I really owe an awful lot to Scott Alexander. If nothing else, he’s had a huge influence on the way I write. I first became acquainted with his work in my twenties, and I’ve read virtually everything he’s written since then. He’s a solid writer, and he was and remains one of the few people I’m aware of who tackles complex subjects in an in-depth way both effectively and without hiding behind big words or academia-speak. If my writing sometimes comes off as being produced by a discount-brand Scott, there’s a reason for that.
I think Scott is aware of the damage that partisan thinking has and does inflict on our discourse, and he is hypersensitive to any accusation that he is indulging in that kind of thinking. He wants to be above reproach in this area, and puts hedges around himself so as to not even get close to saying anything that might seem biased. Does he go too far? Perhaps. He has not yet gone as far as Zossima in "The Brothers Karamazov" who blamed himself for everything and asked forgiveness of basically all of humanity and the whole universe for their own mistakes.
I'm willing to grant him leniency in this area, because, as you said, his commitment to self-aware, reasoned responses to situations is quite valuable and rare in this age. I'm also glad that you wrote this "contra" because it's very easy to follow along with rationalist thinkers like Scott when they start pointing out biases, so as not to seem biased ourselves.
"Scott desperately wants to believe that he can win over the left and be accepted and important in their world, even though the left has made it clear they want none of this to the extent a non-monolithic group can make things clear."
To be fair to Scott Alexander, he has won over a lot of left-leaning folks, as is clear from his comments section. You don't have to convince the entire left-wing media establishment your message is worthwhile to have a positive influence.
Eh, as someone who hangs out with right wingers a lot I appreciated the article because it brought needed subtlety and moderation to stuff like tweets from cernovich and other big right wingers about how this proves the msm always lies and you should never listen to them again (despite them not being reliable news sources themselves).
> The twitter level discourse, for instance, says something like "CONSERVATIVES ARE SO DUMB THEY ARE ALL TAKING HORSE DRUGS BECAUSE TRUMP SAID",
I liked the article precisely because the conservative discourse on the article was also “LIBERALS ARE SO DUMB THEY ALL BELIEVE THIS ONE TWITTER SCREENSHOT PEOVES IT AND EVERY NYT STORY IS JUST LIKE THIS THEIR MEDIA NEEDS TO BE DISMANTLED PERMANENTLY” and hence liked Scott’s thread of the needle
News sifes do need to fact check at least a bit tho. As an example, I saw this yesterday - https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg83bg/reddit-bans-abortion-bounty-hunter-forum a story about a Reddit sub for abortion bounty hunting. How awful! But the sub was a fake subreddit for baiting people, and had a grand total of 50 subscribers and as many posts. - the image in question has such real Texan usernames as CatsLikeMyCum and cry_for_me_fatty
Thanks for writing this. I appreciated your comments on Scott's article because I was pretty uncomfortable with what he wrote myself, but I didn't really feel like I could put my finger on why. I think the focus on Mistake and Conflict Theory really helps. I wonder if there should be a corollary that whichever theory you subscribe to, Mistake or Conflict, you will then behave in such a fashion as to make your chosen theory literally true. Maybe that doesn't apply to Mistake Theory, but it seems to me that if you believe in a Conflict Theory world you are going to act out your part, creating a situation where Conflict Theory is in fact true. Since they believe the other side is out to do evil and destroy them, the believer of Conflict Theory seeks to destroy the other side in the name of good because discussion is pointless. Thus is created a REAL faction that really does want to destroy the other side, making Conflict Theory true in this case.
My sense is that Scott is deeply uncomfortable with that notion, perhaps more so because the so much of the American left has fallen into that pattern. Not that the right is free of Conflict Theorists, but my sense is that they are much fewer and less respected, whereas those on the left are considered the true believers and practically lionized by others on the left. Possibly because the left's philosophy is grounded in Conflict Theory?
I want to be careful of things like "the left's philosophy is more grounded in conflict theory". It's not that it definitely isn't or is, but more that I'm not sure the right wouldn't be doing the same thing if it had near-complete control of media and the kind of confidence that provides. The twitter level discourse, for instance, says something like "CONSERVATIVES ARE SO DUMB THEY ARE ALL TAKING HORSE DRUGS BECAUSE TRUMP SAID", and even though this appears to be maybe 1000 people the general media take is to write carefully worded versions of the same claim, because they can, because nobody will seriously contradict them in a highly-visible way.
I don't know for sure that conservatives would in the same situation, but I'm not at all confident they'd resist the temptation. I know that I'm helped in terms of keeping myself in check knowing that I'll be questioned - I'm not sure how it would be if I knew I had carte blanche.
I think you are quite correct, that if the right were not experiencing the "in the wilderness" phase right now they would be inclined to pass a lot of really terrible arguments off as legit. I doubt Bible camp is the best place to go for really rigorous debate about whether or not God is, in fact, great. :)
Conflict vs Mistake is definitely something that will exist on both sides of any issue. Demonizing the opposition is quite the popular pass time with humans. However, I think the modern left, the left of the past 20 years or so in America at least, have Conflict Theory as their core world view. I think one could trace this to the early Marxists or Leninists of the 20th century, as they certainly took to heart the idea of making those who disagree with them not merely wrong, but aggressively evil. If you aren't with them, you are against them. If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. I expect this is because if you want to make people do what you want (which is as near as I can tell the only consistent thread in the modern left philosophy as I write here https://dochammer.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-and-alexander-on-partisanship ) leaning on Conflict Theory is a very effective method to get people to back you. Not many people are willing to force people to conform to another's will without believing those being forced are evil or being misled by other evil people.
Again, I do want to emphasize that the American right could just as well hop onto the "everything that is not forbidden is mandatory!" bandwagon, just with a different list for each category. Just at the moment the American left has been the one really pushing control, with the right almost being defined as those who don't want to be controlled.
> if the right were not experiencing the "in the wilderness" phase right now they would be inclined to pass a lot of really terrible arguments off as legit
this was maybe true (in small parts) six to four years ago, but now even most corners of the “dissident right” or really any center right place is totally awash with the most ridiculous and unsupported claims. I wish it wasn’t like that...
>>> Again, I do want to emphasize that the American right could just as well hop onto the "everything that is not forbidden is mandatory!" bandwagon, just with a different list for each category. <<<
1. They "could," but this doesn't by itself invalidate an argument that the left should cut down its list.
2. I wish there was a legitimate political place for someone like myself, who has a very short list of things I think should be mandatory.
That would be the Libertarian Party, wouldn't it? Unless by "legitimate" you mean "likely to win a majority or sizable minority in the national legislature." I feel you there.
