power and the left as flustered. That’s why parody is so effective on them because it turns the table and they are stuck arguing why their bullshit is right and your bullshit is wrong.

  134. 134.

    Geminid

    @Adam L Silverman: My late friend Chris had a deep Christian faith, but he was skeptical of people who talked about how they consulted God about their problems. Chris would point out that even Moses, who lived more than a hundred years, was only spoken to by God twice.

  135. 135.

    Ruckus

    @Raven:

    Damn. That song.

    For 2 yrs I was the entry guy in my fire crew in the navy. First in, hose behind you. Had a fire axe, and oxygen canister and mask. All you could do was hope the guys behind you did their job and kept you from burning up. A rush of air when you opened that hatch could get you a flare up in the face, or overwhelm you completely, and you’d likely only know when you were actually on fire. And trusting everyone else to do the right thing.

    The risk was less than being in country, but it was still very real

    Thank you.

  137. 137.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Geminid: One former Evangelical who eventually de-converted into unbelief was talking about that. He said he was told his inner monologue was the voice of god.

  138. 138.

    Tiny Getace

    @Anthony: i listen to the radio show of anti vaxxer grifter Gary Null whenever I feel like getting high blood pressure.  In addition to opposing all vaccines, he’s been contending since the eighties that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS.  Maybe he’s anti germ theory

  139. 139.

    ilieitz

    Most people have no idea about the world of small like 99% of the biomass on earth are ants and that there are >100000 species of beetles on earth

  142. 142.

    FlyingToaster

    @Meyerman: I learned that in 10th grade biology.  Everyone was given a test tube to bring in a “natural water sample” (mine was from the creek at the bottom of the hill).

    We spent the next couple classes preparing and examining slides: home water samples, rainwater, tap water from the lab faucet, and a distilled water sample from the instructor.

    EVERYTHING had microbes, except distilled water.

  143. 143.

    OGLiberal

    What’s the pasta thing?  Is it related to the numerous wingers I’ve encountered who all seem to have gluten intolerance, otherwise known as, “that bagel made me feel full!”

    And what’s with the peanut stuff? Have peanuts become especially toxic since the 80s?

    I get that people actually have shit like nut allergies and celiac disease…and they are serious. My kid has Crohn’s and even less than 10 years ago his pedi was implying his complaints were to get attention. (He was six and she is no longer his doc)  But most of these folks base their diagnosis on “something I read”, not real tests or diagnosis.  If gluten and peanut poison was as widespread as it seems among these wingers who are my same age I have no idea how my generation survived

    ETA:  Because white bread and Jif.

  146. 146.

    Ken

    @ilieitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology) has ants about the same biomass as humans, and less than cattle, earthworms, and krill. There are a huge number of ants, though krill still dominate – huh, according to that table, there are about 10^7 ants per human, and about 10^7 krill per ant. Prokaryotes win, of course, by both mass and number.

    In semi-related trivia, I find this old XKCD simultaneously impressive and depressing. And the most abundant protein by mass is thought to be RuBisCO.

  147. 147.

    Yutsano

    @Adam L Silverman: Oh yeah. Sorry I’ve been out of it more or less out of it all day.

    The note I meant was that the two degrees were basically done except I was short a science. So since I had a good acquaintance who was a micro post doc I opted for that. Changed my universe, it did.

  149. 149.

    Kent

    @Ken: I remember reading once that 40% of the animal biomass in the Amazon rain forest is ants.  I don’t know how accurate that was.

  150. 150.

    Ken

    @sdhays: And how does an empire exist in secret? If it’s secret, it’s not really an empire, is it?

    That’s exactly what they want you to think.

    (To be clear, I don’t think that; and I’m only about, oh, 60% certain that that would be the response if you asked someone who did believe in this “secret empire”.)

  151. 151.

    FlyingToaster

    @OGLiberal: It looks like nut allergies used to not be detected and kids just died (ditto shellfish allergies).

