The Weinstein Brothers: Nobel-Prize Level Scientists or Self-Aggrandizing Woosters?

[Chris_Halkides]

selective pressure

Now Bret Weinstein is going on Tucker Carlson's program to claim that vaccines cause a selective pressure to make Covid worse.

He truly is an arse, isn't he!

Link

It is generally accepted that antibacterials put selective pressure on bacteria. That is a good argument for not using an antibacterial compound for a viral infection, for example, but it is not a good argument for not using them at all.

 

[angrysoba]

It is generally accepted that antibacterials put selective pressure on bacteria. That is a good argument for not using an antibacterial compound for a viral infection, for example, but not a good argument for not using them at all.

He is arguing not to use a vaccine against Covid.

Or rather, he is not saying we shouldn't, just asking questions of course... just wondering aloud whether or not these vaccines might somehow do something bad...

 

[TurkeysGhost]

He is arguing not to use a vaccine against Covid.

Or rather, he is not saying we shouldn't, just asking questions of course... just wondering aloud whether or not these vaccines might somehow do something bad...

There's probably cause for concern that the US seems determined to have comingled populations of vaccinated and unvaccinated people indefinitely. It seems like the ideal conditions to keep covid endemic in the anti-vax community until a variant develops that is more resistant to the vaccine and infects everyone again.

Of course, this fear would justify trying to encourage everyone to get vaccinated and eradicate covid entirely, not justify anti-vax quackery.

 

[angrysoba]

Bob Wright is an interesting guy, IMO.

This is an over 2 hour video so I don't imagine that many people will have the free time to watch it all, but in case anyone is interested:



The title is "Is Eric Weinstein a Crackpot?"

Oh, if you click through to watch it on YouTube instead of embedded here in the forum, you can find timestamps to skip to different topics as well as background information. I would, however at least start at the beginning so that the participants in the dialog can introduce themselves.

Thanks for that. I listened to it yesterday. Much of it is what I had already listened to on the Decoding the Gurus podcast (which they reference a number of times).

Of course, this is another area where most of us cannot possibly know if someone has a Great Idea^TM, or they are just talking nonsense. But out prior assumption surely has to be that claiming you have a Grand Unified Theory of Everything is one of the most extraordinary claims you can make in physics, and yet if most of his peers don't seem impressed but he is going on the Joe Rogan show to promote it, then, well... it doesn't inspire confidence.

Of course, there is a well-known process for people who would like to persuade their peers and that is to go through the process of publishing papers on the subject. Apparently he doesn't do it because the entire establishment is against him - Harvard University, physicists, mathematicians, the entire peer review process, comedians - the list goes on with everyone suppressing the idea and nobody taking him seriously.

 

[angrysoba]

There's probably cause for concern that the US seems determined to have comingled populations of vaccinated and unvaccinated people indefinitely. It seems like the ideal conditions to keep covid endemic in the anti-vax community until a variant develops that is more resistant to the vaccine and infects everyone again.
Of course, this fear would justify trying to encourage everyone to get vaccinated and eradicate covid entirely, not justify anti-vax quackery.

My understanding is that the infections are not as relevant as how seriously ill people get.

Vaccinations massively reduce serious illness when compared to the non-vaccinated. And they also massively reduce the opportunities for variants.

One of Bret's lab leak buddies has now become his fiercest critic on Ivermectin and Covid vaccinations. It turns out that they have written an article in... Quillette (it's hilarious to see Bret Weinstein and Quillette arguing - an Intellectual Dark Web Civil War seems to be going on).

Anyway, he makes a good point...

Just ask yourself: in 2 years, which world will have more and deadlier SARS2 variants —

(a) one where no vaccines have been deployed

or

(b) one where current vaccines were available to everyone who wants to vaccinate.

If you’ve replied (b), you need to go back to school.

Link

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Does the same argument not apply to ivermectin?

He is arguing not to use a vaccine against Covid.

Or rather, he is not saying we shouldn't, just asking questions of course... just wondering aloud whether or not these vaccines might somehow do something bad...

And yet using ivermectin does not do the same bad thing regarding selective pressure? I am having a hard time with Professor Weinstein's argument.