Since the NYT published their "hit-piece" smearing "verbose" Scott, he seems to got a bit embittered. He even wrote: about the NYT: "écrasez l'infâme" - which is strong language. (And French, had to look it up on wikipedia: "Voltaire's works, especially his private letters, frequently urge the reader: "écrasez l'infâme", or "crush the infamous".[121] The phrase refers to contemporaneous abuses of power by royal and religious authorities, and the superstition and intolerance fomented by the clergy" - I would translate it as "kill the beast". ;)
Today he published his 2nd piece about climate-alarmists - still sounding as if he is a firmbeliever - but if you stick to the facts as Scott does, you end up showing the alarmists wrong (the first one started out as "having kids is fine, even if bad for the climate - and it is not that bad for climate" and ended up showing: people mostly die, when it is cooler, not when hotter) . - I wonder if he is on a mission? - Whatever: For me the most important living writer. And I got to your fine substack only because: Scott reads you.
When I disagree with Scott I do always try to put something in mentioning that I owe him a great deal. He's certainly influenced how I write. And I think that he has been and will probably continue to be important.
But at the same time we disagree on an awful lot of stuff, and probably the biggest thing in a subtle way is that he emphasizes kindness more than I do. I tend to guess that this is because he came out of an era of internet where meanness has completely crippled discourse, and he corrected in the other direction. In a calm mood I think that plays into what I saw in the article I wrote about; he's wanting to be *nice* to both sides, to keep things even and measured in a way that solves the internet "everyone is too mean" problems of 2010.
If accurate, I think that's often a good thing. As an abstract keeping a discourse calm and from falling into partisan pitfalls is fine. Where it fails is where meanness is called for to some extent or another - say, acknowledging that one group is worse than another in a situation where it's clear they were. I think Scott's bad at that, or at least very reluctant to do it.
The flip side of that is I'm on the opposite side of things and maximally ready to disagree or point at the bad guy at all times. That comes with a completely different set of pitfalls that's probably much bigger.
Well spoken. The reason Scott does it, seems clear to me: Cuz he is him. And can`t help it much. Patrick Süskind can not be not Patrick Süskind (maybe best writer in my language). As you and me can hardly change- but we should try to change more towards Scott than Cochran; if only I could, I surely would.
I disagree with this criticism of Scott, I think he wrote a piece that needed to be written, and he wrote it excellently. Perhaps Scott stops short of accusing Rolling Stone to have acted in bad faith, but Scott does make it quite clear that Rolling Stone is a bad actor. And importantly, that so are BBC and Guardian and the others who just piled on - and who are quite bigger fish than Rolling Stone, by any metric.
Your criticism of Scott revolves around that "Conflict vs. Mistake" distinction, because Scott makes those newspapers to be "merely" bad actors ("Mistake") rather than bad faith actors ("Conflict").
I think Scott basically looks at the facts, leaving emotion and attribution-of-motives completely aside. Like a doctor assessing a tumor, and not in an "Aaarg! Tumor! Bad Tumor! EVIL Tumor!!1! (rage)" way. More in the way of pondering "OK so, when looking at all of these messy guts, what is the healthy tissue and what is the tumor? How far has it spread? How do we stop it from spreading?" In my view, Scott gets kudos for thoroughly presenting the facts, and a hundred kudos for exculpating Dr. McElyea from the whole shitshow. The RS-debunking ran along the lines of discrediting McElyea (the NHS Sequoyah message). Someone who gets his news only from that strand of RS-debunking narrative, is likely to pile on McElyea as the culprit for the RS article. Scott makes it clear that McElyea is guilty of no such thing - he had merely given an interview to a local news source where he was talking both about hospital overcrowding and about the appearance of ivermectin overdose cases and about various other things. It was *RS* who decided to fabricate this into a "ivermectin overdoses cause hospital overcrowding" narrative - yes, a narrative in the service of tarnishing Republicans. And the other tarnish-spreading powerhouses immediately jumped in, from BBC to Guardian etc. None of whom did any basic fact checks. None of whom apparently -wanted- to do so.
It's down to that "bad faith actor" vs "bad actor" distinction. Would that distinction apply also to the other side? Where do you draw the line between "lack of due dilligence in disproving a tidbit of information that nicely aligns with your overall worldview" and "nefarious fabrications"? How would you classify a right-winger who, after seeing the @NumbersMuncher tweet, goes to pile onto McElyea? A bad faith actor? Or just a bad actor lacking due dilligence? Those are the kinds of questions that implicitly arise reading Scott's article.
Whence Scott's commandment, "thou shalt not debunk bullshit with cowshit, for it leadeth to pointless polarization, with each side seeing only the shit in their neighbour's eye". There might be less "visceral satisfaction" in the kind of RS debunking that *Scott* made, but it is nonetheless the correct take on debunking.
To make my position clear: to me, RS *is* a bad faith actor, not merely a bad actor. This scoop did involve a fabrication step, and this is not exactly the first time for them. The BBC / Guardian / co. might have picked it up without due dilligence, but also without fabrication - like any right-winger piling onto McElyea, say.
Scott-the-doctor seems to ask, what is the tumor? (insufficient due dilligence in verifying information that aligns nicely with our worldview) How far has it spread? (BBC, Guardian ... but not *only* them) How do we stop it from spreading? (due dilligence)
Does Scott lean too much into the "Mistake" camp, at the expense of the "Conflict" camp? I'd agree that yes, he does. But c'mon, you can accuse the present times of many things, but not of "lack of Conflict". Attribution-of-motive is cheap, and in serious oversupply on all sides (much more so on the "progressive left", but it certainly exists on the "right" too). Due dilligence is expensive, and in serious undersupply. What Scott is doing is thus golden, and rare. And if he's unduly reserved on proclaiming RS a bad faith actor, so what? The world will still become a better place if Scott's approach becomes more prevalent, not less.
The very condensed version of why I think you are wrong is this:
RS made a broad, lazy swipe at their political enemies. At this point, they had an obligation that they ignored to verify that the swipe was true. They didn't do this; as soon as they were called out on it they said "oh, yeah, we absolutely didn't do that; we just assumed it was true because we hate those guys.". The claim they made was also essentially mathematically impossible - a simple check of the prevalence of ivermectin overdose frequency would have told them them. They just didn't bother. No matter what the other side did, what RS did was very, very bad.
RS' enemies (see: anybody vaguely on the right in any way) were now on the defense. They got a statement from a hospital at which the doctor had previously worked saying that the situation on the ground was nothing like he (perhaps) and RS (definitely) described. *In the context of the immense implausibility of Rolling Stone's claim, they used this document -defensively- to emphasize the point that Rolling Stone's claims were bullshit.