    Nowadays it’s far simpler to figure out what’s going on, so any weird reaction and you get your kid tested.  Because I have an inherited autoimmune disorder, I had a pediatric allergist for then WarriorBabyGirl, and when her second breakfast of scrambled eggs resulted in a rash, she got tested.  It turned out to be a skin reaction to some plant in my neighbor’s yard.

    The coolest thing is that WarriorTeen and I are living proof of epigenetics.  Her first pediatrician had her on a diet that would avoid instantiating dietary allergies, and she has none.  Unlike her mother, grandmother, uncle, great uncle, and a number of cousins.

  152. 152.

    FlyingToaster

    @Another Scott: That episode was a blast! (though the ones with explosions were more exciting)

    Unfortunately, NerdTV like Mythbusters is not mainstream (sigh).

  153. 153.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ken: ​

    I’m told by people I trust that this would be morally questionable.

    Before I saw your comment, I was already thinking about how one might fasten a large N (like > 100) of such believers into an fMRI machine and interrogate them. Perhaps also a second round of interrogation while they are being monitored with 256 electrode EEGs. I am fascinated by such minds and by the apparent unfalsifiability of their beliefs.

    The linked arstechnica piece reminds me a bit of this, which is a (well-done) spoof, in case it is not obvious. (I heard him mention it to the founder of The Onion.)
    The Mineralarians ( Charles H. Bennett )

    (Unlike Mr. Bennett, I did not pursue an advanced degree in physics even though encouraged, curiously for a reason closely related to his PhD thesis; said reason will only be disclosed if all listening (and myself) consume at least a liter of vodka apiece first. :-)

  155. 155.

    FlyingToaster

    One of the things I remember from being 13 was the Talmudic advice:  “People see what they expect to see.”

    I know an MIT & Stanford trained biologist who told me that my allergies were all in my head.  I pointed out that hives and anaphylaxis are not psychosomatic disorders.  Then I told HerrDoktor to keep that bunch away from me.  (Note:  she no longer works as a biologist, heh.)

    There’s no point in trying to tell someone a fact, when they’ve decided the outcome of the argument before they started it.  I could have gone all Mendelian genetics on her, proving that this was heritable and that I’d fucking inherited it, but why bother?  There was and is no combination of evidence that was going to get through, because that isn’t what she wanted to see.

    You’re not going to change a closed mind.  The only thing that will is catastrophe.

  157. 157.

    Peale

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: I went back to find where I read that about Q and Byzantium and Rome not existing, and it was your post of this article.

    As for China. I got the date wrong. It’s 1962 and something to do with missiles on Okinawa that we set off during the Cuban missive crisis. I stopped looking more because I don’t want my YouTube algorithm to get borked again with conspiracy videos.

  158. 158.

    Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]

    @Peale: There is a reddit group called “Birds aren’t real”  It’s mainly a joke sub-reddit, but you know that there are some true believers salted in there.

  159. 159.

    OGLiberal

    @FlyingToaster: Before the pandemic we lowered the carbs in my Crohn’s kid’s diet.  He lost weight and had less GERD related discomfort.  Doc said her field was starting to shift to that being important…previously, they felt diet wasn’t important.  We ended treatment last Spring because of the risks (in person outpatient at a hospital) and he’s been great, so far.  We keep him – mostly (he is a teen) away from everything and fear a flare but so far, so good.  What gets me are the large number of anti-vaxxer, wingers we know who hate science but who claim they have celiac disease based on nothing but, “that’s how I feel “.  It leads to people thinking, “you’re a hypochondriac” when it actually is a serious medical condition for some and not just, “I had too many hot dog rolls ”  it’s not so different from the BS they use to justify not getting vaxxed.

  160. 160.

    frosty

    @OGLiberal: Skippy or GTFO.