 

[Roboramma]

I find both Eric and Bret, to me, vary from infuriating to interesting. Though Bret more on the infuriating side. Eric does a lot of innuendo without actually saying the objectionable thing, most of the time.

For instance, I listened to the "Into the Impossible" podcast where Eric and Micheal Shermer talk about UFOs, and if you listen to what he actually says Eric is basically saying that UFOs are ridiculous and none of the supposed videos he's seen are even remotely convincing. Yet he engages in a bunch of innuendo that implies that there's some evidence that we haven't seen, or people who he knows but can't actually name who have this evidence, that there's something else going on. Shermer was pretty much reduced to agreeing with him most of the time and then just not knowing what the hell he was getting on about the rest of the time. (He kept going on about how he's angry with the government for either having information that we should see, or not having that information, and somehow either case was bad, because nuclear war or something).

It's pretty much the same problem when he talks about physics. He never really comes out and says what he's supposedly trying to say.

On the other hand, I enjoyed his conversation with Roger Penrose, because Penrose has interesting things to say, and Eric was obviously interested in hearing them, and educated enough to be a good interviewer. I also enjoyed his conversation with Tyler Cowen for similar reasons, though it was telling when Cowen asked Eric to say what the implications of his use of gauge theory in economics actually are for economics, Eric just gave some bluster about how he shouldn't expect to have an answer to that question.

I'm willing to accept that both Eric and Bret had some negative experiences in academia. There certainly are such experiences. Just this morning I was listening to a couple of completely unrelated interviews, one with David Albert in which he relates a story about being interested in the foundations of QM while doing his PhD in physics, and being forced to change his thesis topic. He considered changing schools, but after some advice while angry put his head down, and finished his PhD. Someone with a different personality might have responded with a F-you and quit the program and just remained bitter thereafter. They'd have a legitimate grievance, but it would have been a dumb decision.
The second story is George Church talking about having taken graduate level courses during his undergrad, and when he went on to grad school having to take the same courses with the same teaches and "the same jokes". He just refused to take the courses and failed two classes because of that, and thus was expelled from the program. Luckily he managed to get into a different program and finished a PhD at Harvard instead.
The problem with Eric and Bret is that they seem to think that because these sorts of stories happen, there must be some major problem with academia in general, and their bitterness seems to lead to these weird, vague, conspiracy theories. I think it's just that some people are dicks, or unreasonable, or institutions aren't as flexible as we'd like, etc ("yes, I know you've already taken this course, but we don't have a way to let you skip it now, so you just have to suck it up and go through it again. At least you won't need to study too much and can focus most of your time on other things")

It's not that they have no real concerns, even when it comes to peer review. It's that they take real concerns and blow them up into giant conspiracy theories.

As to whether either of them could have achieved more if not for being so bitter about their experiences? I don't know. But when Bret talks about evolutionary biology he says enough things that just strike me as wrong that I decided it was a waste of time to listen to him. His anti-vax stuff just confirms for me that I was probably right.

 

[malbui]

Of course, this is another area where most of us cannot possibly know if someone has a Great Idea^TM, or they are just talking nonsense. But out prior assumption surely has to be that claiming you have a Grand Unified Theory of Everything is one of the most extraordinary claims you can make in physics, and yet if most of his peers don't seem impressed but he is going on the Joe Rogan show to promote it, then, well... it doesn't inspire confidence.

Of course, there is a well-known process for people who would like to persuade their peers and that is to go through the process of publishing papers on the subject. Apparently he doesn't do it because the entire establishment is against him - Harvard University, physicists, mathematicians, the entire peer review process, comedians - the list goes on with everyone suppressing the idea and nobody taking him seriously.

We've had a lot of fun in France over the years with the Bogdanov brothers whose academic careers and credentials provoked a lot of both high-level and public discussion about the way PhDs are assessed and awarded, and about the value of work if it never gets cited anywhere.

I have my own opinions about the validity of their work, but given their enthusiasm for litigation I'm not going to spell them out on a public forum.

