Then, Duck at December 10, 11:14;
#63045:
– “Please check the credentials of Professor Carl James Heneghan, then read what he said about Public Health England’s (PHE) method of compiling covid death statistics in July…”
“Check the credentials…” is argument from authority; it seems sciency but that’s misleading, because a scientific argument is based on evidence, not somebody’s say-so, not even a professor’s. Picking out that particular quote is quote-mining, obviously. But to use it as an argument that covid-19 is killing only a fraction as many as claimed by the official covid figures is also rampant cherry-picking, because the official covid figures are already broadly confirmed by the overall excess mortality.
Of course the argument that all the medical authorities, and all the general records offices, of all the towns and cities and districts and counties and states and nations, all across the world, are all coordinating diagnostic, statistical and scientific fraud to make a bad cold look like a lethal pandemic – this is pure conspiracy theory.
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Steph, I just pointed out an example of conspiracy theory; do you recognise it as such?
Or do you subscribe to it? The Secret Powerful Men say, incite a panic out of nothing, and all these hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers – scientific, medical and official, in different fields, jobs, departments and levels of the hierarchy from local to international, in different countries all over the world – they all change their usual ways of working to start doing just the right things to make it look as if millions of people are suffering from a new disease, when in fact everything is normal? This could be true, could it? And I have to take it seriously and not call it anything rude like “conspiracy theory”?
I say it’s a waste of time. SA and ET have written reams of rational argument yet still it continues. That’s because conspiracy theory isn’t rational. It’s the same as trying to convince religious creationists; it’s a belief rather than a position chosen by reason and evidence, so there’s no point trying to reason about it. Just call it out for what it is, be it religious fundamentalism, political ideology, conspiracy theory, propaganda, New Age hodgepodge mysticism or whatever. None of these are susceptible to reason, so there has to be a widespread understanding that it’s OK to just call them out and move on, and why such dismissal is valid.