Category Archives: The Evidentialism Files

The Great Thinning, Pt. III (Billy & Big Earl Remix)

War Poems

One of my dad’s favorite poems, and one spotted by Earl Troglin, one of dad’s favorite people.

Opportunity

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:—
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle’s edge,
And thought, “Had I a sword of keener steel—
That blue blade that the king’s son bears,— but this
Blunt thing—!” He snapped and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king’s son, wounded sore bested,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down
And saved a great cause that heroic day.

— Edward Rowland Sill

 

The Great Thinning, Part II

And so it goes.

As the COVID-19 death toll tops 67,000 (a government statistic, so likely a conservative tally), we pass grim milestone after grim milestone. In less than two months, we’ve surpassed the body count in the Vietnam War. We have endured the human loss of a Sept. 11 attack every other day.

Yet, we’re divided as a nation over whether we have it.

Last week, The Washington Times blasted a front page headline: Coronavirus hype biggest political hoax in history. The conservative paper will surely point out that it used the word “hype” with hoax. But do we really believe today’s American reader will get the nuance?

Consider: Dozens of cell towers were set ablaze a few weeks ago after a conspiracy theory conjured that COVID was caused by 5G transmissions. According to the Pew Research group, nearly one in four believe the virus is a man-made contagion.Cell phone tower catches fire in Sanford, area evacuated | Paisajes

Which brings us to another scaling back in The Great Thinning: Our view of medicine.

Just look at the all-star roster of charlatans to emerge in the pandemic:

Dr. Awshucks put his loafer in his mouth with this proclamation: “The fact of the matter is we have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don’t shut the country down for that, but yet we’re doing it for this?”

Phil, who has no doctor’s licence, probably meant to say 3,600 pool deaths a year, which is about the national average. And you can’t catch an automobile accident.

  • Dr. Oz  False and baseless medical claims from Dr. Oz, Trump advisor ...

The perfectly-named Fox favorite said the idea of reopening schools was “an appetizing opportunity” in light of an article in a medical journal “arguing that the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality.” “We need our mojo back,” he told Sean Hannity.

Someone wants to be in a new Austin Powers movie. And what do you mean “appetizing?” Is that really the verb you want to use for schoolchildren?

  • Dr. Drew    Dr Drew (@drdrew) | Twitter

The former Celebrity Rehab host called COVID “way less serious than influenza;” referred to the pandemic  as “a press-induced panic;” said “the flu virus in this country is vastly more consequential” and compared the probability of dying from the disease to being “hit by an asteroid.”

He retracted every statement.

And then there’s Dr. Bone Spur. The Pumpkin-in-Chief has been urging states to get back to work since we began keeling over, and his administration eased stay at home orders nationwide, lifting restrictions on everything from beaches to bowling alleys this weekend.Donald Trump wearing a suit and tie: US President Donald Trump

Maybe the timing is right. Maybe the summer will shoo coronavirus.

This much is clear: Darwin will take it from here. Because we’ve turned belief in him into an ideology.

Exhibits A and B: Gary Lenius and his wife Wanda. The couple ingested chloroquine phosphate, a fish tank cleaner, thinking it was the chemical Trump had championed for weeks in the virus fight.a group of people posing for the camera: Gary Lenius and his wife Wanda

Gary, a retired mechanical engineer living in Arizona, died in March and his wife was left in critical condition after ingesting the toxic chemical. Wanda told reporters that she and her husband took a teaspoon of fish tank cleaner, mixing it with soda, hoping it would protect them from contracting the coronavirus.

“We were afraid we were getting sick,” she said. “We were getting really worried. We saw his [Trump’s] press conference. It was on a lot, actually. Trump kept saying it was pretty much a cure.”

To which the HB would like to offer this public service tip: If you are considering ingesting or injecting any cleanser or cleaning chemicals into your body to fight COVID, by all means go ahead. You will do much more damage in a voting both than you will at your own aquarium. It’s a free country; you have the right to be wrong.

As do the protesters in that top photo, who stormed the Michigan Capitol to rail against…bacteria? Empty nail salons? It’s ironic that the same group that challenges the theory of evolution is now tossing around terms like “herd immunity.”

I’m not sure who they’re going to yell at when the governor lifts the state of emergency order because, at this point, who is ready wade back into those waters? Even if we do blow up the shark, we’ve left a lot of blood in the sea. You can’t yell an economy back into action.

Which is where Darwin steps in. As many of us celebrate gathering in malls or flocking to movie theaters again, the weaker of us may die off — including those who were in no rush to re-enter the currents to begin with.