In terms of actual reality, Rolling Stone's claims were false. The right's claims here were correct.
Now, Scott comes in and writes an article that goes to great pains to say "both of these people tried to trick you; they are the same, and deserve the same level of scrutiny within the context of this story". But to do that he has to do what you just did - draw a very clearly false equivalence between a party making an implausible smear against their opponents and a party defending against them, the obligation RS had to verify facts before printing a smear vs. the obligation anyone thus smeared had to verify facts used to defend themselves from an already mathematically impossible smear, and to ignore that believing RS would have you believing lies while believing the right in this case would have you believing the truth.
To put it another way: Any work the right did defending itself here was actually work that belonged to Rolling Stone; any evidence whatsoever they presented was *extra* to what they should have been obligated to do to defend from an obvious smear, since that work should have already been done.
Scott is, I want to emphasize, not my dad. He's a guy I sometimes read because at one point he used to be trustworthy, and on certain topics he still is. I'm not looking to him to subtly influence my views with whatever tactics he thinks are paternalistically good for me.
But in this case, Scott looking at one side playing immensely dirty in an effort to hurt people they hate and another side doing their enemy's fact-checking for them in the process of defending themselves and going "welp, I guess both those things are exactly the same" Scott is illustrating something bad: he's essentially incapable of calling a spade a spade when it comes to partisan issues. This makes him unreliable on any subject where those issues are in play.
Scott is not my dad. He's a guy I sometimes read because at one point he used to be trustworthy, and on certain topics he still is. I'm not looking to him to subtly influence my views with whatever tactics he thinks are paternalistically good for me. If he wants to actually make valid arguments, I find he's very good at that; I'll read that all day. But when he tries to feed me a bucket of bullshit, as here, I'm going to mention that.
There might be a misunderstanding if you say that I'm drawing a false equivalence between *Rolling Stone* and the right's reaction on this topic. I am drawing no such equivalence. I have called Rolling Stone a bad faith actor. I didn't call anyone else involved a bad faith actor. Perhaps the disconnect here is that you don't realize just how damning a qualification of "bad faith actor" is, at least in my book.
I am quite right-leaning, but I accept people who lean in other ways, as long as one fundamental premise is present: good faith. And people on all sides can make bad calls without having had bad faith. Unfortunate, but happens all the time. If such people realize their error, and apologize, that makes sense.
But not so for people who knowingly started out in bad faith. In that ivermectin story, Rolling Stone didn't "misunderstand" something they reported on, they didn't "insufficiently verify" something before reprinting it. Rather, in order to score points (and clicks, and status in their camp, and revenue), RS *fabricated* something.
My view on that is, as Christ famously said not, "Lord, do not forgive them, for they know what they are doing."
So you want RS to say that they are... "sorry"? *What for*? What meaning is there in a bad faith actor saying that they are sorry? Not that they tried, but it doesn't matter. From a qualification of bad faith actor, there is no return. Whoever accepts apologies from bad faith actors, is a fool.
In case that this had better illustrated my view on RS, and equivalences that I did and did not make, we could go back to Scott. I agree that Scott stopped short of calling RS a bad faith actor... which he should have? Perhaps? Maybe. But Scott did do a reasonable amount of due dilligence on this case, and *has* laid out all the facts that depict RS as a bad faith actor. For what was laid out "against" the right, was not an accusation of bad faith, but a call for due dilligence -- the same one that was laid out "against" the left, as it could have stopped the spread (on the left) of a story fabricated by a bad faith actor.
The initial debunking of RS had framed McElyea as "the culprit" for the bullshit which RS had fabricated, in a way that was just wrong. There was a much *better* debunking to be done, the one which Scott *did* present, with the actual statistics, and with what is it that McElyea had really been saying. In other words: a debunking which shows *both* that what RS is writing is bullshit *and* that they have knowingly fabricated it.
Wouldn't it have been better for *that* debunking to have been used from the outset? Instead of the debunking that called for piling onto McElyea?
The missing ingredient, according to Scott, was due dilligence, and I concur. It was not an accusation of bad faith. It was a heads-up on the importance of due dilligence.
I continue viewing Scott as a remarkable left-leaning writer, writing in good faith. And given the astounding amounts of bad faith that kept gushing out of the lefty media and academia over the past decade, I actually seriously appreciate that. Scott is not the *only* left-leaning writer who has my respect (there's also Jonathan Haidt and some others - just as there's lefty writers to whom I wouldn't give the time of day, like Ezra Klein and Nathan Robinson) but Scott's writing and perception are really something unique.
So this idea that the right wing was uniquely wrong in how they handled things is absent both from Scott's article and from the sources he linked. Scott did some guesses that McElyea didn't go as far in his interviews as he could have, but he didn't put the blame for that on either side. And it's clear why: the articles linked (with the reddit post left out because "random redditor says something bad about an issue" isn't really news or indicative of anything substantial) don't go any farther than RS did or call for pile-ons as you claim they did. Quotes from the articles Scott used as examples:
Fox News: "On Friday, the liberal magazine published testimony from Dr. Jason McElyea, who told a local news station that hospitals were being overrun from patients overdosing on ivermectin which resulted in other patients waiting for treatment. McElyea claimed the situation was so bad that gunshot victims were being neglected."
"The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated," McElyea said."
Washington Examiner: " McElyea blamed the lack of hospital beds on an influx of patients who had taken ivermectin to counteract COVID-19 symptoms. Despite the drug’s long history of successful prescribed use in human patients, the online left has taken to calling the Nobel Prize-winning drug a “horse dewormer.”
McElyea added some color to his story, claiming, “The scariest one that I’ve heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss,” the doctor said."
So not substantially worse and no more calling for pile-ons than anything RS printed. Did *somebody*? Maybe, even probably; I haven't read every article on the internet. Did Scott present that evidence? No. He's saying that the bad behavior is equivalent on both sides, but he never provides that as a reason why. I'm not responding to articles he might have written; I'm responding to articles he did write. And if he did make that claim, with the same evidence presented, I'd be criticizing him for that, because nothing he presented supports it.
Now for a hamhanded metaphor:
You are visiting a friend's house who prides himself on being even-handed and rational. At some point, someone bashes in his door and stabs you in the torso. As you bleed out on your friend's floor, he says "Oh, shoot; you bled on my floor. Both of you are equally at fault; him for stabbing you, and you for not dodging well enough."
Now for a fun insurance fact:
In auto insurance, there's a concept called "proximate cause". Consider a car that makes an illegal lane change; he hits another car, which goes out of control and hits another car. In insurance, the "proximate cause" is the first car; but for the illegal action of the first car, none of the rest of it would have happened. Proximate cause puts the fault on the first car.
