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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I think part of it is just a large group of people are contrarian against whatever the mainstream is pushing. If Pfizer and the CDC were pushing ivermectin hard and MRNA vaccines were still under review the Brett Weinstein’s of the world would be clamoring for MRNA and crying conspiracy.

An interesting thought experiment is if the vaccine came out 5 months sooner Trump would have taken credit and pushed it all day every day to try and win the election. Could easily see a scenario where the anti vax and pro vax camps flip among the hardcore partisans.

MRNA vaccines were still under review the Brett Weinstein’s of the world would be clamoring for MRNA and crying conspiracy.

I mean, it's possible, but to hear Brett himself say it, he's reasoning from first principles that we simply do not understand the complex system that is our immune response well enough to make the very first MRNA vaccine ever mandatory for as much of the population as possible. He talked to a lot of people discussing vaccine side effects, and while I think he may have been taken in by some hustlers or alarmist early on, I think his assessment that the risk of myocarditis among the young male cohort easily overshadows the pitiful protections the "vaccine" offers is reasonable. Seems to even be the consensus position of most nations not dominated by Phizer ad dollars. He also recently picked up on igg4 discussion related to the MRNA vaccine, and I guess we'll see how that turns out.

Personally I've had pain in the ass tinnitus since I got the jab, and am fairly bitter since it was mandatory for me to keep my job, and keep my family warm with full bellies.

If Pfizer and the CDC were pushing ivermectin hard and MRNA vaccines were still under review the Brett Weinstein’s of the world would be clamoring for MRNA and crying conspiracy.

What do you base this on? Weinstein seemed pretty reasonable to me, although I haven't heard from him in a while.

I may be overly cynical but I think Weinstein saw a big opening to get a following by going against the vax (he’d already had similar success going against academia) and he ran with it to great success.

He could sound very reasonable by preaching a pro vaccine message as well but then he’d just be another fish in the mainstream media sea.

I have yet to hear him say something that didn't seem like an extrapolation of classical liberal principles. What he said about both academic insanity and the handling of the vaccine are that. Have you? Because it seems like you are overly partisan rather than cynical if 'he speaks out based on his principles' didn't occur to you - you view him as an enemy, so only vices like greed and conceit drive him, not principles.

Why would I view Brett as the enemy? He’s just another talking head. I think he’s acting to build and engage with an audience. This is the same incentive structure as the rest of the media.

There was clearly an unmet market for a contrarian take on the vaccine and Brett jumped whole heart into it.

Just because someone has a different take than Maddow and Hannity doesn’t mean they don’t have the same incentives.

Dude, he has a middling youtube channel (not even half a million subscribers!) and he goes on podcasts and you classify him as media - like Hannity or Maddow - to justify your dislike of him. Despite having no evidence he has espoused non classical liberal values, let alone that he's just being contrarian.

You have nothing to base your original claim on, so the conclusion I reach is that you either view him as the enemy and think he must be motivated by vice or don't understand classical liberals and think we are all lying about our principles. We're not. Bret Weinstein is a dork, but he's a dork with principles.

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