His last idiocy was basically, "if only I hadn't been wrong, I'd be right, and the idiots who were right would be wrong, and then we wouldn't tolerate them having been wrong."
If I'm being charitable, I think what he meant to say was that by not taking the vaccine, we were gambling on the virus's lethality and just happened to get it right, and if we hadn't, we'd be feeling pretty stupid. It's like saying "just because you won that game of roulette doesn't mean betting your life savings was a good idea". Which would be a fair argument if it wasn't based on a bad assumption.
My decision wasn't based on luck. I knew that COVID presented virtually no risk to me. I ran the numbers myself, over and over. It's not like calculating a percentage is difficult. Even with the massively inflated death tolls, it was still less of a concern to me than simply leaving my house and subjecting myself to the dangers of living on planet Earth, and as the pandemic progressed, the danger receded even further.
He, on the other hand, trusted an untested technology with a completely unknown side effect profile simply because the establishment told him to. He exercised blind faith. And he still thinks he's the rational one here. And that is what makes him a midwit.
I still don't know where he got the idea that the non-vaccine "vaccines" were ever supposed to work. If you muted Fauci and just read what Pfizer was saying from the outset (not their mouthpieces on CNN, but the stuff they literally put in writing themselves), you knew this shit didn't work. Pfizer said from day 1 that the "vaccine" wouldn't prevent infection but "may" reduce symptoms. All the other claims came from Biden, the CDC, Fauci, the media, etc.
It was 100% because they were called "vaccines". Society has built a myth around vaccines and people believe they are "miraculous" and are always "safe and effective". People like this guy are simply have no idea why they believe that they do about vaccines, so don't ever have an invalidation point at which they will start questioning them. They will forever fool themselves but at the same time think they are correct.
This is the irony of the information age that you can be totally convinced that you're rational and correct just by curating what information you look at. The information he saw was covid had R=10, 5% fatality, the vaccines reduced deaths by 50x and only problems were mild heart disease in 1 in a million. It's totally rational to take the vaccine with that information and crazy not to.
Of course the reality was about R=2, the % fatality was case fatality of those who went to the hospital when the vast majority of didn't need to, the vaccines only helped much in a brief window after injection, and side-effects were way higher.
He's right that we're facing a social emergency. That emergency is not covid or anti-vax, it's censorship and information bubbles. It's Sam Harris and his ilk that's the social emergency.
People like him were just picking "studies" off the internet that proved what they were saying and dismissing the rest.
I was basing my decisions off population-level data from public health. Even though it was flawed (over-counting cases, etc), so long as the methods were consistent, you can still see patterns over time and demographics.
I knew (as much as is possible) that Covid wasn't dangerous to kids or adults by about July 2020 based on population data. I knew that Covid deaths were not outpacing the flu deaths they replaced. I knew that Covid was seasonal, well before they were even discussing a "vaccine". I didn't need some pharma-backed study, or a degree in statistical analysis or virology; it was as plain as the nose on my face.
Maybe I was just "lucky" but there was absolutely a reason that I (and many others) came to the correct conclusion independently while mid-wits such as Harris and Scott Adams were completely wrong; they put faith in "The Science" while we looked at reality.
He, on the other hand, trusted an untested technology with a completely unknown side effect profile simply because the establishment told him to. He exercised blind faith. And he still thinks he's the rational one here. And that is what makes him a midwit.
Exactly. He is unable to work out how he got it wrong because he is unwilling to accept that he could have been wrong in the first place. He can't accept that his opponents might have figured things out better than he did, which is evident by the argument based that it simply came down to "luck". It wasn't luck. He was wrong. Those opposed the the jab were right.
The major issue with an attitude like this is that it prevents him ever being able to improve and get better. A well-adjusted person would take this as an opportunity to learn so they don't fuck up next time, but this idiot can't do that because he's boxed himself into a corner of his own making.
He also says "we", meaning the vaccine authoritarians, were "patient" -- as if they were justified in taking even more extreme measures than what they did in firing doctors and all the other crap they did, even for Covid as it was.
He's lamenting that Covid wasn't strong enough to really tighten the iron fist around the medical dissidents. If karma exists, he should be first in line for vaccine side effects.
-Sam Harris talking about a hypothetical scenario in late 2019 where antivaxxers have to be treated as the enemy and put 'under attack'.
He couches his thinking in Popperian logical positivist talk, because on some deep level he's convinced that this shields him from pitfalls, contradictions and superstitions, and instead puts him in a comfortable position of constant logical improvement. In fact Sam falls prey to the exact blindness of logical positivism that people like Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn describe, where he runs into the dead end of his own self-serving paradigm while being unable to conceive of any other.
What Sam is blind to, and what is obvious to anyone watching him, and what makes him say such stupid things, is that he WANTS this moral emergency most of all, because then he has obtained a moral grounding which he can't find anywhere else. That's why he literally can't go 5 seconds without saying some completely stupid, unsupported thing like "we got really lucky that Covid wasn't worse than it was" and "it could have been 50x as deadly". Really?? I'm sure you have rock solid virological, immunological or epidemiological grounds for that wild statement right? The fundamental nature of viruses - which means every viral replication carries a significant chance of producing something that's not the same strain or even any strain capable of further replication - that presents NO impediment to global, lethal, infectious viral replication, does it? Despite the fact that it's well known for viruses to naturally select for infectiousness and against lethality, because on a basic level that's what's best for their propagation? Despite the fact that that throws even covid's supposed, rigged 'lethality' into doubt?
This enlightened atheist is so fucking retarded he doesn't realise there's a form of evolution denial embedded in his assertions. It's there because he needs it to be - he's incapable of examining it, because it would destroy his concept of self.