So it goes. Those are the terms of use of personhood; you either work with science, or for it.

 

 

 

Panic Porn and the Press; A Love Story

Inside Australia's COVID-19 ICU hospitals | 60 Minutes Australia ...
A buddy, Daniel Scherl, runs a wonderful website and podcast on travel. Recently, we had this correspondence about COVID-19 and media coverage:
Scott,
I just posted this on Facebook. I tagged 60 Minutes Australia and 60 minutes in it. Fuck those people. I’m tired of not speaking up.
Thought you’d enjoy. 🙂
Daniel
   I’m going to write about something that has been bothering me for a VERY long time in the hopes that ALL of you will see through the lies that are the NEWS MEDIA.
   The news used to be just the news. A newscaster would read the news to us and that’s all it was. A human being telling us what’s going on, and hopefully they were telling us the facts. Somewhere along the road, likely because of ratings and money, someone decided they needed to add flash transitions, quick cuts, animations and VERY, VERY, VERY over-dramatic music.
   Then they did an even worse thing, they began editing the stories for the “sound bytes.”
   Sound bytes are small snippets of someone else talking designed specifically to slant the story from the perspective of the storyteller, in this case, to design and craft the news very much like a movie so it tells the story THEY want to tell, not the ACTUAL TRUTH.
   They’re still somewhat careful, and they make sure that when they’re “reporting the news,” they carefully slip in words like “could, may, and might.” They use phrases like, “This could mean the worst is yet to come,” “Things may only be on a downturn,” “experts say we might be headed for a global catastrophe.”
   And they use those words FAST and slip them in so the emphasis is on the more dramatic parts of the sentences. Next time you watch the news, you’ll see it if you pay attention.
   The problem, beyond the obvious manipulations and speculations, is that it’s simply NOT THE TRUTH.
   It’s a guess. It’s a speculation CRAFTED and PRESENTED to you as if it’s the truth, and it’s done so because they think YOU ARE STUPID.
   Yes, YOU.
   The person reading this post. The news media worldwide thinks you are DUMB, and that’s why they create sensational news read to you by what are essentially actors, instead of actual journalists doing their best to present the impartial information of what is happening in the world.
   It pains me to say this as a registered Democrat, but this is why Trump is not actually completely wrong when he talks about “fake news.”
   So why am I writing about this?
   Because the people at 60 Minutes Australia released a video on YouTube talking about the current Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s like watching a Michael Bay movie:
   It’s FILLED with quick flash cuts, INCREDIBLY RIDICULOUSLY over-dramatic music, flashes of animal markets, sad people everywhere, and only VERY, VERY, VERY purposely edited quick sound bytes of interviews with people that support only fear-tactic driven sensationalized media to scare you, get RATINGS and make MONEY.
   They are NOT presenting the news.
   They are presenting THEATER.
   They DO NOT trust you. They DO NOT think you are smart. They INSULT YOU every single time they do this, which is the majority of the news today.
   It’s really this simple:
   THE NEWS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ENTERTAINMENT.
   It’s supposed to be a place we go to get information. That’s it.
   We all know the situation with Covid-19 is difficult at best. We are not stupid. We know it. The whole world is feeling it. This is exactly WHY we need REAL NEWS.
   We don’t need it presented like a bad student film.
   We need it presented calmly, clearly, and professionally, without bias (if possible) and certainly without dramatic music, flashy editing, and the selected sound bytes.
   I challenge 60 Minutes Australia to post the ENTIRE unedited interviews with that doctor, with no music, no editing, no color correction, just the raw interview, on YouTube for us to watch.
   But they won’t.
   Even if they say they will… they’ll still edit it because they don’t want you to see the truth.
   They don’t want you to hear the truth. They don’t trust you to MAKE YOUR OWN JUDGMENT without being LED THERE by music and flashy fear-based editing, because they’re afraid that if they don’t present the Covid story with a lot of panic-driven concern, that YOU won’t do what’s required to help.
   They believe that if they don’t scare you into behaving, then the virus will spread more rapidly, more people will die, and they will lose all control, which at the end of the day, is what they want: control, money, and power. And ratings.
   Do you need to stay home right now? YES.
   Do media companies need to present the truth and trust human beings to do the right thing? YES.
   This is a time in the world when we NEED to learn to trust one another. We need to have media companies on the side of humanity not the side of sensationalism.
   I hope 60 Minutes Australia and 60 Minutes are ashamed of how they take advantage of people’s fears and use Hollywood editing tools to create even MORE fear and panic.
   They almost as big a problem as the virus itself because in many ways they ARE a virus. They’re a media virus spreading the infection of sensationalism when they COULD be spreading the truth.
   I really don’t want to give their video any more traction so I am not going to link it here, but if you want to see it yourself, go to YouTube and type “Journalist goes undercover at “wet markets”, where the Coronavirus started.”