    Confession: I grew up with Skippy and Miracle Whip. I’ve been converted to Jif and Hellman’s. Less sugar for starters. I’m glad my mother is gone so she doesn’t know how I’ve betrayed her.

  161. 161.

    ilieitz

    Doesn’t change my point that humans don’t even see the world of small unless they are a nuisance but they rule the world whether we like it or not

  162. 162.

    FlyingToaster

    @OGLiberal: Exactly.  One of WarriorTeen’s friends is a celiac sufferer, as is their mom.  When they lived around here, we knew EVERY casual restaurant that was celiac compliant.  (They moved away 4 years ago.)

    The kid’s paternal grandparents were another matter.  They learned not to eat at MaMaw’s house.

    A couple of years ago a fellow parent touted a local diner for having gluten-free meals.  I was puzzled, “I don’t have celiac, and I’m not gluten-sensitive, so why are you telling me?”  “Well, gluten is bad for you, isn’t it?”  “No, it’s only bad if you’re sensitive and dangerous if you have celiac.”  “I thought gluten was bad for people with allergies.”  “Talk to your doctor, please.”

  165. 165.

    Yutsano

    @FlyingToaster:  Odds of them actually talking to their doctor are slim to none. Even worse: doctor is a crackpot looney who doesn’t believe in the “science” behind celiac disease.

  167. 167.

    Kay

    U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D.
    @SenBillCassidy
    Replying to
    @SenBillCassidy
    Third, Critical Race Theory is not in this bill, never has been. Equity is not a catch-phrase for CRT. Language in this bill DOES NOT change current anti-discrimination laws at all. (7/9)

    The GOP base believe “critical race theory” is somehow IN the infrastructure bill. Should we encourage them believing that, or not?

  168. 168.

    Poe Larity

    @dnfree: I am continually gobsmacked S-W still uses the “Cover the Earth” logo with a bucket of red paint drowning the planet.

    Like, WTF.

  169. 169.

    BruceFromOhio

    @FlyingToaster:

    You’re not going to change a closed mind. The only thing that will is catastrophe.

    This is fine, except that the catastrophes are including me, even after I’ve sent multiple UNSUBSCRIBE.

    Go catastrophe on your own, closed minds! If you want to do yourself in, just go! Leave me out of it!

    That’s the part that is most bothersome.

  170. 170.

    BruceFromOhio

    @jl: 

    Also: why does no one mention the vile plot to suppress the Baud XXXX!! stale beer cure. Secret is to crumble in some pringles.

    Stale Pringles and Natty Light was proven to kill the virus 2x faster. I heard it from the guy pumping gas at the next pump at the GetGo.

  172. 172.

    scav

    @FlyingToaster: There does also seem to be a measurable increase in allergies, beyond the increase in identifying them. Some evidence suggests it has to do with elements of the “modern/western/hyper-industrialized/etc” lifestyle.
    something from the bbc

    There’s also a thread of research comparing allergies arising in Amish, Mennonite, other farming and non-farming populations. Early exposure to soil and animals being chased there. (eta, also asthma plus allergies related).

  173. 173.

    SFAW

    @Raoul Paste:

    I heard an ad on the radio for a local mental health facility, claiming that one in five Americans is mentally ill

    Well, there are at least 74 million (documented) insane persons of voting age in this country. Divide that into the US population (328M), and you get approx 22 percent. I would expect the total number/percent is actually higher.

  175. 175.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Peale: Well the Byzantine thing is predictable after the Historians have spent the last three years trashing Nazi Germany, Sparta, Rome and Medieval Norway as some kind of Ayran super states.

    But this Chines thing is amazingly bizarre all things considered. I mean how can China be the Yellow Peril ™ that women, liberals and minorities need to shush for National security, if it don’t exist?

  177. 177.

    RaflW

    It turns out that editors actually do serve as gatekeepers. That having a free-for-all, largely uncensored but highly monetized ‘universe’ lie Facebook is in fact destructive to social cohesion, and possibly even societal survival.

