Passing the blue pill "credibility test"
Here are some options to respond to people who claim I'm not credible because I've been "debunked" by "respected authorities" such as the authors of hit pieces.
I received an email recently that read:
I sent out your email from yesterday and this is one response:
How would you respond?
Thanks
Ron
He then attached the reply he got:
Dear Ron,
Your source person - Steve Kirsch - does not pass my credibility tests. Here are some credible sources that have debunked his claims:
- Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law
- David H. Gorski, Professor of surgery, Wayne State University School of Medicine
Please share my message and these links with the rest of your distribution list in the interest of supporting a more balanced consideration of differing views on these issues.
Thanks,
Rob
To answer Ron’s questions, possible response to Rob would be:
It seems that it’s hard to trust anyone nowadays isn’t it? For example, why did the CDC never reveal any of the V-Safe data to the American public? It took two lawsuits and 463 days after the first request before the CDC was forced to release the V-Safe data which showed that 7.7% had to seek medical care after vaccination. 25% missed work, school, or had bad reactions to the vaccine. Those are unacceptably high numbers and the CDC knew that; that is why they stonewalled attorney Aaron Siri for so long to keep the data under wraps. They were hoping to win and not produce the data at all. Think about it… if the data showed the vaccines were safe, why would the CDC not release any summary data at all for V-safe? Do you think that inspires trust that they hid the data showing the vaccines were so harmful? See this press release for more detail or view the data yourself. The CDC is supposed to be trustable, but clearly they aren’t. Neither is the medical community for not insisting that this data be published. So we need to look at the data directly. What Kirsch did in his article is to collect pieces of evidence that each of us can evaluate ourselves to determine who is telling the truth.
None of these people has ever seen the “Evidence of Harm” document because it was created after those people wrote their articles. Can we discuss each of the points in the article without getting into ad hominem attacks and just talking about each point on its merits?
How about we start with just the first two points in the Evidence of Harm article and if you can show me the clear evidence that these are not true, then I won’t bother you anymore. Otherwise, you agree to discuss all the other points with me.
The book Turtles All the Way Down has not been debunked by any scientist and is heavily referenced. They offer a $1,000 reward to anyone who finds a factual error in the book. Nobody has ever claimed the reward. Will you accept everything in that book as true as a starting point for our discussion?
Some of the most respected doctors in their respective fields such as Peter McCullough, Paul Marik, and, most recently, Aseem Malhotra, now believe the vaccines are unsafe. Do you believe them? Why do you think they are speaking out? None of them have anything to gain by this.
Kirsch has open $1M bet offers that include that the COVID vaccines kill more people than they save. Since as you say he’s been debunked, it should be easy money for any of these “debunkers.” Why don’t they take his money? Will you accept his bet?
Why have all of these people declined his offer to debate him live about what he’s written? He’s asked all of them and they’ve all declined. They can’t say that they don’t want to give him credibility because he has a bigger base of followers than all of these people combined.
Why hasn’t any expert challenged him to a debate? Kirsch is one of the top “misinformation spreaders” in the world. He even offered $1M to the members of the CDC and FDA outside committee to debate him for four hours. Why do you think they refused to do that? When they declined his offer, he raised it to “name your price.” Why would any academic turn down $10M for a four hour meeting?
None of these people have published a peer-reviewed paper debunking Kirsch’s work. On the other hand, there is a peer reviewed paper that says Kirsch, McCullough, and others are telling the truth. Shouldn’t we trust the peer-reviewed sources over the non-peer-reviewed sources in assessing his credibility? The peer-reviewed literature says: “I have met and worked with a number of people concerned with vaccine safety and I can tell you they are not the evil anti-vaxxers you are told they are. They are highly principled, moral, compassionate people, many of which are top researchers and people who have studied the issue extensively.”
Kirsch is saying the vaccines are dangerous. There are over 1,250 peer-reviewed papers published in the scientific literature. Should we ignore those as well because Cat Ferguson, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Jeffrey S. Morris, David H. Gorski say the vaccines are safe? Are they the new “subject matter experts” on vaccines?
Numerous polls done by independent polling agencies show Kirsch is right about the vaccines being unsafe.The mainstream media refuses to do such polls. Do you know why?
I use the 1 million deal all the time, that usually stops them in their tracks. No debunker wants a million dollars? No debunker can debate? I will also tell them Steve Kirsch and his team of scientists and doctors are ready to debate their team or any team of scientists and doctors live-streamed. They are just waiting to prove their point using facts and data.
There was a transformation in the American medical system over the last century many believe originated with the General Education Board which was created by Rockefeller. Although the focus on issues education has typically revolved around important concepts being censored from it, in my opinion the much larger issue has been the removal of critical thinking itself from the educational system. Put differently, rather than being encouraged to think critically to solve problems or appraise information one is exposed to, the emphasis has shifted to teaching people specific thought processes to copy/replicate and feel "intelligent" for having done so (e.g. much of the practice of medicine is memorizing lists and treatment algorithms).
Throughout my time in the educational system, I'd often notice there was a sensible way to approach a problem or task we were given, but we would instead have to follow a set approach we were taught to solve it.
