The rise of the relentlessly curt "critic" of persistently terse "grifters"
A common theme among the "we, we, we" crowd: a misplaced, unexamined, and crippling trust in government
Every subculture has its allotment of high-ranking social-media prescribers of plain old common sense. Almost every serious collective problem facing humanity would, these gurus emphasize. evaporate by midnight if everyone took more deep, mind-clearing breaths and reoriented themselves toward being as productively relaxed and as balanced as possible. These psychosocial course-correctors are fed up with the amount of blunt-force nonsense out there, and worse, how easy it is for people to profit handsomely from that nonsense.
Zooming in more closely, these stewards of wellness harbor a particular distaste for people who reap the financial rewards of peddling quick fixes. The typical construct of a mini-plaint is quoting a tweet from a suspected quick-fix grifter, declaring that there are no such fixes, and supplying the right answers: Adequate sleep, sensible training, proper nutrition, and self-care leading to stress reduction. Q.E.D.
There are several problems with this plan to reduce the online circulation of superficial, unhelpful, clickbait-driven tripe. One is that any advice that can be compressed into 240 or fewer ASCII characters itself qualifies as a “quick fix,” or at least “quick.” Another is that repeatedly advocating for the same small set of strategies in response to every “quick fix” detected on Twitter seems like nothing more than an attempt to clean up all extant dubious “quick fixes” with one, grand, all-encompassing, and immediately effective repair-job. On this view, such a plan is no more than an attempted hostile takeover of the entire quick-fix industry.
Steve Magness is probably running’s most well-known dispenser of pure, elemental nothingness. If a bare-assed Magness bent over, placed the crack of his skinny ass one inch from your face, and farted with as much force as he could muster, you would smell nothing. No matter how a powerful a trombone-blast of ostensible flatus was produced—even if the sonic wavefront parted your hair and knocked a few teeth loose—the insult would be purely mechanical. And a bomb-sniffing bloodhound would experience the same result (but perhaps be more inclined to bite someone’s ass in response).
In the brief period in which Magness and I interacted on Twitter last year before he blocked me, when I suggested that his manner of wisdom-distribution merely translated into a different version of a “quick fix,” he denied this, claiming something along the lines of “My ideas all pertain to the long term” (and adding something like “Nice try”). My response was consonant with “Then why the need to express those ideas nonstop? Why not just wait for everyone to catch up on sleep and positive thoughts and nourishing food and see what happens?” Ba-ba-ba-blocked.
Magness didn’t seem like an empty shell before and during his time with the Nike Oregon Project. But it now seems like he must have bamboozled some key people, or maybe offered to perform work other candidates were reluctant to undertake, such as using testosterone. It’s as if he wore a swoosh-emblazoned baseball cap for a while, and when he was forced to whip it off his head, it turned out to be bolted to his skull and the gesture removed of half his brain along with the ballcap.
Multiple readers have also highlighted the output of a similar character over the past few years. I haven’t mentioned any of this output here, because I believe Brad Stulberg means well; that his various frustrations and anxieties over the behavior of others are genuine, and that he really believes the world would be a better place if everyone just sort of behaved better in basic ways.
That this is never, ever going to happen doesn’t necessarily make him wrong. But either way, he’s had it with energetic frauds.
Because Stulberg uses social media to repeatedly emphasize the same well-delineated set of “life well lived” philosophies, and has written at least five books expounding on these philosophies, it might be fair to accuse him of having a nonfunctioning irony meter in his home.
By Freddie DeBoer’s definition, anyone who accepts money in exchange for ideas is a grifter, including Freddie himself. That might make me a grifter, although perhaps not, since I don’t paywall posts, yet some people give me money anyway. This inevitably compels me to keep going in my own vein.
That aside, I would rather not see Stulberg as a grifter because I would rather think he firmly believes everything he says. Because I am not being sensible here, I’m probably wrong. However, this is moot, because Stulberg’s output is often undeniably problematic.