    Congrats, Zuckerberg. Your site for college nerds to maybe get dates has turned out … terrifying.

  178. 178.

    Brachiator

    @Ken: 

    Only on the internet, but that’s to be expected. There are any number of studies showing that people’s personas shift online, becoming generally coarser, ruder, and more prone to violent (and racist, misogynist, etc.) speech.

    People in general? That doesn’t sound right. Some people enjoy coming to the Internet where there is relative anonymity and throwing off all restraint. Some people love to be able to join like minded hostile “friends.”

    But other people have no need to be hostile. Most people.

    The angry insecure people would tend to sulk in a corner in the real world. Now they can command center stage on the Internet.

    Very strange.

  179. 179.

    Ryan

    “The group members know better, of course, because, you know, they’ve read a lot of stuff on the Internet—like a lot!”

    I don’t think you follow the internet the way they do.

  180. 180.

    Darkrose

    @Meyerman: 

    I’ve been on an anime kick lately, and one neat thing I ran across on Netflix is a series called “Cells At Work”. It anthropomorphizes the inside of human body, specifically blood and immune cells, bacteria, viruses, and parasites. It’s cute, occasionally creepy (I can’t watch the cancer cell episode), and apparently, fairly accurate about the general facts. I never thought I’d be enjoying a show where animated white blood cells fight off bacteria while screaming “DIE GERM!” but it’s a lot of fun.

  181. 181.

    Revrick

    @Yutsano: The anti-germ people use the fact that microbes are everywhere to explain their position. If that’s true, they say, then why aren’t we getting sick all the time? Fecal bacteria on my toothbrush? Sometimes, when I brush my teeth, my gums bleed, which means that bacteria must be getting in my bloodstream. Yet, I don’t get diarrhea, or worse. Explain why that doesn’t happen, libtard germ-theory guy.

    Of course, their counter explanation is the “Filth theory,” which holds that disease is the result of filthy conditions. And, in fairness, for a long time, that seemed like a reasonable explanation. Cities were cesspools of human filth. They were especially vulnerable to epidemics. It must be bad air! Or all the garbage with all those filthy rats!
    This also seemed to explain why the poor often fared far worse than the rich, when it came to disease outbreaks. After all, very few royalty died when the Plague devastated Europe. It must have been the bad air surrounding those filthy poor people!
    And then, they’d point to the fact that one of the greatest improvements in life expectancy occurred in the early 20th century, before any real modern medicine, when cities started cleaning up their filth with sewers and garbage collections.
    Of course, all of this fits quite well with right-wing politics, which often blames the poor for their condition, and has a strong moralizing bent. (This calls to mind TFG’s alleged comment when being driven through Chicago’s Southside that “only blacks could live like that.” Which conveniently overlooked his and dad’s racist housing practices.)

    It’s a short hop from that point to claim that the politics of the poor are filthy (and dangerous). And from there it follows that those who ally themselves with any effort to ameliorate their condition are also filthy and dangerous.

  182. 182.

    Brachiator

    @Revrick:

    After all, very few royalty died when the Plague devastated Europe. It must have been the bad air surrounding those filthy poor people!

    I am not sure that very few royalty died.

    Also one advantage that the rich had, and have to this day, is the ability to more easily move away from areas where the plague might be.

    Also you would need to define filth. It is not just trash and junk. It would include material with germs and other infectious agents.

    The rich got their share of sexually transmitted diseases. How does the filth theory account for that?

  183. 183.

    Matt

    @RSA: “Diagnosable” is carrying a lot of weight there; lot of batshit-crazy folks walking around that can’t be diagnosed because society has deemed it impolite to accurately characterize fundamentalist religion as mental illness.

    Seriously, tho: if you show up at the ER and explain that Pikachu protects you from diseases you’ll get a psych consult. Do the same thing with Sky Jeebus and somehow it’s not a problem.