For example, when I was in college, both math and physics (subjects that I liked) required us to "show our work" in order to get credit for our answers on examinations, and in both classes I failed tests because "I did not show my work" when I arrived at the correct solution, thus suggesting I had cheated (truthfully, I just didn't go to most of the classes). I ended up having to spend hours meeting with the professors to explain how the work I had written down was actually a valid way to solve the problem and it just differed from anything we had been taught. I had a few professors on the opposite end of the spectrum who wanted students to critically understand the material and figure it out themselves (e.g. one of my calculus teachers), but each confided to me that they continually ran into major issues with administration because they would receive nasty feedback from students effectively stating "we don't want to be told how to understand and figure out the problems, we just want a formula we can copy and use to solve them."
One of the things I find fascinating with debating with people, especially as they become more educated is that I can normally predict exactly what they will say or how they will respond to an argument because they are simply reflexively copying a "thought process" they and many others were taught in school (there's a very distinct tightening of ones mind I always feel when one does this), so after you spend enough time talking with these people, you know the "available thought processes" they have and can reasonably predict which one they will select. At many earlier times in my life I've explored finding errors in their programming (since if you approach it in the right direction you can reach points where things lock up and glitch), but I stopped doing that because I didn't think it was a nice thing to do and didn't really accomplish anything. I also thought this over for a while, and believe whenever I witness people do this, I am essentially witnessing the deadly sins of pride (because of the mindless pride they take in acting their programming) and sloth (because most of the time the reason they default to this is because they don't want to make the effort to critically think about something and have to be in a place where they aren't sure about what is going on anymore...which is very difficult for most people).
The long and short of this is that there are a lot of common reasons people use to reject arguments and data (e.g. Steve is a misinformation spreader so you must ignore everything he says) and these are drilled into everyone throughout the educational system. Oftentimes, the smartest people you will find are those with minimal education because their critical thinking skills are intact (and had to be developed in competitive fields that required them) whereas the more one is education, the more their mind is transformed from thinking critically to thinking in predefined algorithms that innevitably preclude thoughts that challenge vested interests. This is particularly insidious since "smart" people are supposed to "go to college (and graduate education)" so this effectively creates a funnel that takes away the critical thinking capacities from many of the individuals who might otherwise try to change the system (and instead often leave them trapped with educational debt). One of the reasons I avoided going to class throughout my undergraduate was because in many classes (particularly STEM and philosophy) I could feel a very specific way of thinking was being pushed on me, and I felt that it was taking away my brain's ability to function, which I did not want to happen so I tried to minimize the impact that would happen.
Currently, our system is designed to employ highly credentialed individuals, which allows those with impaired critical thinking to still be economically competitive (great example being Obama switching federal hiring practices to go from recruiting/promoting those with successful experience in the field to seeking those with nothing besides Ivy league degrees), but my general sense is that as our economy begins to decline, a lot of those people who effectively have worthless skills because critical thinking was not developed in their education will be forced out of the workforce (many people I know who have businesses that need to be able to solve problems such as electrical engineering firms say they prefer to hire highschool graduates with experience in the field over college trained individuals because the former are more likely to have the critical thinking needed to solve problems).
All of these problems also exist in medicine and medical education where the schools recruit for students who have been highly compliant with the college educational process, and throughout your training, force you to copy your supervising doctor's thought process or be heavily penalized for not doing so (similarly once in practice you are supposed to follow EMR scripts and [typically corrupt] official guidelines to stay in practice and not lose your job or have legal action filed against you for breaking the "standard of care"). In the case of medicine, this is particularly ironic because I regularly hear medical school deans and program directors (people who run residencies/post graduate medical education) complain about a lack of critical thinking in their applicants and the fact that a lack of critical thinking makes poor doctors, yet they simultaneously fail to realize they are actively training their students/trainees to not think critically.
The reason I think I ultimately escaped all of this is because the subject of epistomology (how one knows what they know) genuinely interested me long before I had even learned it was a philosophical discipline, whereas most people do not seem to have a sincere interest in learning what the basis is for their knowledge and would instead prefer to assume it was all true as a matter of faith so they can be comfortable with their own sense of reality. At some point in the not too distant future I am planning to write an article on medical epistomology for that reason (its a really fascinating topic!).
This is a bit of a long post, but the key point is, a lot of people are (or were trained to be) mentally lazy, and anytime you can give them an excuse to not have to think about something difficult, they normally will take that excuse. Persuasion hence has to go beyond simply persuading someone by presenting them with evidence, as the need for "evidence" isn't actually their epistomological framework, its simply an excuse they are making to avoid thinking critically, and hence will not be addressed by simply providing additional evidence.
Additionally, for those who want to know more about the corruption within the guidleline process, I tried to summarize it in these two articles:
https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/how-corruption-dictates-the-practice
https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/californias-misinformation-epidemic
What happened with Ivermectin and HCQ being banned to push through Remdesivir is sadly just one of many examples of that process happening and one of best ones I was ever able to identify was with the statins.