Breitbart News: Zika is a conspiracy, DDT is the answer.

Great Debates
1

Since this is going in the Great Debates forum…
The topic of my debate is: Where does the Stupid come from in America? I think it comes from Breitbart.

I thought maybe the wide spread ignorance spewing forth from Trump voters was coming from some contaminant like lead in the water, or the educational system, or incest and inbreeding in poor southern states, but now I think it is Breitbart News.

In this Breitbart article http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/09/massive-study-casts-doubt-zika-cause-microcephaly/ they prove that Zika doesn’t cause birth defects.

[INDENT]Breitbart News: Preliminary results published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) found that of nearly 12,000 pregnant women from Columbia who were infected with the Zika virus, none gave birth to babies with microcephaly.
[/INDENT]

What does cause birth defects accordng to Breitbart? The insecticide they (the global elites lead by Obama) are currently spraying in Florida to combat the mosquitos.

[INDENT]
Breitbart News: Physicians in Argentina and Brazil have warned that the birth defects might instead be caused by pre-natal exposure to the larvicide pyriproxyfen, which has been used to control the breeding of mosquitos since late 2014, just prior to the spread of Zika.
As Life Issues Institute observes:
[/QUOTE]

[/INDENT]

So why are the “democtrat global elites” spraying insecticide on purpose to cause women to have birth defects? The answer is so obvious, they want to fund Planned Parenthood and send people door to door to talk pregnant women into killing their unborn babies, because… I don’t know…because democrats hate babies?

[INDENT]Breitbart News: Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry were quick to insert themselves into the medical crisis because they’re absolutely desperate to link abortion to any perceived common good and they thought the Zika virus was their ride to glory. As a result, they’ve been advocating abortion for at-risk pregnant women. Planned Parenthood even hired canvassers to go door-to-door in Miami.

[/INDENT]

What is the answer to dealing with the Zika outbreak according to Breitbart. Simple, use a different insecticide that doesn’t cause birth defects. And what should that insecticide be? DDT of course! Because the whole anti-DDT thing was a left wing conspiracy too!

[INDENT]Breitbart News: Pioneer Energy president, Dr. Robert Zubrin, recently echoed the same view at National Review, observing that a massive propaganda campaign against DDT was helped significantly by Rachel Carson, who wrote in her 1962 book Silent Spring that the pesticide was endangering bird populations:

“The most effective pesticide is DDT,” Zubrin asserted. “If the Zika catastrophe is to be prevented in time, we need to use it.”
[/QUOTE]
[/INDENT]

I see Breitbart rheteric everywhere. I see people using Breitbart as their source to prove: why Hillary should not be president, why global warming is a hoax, and why the New York Times is not a credible source.

Straight Dope’s mission statement is "fighting Ignorance since 1973: It took longer than we thought— that’s at least in part because of Breitbart.

I actually went into a Breitbart comments section and tried to combat the ignorance by posting a quote from the New England Journal of Medicine that does report finding that Zika causes birth defects. Surprise! My comment was deleted.

Is their anyway to combat the ignorance spewing forth from Breitbart?

2

Vote Hillary. Make sure your kids get a good education. Lead a good life as an example to others.

3

The stupid from Breitbart really burns, and the worst thing is that Trump is following that rotten source of information.

More serious sources already looked at that study:

4

Though prominent, Breitbart is by no means the primary source of online lunatic right wing rhetoric. There’s also The Drudge Report. Or Infowars. If I typed out what Alex Jones actually believes it would sound like a bad parody. If you go further down the alt-right rabbit hole you end up in places like The Right Stuff or The Daily Stormer. There’s the red pill / manosphere community. Also dark enlightenment / neo-reaction. Whatever libertarian or ancap cult Molyneux is trying to build. I think 4chan’s /pol/ is the most popular white nationalist board, as well as being a meme factory (e.g. cuck, dindu) and the muscle behind Trump’s online presence, whether it’s flooding polls or organizing Twitter trolling campaigns. Don’t forget various Reddit subs and endless Youtube personalities and who knows how many random blogs.