 

[angrysoba]

Hmmmm... Eric seems to be in the mood for suing someone. He doesn't say who, so I wonder if this is an attempt to get people to stop calling him a crackpot.

But who could it be Tim Nguyen and his anonymous co-author? Robert Wright? Decoding the Gurus?

 

[angrysoba]

Oh, and just so that Bret doesn't feel left out...

 

[angrysoba]

We've had a lot of fun in France over the years with the Bogdanov brothers whose academic careers and credentials provoked a lot of both high-level and public discussion about the way PhDs are assessed and awarded, and about the value of work if it never gets cited anywhere.

I have my own opinions about the validity of their work, but given their enthusiasm for litigation I'm not going to spell them out on a public forum.

Hmmm... seems there are some universal patters to this type of thing then...

 

[angrysoba]

Sam Harris talks with Eric Topol and quite a lot of it is dedicated to debunking much of Bret Weinstein's BS about vaccines and Ivermectin.

Of course, Bret is a friend of Sam's so Sam treads carefully. I have a feeling that if he wasn't friends (for example, if Glenn Greenwald was pushing the same crap that Bret was) he would be screaming about blood on his hands. That said, as they share a large listenership and as Bret's followers seem to be under the misapprehension that Bret Weinstein is some kind of scientific genius when in actuality he has an h-factor of 2, and has only ever published 3 papers, and spends most of his time blathering tedious nonsense with his wife on a podcast, it is possible that hearing Sam Harris contradicting Bret might lead to a wake-up call for them.

 

[Roboramma]

I'm listening to it now. As usual Sam Harris is clear and well reasoned. I'm pretty happy Sam did this. Hopefully he gets through to at least a few.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying are hawking pseudoscientific anti-nausea bracelets on their podcast.

Bret and Heather are pushing woo medical devices as paid ads now.

https://twitter.com/danieleharper/status/1419103811818463238

Daniel Harper has also been covering these freaks on his podcast "I don't speak German", an antifascist podcast about fascist and right wing media. He is always very careful about his choice of words and, as far as I can recall, he has never ascribed the label "fascist" to "intellectual dark web" types like the Weinsteins or Sam Harris, but rather just contextualizes their role in the broader reactionary right.

To be honest, I'm not sure how anyone can even pretend that the Weinsteins are serious academics at this point. Plausible deniability for their woo peddling and the plain pseudo-academic laundering of reactionary politics has long been exhausted.

 

[angrysoba]

Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying are hawking pseudoscientific anti-nausea bracelets on their podcast.



https://twitter.com/danieleharper/status/1419103811818463238

Daniel Harper has also been covering these freaks on his podcast "I don't speak German", an antifascist podcast about fascist and right wing media. He is always very careful about his choice of words and, as far as I can recall, he has never ascribed the label "fascist" to "intellectual dark web" types like the Weinsteins or Sam Harris, but rather just contextualizes their role in the broader reactionary right.

To be honest, I'm not sure how anyone can even pretend that the Weinsteins are serious academics at this point. Plausible deniability for their woo peddling and the plain pseudo-academic laundering of reactionary politics has long been exhausted.

Yep, I listened to the I Don't Speak German podcast episode on Bret and Heather's "Crunchy Covid". It was pretty good. I liked that point that Jack made that it makes perfect sense to be skeptical of Big Pharma, but it makes no sense that Big Pharma can suppress all the other industries in the world and have Tory governments printing money like there is no tomorrow if they had a cheap and affordable medicine like Ivermectin to hand out to all their employees and keep them working. The idea that somehow Big Pharma have manipulated the world into suppressing Ivermectin if it was a miracle prophylactic is, therefore, bat-**** crazy.

 

[Carrot Flower King]

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/iv...4-bret-weinstein-misrepresents-meta-analyses/

I posted this one in the Covid conspiracies thread, but thought it might be worthwhile also putting it here.

It shows how great Weinstein, B's contortions of thought and mental gymnastics had to be in order to reach his pre-conceived conclusions on ivermectin. With a helping of wilfully misrepresenting what meta-analysis does and how it works.

