Thatâs all well and good, but how do we turn that into pain, misery and fear for the people responsible?
Let me put it another way, if thereâs a sociopathic asshole driving around in the woods with twenty cans of gasoline setting fires every couple of miles youâre going to solve the problem a lot faster with a .45 than a bucket of water.
Rebuttal arguments have been shown over and over not to work. Once those types of people hear something, they never ever change their mind.
Itâs important to point out that many of the anti-GMO people and antivaxxers are the same people.
If you read Deutsch on the âas ifâ personality or Jacobson on the âJudasâ type, they describe people that join one political activist group after another without accomplishing anything. Iâve recently realized that these are âcharacterologicalâ issues in which it is impossible to get people articulate their beliefs, plans, and goals because they simply donât exist in a coherent enough form to be articulated, not even as nonsense. Thatâs why it comes of as some sort of extreme trolling. You will find many of these people are also gun control zealots, which is fine, except for their utter uselessness. Does calling all gun owners âracistâ move the ball even an inch down the field? Is that what weâd call a âplan?â Nope, but it does allow someone to be a sort of a Judas in the movement that they supposedly support.
A good example of these characterological conditions is hoarding - itâs a mental condition that comes without conscious thought. If you grill them on what they are doing and even the possibility that they will make themselves homeless, they may respond with nothing but a blank look and surliness.
I know anti-vax people who changed their minds, ditto a few homeopaths. There are also mainstream news stories about the same thing: anti-vax family threatened by local outbreak, gets vaccinated; close relative dies of fraudulent woo treatments, rest of family revolts against the nonsense.
The confounding issue is time; if you can get a rough grasp of another personâs narrative identity and craft an argument which takes it into account, your persuasiveness increases a helluva lot. Thatâs doable onesies-twosies, assuming interlocutors with good faith, but herd mentalities arenât as directly tractable.
Thatâs why I donât envy politicians or cat-herders generally. With pressing public health concerns like this, the only viable option I can see is direct coercion (either mandatory vaccination or quarantine-like relocation). Thatâll sit well with people who also seem to obsess over government overreach and corporate influence.
@doctorow @Falcor Title reads âPlannet Parenthoodâ, which sounds like an interesting spot, I guess.
Wait. Can we change these yet?
Well you and I can change the BBS title but then it gets changed out of the Boing category which we canât post to. The links and all the other stuff still works.
Thanks, suspected I might cause more problems than I solved.
Will wait on the friendly, neighbourhood dragon.
⌠as I was saying about comparing it to hoarding. Each random belief is like one more piece of precious trash added to the hoarder pile.
Those type of people (like my uncle) hold the worst types of grudges, especially if itâs something they had nothing to do with. Example: Jane Fonda, no matter how many time you could show him (or older conservatives) things about how she didnât stab American soldiers in the eye with sticks of shit covered bamboo he would just brush it off or get angry. They just hear what confirms their beliefs and thatâs it.
I actually heard somebody make a crack yesterday about Ted Kennedy, speaking of grudges.
Uhhh, citation please?
While not explicitly anti-GMO, a SciAm editorial calls attention to the fact that seed companies prevent free and open research. âAnd perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.â
I doubt very much that Scientific Americanâs editors are anti-vaxxers.
Iâm not willing to tie my horse to Monsantoâs (Prosilac, for one), DuPontâs (Teflon and C8), and Syngentaâs (Indian rice) wagons. Itâs a reasonable heuristic to start by noting the fact that these companiesâ Prime Directive is to make money, not to better the world, and then proceed from there.
The Planned Parenthood video is hurting pro-choice a LOT. You can show how the editing was done a certain way (not even in a clever way, but in a rough, obvious way), how the facts about Planned Parenthood and abortion donât line up to what was presented in the video or the conversations it has stirred up, and it wonât matter.
The video confirmed the biases that the so-called pro-life moment has held for a long time and heaped a little more dung onto the pile to boot. Thereâs not much we can do to convince people that it was a hoax because it just so perfectly matches what they want to believe.
You can make all reasonable sense you want with measured, factual information, but unfortunately, at the end of the day conspiracy theorists, trolls, and ideological commentators are like:
It takes the energy, persistence and volume of trolls to beat trolls. something something become the monsterâŚ
Theyâd rather believe a lie than accept that they said shameful things for thirtysomething years.
âNot explicitly anti-GMOâ is an very important phrase there. There is a lot to be concerned about regarding the way in which we do genetic modifications, mostly surrounding copyrighting of gene sequences and of research into their effects. We can recognize that without thinking that genetic modification itself is a monstrosity.
Iâd be very against genetically modified carrots that have added genes to make them deadly poison showing up in my supermarket, but Iâm not anti-GMO.
Hi!
Sounds like the babies-in-the-river story, but with violence.
Yes, we need to get to the source of the problem, not just deal with the consequences after the fact. Using a gun to âsolveâ a problem is a very emotional response, however.
The article notes
." What you find is that thereâs a benefit for the catfisher/hoaxer in there somewhere. According to G. Gordon Liddy, one of the men involved in Watergate, we should always âfollow the money.
Traditionally, thatâs Deep Throatâs line. Though it was probably invented for the movie.
Iâm always a little confused by the âbig money vaccinesâ argument. Vaccines are something all kids have to have for school unless you go out of your way to get exempted (from school or from vaccines), so theyâre offered free at clinics. I didnât pay for half my childâs vaccines due to a lack of insurance at a critical time. I even got her the optional vaccines; Iâm a rubella baby, my kid is getting all the shots.
So âBig Pharmaâ is not getting all this âbig vaccine moneyâ from me, and if theyâre getting it directly from the government thatâs not going to change because Suzy down the street doesnât vaccinate her kids.
Yeah, this one baffles me. If vaccines were big bucks why doesnât big pharma put their research money into developing new ones? The real âconspiracyâ (if you want to call it that, itâs happening in plain sight) is that we arenât developing new vaccines, but rather big pharma develops maintenance drugs. They want you to take a pill every day for the rest of your life, not get two shots when you are three and never have to pay them again.
I always want to yell, âPlease! Big Pharma is corrupt and our reliance on them is endangering our health, but try to understand how and why!â
