It would be nice to see a little intellectual humility. From everybody. You can’t know everything. It’s important to know what you don’t know.
Only a few days on Twitter and I’m already ready to be off of it again. The Facebooking of Twitter continues. With the former, I slowly became so grossed out by the site that I just stopped going. Twitter is following in due course.
I’m so tired of seeing the disingenuousness with which people approach views that are different from their own. I’m tired of this need to be right, or to appear smart. The thing is, most of us are pretty average on most things. Again…just a little humility.
On the disingenuousness: one of the straws that broke the camel’s back was the discourse around ivermectin. It boiled down to “lol, that shit is horse dewormer.”
Of course, it’s more than that. The biologists behind the drug won the 2015 Nobel Prize for its anti-parasitic properties, and the investigation into its antiviral properties are ongoing. The way I understand it, an effective oral dose to fight covid would be too large for our stomachs to handle. There are ongoing investigations into delivering the drug nasally, or in combination with other drugs (zinc, I think?) to allow safe and effective delivery.
These are all facts about ivermectin. This is a balanced way to look at things. But that’s not what people do. It’s “lol horse dewormer.” Then Maddow can share an article from my local news station KFOR about how there are so many ivermectin overdoses in Oklahoman ICUs that gunshot victims are having to be turned away. Which is fake, but it doesn’t matter, because the only thing that matters is that we have a suitable amount of disdain for the people who “aren’t on our side.”
Today, The Intercept published an investigative report that further points the finger at NIAID and Peter Daszak (and by extension Fauci, although he isn’t named in the report) for funding the gain of function research that more than likely led to the covid outbreak. Twitter’s response? To argue about whether Rand Paul was “right” when he took Fauci behind the woodshed months ago.
Who cares? But it gets worse. The fight devolved into whether Paul is a qualified doctor. “He’s an eye doctor.” “He went to medical school!” Back and forth like this.
Truly, deeply stupid stuff.
So that’s how I spent 20 minutes this morning. And that’s on me. But I’m trying to be proactive here, and so what I’m going to do is I’m going to stop considering the people who do this kind of thing to be my enemy. Do a little practicing what I’m preaching, ya know?
For real. Just stop. You’re not in a war. You’re certainly not in any kind of war you can actually win. Shitty things have always happened, are happening now, and will continue to happen long after we are all dead. How do you want to live your life? Who benefits from you being scared, angry, and nasty all day long?
I’m off to work on some stories.
Broken River Blog 