You're being generous.
His last idiocy was basically, "if only I hadn't been wrong, I'd be right, and the idiots who were right would be wrong, and then we wouldn't tolerate them having been wrong."
If I'm being charitable, I think what he meant to say was that by not taking the vaccine, we were gambling on the virus's lethality and just happened to get it right, and if we hadn't, we'd be feeling pretty stupid. It's like saying "just because you won that game of roulette doesn't mean betting your life savings was a good idea". Which would be a fair argument if it wasn't based on a bad assumption.
My decision wasn't based on luck. I knew that COVID presented virtually no risk to me. I ran the numbers myself, over and over. It's not like calculating a percentage is difficult. Even with the massively inflated death tolls, it was still less of a concern to me than simply leaving my house and subjecting myself to the dangers of living on planet Earth, and as the pandemic progressed, the danger receded even further.
He, on the other hand, trusted an untested technology with a completely unknown side effect profile simply because the establishment told him to. He exercised blind faith. And he still thinks he's the rational one here. And that is what makes him a midwit.
I still don't know where he got the idea that the non-vaccine "vaccines" were ever supposed to work. If you muted Fauci and just read what Pfizer was saying from the outset (not their mouthpieces on CNN, but the stuff they literally put in writing themselves), you knew this shit didn't work. Pfizer said from day 1 that the "vaccine" wouldn't prevent infection but "may" reduce symptoms. All the other claims came from Biden, the CDC, Fauci, the media, etc.
It was 100% because they were called "vaccines". Society has built a myth around vaccines and people believe they are "miraculous" and are always "safe and effective". People like this guy are simply have no idea why they believe that they do about vaccines, so don't ever have an invalidation point at which they will start questioning them. They will forever fool themselves but at the same time think they are correct.
This is the irony of the information age that you can be totally convinced that you're rational and correct just by curating what information you look at. The information he saw was covid had R=10, 5% fatality, the vaccines reduced deaths by 50x and only problems were mild heart disease in 1 in a million. It's totally rational to take the vaccine with that information and crazy not to.
Of course the reality was about R=2, the % fatality was case fatality of those who went to the hospital when the vast majority of didn't need to, the vaccines only helped much in a brief window after injection, and side-effects were way higher.
He's right that we're facing a social emergency. That emergency is not covid or anti-vax, it's censorship and information bubbles. It's Sam Harris and his ilk that's the social emergency.
And Scientism.
People like him were just picking "studies" off the internet that proved what they were saying and dismissing the rest.
I was basing my decisions off population-level data from public health. Even though it was flawed (over-counting cases, etc), so long as the methods were consistent, you can still see patterns over time and demographics.
I knew (as much as is possible) that Covid wasn't dangerous to kids or adults by about July 2020 based on population data. I knew that Covid deaths were not outpacing the flu deaths they replaced. I knew that Covid was seasonal, well before they were even discussing a "vaccine". I didn't need some pharma-backed study, or a degree in statistical analysis or virology; it was as plain as the nose on my face.
Maybe I was just "lucky" but there was absolutely a reason that I (and many others) came to the correct conclusion independently while mid-wits such as Harris and Scott Adams were completely wrong; they put faith in "The Science" while we looked at reality.
Exactly. He is unable to work out how he got it wrong because he is unwilling to accept that he could have been wrong in the first place. He can't accept that his opponents might have figured things out better than he did, which is evident by the argument based that it simply came down to "luck". It wasn't luck. He was wrong. Those opposed the the jab were right.
The major issue with an attitude like this is that it prevents him ever being able to improve and get better. A well-adjusted person would take this as an opportunity to learn so they don't fuck up next time, but this idiot can't do that because he's boxed himself into a corner of his own making.
He also says "we", meaning the vaccine authoritarians, were "patient" -- as if they were justified in taking even more extreme measures than what they did in firing doctors and all the other crap they did, even for Covid as it was.
He's lamenting that Covid wasn't strong enough to really tighten the iron fist around the medical dissidents. If karma exists, he should be first in line for vaccine side effects.
-Sam Harris talking about a hypothetical scenario in late 2019 where antivaxxers have to be treated as the enemy and put 'under attack'.
He couches his thinking in Popperian logical positivist talk, because on some deep level he's convinced that this shields him from pitfalls, contradictions and superstitions, and instead puts him in a comfortable position of constant logical improvement. In fact Sam falls prey to the exact blindness of logical positivism that people like Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn describe, where he runs into the dead end of his own self-serving paradigm while being unable to conceive of any other.
What Sam is blind to, and what is obvious to anyone watching him, and what makes him say such stupid things, is that he WANTS this moral emergency most of all, because then he has obtained a moral grounding which he can't find anywhere else. That's why he literally can't go 5 seconds without saying some completely stupid, unsupported thing like "we got really lucky that Covid wasn't worse than it was" and "it could have been 50x as deadly". Really?? I'm sure you have rock solid virological, immunological or epidemiological grounds for that wild statement right? The fundamental nature of viruses - which means every viral replication carries a significant chance of producing something that's not the same strain or even any strain capable of further replication - that presents NO impediment to global, lethal, infectious viral replication, does it? Despite the fact that it's well known for viruses to naturally select for infectiousness and against lethality, because on a basic level that's what's best for their propagation? Despite the fact that that throws even covid's supposed, rigged 'lethality' into doubt?
This enlightened atheist is so fucking retarded he doesn't realise there's a form of evolution denial embedded in his assertions. It's there because he needs it to be - he's incapable of examining it, because it would destroy his concept of self.