A serious question for Sam Stone on Factual Errors

The BBQ Pit
801

Yes…! Do eet!

But no, that’s where advertising and consistent messaging from trusted sources is useful, and where having one half of the country trying to kneecap the initiative is poorly considered.

A lot of older Republicans (e.g. Trump) got vaccinated. But, they promulgated stories about the vaccines not being necessary, not being effective, etc. and so they convinced a lot of the younger, more bravado-forward Republicans to forego vaccination.

Between reduced immune strength brought on by age and the relatively short-term strength of vaccines, they almost certainly screwed themselves by thinking that they could just secretly vaccinate and play a double-game.

802

Absolutely. It’s an awful situation to be in for sure. If your immune system is already weak, and then you can’t get a vaccine, it’s sort of a double-whammy. Those are people that just need to be extremely cautious about social distancing, protecting themselves when they have to be in public, etc.

803

Someone repeating an argument they heard that was made by unethical people for very stupid people.

804

Like Fox News?

805

Personally, I think Fox’s problem isn’t political so much as that they started out as a news channel and slowly shifted to being a tabloid channel, like a TV version of the Weekly World News.

Tucker presented a “news” piece about a study showing an increase in heart illness after the vaccines were released. His source was a blog post where someone compared heart illness counts among university athletes at a few specific schools to a count of cases globally, among all ages, discernable through Google searching.

That’s clearly stupid. It’s not that it’s political, it’s a willful intent to create a headline that attracts attention - just the same as “The aliens are invading!” or “Elvis found working at a Baskin Robbins!”

The people creating stuff like this basically assume that their viewers are morons and their business target is to capitalize on it. It’s Murdoch’s business model.

The problem is that he takes sources which weren’t of that style and slowly pushes them in that direction. The History Channel slowly morphs from presenting history documentaries to showing fictional documentaties about the history of alien contact with humanity. Fox news goes from giving the news that’s more meaningful to Republicans to giving imaginary news about pedophilic networks among the Illuminati.

If you’re someone inattentive, you end up like the frog in the pot. The things that you watch to keep you informed about the world just ever so slowly, ever so slowly transform into fantasy television, and you don’t realize that you’re living in a world of manufactured nonsense.

It’s hard for people to accept that they’ve been punked. They married a gaslighter and let him run rampant over their mind. Now they have to admit that they should have known better.

806

The sad thing is that they don’t have to admit it, and usually won’t.

807

That’s typical Nirvana Fallacy, so popular among antivaxers. Partial effectiveness is equated to uselessness. Though Sam gets points for conceding the Covid vaccines have successfully prevented severe disease and death.

808

Agile anti-vaxer vaccine questioning!

809

The problem is that it isn’t just a random selection of fake news. It’s fake news that matches the reality that the views want to believe is true. When I think of gas lighting I think of trying to convince someone to doubt their perceptions of reality despite the evidence. This is sort of the reverse. It’s reinforcing their perceptions of reality despite the evidence. It probably more akin to a daily affirmation tape.

“You are a good person!”, “You are smarter than everyone else!” , “Anything bad that happens to you is not your fault!”, “The world is in danger and only you can save it!”

Its hard to get them to admit they’ve been punked because they want to be punked. They have to do more than admit that they should have known better they also have to accept that they live in a much shittier reality than they had thought, and are much shittier people than they had thought. Good luck with that.

810

Most modern Republican fan-fiction is contrary to Republican thought. Presuming that people signed on, originally, because they agreed with the ideas then the current outcome doesn’t make sense. It’s like you tell people, “Here’s the land for gay people.” Let everyone who wants to, migrate in, and then you come back fifty years later and the top cinematic seller is straight porn. It’s not the result that you would have any realistic expectation of encountering. Something less obvious happened; e.g., people who wanted to support gay people moved in with the gay people and outnumbered them.

In the case of the Republican party, I think that there’s two issues going on.

  1. Human nature.
  2. Communism and deceit.

On the side of UFOs, conspiracy theories, etc. the issue is simply that your average person is into that and your average person really isn’t into politics and philosophical debate. Most people are in the party that they’re in because it’s what the people around them said they should do.