Another Metaphor:
The man from the stabbing story (the one who prides himself on his neutrality and reason, not the other guy) comes into your house and says someone told him that they sky has turned entirely into green ducks. You look outside your window, through which you can see approximately half the sky; everything you can see is blue, normal sky. Since the other person made a nearly-impossible claim, you feel confident enough in your half-sky sample to tell your friend that the sky is not in fact ducks, and he can calm down. He then gets on the internet and verifies further that the sky is not entirely ducks; you think the issue is resolved.
But it isn't. He turns around and goes "Listen, you liar; the first guy lied to me. But I know for a fact you couldn't see the entire sky at the time you checked; some of it was over Australia at the time! You lied to me just the same, and just as bad!"
Scott looked at a situation where someone responded to an implausible claim intended to smear them with pretty good (if not perfect) evidence that it was untrue. These people responding were among those the attackers were looking to smear and were acting in defense. They were also proven factually right - the implausible smear *was* false and unfair.
Scott looks at all this and makes an article that says "These two parties are exactly the same; they both committed the same sin and they were both trying to mislead me". That's not the reaction someone who is both capable and willing of being honest on the matter has.
I value honesty, and I also value sources of information that are looking to give me actual, true information. Where they are explaining something to me, I hope that they are trying to explain to me things *as they actually are*. Scott is increasingly showing that he's uninterested in this; he's pursuing some other goal.
Other people care little about honesty, or value other things higher in a way that negates a lack of it. That may be your case. But here Scott wasn't honest or fair; he was something else. And while that may not matter to you, it does matter to me; he's increasingly showing himself to be willing to weigh in on topics that he's unwilling to be factual or fair on. That diminishes his value an enormous amount (for me).
> Scott did some guesses that McElyea didn't go as far in his interviews as he could have (...)
So McElyea is one of the bad guys in this story?
Have you actually read what McElyea *said*?
(what he said to KFOR - McElyea did not say anything to RS!)
McElyea has not. Done. Anything. Wrong.
Let's drop discussions of Scott for a moment, as I sense that we have a deeper disconnect about the actual matter at hand: ivermectin, McElyea, RS, and the right's reactions.
Lefty media insists on calling ivermectin a "horse dewormer". That is not an accurate description of ivermectin, that is just their cheap method of demeaning the people who are taking ivermectin. Ivermectin is a fine drug, with a number of purposes, as is aspirin, and - just like aspirin - protection against COVID is not one of the effects.
Overdosing is a different thing. With ANY drug. You *can* overdose on aspirin, and if you do, you will get some nasty internal bleeding.
McElyea had related to KFOR how dire the situations can get when the ICUs are overfilled. ICUs today still have to treat all of the diverse cases that they had to treat before 2020 - the car accidents, heart attacks, nasty infections etc. - and this is also what they had historically been "dimensioned" for. Today the ICUs are overfilled, and McElyea recounts the exasperation of not having a single free ICU to send a gunshot wound patient into. An exasperation that is easy to understand.
Who is overfilling the ICUs beyond what they had been "dimensioned" for? COVID patients, of course. And McElyea *never* claimed different. He *never* claimed that ivermectin overdoses are responsible for overfilling ICUs. That claim is bullshit, and to say that McElyea claimed it, is bullshit. McElyea did remark on ivermectin. There's very few ivermectin overdoses, but to McElyea, they're a) new, b) the most trivial to prevent. Put it this way. The number of aspirin overdoses that hospitals had to deal with, was: none. The number of ivermectin overdoses was: very low. But it could *also* have been: none, as for aspirin, and as it was the previous years.
This is a totally reasonable position for a doctor to have. Note also that McElyea did not call ivermectin "horse dewormer". He's a doctor, he knows what ivermectin is, he is not a snide lefty journalist who wants to demean "the stupid republican tribe", he wants people to not get hurt by a futile overdosing. As for ICUs they are overbooked by COVID, with or without those few ivermectin overdoses.
It is *Rolling Stone* who said, quote, "Dr. Jason McElyea told KFOR the [ivermectin] overdoses are causing backlogs in rural hospitals, leaving both beds and ambulance services scarce".
While linking to a text where McElyea has *said no such thing*.
RS are being slimy fact-twisters dunking at the right. But surely, the right shall slam them hard for this?
Yea... you wish.
Fox news, quote: "Dr. Jason McElyea told a local news station that hospitals were being overrun from patients overdosing on ivermectin".
Washington Examiner, quote: " McElyea blamed the lack of hospital beds on an influx of patients who had taken ivermectin".
Except, no.
*He did not*.
Fox and WE could have and should have slammed RS for making a bullshit claim of RS's own fabrication, falsely attributing it to a doctor.
Instead, Fox and WE have related that the doctor really has uttered a bullshit claim, while letting off RS as saints who had merely "repeated what an esteemed doctor has said".
Own goal, hello?
Anyhow, this "caught on" on the right, and the rebuttal soon took its target to be McElyea (the retweeting of NHS Sequoya etc.), instead of RS.
How much flak did McElyea get? I also can't survey the whole internet, but it is certainly more than just that one quoted redditor who called McElyea a liar. I mean, what do you expect will happen, when at the outset the right's reaction gets *steered* against McElyea much more than against RS? And as I said, McElyea has not. Done. Anything. Wrong.
About your hamhanded metaphor, can I propose a somewhat different hamhanded metaphor?
Alex is at some party. Betty and Carl, each going their own way, at one conjecture pass by Alex, when Carl suddenly snatches Betty's handbag, and swings it into Alex's groin. Irate at having been ignominiously suckerpunched, Alex swings his fist wildly in the direction of Carl and Betty. Carl dodges the counterpunch (almost) completely, and grins back derisively at Alex. Betty doesn't dodge it.
My stance on this? It's quite fine for Alex to administer to Carl the punching that Carl needs. And Carl needs quite a bit of it. Whereas, the more *precise* the punching delivery, the better. I do believe we are in agreement on this.
Can we also agree about not punching Betty?
My alternative hamhanded metaphor refuses to fuse Carl and Betty into the same person, *which they are not*. Because if *you* are not able to tell the difference between RS and McElyea - a muckracking twisting manipulative media and a doctor who's trying to help people - then RS has indeed succeeded, to a degree that I find depressing.
(theoretically *I* should also not fuse Peter Wade and Rolling Stone into the "same person", but RS has already made such a habit of deploying this kind of writing, that I am taking that liberty)
At some point you've drifted into a conversation Scott barely touched on, and a part of conversation I never criticized in how Scott handled it as your main thing. I don't understand why. Scott didn't make the claims you are making; the articles related to McElyea didn't throw him under the bus like you've claimed.