Among those who are continually irritated that not enough people are listening to them, the usual culprit is supreme confidence in one’s convictions and discernment in securing these convictions. (I’m annoyed at how much stupidity is out there, too, but I don’t expect the world to change as a result of my shouting. I’m mostly here to reassure the silently disenfranchised and maybe get a few people to accept troubling but accurate information.) When people like this lean strongly toward the political left, they almost always place a near-categorical trust in the leaders they vote for and the officials whose efforts those leaders oversee. “Nanny-stater” is a more unkind but equally appropriate description.
The result of someone ill-suited to change his mind combined with a propensity to unconditionally trust non-Republican government messaging is often catastrophic, epistemically speaking.
I did not sift deeply through Stulberg’s Twitter account, but my cursory search turned up this exchange from a few weeks ago:
What Stulberg wrote here is almost stupefying. He clearly understands that people in the pharmaceutical industry have addicted or killed millions of people through prescription opioid painkillers, simply in the name of raking enormous profits. He’s aware that what he calls grifting is distressingly widespread.
Yet he somehow can’t see that people in the pharmaceutical industry would, years later, create a product that injured or killed tens of thousands of Americans. The only plausible reason I can see for being as wrong as he is about the shots is not looking into them, and the only reason I can think of for this is trusting what he’s been told from people who have been lying for years.
Using Google Search alone for this task is by design futile. But were Stulberg a determined truth-hound, this wouldn’t stymie him. If he’s as smart as he seems to believe he is, then he has no excuse for continuing to trust Fauci, Inc. other than appealing to authority—undeniably a quick-fix way of confirming or disconfirming facts and “facts.”
The tweet below is worse. Everything in it is completely wrong. (Eric Topol has no idea how to even read a clinical study, enjoys lying, or both.)
First: No, you literal idiot, “we” don’t think that way. You and the nanny-staters do, to everyone’s ongoing and worsening detriment. And if you refuse to change your thinking, quit pretending you’re expressing a consensus viewpoint.
Second: If we’re going to call something a scientific breakthrough—and we’ll ignore the fact that Stulberg seems to think the mRNA “vaccines” produced multiple breakthroughs—then we need to show a corresponding effect: An intervention that not only defies odds against succeeding, but also represents novel beneficial technology. If Stulberg believes that the shots on balance saved lives, then he, unlike us, is thinking at a grade-school level.
Stulberg is surely unaware that the “vaccines” were in fact not created from “years and years of tireless work.” I doubt he knows the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ( i.e., Pharma) sought to hide that “tireless work,” which included breaking randomized-clinical-trial protocol after 97 whole days, for seventy-five years. He would therefore be ignorant of the crimes the documents detailing that work—coughed up last fall only after a Freedom of Information Act filing—reveal. Among the revelations is that the shots—in addition to not being tested to see if they prevented transmission or infections—weren’t even tested on healthy subjects, only on people who’d gotten covid already.
Sure, we might say, that’s a lame-o move, fer sure. But a lack of adequate testing doesn’t establish harm; it merely shows the drug companies and the government took a gamble. Maybe it paid off,
Well, that’s also problematic. For one thing, the forcibly released documents detailing the “tireless work” Stulberg refers to prove that Moderna’s and Pfizer’s executives knew exactly the kinds of harms their products were certain to cause, in significant numbers, and that they were aware of the nature of the pathophysiology underlying the damage to different organs and endothelial tissue far removed from the injection site. For another, no one needs to wonder at this point; the shots have indeed caused a great deal of the kinds of terrible harms the drug companies knew about and kept from us.
Stulberg would scoff at that idea that at least 1 in 800 injections cause an adverse event serious enough to require hospitalization, even though the media—now unable to fully deny what’s happening, but still firmly on gaslighting task—have simply absorbed issues like spikes in myocarditis, strokes, neurological problems, and cancers as tolerable in context. And, unlike us, he wouldn’t have noticed how many excess deaths the U.S. has been experiencing, because the media, despite their psychotic, years-long fixation on the (enormously inflated) covid-death tally, are utterly silent on this.