  184. 184.

    Revrick

    @Brachiator: I found the names of six royals who died in the initial outbreak of the Plague that swept Europe. More than that died in subsequent waves extending into the next century, though several of them were either involved in sieges or had been imprisioned.

    My larger point is that we fall into the trap of seeing this sort of belief as a discrete incidence of nuttiness, when it is really one facet of a larger worldview. Research shows that conservatives have stronger visceral reactions of disgust and fear, so things that would trigger them are filth and impurity. Let’s not forget the language that was used about immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe in the early 20th century, hordes coming from filthy hovels, and today it’s Central America.

    Of course, the left is not immune to battles over purity, though ours are over ideology and doctrine, not blood.

  186. 186.

    brantl

    @Anthony: Figures. Although he sounds like he should have been a proctologist. You should be a little smarter than your patients, or the parts of them you treat.

  191. 191.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    @RaflW: here’s an idea:

    what if facebook purged all users not currently enrolled in a college or university & went back to its original idea as a bordello for collegiate men who don’t have the money for rohypnol or ketamine

  192. 192.

    bluefoot

    @Darkrose:  Cells That Work is fun and definitely accurate on the science. My only complaint is that Netflix’s subtitles for the show are pretty subpar.

    I have a couple of immunologist friends who watch it with their kids.

  193. 193.

    J R in WV

    @Raoul Paste: 

    I heard an ad on the radio for a local mental health facility, claiming that one in five Americans is mentally ill

    That seems pretty high, but it would explain a lot

    I think we have pretty well established that the actual crazification number is 27% — haven’t we?

    So, then, closer to one in four..!!!

  194. 194.

    J R in WV

    @Raven:

    It hasn’t taken much, we’re treating her like we have treated all of our dogs. What is stunning to us is how receptive she is.

    I picked up an abandoned dog at the Diary Queen, where she was attempting to survive a cold February on hot dog bun ends. Vet told us not to bathe her, she wouldn’t survive it, so very close.

    Was an adoring, adored puppy who knew exactly how much we gave her when we rescued her.

    Most rescued dogs are that smart, they know they were rescued, what they were rescued from. So rewarding to have that love from a puppy. Smarter than Republicans for sure, who can’t be rescued and wouldn’t appreciate it if they were.

  195. 195.

    J R in WV

    @HumboldtBlue:

    Actually sounds reasonable to save a finger, hope it will be fully operational once healed. No tendon damage, etc.

    Plus a little bit for the Dr’s school debt…

  196. 196.

    glc

    I wouldn’t say the Belloc poem is a hoot. It is artfully constructed.

    It’s sincere, and deeply ignorant for its own time. He was 26 at the time but did not improve with age.  He is referring to a discovery published in 1677. Two years after the poem, the tobacco mosaic virus was identified. And of course the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch were well known in his day.

    A kind of William F. Buckley, but with talent.

    Referring to Shakespeare’s “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can was the balm from an anointed king” G. H. Hardy wrote something like the following: “Could lines be better, or sentiments be worse?”

  197. 197.

    JAFD

    You jackals may find interesting

    http://www.public-domain-poetry.com/roy-atwell/some-little-bug-39012

    http://www.lizlyle.lofgrens.org/RmOlSngs/RTOS-SomeLittleBug.html

    @frosty: You might try Mrs. Schlorer’s mayo – seems to have less sugar then Hellman’s. (I think – have no proof – that they also make Shop-Rite*’s store brand, Bowl & Basket)

    *I’ve always thought that if they wanted to make a Rite of Shopping, they’d have Gregorian chants playing over the loudspeakers and incense burning at the cash registers…

  198. 198.

    dopey-o

    @Peale: I’m not lying. I’m just going to start a movement that just affirms there are no cats. See if I can turn a profit.

    try Birds Aren’t Real. Apparently, those things outside your window are government  surveillance drones! hummingbirds are assassins!

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