This is just Murdoch and the like looking to make money and isn’t particularly “political”. Tabloid news is for the average joe, not for anyone of any particular politics. Anti-vaccine (to my understanding) mostly started on the left; JFK assassination theories and moon landing denialism mostly started on the left; “Bat Boy Lives” was originated in a newspaper made by and for New Yorkers and LA types; Joe Rogan is a lefty; and so on. Stupidity isn’t political, it’s just the average joe and it makes money.

The other side of things (I theorize) starts with Communism and its push for atheism. Traditionally, the Democratic party was aligned with socialist policy but it was also full of fundamentalists in the South. Once socialism became associated with atheism, that created a negative force for fundies in the Democratic party. Nixon saw that and used racist rhetoric to create a positive force for those same groups. He didn’t really sell them on Republican values.

This flooded the Republican party with people who, at the end of the day, aren’t Republicans. It’s a bunch of people who are still angry that the Republicans forced them to end slavery, promoted black politicians in the South after the Civil War, ended the spoils system, locked up the KKK, created the FDA and the asylum program.

Fox News has gone from being Republican to being news for the group of people that left the Democratic party in the 70s.

Personally, I don’t want them if they’re not willing to become real Republicans and, minus their participation, the Democratic party has run screaming away from them and became so far removed that it’s probably impossible to get the two back together again.

But, in history, the Democrats were able to wrangle them under the control of more reasonable sorts like Roosevelt and Carter. They were reasonably well behaved under Reagan and HW Bush. It’s just a matter of getting them subdued again.

But if I was @Sam_Stone, I’d be keeping my eye on the ball. If you want to be a Republican (or the Canadian equivalent) then you need to be that. Letting the idiots drag you down just makes you into an idiot along with them.

811

Um, thanks for the history lesson. If you want to call the bigoted base of the modern Republican party Dixiecrats instead of Republicans, knock yourself out I guess. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to Fox News which was founded in 1996, some 25 years after the Southern strategy and so was from the beginning pandering to this base element by conforming its picture of reality to what they want to believe.

I was mostly agreeing with your post, and was just pointing out that changing minds is going to be even harder than you suggested. In any case this is a hijack from the pitting of Sam and should probably be continued in another thread if at all.

812

Shhhhh! You want the ghost of Harlan Ellison to sue you? The man may be dead, but he never was one to let a little inconvenience slow him down!

Also, the idea reminds me of “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” by Jorge Luis Borgias.

813

His bullshit in the “Judge limits Biden Administration Contact with Social Media Firms” thread is next fuckin level. @Lance_Turbo calls him out on it unambiguously. So what does @Sam_Stone do? He apologizes and promises to do better next time.

KIDDING!

He leaves the thread and goes off to shit in the Elon Musk pit thread instead and snipe about people calling him a liar.

I used to double-check all Sam’s cites, because I knew he wouldn’t read them and probably wouldn’t represent them accurately. But we’re beyond that now: there’s no use in checking his cites, because the distance between such reckless disregard for facts and outright lying is nonexistent.

At this point, when he posts his long and articulate arguments, I just assume he’s lying and move on.

814

You missed the best part! He snidely comments that he guesses I didn’t read his link (I didn’t, since I’ve long come to the same conclusion as you regarding his cites) only to have it immediately brought to his attention that he didn’t either because surprise, surprise it doesn’t actually say what he claimed it said.

Then follows up with trying to bullshit his way out of a thoroughly unreasonable conclusion he made by stating that he never said it he thought what he wrote was reasonable, it’s the readers fault for expecting him to consider what he wrote to be reasonable.

815

Same same, mostly. In music and non-political/Musk threads, I think he’s a good poster. I’ll read them in the appropriate topic.

816

817

Also supposedly didn’t “see anyone else’s posts” telling him his original claim was wrong, so that he is able to admit he is wrong without making the far more serious admission that someone else is right.

818

Ah, the Fox News defense. How appropriate!

819

He continues to post absolute nonsense in that same thread–ignoring the fact that his previous nonsense was refuted.

He is a bullshit machine.

820

Yeah, the stuff in social media ruling thread is really execrable.