This is not the behaviour of a reputable scientist.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/iv...4-bret-weinstein-misrepresents-meta-analyses/

I posted this one in the Covid conspiracies thread, but thought it might be worthwhile also putting it here.

It shows how great Weinstein, B's contortions of thought and mental gymnastics had to be in order to reach his pre-conceived conclusions on ivermectin. With a helping of wilfully misrepresenting what meta-analysis does and how it works.

This is not the behaviour of a reputable scientist.

It's a double standard that common in the medical woo industry. Extreme skepticism is applied to real medicine, like the vaccine, while laughably lax standards of evidence is required for the preferred quack cure.

 

[Carrot Flower King]

^ Yup, seen it so many times...

 

[TurkeysGhost]

One documented case of a death directly attributed to an idiot believing the BS shoveled by Brett Weinstein

COVID denier dies of COVID after being "red pilled" on vaccines, ivermectin and natural immunity by medical quack Youtuber Brett Weinstein https://t.co/HiD5n0Hn2Z

https://twitter.com/nathanTbernard/status/1425116666908794882?s=19

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Podcast featuring Robert Malone

Bret Weinstein hosted a podcast "How to save the world in three easy steps." link. At 3+ hours, it is long. Has anyone watched all or parts of it? If so, thoughts?

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Bret Weinstein hosted a podcast "How to save the world in three easy steps." link. At 3+ hours, it is long. Has anyone watched all or parts of it? If so, thoughts?

no

 

[angrysoba]

Bret Weinstein hosted a podcast "How to save the world in three easy steps." link. At 3+ hours, it is long. Has anyone watched all or parts of it? If so, thoughts?

no

Here's someone who did watch it (see attached image).

What happened? Well, he got Covid and died.

See video:



I think we can now officially say that Bret Weinstein has blood on his hands.

 

[angrysoba]

Bret Weinstein hosted a podcast "How to save the world in three easy steps." link. At 3+ hours, it is long. Has anyone watched all or parts of it? If so, thoughts?

Oh, and a few things about this "3 easy steps"

1.) Maybe the most obvious question is why would 3 easy steps take 3+hours to waffle through? Can these "3 easy steps" not be bulletpointed somewhere?

2.) Who has time for 3+hours???!? What are these 3 easy steps?

3.) The beauty of 3+hours is there is plenty of room to smuggle in your disclaimers - you can say, "Of course, I don't know whether any of this is actually true". Some of Bret's followers use these as Get Out of Jail free cards to explain why the dilletantes think the way forward is to avoid vaccines and assume Ivermectin will end the pandemic.

4.) "Easy"?!?!? The idea being promoted here is that every man, woman and child take Ivermectin on a weekly basis for a month to eradicate Covid-19. How the **** is that "easy"?

5.) They have no idea what dose to take.

6.) They have no idea if Ivermectin is as good as they say.

7.) ....or as safe.

8.) Robert Malone is NOT the inventor of the mRNA virus. In short, he is a liar, so why trust him?

9.) Steve Kirsch is apparently an anti-vaxxer.

10.) They abuse the VAERS database.

11.) Some Bret Weinstein-worshipper called Alexandros Marinos set up a group called...wait for it...Better Skeptics.... unironically shorted to BS, asking for people to fact check the video and to offer Amazon cards for people who submitted critiques. They concluded that the podcast and others by Bret were mostly true. Because of course they did.

12.) As mentioned above, one of Bret's followers died from taking Bret's dumb advice.

 

[Roboramma]

6.) They have no idea if Ivermectin is as good as they say.

Seems like it's probably not:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-08-11/ivermectin-no-effect-covid

That’s the conclusion of the Together Trial, which has subjected several purported nonvaccine treatments for COVID-19 to carefully designed clinical testing. The trial is supervised by McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and conducted in Brazil.

One of the trial’s principal investigators, Edward Mills of McMaster, presented the results from the Ivermectin arms of the study at an Aug. 6 symposium sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

Among the 1,500 patients in the study, he said, Ivermectin showed “no effect whatsoever” on the trial’s outcome goals — whether patients required extended observation in the emergency room or hospitalization.