Earlier, some of this was mainstreamed by Fox News (which is too liberal and establishment for them nowadays), and also conservative radio, like Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, Ingraham, Beck, etc. Before that, television evangelists and the Jon Birch society. One could probably trace the paranoia all the way back to the first red scare.

5

Statistically, some percentage of the population is always going to be stupid.

The solution, in my opinion, is stop being polite to people pushing stupid ideas out of fears of being called a polarizing elitist. This is especially true when the stupid ideas are anti-science but stupid generalities like, “both sides are equally to blame” should also be stomped down like forest fires.

6

I think it’s curious that none of the job offerings from Breitbart News requires a High School diploma, or a driver’s license … so we have the senior editor staff composed of 14-year-olds?

7

That’s Hilarious, and I did not know that there was job offerings on Breitbart. I haven’t ever studied it that closely. But, I know I have been in online forum debates where people are getting all their information from there and sadly, I can tell they are over 40 because they will say something like they remember Reagan, Carter, Nixon etc… And they have lived that long on this earth and they believe Zika and DDT are conspiracy theories made up by the lizard people.

8

Well, there were several openings a few months back…

http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/breitbart-staffers-resign-jordan-schachtel-jarrett-stepman-220730

[QUOTE=Stepman]
“I believe the integrity of Breitbart News, my own personal integrity, and the legacy of Andrew Breitbart are at stake, which is why I had to resign,” he continued.
[/QUOTE]

Integrity? You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means…

9

The zika-hoax-larvacide-actually-causes-microcephaly meme has been around awhile, and has been peddled by people across the political spectrum - notably by anti-GMOers (who often have left-wing views), as described in this article.

10

Bryan, you Canuckistani asshole, you probably know I love every word you type but won’t admit it because that would sound gay.

dropzone, born in the Peoples Republic of Minnesota, or Ontario’s southern suburb.

11

Jesus H. Christ, the topic here is that Brietbart is, as usual, totally making shit up in the most grossly reckless manner imaginable, throwing public safety out the window to promote their usual criminally reckless excuse for sensationalistic “journalism” that destroys the lives of newborns before they even come into this world and promulgates unimaginable suffering for everyone involved.

That’s the issue here. Nice job trying to use some hearsay from some crackpot quoted in the article to try to make a connection between Brietbart’s criminally reckless claims about an alleged connection between pyriproxyfen and microcephaly with scientifically supportable prudence governing responsible regulation of GMO technologies. :rolleyes: This is exactly the kind of false-equivalence crap that Brietbart is always trying to pull.

12

That’s not a very worthwhile thing to notice: A job for a research scientist in a big city wouldn’t require a high school diploma or a driver’s license, either: It would require a graduate degree, and people in big cities tend to take mass transit or bike to the exclusion of driving.

Seriously, how many jobs are there which require driver’s licenses, other than the obvious? Is it your employer’s business how you get to and from work?

13

So does Breitbart require, say, a graduate degree in journalism instead?

If they did require actual journalism qualifications, how many applicants do you think a backwater dirtbag operation like Breitbart would get?

I looked at some of the job postings knowing what I’d find, and they all basically hint that what they’re looking for is someone willing to write the kind of trash that their readers eat up. Qualifications for “Senior Editor”? Must be a “news junkie” and – my favorite part – must have “mastery of grammar”. This requirement actually continues down through most of the jobs. How many real jobs in journalism essentially say “must be able to write English without making a fool of himself”? The only one that doesn’t say that is a job for an intern, which says – and I’m not making this up – that the applicant must be able to write.

Translation: Our senior editorial staff must be able to write a complete sentence without making an ass of themselves like most of our readers and online commenters are always doing. Our more junior staff must be able to use a pencil without stabbing themselves in the eye.

Yes, these are the standards of journalistic excellence of the Breitbart that we know and love. This is why their journalism is always so credible. :smiley:

14

wolfpup: Journalism was one of the last fields where apprenticeships were a reasonable way to come up. Back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, I was in journalism. I had a weekly opinion column and one summer I interned as a copy editor, both at the real newspaper in my town. I know, but back in the day, my experience would have been the first step. I would have proven myself doing that, then got assigned an actual beat by the editor, and then worked my way up to a state of extreme poverty, because journalism has never paid well.

