Dream Well!!!!!

I have spent the last couple weeks looking a the alternative social media sites Gab and Bitchute---which are functionally copies of Facebook and Youtube, respectively. The only real difference is that they don't censor content if it's out-and-out lies or designed to foster hatred against groups of people. As such, they are where most of the people banned off the mainstream social media end up. It's been a bit of an eye-opener.  

It's a bit of a fire hose, so I won't attempt to describe everything I saw. Instead, I'll try to focus on a couple posts that I think will give my readers a feel for what I saw. I'm going to be a bit sparing about what I post because I've had problems in the past with Google yanking images that they deemed "unacceptable". There's supposed to be an exception for educational purposes, but my experience is that the artificial intelligence cannot tell the difference and if you appeal the odds are that I will never be able to get in touch with a real human being that I can explain things to.  

One of several odd posts I saw contained the following.

This purports to be a photo of a living, metallic wire that a "doctor" removed from a soldier who'd been injected with one of the COVID-19 vaccines. 

Here's a diagnosis from the same doctor about the soldier.

And, a prescription

The thing to understand about the above is what "detox" means in the "alternative medicine" community. It generally isn't the orthodox medicine treatment known as "chelation therapy", which is a rarely used, potentially dangerous treatment for various types of metal poisoning. Instead, it's usually a vague, new-age regime that generally involves a patient spending a lot of money on expensive products that don't do much at all. Quackwatch identifies several common types of "detox" that range from "colonic irrigation" (what our grandparents called an "enema"), through treatments that promote sweating, to some form of pseudo-chelation therapy. 

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There are a lot of people who publish opinion pieces on the Web and in legacy media. Unfortunately, a lot of them just pull nonsense out of their butts and rant. I like to think that I'm different in that I put a lot of time and effort into researching everything I write. But that takes a lot of time and effort. If you like what I write---and you can afford it---why not buy a subscription or toss something in the tip jar? (Thanks Anthony for being so awesome!) Paypal and Patreon make it easy to do.

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There's a second video from Stew Peters that builds on this theme and takes it into X Files territory. I tried to put up an excerpt that showed the insanity, but Youtube's artificial intelligence is incapable of making a distinction between someone who is putting something up to trick people versus using it educate people so they are less likely to get tricked. As a result, you are just going to have to believe me when I describe what they are talking about. (I know, but we live in an imperfect world---get used to it. I have.)

Peters is interviewing a woman by the name of Carrie Madej. (She says she's a doctor, but I'm reticent to call her that given what says in this interview.) In the video he shows some black and white, slightly out-of-focus pictures that look remarkably just like the sort of fuzzy images that I used to see with a cheap compound microscope when I was a kid.

Just for comparison's sake, here's an image I found from an American Public Broadcasting System article on microfiber plastic pollution that looks remarkably similar.

Image from This New York River Dumps Millions of Fabric Microfibers into the Ocean Daily.

The next image is something that Ms Madej became very concerned about. That's because she said it had tentacles, was lifting itself off the slide----"it appeared to be self-aware" and "it knows we were watching it". (How she could infer any of this from a blurred image on a compound microscope is beyond me.)

Here's an example of the sort of weird stuff you can find in just a drop of pond water and see under a microscope. It's a water hydra, recorded from a much better microscope than the one that was used to take the pictures on this dumb show. It's something that elementary school teachers routinely show children to get them to realize how complex the world is and how little our "common sense" prepares us to understand it. 

Image from Larval Behavioral, Morphological Changes, and Nematocyte Dynamics During Settlement of Actinulae of Tubularia mesembryanthemum, Allman 1871 (Hydrozoa: Tubulariidae).

Using the above two pictures plus some others of equally dubious value, she describes them as being evidence of:

• "an injectable computing system"
• "super conducting material"
• "self-assembly, things were growing"
  
• "metallic fragments"
• "tentacles"
• "graphene-like structures"
• "sticky glue-like substance that would be considered a hydro-gel"
• "nano-lipids"

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Of course this is all nonsense. But it raises the important question "what are these people thinking?" The first thing to remember is that "Dr." Madej is using "technobabble" to confound the viewer. The term comes from Star Trek where writers would inject some sort of baffle-gab into the conversation between characters that would suggest some sort of pseudo-scientific reason for the magic that the plot needs to explain the crisis or save the day.
 

In the case of The Stew Peters Show, the guest---Carrie Madej---is using the con-man's version of the "Gish gallop" to dump a load of bullshit on the viewer so it will over-load whatever doubts she might have about any one particular part of it. (That's the same sort of maneuvor that a confidence trickster used separate me from $60 a couple weeks ago.)

