I’ll chime in and say that I’ve had my fair share of issues with Stranger over the years and if I were Chronos, I would be tempted to get equally snippy at his stream of bullshit that I constantly see him posting.
His problem is that he’s addicted to the feeling of being an expert and will blithely insert whatever made up nonsense claims make sense in the moment under the fairly confident belief that it’s likely there isn’t someone with specialized enough knowledge to counter specific claims. This would be fine when, if called upon, he treats it as a learning opportunity and acknowledges his layman status and retracts his claims except I almost never see him do this, instead, he tries to bluff and blunder his way through in the hopes that people will not realize how shaky his initial foundations in the subject are.
Two instances I was able to dredge up from my interactions with him:
1, In a thread about China/Taiwan cross-strait conflict:
He casually drops this amongst a dense thicket where he loves to pretend he’s an expert on the issue
I agree that Taiwan let military readiness fall into a poor state in the late-‘Nineties and beginning of the 2000s because the rhetoric about PRC ‘reunification’ became just kind of a background noise but what I’ve seen of readiness estimates in the last ten years shows substantial improvement.
Luckily, I’d been engaged in several debates on reddit on this exact topic and had generated my own home-grown copy-pasta of links which I was able to drop with minimal editing here. I want to emphasize again for the people who might not be super familiar with the topic just how much of a “tell” this is that you’re dealing with a pseudo-expert. It’s as outrageous as someone casually writing “I remember reading in a report somewhere that America has some of the best public transit in the world”. Like, no, you definitely didn’t read anything in any report, you’re just casually making things up and so unfamiliar with the topic you don’t even realize how egregiously you got something wrong. He never returned to address that allegation in that thread but I still see him confidently posting reams in other cross-strait topics on the dope and I just roll my eyes with how many things he gets subtly or obviously wrong. I want to emphasize though that, were it not for the lucky co-incidence of me already having a rebuttal ready to paste in, I don’t think I would have spent the effort to bother countering his ridiculous statement.
2, In a thread about Vaccine timing of the second dose
He drops this absolutely garbled, plausible sounding but completely wrong causal mechanism of how vaccines interact with the immune system:
We know from other vaccines that require boosters that delaying the booster shot significantly results in dramatically lowered long term immunogenicity; essentially, if the ‘virus’ (in the case of a vaccine, the antigen surrogate epitope) doesn’t hang around very long, the immune system ‘assumes’ that it wasn’t a real threat and doesn’t develop long term response in order to prevent allergic response to what could just be a harmless protein.
In this case, when correctly called out on it by FigNorton, his response was:
My cite is any immunology textbook written in the last couple of decades. These are not novel insights; it is basic knowledge in the field.
Which, again, is definitely false because that’s not how vaccines work and no textbook would tell you that’s how vaccines work. He just made up something that sounds plausible on the surface and is trying to bluster his way around admitting he’s just making shit up.
I come in and do what should be done in a real debate and provide real cites to real data which shows that vaccines simply do not work the way he claims they do and lengthening doses are associated with more efficacy, not less in at least two extremely well studied vaccines.
He then attempts to quadruple down on the double down with this statement:
However, it is not true that all vaccines have equal or better efficacy with a longer interval between the initial vaccination and a booster. The trivalent oral polio vaccine in particular has a quantifiable reduction in effectiveness if the booster schedule is significantly delayed. This is for an interval exceeding four years, but the point remains
Which I point out is clearly an attempt at him finding whatever scrap of a cite he can to try and preserve a fig leaf of legitimacy but it’s plainly obvious he was grasping for cites in the moment because the only cite he found was one from 1978 and only showed a booster efficacy drop after 4 years, as he even pointed out himself. If this was a claim found in “every immunology textbook” and is “basic knowledge of the field”, then surely he has plenty of cites that are way higher quality than the one he provides but he can’t because he’s not the expert he’s claiming to be and he’s just making random shit up.
I cannot emphasize just how it exhausting it is dealing with confabulists where you just want to pin them down on a basic lie they told and they just keep on twisting and spinning and throwing more bullshit at you because they have no shame.
I’m not paid to post here and I can’t be paid enough to deal with anyone with a known history of doubling down on their lies. I still have scars from the Blake days where I recall him confidently asserting that washing a chicken under tap water would increase the bacterial load on the chicken and that cats definitely couldn’t jump on top of a 1m fence purely from the ground and anyone who had observed it happening were under an optical illusion where they were invisibly grasping the fence halfway up. So I’m 100% on Chronos’ side here where, in an ideal world, we should be professional courteous to everyone we deal with for ourselves more than for others, but when faced with someone so fucking annoying, it’s perfectly natural to let the mask slip.