“In our specific trial,” he said, “we do not see the treatment benefit that a lot of the advocates believe should have been” seen.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

shorter Weinstein video

Here are the three (Weinstein, Malone, Kirsch) in a 15 minute video, which is better than 3 hours. It might be an excerpt of the longer video.

The first error I found was the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The second error is to claim the the spike protein is cytotoxic (for example, see Derek Lowe's May entry). They acknowledged the anecdotal nature of the evidence, but it is also true that Kirsch is not even a medical professional and therefore hardly qualified to evaluate anyone's symptoms. They also tried to claim that there is misreporting of adverse events. The Johnson and Johnson vaccine issue is a rebuttal to that idea.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Person Hospitalized After Taking Livestock Ivermectin From Feed Store To Treat COVID-19

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/15002/person-hospitalized-after-taking-livestock-ivermectin-from-feed-store-to-treat-covid-19/

IIRC, the study showed that Ivermectin killed covid that Bret and Heather keep JAQing off about was done in vitro, aka in a petri dish, at concentrations that cannot be safely achieved in actual patients.

The bioavailability of eating Ivermectin has to be terrible. There's 0% chance that there's anything close to a therapeutic dose achieved from scarfing down a tub of horse dewormer you picked up at your local farm supply store.

An important controversial point to consider in any rationale is the 5 µM required concentration to reach the anti-SARS-CoV-2 action of ivermectin observed in vitro,17 which is much higher than 0.28 µM, the maximum reported plasma concentration achieved in vivo with a dose of approximately 1700 µg/kg (about nine times the FDA-approved dosification).24 25 In this sense, basic fundamentals for assessing ivermectin in COVID-19 at a clinical level appear to be insufficient. Among other reasons, we believe this might have led WHO to exclude ivermectin from its Solidarity Trial for repurposed drugs for COVID-19,12 which raises questions about the pertinence of conducting clinical studies on ivermectin.

https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111678


It does not appear possible to achieve a therapeutic dose of Ivermectin in actual human bodies, unless you have some kind of parasite infestation.

Running off and making wild conclusions based on preliminary, in vitro results is exactly the kind of woo peddling that is common in the alt-med world. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with how medicine works knows how frequently in vitro results do not lead to viable drug treatments.

 

[angrysoba]

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/15002/person-hospitalized-after-taking-livestock-ivermectin-from-feed-store-to-treat-covid-19/

IIRC, the study showed that Ivermectin killed covid that Bret and Heather keep JAQing off about was done in vitro, aka in a petri dish, at concentrations that cannot be safely achieved in actual patients.

The bioavailability of eating Ivermectin has to be terrible. There's 0% chance that there's anything close to a therapeutic dose achieved from scarfing down a tub of horse dewormer you picked up at your local farm supply store.



https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111678


It does not appear possible to achieve a therapeutic dose of Ivermectin in actual human bodies, unless you have some kind of parasite infestation.

Running off and making wild conclusions based on preliminary, in vitro results is exactly the kind of woo peddling that is common in the alt-med world. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with how medicine works knows how frequently in vitro results do not lead to viable drug treatments.

I think David Gorski made the point that, yes, Ivermectin is a "miracle cure" and yes, the people who developed its use won the Nobel Prize, but Ivermectin was, and should be used for parasites to prevent river blindness.

Whether or not it has some other utility is incredibly insufficiently evidenced, and yet Bret is there saying that it can be used instead of vaccines, and that it can be the end of Covid-19 in "three easy steps".

Crazily irresponsible!

 

[Carrot Flower King]

^Yup, Gorski has done pieces on both SBM and Respectful Insolence to that effect - I've linked to one or other opf the SBM ones upthread.

 

[Venom]

I actually like the theme of Bret's book A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. Haven't read it yet and I don't know what direction it'll go but it's refreshing to see someone give some perspective on our modern behavior by evoking the ancestral past.

 

[marting]

I actually like the theme of Bret's book A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. Haven't read it yet and I don't know what direction it'll go but it's refreshing to see someone give some perspective on our modern behavior by evoking the ancestral past.