I don't think you are reading anybody involved very closely here; I'm not sure how productive I can be continuing with this.
I'd say I'm reading the related articles (KFOR/McEleya, RS, Fox, WE...) quite closely. And this is exactly why, although I understand what you're trying with your two metaphors (bleeding on the carpet and frogs in the sky), I think that both of your metaphors are missing the point. I'm trying to give the perspective why so.
Your central grudge is that Scott has qualified both "act 1" and "act 2" in the same manner, as if they were "morally equivalent". "Act 1" was that RS's bad-faith fabrication was "debunked" by the NHS Sequoia statement, and "act 2" was "the debunking of the debunking" of that NHS Sequoia statement. Which you protest with your "half the sky not covered in frogs" metaphor.
This is the first missed point. NHS Sequoia is not *half* of the sky. Check out the size of Oklahoma. NHS Sequoia's statement is correct - Scott never said it was false - but nonetheless, formally it does NOT constitute the debunking of the RS fabrication. Which is basically what Scott is saying, even if Scott said it in a manner that offended you. Factually, McElyea *really did* have a gunshot wound patient he couldn't put in any ICU, whatever NHS Sequoia's ICUs may have been like at that time.
Put it this way. The right writes about how BLM is instigating burning looting ravaging riots on a large scale. Then comes a lefty journo to claim "Vile rightist propaganda! No they don't! I've been through the entire BLM demonstration in Poshtown CA, and it has been a completely peaceful and dignified affair. Bzzzt DEBUNKED!"
Did that journo lie about Poshtown, CA? No.
Did he debunk what he claims to have debunked? No.
Is Poshtown, CA "half the sky"? No.
OK, those 3 questions were real easy. Now, for a slightly harder one: would you have been as cross with Scott if he had answered "No" to the second question above?
What *does* debunk the RS fabrication, if not NHS Sequoia? Well, for one, comprehensive statistics *do* debunk it. And this is exactly what all of Scott's "act 3" was dedicated to!
OK I get it, the problem with Scott "morally equating" the RS fabrication and the retweeting of the NHS Sequoia statement. I.e. the "bleeding on the carpet" metaphor. Because the RS fabrication is morally reprehensible, and the NHS Sequoia rebuttal is morally clean.
OK so this is where I'm trying to get you to reconsider the perspective a bit.
If the point of the RS article was to smear the right - which it was - the point of retweeting the NHS Sequoia was to smear McElyea. With RW reddit and twitter calling McElyea a liar.
This is where I had to draw that Alex/Betty/Carl metaphor, which quite more accurately describes the incident than the bleeding-on-carpet metaphor (where you "fused" the offender into a single person). McElyea never said that the ICUs were overbooked by ivermectin overdosers. That bullshit is a fabrication that was specifically created by RS. Read the articles in question. Alex was hit by Carl, and is counterpunching Betty. That was an "ad hominem" attack against a "hominem" who did nothing wrong to you, a doctor trying to help people.
And it was *barking up the wrong tree*. The right tree to bark up is RS and not McElyea.
I think Scott is aware of the damage that partisan thinking has and does inflict on our discourse, and he is hypersensitive to any accusation that he is indulging in that kind of thinking. He wants to be above reproach in this area, and puts hedges around himself so as to not even get close to saying anything that might seem biased. Does he go too far? Perhaps. He has not yet gone as far as Zossima in "The Brothers Karamazov" who blamed himself for everything and asked forgiveness of basically all of humanity and the whole universe for their own mistakes.
I'm willing to grant him leniency in this area, because, as you said, his commitment to self-aware, reasoned responses to situations is quite valuable and rare in this age. I'm also glad that you wrote this "contra" because it's very easy to follow along with rationalist thinkers like Scott when they start pointing out biases, so as not to seem biased ourselves.
Agree on both points. Just wish the title of this post wasn't quite so misleading/clickbaity.
Yes; he doesn't disagree with Scott's choice of font for his newsletter, among other things...
"Scott desperately wants to believe that he can win over the left and be accepted and important in their world, even though the left has made it clear they want none of this to the extent a non-monolithic group can make things clear."
To be fair to Scott Alexander, he has won over a lot of left-leaning folks, as is clear from his comments section. You don't have to convince the entire left-wing media establishment your message is worthwhile to have a positive influence.
Eh, as someone who hangs out with right wingers a lot I appreciated the article because it brought needed subtlety and moderation to stuff like tweets from cernovich and other big right wingers about how this proves the msm always lies and you should never listen to them again (despite them not being reliable news sources themselves).
> The twitter level discourse, for instance, says something like "CONSERVATIVES ARE SO DUMB THEY ARE ALL TAKING HORSE DRUGS BECAUSE TRUMP SAID",
I liked the article precisely because the conservative discourse on the article was also “LIBERALS ARE SO DUMB THEY ALL BELIEVE THIS ONE TWITTER SCREENSHOT PEOVES IT AND EVERY NYT STORY IS JUST LIKE THIS THEIR MEDIA NEEDS TO BE DISMANTLED PERMANENTLY” and hence liked Scott’s thread of the needle
News sifes do need to fact check at least a bit tho. As an example, I saw this yesterday - https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg83bg/reddit-bans-abortion-bounty-hunter-forum a story about a Reddit sub for abortion bounty hunting. How awful! But the sub was a fake subreddit for baiting people, and had a grand total of 50 subscribers and as many posts. - the image in question has such real Texan usernames as CatsLikeMyCum and cry_for_me_fatty
It got 17k upvotes in 4 hours - https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/pk9e28/reddit_shut_down_a_forum_for_selfdescribed_texas/ and 13k likes https://mobile.twitter.com/kendallybrown/status/1433588701385400327?s=19
rdrama[.]net was the source of the bait
Thanks for writing this. I appreciated your comments on Scott's article because I was pretty uncomfortable with what he wrote myself, but I didn't really feel like I could put my finger on why. I think the focus on Mistake and Conflict Theory really helps. I wonder if there should be a corollary that whichever theory you subscribe to, Mistake or Conflict, you will then behave in such a fashion as to make your chosen theory literally true. Maybe that doesn't apply to Mistake Theory, but it seems to me that if you believe in a Conflict Theory world you are going to act out your part, creating a situation where Conflict Theory is in fact true. Since they believe the other side is out to do evil and destroy them, the believer of Conflict Theory seeks to destroy the other side in the name of good because discussion is pointless. Thus is created a REAL faction that really does want to destroy the other side, making Conflict Theory true in this case.
