Congratulations, man. I used to respect you. You’re a close friend of my father’s, you’ve known me since I was a toddler, and I used to look up to you. I used to think you were a pretty cool guy, that you were wise, in a cynical, world-weary kinda way. Turns out that “wisdom” is pretty much just anti-government insanity with a bullshit filter that could not be more fucked up if you imported it from bizarro world.
I mean, I knew you were a kook. JFK assassination, 9/11, what have you. That’s okay. Most of my dad’s group of friends (including him) are. They’re wrong, of course, and their methodology is terrible, but hey - it’s not a huge deal. But then you started emailing me about climatology. Just out of the blue, linking me to an article and saying, “what do you think about that”. Not just any articles, though. Really, really, really bad articles. Not even WUWT quality, which is somewhat believable bullshit. But this kind of crap. And then you find it odd when I reject it for having no source and an incredibly faulty argument. But okay, whatever. Then you send me this. And when I tell you what I think of it (god, what a load of crap, in not quite that many words), you accuse me of being dismissive of anything not published by the mainstream CONspiracy media (I didn’t even ask why you wrote it like that, because the answer was probably so mind-numbingly stupid as to not be worth my time), and start attacking my choice of words. You know I don’t believe in god, and you find it bizarre that I’d use “for the love of god” or “for christ’s sake” or “god dammit”. You know, not like those phrases are used frequently throughout the english language by people, regardless of their belief in god.
And I was annoyed by all of it. Flipping the burden of proof by saying things like “Do you really believe no nation has an atmospheric geoengineering project?”, dismissing sources out of hand, asserting “all of this can be rejected out of deduction alone” without actually showing your work (not that it mattered, I’d rather not look at what sort of bizarre, convoluted logic you presented), your blather about the church of the subgenius which I literally could not give less of a shit about… And I made that opinion clear. I grew tired of the crap, of posting legitimate, reliable sources, and having you in essence claim that anything that you could play “6 degrees of separation” to link to any corporate or government entity was tainted and part of “the CONspiracy”. And then came the straw the broke the camel’s back.
That’s all I could handle. I wrote back quite tersely, asking if he seriously believed there was no link between HIV and AIDS. His response?
As a bisexual man, this is something of a touchy subject for me. You know, the whole “AIDS kills people” thing is kind of a big deal. So I responded yet again, offering to show with legitimate sources that everything in that email was wrong, but only if he dropped the spurious claims of unreliability, ridiculous deflections, and outright denial, silently promising myself that if he took nothing from this, I would give up. He challenged me to do so. So I did. In no uncertain terms, I took every single claim there and debunked it with legitimate and worthwhile sources, citing peer-reviewed literature at every turn. And the response?
“I yam going to take a page from your book and impeach as not credible (as you do Duesberg et al.) any information derived from corporate/government sources; I suspect you pulled all those URLs exclusively from a CDC aligned site.”
I had dropped a throwaway comment on how Duesburg is essentially a lunatic. He spoke shortly about how the uncertainty in the papers (read: the standard scientific uncertainty researchers are required to have regardless of how solid their evidence showed them wrong, completely misinterpreted the data on one paper, and then launched into a long diatribe on how odd he found my word choice.
This is the last email I will ever send this person not specifically related to business.
Dude, I used to respect you. What the hell happened to you? When did you lose your mind? 
This may sound childish, but dammit, I’m mad. I’m mad at myself for wasting so much time talking to this guy, I’m mad at him for giving mutual friends (including my family) absolutely horrible advice over the years, and I’m mad at him for proving to me that I am a lousy judge of character. Ugh. Just ugh.
