bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 8:40 am
Nortaneous wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 8:31 am
bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 6:16 am
Unfortunately, Nortaneous is correct here. Ivermectin is a horse dewormer
and a human dewormer. It is, however, not an effective antiviral, since the dose required for that simultaneously makes it an effective anti-human as well.
(I say ‘unfortunately’ here because ‘don’t take horse dewormer!’ would really be an excellent advertisement, were it true. Unfortunately, it isn’t, and claiming othewise just gives more ammunition to the committed lunatic, especially those of the big-gub’ment-is-
lyin’-to-us type.)
Big gubmint literally
is lying to us. "If we lie, people we don't like will be able to point out that we're lying" is not the most morally upstanding reasoning in the world, but it's still not as bad as the actual PR strategy of the actual regime.
But the wonders of meritocracy have given us a regime ruled by... people who've spent their whole lives reshaping themselves to please authority. If you're too much of an ornery bastard to get the Harvard admissions people to like you, you don't go to Harvard. Competition is fierce. Any deviation from the norm will be punished. And you end up with a class of ultra-conformists who've spent their whole lives in ultra-conformist bubbles and don't realize most people aren't like them.
I must admit to finding most of your political posts incomprehensible, and this one is no exception. What, exactly, is your point here?
For whatever reason, people started promoting ivermectin as a treatment for COVID. In response, everyone started hearing about how people shouldn't take ivermectin because it's a "horse dewormer", for reasons that include "the Responsible Authorities [in the typical DC progressives sense] said so".
Leaving aside the issues with the implied distinction between human medicine and animal medicine (in a country where horse anesthetic is routinely used recreationally, by humans, and also shows widely publicized promise as an antidepressant), ivermectin
is in fact human medicine, is in routine use for parasitic diseases like river blindness, and won its discoverers the Nobel Prize. (OK, it was actually for the drug class of avermectin derivatives, but ivermectin seems to be the most important one.)
However, it doesn't show promise as a human antiviral for entirely unrelated reasons.
There are some questions that seem reasonable, given all that.
- Why did people hear about this? Why did
so many people hear about it, from
so many sources, that it became common knowledge (among the sorts of people who follow news for DC progressives)? That seems to happen a lot - how? And who decides?
- Did the Responsible Authorities (and other figures with platforms) know they were lying, or were they all sincerely mistaken in the same way for a duration greater than a week?
- If the Responsible Authorities (and other figures with platforms)
didn't know they were lying, did they ever correct themselves in a manner consistent with concern for not misleading the audience?
- If the Responsible Authorities (and other figures with platforms)
knew they were lying, why did they tell such an obvious lie? Do they think their audience is stupid? Or is the thing they see themselves as doing not connected to truth at all?
- If the point was to get people to stop using ivermectin for legitimate medical reasons, why didn't they lead with the legitimate medical reasons?
- If the Responsible Authorities (and other figures with platforms)
knew they were lying, what sorts of people would
they have to be, with what sorts of characters and what sorts of influences, to think that plan would work?
And if you've ever met a Harvard student or a high-ranking manager, you might have some ideas about the last question. There are classes of people whose lives, from private preschool to tenure or retirement, revolve around things like admissions councils, graded essays, and letters of recommendation.
What gets you admitted? Being the sort of person the admissions council wants, and being OK at tests. What's the right answer on the essay? Whatever the professor agrees with. How do you form strategic relationships with people who outrank you and turn those relationships into career advancement? Well...
If you're the sort of person the admission council wants, you're more likely to get admitted. If you're
not that sort of person, and getting admitted is important to you, you'd better to learn to
appear to be that sort. And if one admissions council is important to you, there will probably be another, and another... at each step, to the extent that each admissions council, professor, or higher-up wants different things, distilling and concentrating the set of people best at deforming themselves to please authority... which is exactly the kind of mindset that could lead someone to just not care about the truth or their reputation in the eyes of people who care about, like, not blatantly lying. (Unless it would upset the higher-ups, but presumably the higher-ups got there by the same process.) And, since the admissions councils control whole social environments, the people subject to those process will mostly socialize with each other - and their models of how people behave will be models of people like them. People who are selected for their skill with political maneuvering in hierarchical social structures. People who can tell which way the wind is blowing.
If the wind blows toward "horse dewormer", you say "horse dewormer" - and if you only notice the wind when it hits you, what you notice is a lot of people, especially Responsible Authorities, saying "horse dewormer", at the same time, without any Illuminati making them do it.