I do as well. I find Bret's thinking iconoclastic. And I like reading people with views that differ from mine since my own views aren't set in concrete. However, I find his views on Covid-19 ill informed and contradictory at times. Examples:

He entertains ideas that the vaccine may induce Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) that would cause increased fatalities when encountering new variants similar to dengue. At the same time he states that vaccine rollouts should have been done differently. That we should have waited, accumulated enough vaccine that virtually everyone could be vaccinated within a short time. The idea is that we would quickly then reach herd immunity.

But both Alpha and Delta evolved prior to vaccines and nothing has shown up since vaccination that suggests rapid evolution to escape vaccines, the argument loses. And as a practical matter there was no way to do this in a World-wide way. Rather, evolution worked as expected. Variants that are more fit (infectious) have occurred as a natural result of more of the population developing resistance from prior infection. It's just what they have to do. There's a limit though and we may even have reached close to it.

Had we even been able to do what Bret wanted, many more people would have died because rolling it out to the oldest first reduced net deaths much more than waiting and rolling out all at once even were that feasible. Further, unlikely adverse effects, which he seemed concerned about, would have been apparent sooner. As it was some countries made the decision to hold off vaccinating the very young for some vaccines based on risk/benefit.

As it has turned out, the public health people made pretty good decisions on rollout even with limited data at the time.

And i see zero evidence of ADE.

 

[angrysoba]

I actually like the theme of Bret's book A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. Haven't read it yet and I don't know what direction it'll go but it's refreshing to see someone give some perspective on our modern behavior by evoking the ancestral past.

Yeah, interesting topic, no doubt. But if I were to read a book on the topic, I would want someone I could rely on to get the topic right, particularly if they are going to give prescriptions for how we ought to live derived from information about our ancestral past. Frankly, I don't trust Bret and Heather to be reliable guides given the way that I have seen them draw highly questionable conclusions (and I am being charitable here) from unreliable data.

Similarly, and as mentioned, I think that Bret's understanding of evolution is... "heterodox" to say the least, and involves a theory of natural selection that almost no other biologist agrees with from what I can gather. It seems to me, and this is more speculation on my part, that maybe being allowed cartes blanches to teach what he wanted at Evergreen led him to develop idiosyncratic views of science.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Yeah, interesting topic, no doubt. But if I were to read a book on the topic, I would want someone I could rely on to get the topic right, particularly if they are going to give prescriptions for how we ought to live derived from information about our ancestral past. Frankly, I don't trust Bret and Heather to be reliable guides given the way that I have seen them draw highly questionable conclusions (and I am being charitable here) from unreliable data.

Similarly, and as mentioned, I think that Bret's understanding of evolution is... "heterodox" to say the least, and involves a theory of natural selection that almost no other biologist agrees with from what I can gather. It seems to me, and this is more speculation on my part, that maybe being allowed cartes blanches to teach what he wanted at Evergreen led him to develop idiosyncratic views of science.

Evolutionary psych and thought experiments set in the distant past are the perfect cover for laundering pseudo scientific horse crap. The data from such long passed eras is spotty enough that ideologues like the Weinsteins can fill in the gaps with whatever BS they are peddling.

Peterson has his lobster society, now the Weinsteins have their mythical hunter gatherer utopia. Somehow I imagine it all ends with the conclusion that SJWs are the antithesis of modern society.

 

[Venom]

Peterson has his lobster society, now the Weinsteins have their mythical hunter gatherer utopia. Somehow I imagine it all ends with the conclusion that SJWs are the antithesis of modern society.

I get that feeling as well. There always seems to be room in their analysis to stick it to the SJWs one way or another, even if only subtly.

 

[Roboramma]

Yeah, interesting topic, no doubt. But if I were to read a book on the topic, I would want someone I could rely on to get the topic right, particularly if they are going to give prescriptions for how we ought to live derived from information about our ancestral past. Frankly, I don't trust Bret and Heather to be reliable guides given the way that I have seen them draw highly questionable conclusions (and I am being charitable here) from unreliable data.