My sense is that Scott is deeply uncomfortable with that notion, perhaps more so because the so much of the American left has fallen into that pattern. Not that the right is free of Conflict Theorists, but my sense is that they are much fewer and less respected, whereas those on the left are considered the true believers and practically lionized by others on the left. Possibly because the left's philosophy is grounded in Conflict Theory?
Anyway, thanks for writing this!
I want to be careful of things like "the left's philosophy is more grounded in conflict theory". It's not that it definitely isn't or is, but more that I'm not sure the right wouldn't be doing the same thing if it had near-complete control of media and the kind of confidence that provides. The twitter level discourse, for instance, says something like "CONSERVATIVES ARE SO DUMB THEY ARE ALL TAKING HORSE DRUGS BECAUSE TRUMP SAID", and even though this appears to be maybe 1000 people the general media take is to write carefully worded versions of the same claim, because they can, because nobody will seriously contradict them in a highly-visible way.
I don't know for sure that conservatives would in the same situation, but I'm not at all confident they'd resist the temptation. I know that I'm helped in terms of keeping myself in check knowing that I'll be questioned - I'm not sure how it would be if I knew I had carte blanche.
I think you are quite correct, that if the right were not experiencing the "in the wilderness" phase right now they would be inclined to pass a lot of really terrible arguments off as legit. I doubt Bible camp is the best place to go for really rigorous debate about whether or not God is, in fact, great. :)
Conflict vs Mistake is definitely something that will exist on both sides of any issue. Demonizing the opposition is quite the popular pass time with humans. However, I think the modern left, the left of the past 20 years or so in America at least, have Conflict Theory as their core world view. I think one could trace this to the early Marxists or Leninists of the 20th century, as they certainly took to heart the idea of making those who disagree with them not merely wrong, but aggressively evil. If you aren't with them, you are against them. If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. I expect this is because if you want to make people do what you want (which is as near as I can tell the only consistent thread in the modern left philosophy as I write here https://dochammer.substack.com/p/contra-hanania-and-alexander-on-partisanship ) leaning on Conflict Theory is a very effective method to get people to back you. Not many people are willing to force people to conform to another's will without believing those being forced are evil or being misled by other evil people.
Again, I do want to emphasize that the American right could just as well hop onto the "everything that is not forbidden is mandatory!" bandwagon, just with a different list for each category. Just at the moment the American left has been the one really pushing control, with the right almost being defined as those who don't want to be controlled.
> if the right were not experiencing the "in the wilderness" phase right now they would be inclined to pass a lot of really terrible arguments off as legit
this was maybe true (in small parts) six to four years ago, but now even most corners of the “dissident right” or really any center right place is totally awash with the most ridiculous and unsupported claims. I wish it wasn’t like that...
>>> Again, I do want to emphasize that the American right could just as well hop onto the "everything that is not forbidden is mandatory!" bandwagon, just with a different list for each category. <<<
1. They "could," but this doesn't by itself invalidate an argument that the left should cut down its list.
2. I wish there was a legitimate political place for someone like myself, who has a very short list of things I think should be mandatory.
That would be the Libertarian Party, wouldn't it? Unless by "legitimate" you mean "likely to win a majority or sizable minority in the national legislature." I feel you there.
You have understood my meaning correctly.
Since the NYT published their "hit-piece" smearing "verbose" Scott, he seems to got a bit embittered. He even wrote: about the NYT: "écrasez l'infâme" - which is strong language. (And French, had to look it up on wikipedia: "Voltaire's works, especially his private letters, frequently urge the reader: "écrasez l'infâme", or "crush the infamous".[121] The phrase refers to contemporaneous abuses of power by royal and religious authorities, and the superstition and intolerance fomented by the clergy" - I would translate it as "kill the beast". ;)
Today he published his 2nd piece about climate-alarmists - still sounding as if he is a firmbeliever - but if you stick to the facts as Scott does, you end up showing the alarmists wrong (the first one started out as "having kids is fine, even if bad for the climate - and it is not that bad for climate" and ended up showing: people mostly die, when it is cooler, not when hotter) . - I wonder if he is on a mission? - Whatever: For me the most important living writer. And I got to your fine substack only because: Scott reads you.
When I disagree with Scott I do always try to put something in mentioning that I owe him a great deal. He's certainly influenced how I write. And I think that he has been and will probably continue to be important.
But at the same time we disagree on an awful lot of stuff, and probably the biggest thing in a subtle way is that he emphasizes kindness more than I do. I tend to guess that this is because he came out of an era of internet where meanness has completely crippled discourse, and he corrected in the other direction. In a calm mood I think that plays into what I saw in the article I wrote about; he's wanting to be *nice* to both sides, to keep things even and measured in a way that solves the internet "everyone is too mean" problems of 2010.
If accurate, I think that's often a good thing. As an abstract keeping a discourse calm and from falling into partisan pitfalls is fine. Where it fails is where meanness is called for to some extent or another - say, acknowledging that one group is worse than another in a situation where it's clear they were. I think Scott's bad at that, or at least very reluctant to do it.
The flip side of that is I'm on the opposite side of things and maximally ready to disagree or point at the bad guy at all times. That comes with a completely different set of pitfalls that's probably much bigger.
Well spoken. The reason Scott does it, seems clear to me: Cuz he is him. And can`t help it much. Patrick Süskind can not be not Patrick Süskind (maybe best writer in my language). As you and me can hardly change- but we should try to change more towards Scott than Cochran; if only I could, I surely would.
I disagree with this criticism of Scott, I think he wrote a piece that needed to be written, and he wrote it excellently. Perhaps Scott stops short of accusing Rolling Stone to have acted in bad faith, but Scott does make it quite clear that Rolling Stone is a bad actor. And importantly, that so are BBC and Guardian and the others who just piled on - and who are quite bigger fish than Rolling Stone, by any metric.
Your criticism of Scott revolves around that "Conflict vs. Mistake" distinction, because Scott makes those newspapers to be "merely" bad actors ("Mistake") rather than bad faith actors ("Conflict").