How many people have the shots actually killed, not including ourselves? Israel, which has a small population and started injecting its citizens earlier than the U.S. did, has proven a helpful source of leaks of useful, if depressing, information. (That we even live in a world where we have to rely on leaks for information ethical governments would be eager to feed us is tougher to take than I can express, though I try in various ways almost daily.) A conservative analysis of such a leak suggests that a booster dose (third shot, for most) has a fatality rate of about 1 in 8,000 to 1 in 12,500.
That should shock people, especially the part about this range being a conservative estimate. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Creation (CDC), 676 million mRNA shots have been given to 270 million people. While it has been established that these is a dose-response relationship concerning the shots and adverse events, some people were injured or killed by either the first or the second Moderna shot in the initial two-jab series. So, it wouldn’t be easy to conduct an analysis of the lethality of experimental mRNA injections—potions given mostly for massive profits, but partly to kill off or prevent some excess and future folks through both direct lethality and sterilization.
Lethality? The Ethical Skeptic continues to pore over the one thing the government can’t yet fully hide—dead bodies and the reasons they became that way, the CDC’s crafty efforts to conceal this granular data notwithstanding.
The Ethical Skeptic has concluded that the covid “vaccines” have been responsible for over 540,000 of the 1.4 million excess U.S. deaths since March 2020, over 50 percent more than coronavirus infections have killed. Denial of treatment and “giving up”-related deaths are up to around 520,000.
And sterilization? Yes. Lumping miscarriages and stillborn babies into this category, the effects of the shots on the female reproductive system have been profound and ghastly, and were among the sources of chief fixation among the researchers conducting Moderna’s and Pfizer’s shambling RCTs. Those lipid nanoparticles can lodge in women’s ovaries (and in other tissues) for quite some time, it seems.
“THEY” SAID THIS WOULD NOT FUCKING HAPPEN. “THEY” FUCKING LIED ABOUT THIS ALONG WITH EVERY SINGLE ASPECT OF THE “PANDEMIC” “THEY” ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR. There is no good reason to participate willingly in this, especially people who think they have unusually sensitive bullshit detectors.
Sorry to take such a long-winded side-trip, but I don’t believe in quick fixes. An example of such a “fix” is checking to see what some government propagandist has just said on MSNBC or tweeted about covid, muttering “that surely checks out,” and spreading this propaganda as rapidly and unwittingly as possible to others who hate laziness and abbreviated immersions of self-enlightenment and self-betterment.
Stulberg, in listening to public figures any true intellectual has now justifiably mistrusted in the extreme for years, is confidently spreading dangerous misinformation on Twitter. If I thought he was lying, I’d use the word “disinformation,” but I don’t think he is. Unquestionably, however, he is colossally ignorant about the shots, a clear consequence of his irrational and openly selective trust of Pharma.
Stulberg is probably a nice guy. So are a lot of smooth-talking shitheads who have not the slightest clue what they’re telling us. We need to learn to recognize that people who place trust in something as openly, gleefully corrupt as the drug industry cannot possibly have anything wise to say about much of anything, because they are too busy spending perhaps 45 seconds per tweet on decrying all the scammers out there and their hapless marks.
Postscript: Some of my assertions above are reruns of previous episodes, even old favorites. Confirming them requires nothing more than visiting the links I provide and a passing understanding of arithmetic. The Ethical Skeptic is competent in layers of statistical analysis I have only heard about, but I understand the arcane terminology and annotative style he uses.
I trust my own ability to contextualize and grasp what’s in credible research papers, and I have no reason to mistrust any of the sources I have used because for one thing, data are data, and for another, when efforts have been made by governments to conceal the particulars of clinical trials, VAERS reports, autopsy findings, and everything else of importance, it’s never because those governments are intent on hiding fake alarming data.
If that’s not good enough, people far more learned than I am about this stuff are slowly gaining voices. This is a great place to start, if you’re not moving yet.