I know, Breitbart isn’t real journalism, but learning while doing and proving yourself on the job used to mean something. It used to mean you’d have a tough time getting a job outside of one field, but you can say the same thing for any number of Bachelor’s degrees these days, too.

15

No I think he is exactly correct, and remembering your performance of the constant goal shifting in this thread it is entirely useful to point out that the Left and the Right have the sub-sets which adhere to this kind of panic-mongering and conspiracy mongering. For the Left it is the scaremonger of Big X companies. For the Right in the USA it is particularly about the Government.

the cross fertilization of the conspiracies from the extremes of the Left to the Right is interesting.

16

Is this the “crackpot” you’re referring to, or is any media source that debunks the blame-gmos-monsanto-for-microcephaly meme “crackpot” in your view? Do you think that it was prudent for this anti-GMO group to leap on the larvacide bandwagon?

Pointing fingers at the larvacide, or at genetically modified mosquitoes is not “scientifically supportable prudence”, it’s nuttery, whether it’s Breitbart or the anti-GMO crowd (note that research published since these articles appeared has substantially strengthened the Zika-microcephaly link).

17

DDT isn’t the answer; that would imply that modern pesticides are in wide use and have been somehow been found wanting, which as far as I’m aware is not the case at all.

For whatever reason, modern day city and county governments are extremely reticent to order comprehensive insecticide spraying these days. For example, back a few years ago when Dallas was having the big West Nile epidemic, they only ordered aerial spraying a time or two. And the fogging trucks weren’t making nightly laps of affected areas either.

For the most part, as someone living in the midst of the most affected area, it didn’t seem like they did much at all except put out signs saying to wear insect repellent. DDT wouldn’t have done a damn thing when they were hardly using insecticides in the first place.

18

Gotta agree with bump, calling for bringing out the DDT every time there’s an insect vector problem seems to presume that (1) anything else would not work or has been tried and failed and/or (2) that it’s the Wonder Plaguicide that can take out any vector any time anywhere.

(and (3) damn them dirty hippies for ruining everything with their lies.)

That said, you DO have to first try conventional public health vector control measures (to lessen the spread of mosquitos), AND then use plaguicides when/where needed: you can’t rely solely on the foggers or aerial dusters to solve the issue with no participation by the public.

19

And this is exactly what I mean. You’ve just done it again, as that was totally not the context in which I used that phrase, and I’ve unreservedly condemned everything in that lunatic Breitbart article, but I guess anything goes as long as you can demonize your critics by trying to associate them with it.

Breitbart are a bunch of far-right idiots and conspiracy theorists who are being grossly irresponsible in making these claims. If you look hard enough you can find a few crackpot environmentalists who believe the same nonsense. If you keep looking you might find an anti-GMO group who does, too, as indeed you just did. So what? It’s dangerous and irresponsible to try to group all these myriad different factions together and try to demonize them all as equivalent. And don’t forget to compare them all to anti-vaxers and climate change deniers. It’s ridiculous and counterproductive to make these kinds of broad-brush guilt-by-association smears; it doesn’t do anything to move the conversation forward, but instead, it’s the kind of preemptive well-poisoning that makes rational discourse more difficult. That’s not science, it’s politics of the worst kind.

I don’t give a crap about Breitbart except to hope that they vanish off the face of the earth. Nor do I particularly have a problem in principle with GMOs and biotechnologies, which wasn’t even being discussed here until you dragged it into the conversation for no apparent reason. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the support of policies governing food and environmental safety, including proper and prudent safeguards over the products that affect these things and the responsible regulation of the companies that produce them. These are entirely different topics.

And yes, a rational discussion of such a topic might touch on someone’s sacred cow like the safety of a specific pesticide, or a particular biotechnology, or the need for transparency and regulation of a particular industry. These are all potentially important public policy discussions with important consequences. Not everyone concerned with food and environmental safety is a crackpot. Stop trying to poison the well.

20

It’s true that DDT is not as evil as thought. Used carefully and with controls, it can be a good addition to the anti-mosquito arsenal.

The problem was, here in America, it was NOT used carefully or with controls.

And you cant let farmers make that decision. Generally they dont give a fuck if they can be convinced they can make more money.