Similarly, and as mentioned, I think that Bret's understanding of evolution is... "heterodox" to say the least, and involves a theory of natural selection that almost no other biologist agrees with from what I can gather. It seems to me, and this is more speculation on my part, that maybe being allowed cartes blanches to teach what he wanted at Evergreen led him to develop idiosyncratic views of science.

Yep.

A few years ago Bret had a discussion with Richard Dawkins about evolution where he spouts a bunch of nonsense and Dawkins is at first quite friendly but is pretty much reduced to repeatedly telling Bret that he's not making any sense.

I agree that the title of his book sounds interesting, but I also agree that his poorly constructed views on the topic just don't interest me.

 

[angrysoba]

Peterson has his lobster society, now the Weinsteins have their mythical hunter gatherer utopia. Somehow I imagine it all ends with the conclusion that SJWs are the antithesis of modern society.

There is a Decoding the Gurus episode when they looked at a conversation between Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinsteing.

It went something like this:

JP "I don't know if this is true, but...it's possible that modern medicine may have killed more people than it has saved."
BW: "Wow! Interesting you should say that because I also have no idea if it is true but it is SHOCKING that the question can even be asked."
JP: "Yes, absolutely SHOCKING! It may even be true even though I have not looked at the data!"
BW: "You know what I was also thinking... that we may have evolved to inhabit archetypes that are hardwired into us which the progressives are trying to undermine!"
JP: "Wow! It is SHOCKING that you should say that, because I was thinking exactly the same thing only this morning!"

etc..

 

[TurkeysGhost]

At least 70% of recent calls to the Mississippi Poison Control center are related to people self-medicating with Ivermectin.

According to the health alert in Mississippi:

At least 70% of the recent calls have been related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers
85% of the callers had mild symptoms
No one has been hospitalized due to ingestion of the drug

https://www.wbay.com/2021/08/20/poison-control-calls-spike-people-try-livestock-dewormer-treat-covid-19/

Seems like a perfect scenario for overdosing on this drug. As people get sicker and sicker with covid, they'll be tempted to keep increasing the dosage of their wonder drug out of desperation until they hit toxic levels.

 

[angrysoba]

At least 70% of recent calls to the Mississippi Poison Control center are related to people self-medicating with Ivermectin.



https://www.wbay.com/2021/08/20/poison-control-calls-spike-people-try-livestock-dewormer-treat-covid-19/

Seems like a perfect scenario for overdosing on this drug. As people get sicker and sicker with covid, they'll be tempted to keep increasing the dosage of their wonder drug out of desperation until they hit toxic levels.

Holy crap!

Also, this is not long after Pierre Kory, the guy who famously turned up to a Senate hearing in a lab coat to say that if you take Ivermectin you will not get Covid, got Covid, and then told his followers that they should double their dose ... because Delta...!

So now I wouldn't be surprised if people who listen to Kory and Bret (and Robert "I invented the mRNA vaccine" Malone) have been increasing their doses of sheep worming tablets.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

selective pressure and ivermectin

One thing that is not clear to me is whether or not the hypothetical widespread use of ivermectin would put selective pressure on the virus. Has Bret Weinstein offered an opinion?

 

[angrysoba]

One thing that is not clear to me is whether or not the hypothetical widespread use of ivermectin would put selective pressure on the virus. Has Bret Weinstein offered an opinion?

Lol! He’s probably lampshaded it in some four hour podcast somewhere or pulled out some rationalization for why ivermectin doesn’t behave that way because reasons. It would be hard to believe that unrecognized Nobel Prize laureate (because in our head canon he won instead of fraud Carol Greider amirite!?!) has.no answer, or maybe the totally the inventor of the mRNA vaccine Robert Malone could explain how ivermectin is the safest and bestest while mRNA vaccines are crazy experiments or something.

I don’t know.

 

[angrysoba]

Eric Weinstein's new theory: Joe Biden deliberately screwed up Afghanistan so that he had an excuse to hand over power to Kamala Harris. As evidence he presents Tucker Carlson's commentary about how the liberal media have suddenly got it in for Joe Biden. Carlson's commentary includes statements such as "the Covid vaccines don't work". No comment on that from Eric about how that is not true, and/or how that has nothing to do with Biden anyway.

https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1429223499227271177