“Anthony Fauci Was Right Way”.
Might as well really rub his nose in it.
I am absolutely gobsmacked. I’ve never heard this before. I am in awe. Sagan had it 100% correct.
I don’t have to understand the chemistry involved in creating Atorvastatin, I trust the men of science have created and tested properly. I question if it is removing the cause of heart disease or just lessening a symptom of something else, but the net effect is that it works at lowering cholesterol, which is a net positive. I can question the AMA’s decision to lower the “acceptable” levels, (is it truly for the general health of the population, or is it to keep people going to their physician more often?), but I know that the science is there and that it serves a purpose.
Carl Sagan died in 1996 - well before “the web” became “THE WEB”; well before social media. That “celebration of ignorance” line just hits home so freakin’ hard.
I did put “logical” in quotes, after all. But yeah, it’s almost a sort of “exception proves the rule” sort of mentality on their part. If they can dream up a plausible (to them) way that it could have gone down, then they view that as proof that it happened that way, because it’s not coincidence at that point or something.
But yeah, to anyone sane, it’s almost the exact opposite- a chain of highly implausible or coincidental events that makes the person look crazy, not like they figured something out.
“What a surprise!
The look of terminal shock in your eyes!
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream.”
Yeah, you’re right. I suppose what I meant was that I don’t think they are bad people, they just out of their depth.
Yes, the lie that ‘it’s all simple’ is emotionally appealing to those who prefer a life lived without effort. It requires no work. All you have to do is accept what the conspiracy-monger tells you.
These conspiracy theories always contain flattery of the target believers: ‘only YOU are smart enough to see that the world is simple and only YOU are smart enough to reject the “experts” who tell you that the world is complex.’
Humans crave flattery, and con artists/conspiracy theorists always include a heaping helping of self-serving delusion in every ‘only WE know the truth of it!’ message.
It also helps that most of the professional conspiracy mongers will also validate just about any stupid idea one of their fans comes up with, so no matter how stupid a person is, they feel like they’re “contributing”.
A couple of times in the moderately distant past I was sufficiently bored to join anti-vax facebook groups and post increasingly crazy anti-vax shit to see how far I could go before they finally began to doubt what I was saying. When they finally reached that point, I admitted I had been making stuff up all along, and pointed out that they had largely believed me, and that there was no more evidence for their core beliefs than the nonsense I had been making up.
At that point I was insta-banned and all my posts deleted, because cognitive dissonance is a bitch.
You can go a long, long way, down the path of getting people to believe crazy shit if you write as One of Them and a True Believer.
This is not by any means an original pastime - I got the idea from Illuminatus!
Yup, Sagan nailed it, but the horrifying slide into a new Dark Age we find ourselves tumbling down was essentially foreseen way back in 1985 in Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”
Postman’s thesis addresses the deleterious effect of television, it’s true, since he wrote the book before social media took over dominance of our culture, but it seems clear that TV helped to lay the groundwork for what we contend with now.
Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and “talking hairdos” bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to “sell” lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate’s ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase “now this”, which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication , instead of the traditional “the end”.
Postman refers to the inability to act upon much of the so-called information from televised sources as the information-action ratio. He contends that “television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing”.
Now this! 
I was gonna link the #FauciLied twitter thread, but then I figured there’s not enough brain beach to go around.
It exists, if one’s morbidly curious enough.
Kinda risible, infuriating, disconcerting - all in one.
Furthermore, the Presidential Medal of Freedom award has been thoroughly buggered and contaminated since Trump gave one to Rush. Nobody can ever feel honored again to get this. So we need to invent a new unsullied award now because of that.
Presidential Recipient of Greatness which Dream Theatre might appreciate.
I think the root cause of heart disease is unhealthy lifestyles, namely an insufficiently physically active one along with a truly godawful diet, the latter being much more imortant than the former. But you probably knew this already but just in case someone else was wondering about it, my 2¢.
The Joseph R. Biden First Annual Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.
The Way Smarter Than Donald Trump Award.
Mind you, that’s a long list of qualified recipients.
And Asimov called it even before that.
From an essay in 1980:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Very true. And the strain of American embrace of ignorance had also been noted in 1963’s best-seller by Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. *
And both H. L. Mencken, in the early 20th century, and Mark Twain, before that, had a thing or two to say about the large portion of the population that disliked being expected to know anything and disliked even more those who did know something.
All added their own emphasis to the topic.
*from the wikipedia article on the book:
I suggest the Winning Excellence Recognizing Each Justly Earned Credit That Deserves Tribute award be handed out by all future Presidents.
short for WE REJECT DT