I think Scott basically looks at the facts, leaving emotion and attribution-of-motives completely aside. Like a doctor assessing a tumor, and not in an "Aaarg! Tumor! Bad Tumor! EVIL Tumor!!1! (rage)" way. More in the way of pondering "OK so, when looking at all of these messy guts, what is the healthy tissue and what is the tumor? How far has it spread? How do we stop it from spreading?" In my view, Scott gets kudos for thoroughly presenting the facts, and a hundred kudos for exculpating Dr. McElyea from the whole shitshow. The RS-debunking ran along the lines of discrediting McElyea (the NHS Sequoyah message). Someone who gets his news only from that strand of RS-debunking narrative, is likely to pile on McElyea as the culprit for the RS article. Scott makes it clear that McElyea is guilty of no such thing - he had merely given an interview to a local news source where he was talking both about hospital overcrowding and about the appearance of ivermectin overdose cases and about various other things. It was *RS* who decided to fabricate this into a "ivermectin overdoses cause hospital overcrowding" narrative - yes, a narrative in the service of tarnishing Republicans. And the other tarnish-spreading powerhouses immediately jumped in, from BBC to Guardian etc. None of whom did any basic fact checks. None of whom apparently -wanted- to do so.
It's down to that "bad faith actor" vs "bad actor" distinction. Would that distinction apply also to the other side? Where do you draw the line between "lack of due dilligence in disproving a tidbit of information that nicely aligns with your overall worldview" and "nefarious fabrications"? How would you classify a right-winger who, after seeing the @NumbersMuncher tweet, goes to pile onto McElyea? A bad faith actor? Or just a bad actor lacking due dilligence? Those are the kinds of questions that implicitly arise reading Scott's article.
Whence Scott's commandment, "thou shalt not debunk bullshit with cowshit, for it leadeth to pointless polarization, with each side seeing only the shit in their neighbour's eye". There might be less "visceral satisfaction" in the kind of RS debunking that *Scott* made, but it is nonetheless the correct take on debunking.
To make my position clear: to me, RS *is* a bad faith actor, not merely a bad actor. This scoop did involve a fabrication step, and this is not exactly the first time for them. The BBC / Guardian / co. might have picked it up without due dilligence, but also without fabrication - like any right-winger piling onto McElyea, say.
Scott-the-doctor seems to ask, what is the tumor? (insufficient due dilligence in verifying information that aligns nicely with our worldview) How far has it spread? (BBC, Guardian ... but not *only* them) How do we stop it from spreading? (due dilligence)
Does Scott lean too much into the "Mistake" camp, at the expense of the "Conflict" camp? I'd agree that yes, he does. But c'mon, you can accuse the present times of many things, but not of "lack of Conflict". Attribution-of-motive is cheap, and in serious oversupply on all sides (much more so on the "progressive left", but it certainly exists on the "right" too). Due dilligence is expensive, and in serious undersupply. What Scott is doing is thus golden, and rare. And if he's unduly reserved on proclaiming RS a bad faith actor, so what? The world will still become a better place if Scott's approach becomes more prevalent, not less.
The very condensed version of why I think you are wrong is this:
RS made a broad, lazy swipe at their political enemies. At this point, they had an obligation that they ignored to verify that the swipe was true. They didn't do this; as soon as they were called out on it they said "oh, yeah, we absolutely didn't do that; we just assumed it was true because we hate those guys.". The claim they made was also essentially mathematically impossible - a simple check of the prevalence of ivermectin overdose frequency would have told them them. They just didn't bother. No matter what the other side did, what RS did was very, very bad.
RS' enemies (see: anybody vaguely on the right in any way) were now on the defense. They got a statement from a hospital at which the doctor had previously worked saying that the situation on the ground was nothing like he (perhaps) and RS (definitely) described. *In the context of the immense implausibility of Rolling Stone's claim, they used this document -defensively- to emphasize the point that Rolling Stone's claims were bullshit.
In terms of actual reality, Rolling Stone's claims were false. The right's claims here were correct.
Now, Scott comes in and writes an article that goes to great pains to say "both of these people tried to trick you; they are the same, and deserve the same level of scrutiny within the context of this story". But to do that he has to do what you just did - draw a very clearly false equivalence between a party making an implausible smear against their opponents and a party defending against them, the obligation RS had to verify facts before printing a smear vs. the obligation anyone thus smeared had to verify facts used to defend themselves from an already mathematically impossible smear, and to ignore that believing RS would have you believing lies while believing the right in this case would have you believing the truth.
To put it another way: Any work the right did defending itself here was actually work that belonged to Rolling Stone; any evidence whatsoever they presented was *extra* to what they should have been obligated to do to defend from an obvious smear, since that work should have already been done.
Scott is, I want to emphasize, not my dad. He's a guy I sometimes read because at one point he used to be trustworthy, and on certain topics he still is. I'm not looking to him to subtly influence my views with whatever tactics he thinks are paternalistically good for me.
But in this case, Scott looking at one side playing immensely dirty in an effort to hurt people they hate and another side doing their enemy's fact-checking for them in the process of defending themselves and going "welp, I guess both those things are exactly the same" Scott is illustrating something bad: he's essentially incapable of calling a spade a spade when it comes to partisan issues. This makes him unreliable on any subject where those issues are in play.
Scott is not my dad. He's a guy I sometimes read because at one point he used to be trustworthy, and on certain topics he still is. I'm not looking to him to subtly influence my views with whatever tactics he thinks are paternalistically good for me. If he wants to actually make valid arguments, I find he's very good at that; I'll read that all day. But when he tries to feed me a bucket of bullshit, as here, I'm going to mention that.
There might be a misunderstanding if you say that I'm drawing a false equivalence between *Rolling Stone* and the right's reaction on this topic. I am drawing no such equivalence. I have called Rolling Stone a bad faith actor. I didn't call anyone else involved a bad faith actor. Perhaps the disconnect here is that you don't realize just how damning a qualification of "bad faith actor" is, at least in my book.
I am quite right-leaning, but I accept people who lean in other ways, as long as one fundamental premise is present: good faith. And people on all sides can make bad calls without having had bad faith. Unfortunate, but happens all the time. If such people realize their error, and apologize, that makes sense.
But not so for people who knowingly started out in bad faith. In that ivermectin story, Rolling Stone didn't "misunderstand" something they reported on, they didn't "insufficiently verify" something before reprinting it. Rather, in order to score points (and clicks, and status in their camp, and revenue), RS *fabricated* something.
My view on that is, as Christ famously said not, "Lord, do not forgive them, for they know what they are doing."
So you want RS to say that they are... "sorry"? *What for*? What meaning is there in a bad faith actor saying that they are sorry? Not that they tried, but it doesn't matter. From a qualification of bad faith actor, there is no return. Whoever accepts apologies from bad faith actors, is a fool.
In case that this had better illustrated my view on RS, and equivalences that I did and did not make, we could go back to Scott. I agree that Scott stopped short of calling RS a bad faith actor... which he should have? Perhaps? Maybe. But Scott did do a reasonable amount of due dilligence on this case, and *has* laid out all the facts that depict RS as a bad faith actor. For what was laid out "against" the right, was not an accusation of bad faith, but a call for due dilligence -- the same one that was laid out "against" the left, as it could have stopped the spread (on the left) of a story fabricated by a bad faith actor.