Is she a "wiseguy" doing this on purpose to separate "suckers" from their money? Perhaps. (Quacks charge good money for all those detox treatments.) But that doesn't necessarily mean that she is aware of what she is doing. As I explained in my article a while back titled Human Parasites, natural selection can create different types of populations within a given species. It might be that evolution has created a specific type of human personality---should we call them "homo flakyensus"?---that instinctively spew this sort of nonsense. In that case Carrie Madej really does believe in this stuff and makes a living off it in just the same way a real doctor makes a living off what he does.   

Whatever is going on the heads of people who create this stuff, we also have to account for those who eat it up. I think that this is where the Trekkie idea of "techno-babble" may offer a suggestion. Writers insert this stuff into scripts not to annoy scientists, but rather to create a simulation of reality in a situation that is totally unreal. It's part of telling a convincing story.

And link together enough convincing stories and you end up with what writers call a "mythos". Star Trek has an extremely well-developed mythos that includes heroes (Zephran Cochran), villains (the Borg), political organizations (the Federation), an economic system (as near as I can tell, utopian Communism), and so forth. The Star Trek mythos is so appealing to people that television studios have repeatedly created new shows about it and fans have devoted a great deal of energy into making it a "hobby" through cosplay.

People organize their lives around different mythical systems. In my case, I've constructed a rationalist system that merges parts of Daoism with the scientific Enlightenment of Europe. Many others live in a world that brings together Christianity and Laissez-Faire Capitalism. There are a lot of others. In the case of anti-vaxxers, I think that they have created a mythos that draws from a great many different sources. 

One of them is a profound fear of modern technology fueled by a profound ignorance about how things actually work. You can see this in Madej's belief that scientists are able to inject something into a person's arm that would be able to create metallic filaments and a microscopic yet somehow sentient creature. This doesn't require an evil government conspiracy, but rather an X-Files alien alliance. Only someone who has no understanding of what modern technology can and cannot do would come up with this fantasy.

Another part of this worldview is fear that the government will take away people's "freedom". Again and again Stew Peters ranted about the government "forcing vaccines into people's arms". 

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Why are these mythos I'm talking about so important? I recently watched a video by Rebecca Watson where the issue of motivated reasoning came up. This is the idea that a large part of what people call "rational decision-making" is actually human consciousness creating excuses for decisions that have already been made emotionally. As she explained it, she used the metaphor of a monkey riding a tiger. 

I found this image being used by a Thai Restaurant, so I assumed they wouldn't mind if I copied it.

The main point is that the tiger goes where the tiger wants to go. (It is a cat, after all.) The monkey is not about to argue with it, but she has a certain pride---so she makes up a story about why she wanted to go to wherever they both end up. The tiger represents the older parts of the brain that often make decisions for us and the monkey represents the more modern bits that govern things like conscious decision-making.

So far I'm well within the realm of orthodox psychology. But I'm going to take it one step further---simply because I think that this point seems obvious to me from self-reflection. (Philosophers are allowed to do this sort of thing as long as they freely admit that it is just speculation and are willing to be disabused of their idea if a good experiment proves it wrong.) I think that the tigers we ride aren't just artifacts of brain evolution. I also think that they are probably influenced by culture too. And what I call a person's "mythos" would be a key part of building a person's individual "tiger". 

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If we accept that a person uses motivated reasoning based upon their own inherited or personally-constructed mythological understanding of the world, then trying to reason them out of their crackpot behaviour is a waste of time. Instead, we need to stop the adoption of their nutty mythos in the first place. The problem with this idea is that it flies in the face of one of modern democracy's most cherished ideals: that everyone is entitled to their own personal belief system. 

I'm not suggesting that the state step in and force all people to accept the same worldview. That would be a totalitarian solution. But it might be possible to educate children so they understand the implications for life of the worldview they begin to see everything through. This would perhaps allow them the chance that they might "choose wisely" instead of just stumbling into something without understanding any of the implications.
 

I don't know much about Grey Owl, other than he was an Englishman who became so enamoured with an idealized myth about the First Nations of Canada that he moved to Northern Ontario and tried to totally adopt their lifestyle. I don't even know if it's true that he was accepted by members of the real First Nations, as the above video implies. But I do think that trying to live in harmony with nature was a damn sight better mythos than the British Imperialism and white superiority which a great many of his fellow citizens would have believed. 

In short---true or not---as the line from the "Heritage Minute" above says, people become what they dream. And it's important that we dream well. I would suggest that the people who refuse to wear masks and won't get vaccinated are people who have "dreamed poorly".

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That's enough for this week. Be nice to each other and don't get ahead of the health authorities as we slowly wake up out of this pandemic fever dream.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!