   People, we need to demand better.Wuhan virus: Tweet on school closures in Singapore is fake, says ...

And the response:

   Man, this is a wonderful piece. I hope you get a lot of reaction, and would love it if 60 Minutes responded (or at least mentally noted it). My pet peeve with 60 is that they ask closed questions and set up responses. Just look at how many “yes”/”no” questions they ask to get the answer they need.
   I’ll offer this possibility in defense of news, since that was my field. Honest, it still is. When you get the lead in your blood, there’s no getting it out, mom always said.
   In that piece (which you might wanna freelance, dude; happy to talk about that if you want), you correctly state that THE NEWS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ENTERTAINMENT.
   Fuckin A right.
   But the truth about news is that it’s never objective. Never has been. In 1897, William Randolph Hearst told a military artist shortly before the Spanish-American tensions, “You furnish the photos, I’ll furnish the war.” Walter Cronkite viewed the world, and the news within it, from a very particular perspective. What he viewed as news was largely his decision, and we abided.Yellow Journalism Did Not Cause the Spanish-American War (Role of ...
   But it wasn’t unbiased. Choosing which quotes to use in a story, for instance — even if they’re accurate and properly paint the subject — will be cut and edited to reflect the story the author prefers. Life is subjective. There’s no way for news to be otherwise.
   I hesitate to credit Trump with anything, though he’s onto something with the news. But I don’t think it’s fake.  I think people are confusing “Fake News” with “Non-News.” Which, in a way, I guess makes it fake. But I think that too obtuse a critique of media, and allows outlets to avoid remedies.
   Here’s a specific gripe I have with today’s news. I recently took a look at trending stories on Apple News. Here were the headlines:
  • ‘Warren Buffett says anyone can achieve success by following this 1 personal rule he lives by’
  • ‘Eddie Murphy names the film he feels like an “idiot” for turning down.’
  • ’27 Products that are pretty much dream worthy’
  • ‘Newly released emails offer more details in timeline of Ukraine aid’
  • ‘”Quirkiest of us all: Dallas Cowboys laugh at LB Sean Lee’s unusual gameday drink’
  • ‘The wrenching reason Charles Dickens wrote ‘A Christmas Carol’
   There’s a through-line in all this: They’re click bait a newspaper would/could never use in the day. Worse: half of the stories could be answered in half a sentence — in the headline, no less — to answer the question, instead of luring the reader into an entire story.
   For instance, a newspaper headline writer would pen something like “Best friend’s death gave Dickens’ motive for ‘A Christmas Carol.’ Or ‘Eddie Murphy still regrets turning down Ray.’Eddie Murphy | Biography, Movies, & Facts | Britannica
   But when journalism went the way of the internet, it went the way of TV, which has always, as you pointed out, blurred the line between entertainment and journalism.
   And when we began using a metric in journalism like clicks, it quit being journalism. The newspaper division was always the least profitable arm of any media corporation. But Knight-Ridder, Gannett and others were willing to bear the costs for the prestige to overall brand, either in Pulitzers or stories the parent corporation could turn into movies, TV shows, books, etc.
   The internet demolished all that. When I was still considering sticking around journo, an editor reamed out the staff for being 4 minutes later on a story than the competitor. Minutes, the editor said, were the difference between getting a story read, a customer gained.
   Time was, it was better late than ever. Today, it’s better never than late. That was enough to send me sailing into retirement.
   So I hesitate to use Fake News. To this day, I have met only one reporter who made up stories,  Jack Kelley. He was drummed out the business in shame. 
   I’ve always seen media outlets as a pizza joint. Go to any “news” site and look at the trending stories, the ones that mirror public taste.
   You likely won’t find a thoughtful piece on quantum physics on that list. Instead, you’ll see who Kim Kardashian is blowing. Like a pizza joint, if you ordered pepperoni and they gave you sardines, you’re done with that joint. Economic Darwinism dictates you give customers what they want, regardless of taste, or you file Chapter 11. And it’s rotted media from the inside out til the husk isn’t recognizable.
   Your last graph nails it. Demand better.
   Hopefully life will return to normal soon. Again, terrific piece, man. Hope it resonates the way it should.
bowles