The initial debunking of RS had framed McElyea as "the culprit" for the bullshit which RS had fabricated, in a way that was just wrong. There was a much *better* debunking to be done, the one which Scott *did* present, with the actual statistics, and with what is it that McElyea had really been saying. In other words: a debunking which shows *both* that what RS is writing is bullshit *and* that they have knowingly fabricated it.
Wouldn't it have been better for *that* debunking to have been used from the outset? Instead of the debunking that called for piling onto McElyea?
The missing ingredient, according to Scott, was due dilligence, and I concur. It was not an accusation of bad faith. It was a heads-up on the importance of due dilligence.
I continue viewing Scott as a remarkable left-leaning writer, writing in good faith. And given the astounding amounts of bad faith that kept gushing out of the lefty media and academia over the past decade, I actually seriously appreciate that. Scott is not the *only* left-leaning writer who has my respect (there's also Jonathan Haidt and some others - just as there's lefty writers to whom I wouldn't give the time of day, like Ezra Klein and Nathan Robinson) but Scott's writing and perception are really something unique.
So this idea that the right wing was uniquely wrong in how they handled things is absent both from Scott's article and from the sources he linked. Scott did some guesses that McElyea didn't go as far in his interviews as he could have, but he didn't put the blame for that on either side. And it's clear why: the articles linked (with the reddit post left out because "random redditor says something bad about an issue" isn't really news or indicative of anything substantial) don't go any farther than RS did or call for pile-ons as you claim they did. Quotes from the articles Scott used as examples:
Fox News: "On Friday, the liberal magazine published testimony from Dr. Jason McElyea, who told a local news station that hospitals were being overrun from patients overdosing on ivermectin which resulted in other patients waiting for treatment. McElyea claimed the situation was so bad that gunshot victims were being neglected."
"The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated," McElyea said."
Washington Examiner: " McElyea blamed the lack of hospital beds on an influx of patients who had taken ivermectin to counteract COVID-19 symptoms. Despite the drug’s long history of successful prescribed use in human patients, the online left has taken to calling the Nobel Prize-winning drug a “horse dewormer.”
McElyea added some color to his story, claiming, “The scariest one that I’ve heard of and seen is people coming in with vision loss,” the doctor said."
So not substantially worse and no more calling for pile-ons than anything RS printed. Did *somebody*? Maybe, even probably; I haven't read every article on the internet. Did Scott present that evidence? No. He's saying that the bad behavior is equivalent on both sides, but he never provides that as a reason why. I'm not responding to articles he might have written; I'm responding to articles he did write. And if he did make that claim, with the same evidence presented, I'd be criticizing him for that, because nothing he presented supports it.
Now for a hamhanded metaphor:
You are visiting a friend's house who prides himself on being even-handed and rational. At some point, someone bashes in his door and stabs you in the torso. As you bleed out on your friend's floor, he says "Oh, shoot; you bled on my floor. Both of you are equally at fault; him for stabbing you, and you for not dodging well enough."
Now for a fun insurance fact:
In auto insurance, there's a concept called "proximate cause". Consider a car that makes an illegal lane change; he hits another car, which goes out of control and hits another car. In insurance, the "proximate cause" is the first car; but for the illegal action of the first car, none of the rest of it would have happened. Proximate cause puts the fault on the first car.
Another Metaphor:
The man from the stabbing story (the one who prides himself on his neutrality and reason, not the other guy) comes into your house and says someone told him that they sky has turned entirely into green ducks. You look outside your window, through which you can see approximately half the sky; everything you can see is blue, normal sky. Since the other person made a nearly-impossible claim, you feel confident enough in your half-sky sample to tell your friend that the sky is not in fact ducks, and he can calm down. He then gets on the internet and verifies further that the sky is not entirely ducks; you think the issue is resolved.
But it isn't. He turns around and goes "Listen, you liar; the first guy lied to me. But I know for a fact you couldn't see the entire sky at the time you checked; some of it was over Australia at the time! You lied to me just the same, and just as bad!"
Scott looked at a situation where someone responded to an implausible claim intended to smear them with pretty good (if not perfect) evidence that it was untrue. These people responding were among those the attackers were looking to smear and were acting in defense. They were also proven factually right - the implausible smear *was* false and unfair.
Scott looks at all this and makes an article that says "These two parties are exactly the same; they both committed the same sin and they were both trying to mislead me". That's not the reaction someone who is both capable and willing of being honest on the matter has.
I value honesty, and I also value sources of information that are looking to give me actual, true information. Where they are explaining something to me, I hope that they are trying to explain to me things *as they actually are*. Scott is increasingly showing that he's uninterested in this; he's pursuing some other goal.
Other people care little about honesty, or value other things higher in a way that negates a lack of it. That may be your case. But here Scott wasn't honest or fair; he was something else. And while that may not matter to you, it does matter to me; he's increasingly showing himself to be willing to weigh in on topics that he's unwilling to be factual or fair on. That diminishes his value an enormous amount (for me).
> Scott did some guesses that McElyea didn't go as far in his interviews as he could have (...)
So McElyea is one of the bad guys in this story?
Have you actually read what McElyea *said*?
(what he said to KFOR - McElyea did not say anything to RS!)
McElyea has not. Done. Anything. Wrong.
Let's drop discussions of Scott for a moment, as I sense that we have a deeper disconnect about the actual matter at hand: ivermectin, McElyea, RS, and the right's reactions.
Lefty media insists on calling ivermectin a "horse dewormer". That is not an accurate description of ivermectin, that is just their cheap method of demeaning the people who are taking ivermectin. Ivermectin is a fine drug, with a number of purposes, as is aspirin, and - just like aspirin - protection against COVID is not one of the effects.
Overdosing is a different thing. With ANY drug. You *can* overdose on aspirin, and if you do, you will get some nasty internal bleeding.
McElyea had related to KFOR how dire the situations can get when the ICUs are overfilled. ICUs today still have to treat all of the diverse cases that they had to treat before 2020 - the car accidents, heart attacks, nasty infections etc. - and this is also what they had historically been "dimensioned" for. Today the ICUs are overfilled, and McElyea recounts the exasperation of not having a single free ICU to send a gunshot wound patient into. An exasperation that is easy to understand.
Who is overfilling the ICUs beyond what they had been "dimensioned" for? COVID patients, of course. And McElyea *never* claimed different. He *never* claimed that ivermectin overdoses are responsible for overfilling ICUs. That claim is bullshit, and to say that McElyea claimed it, is bullshit. McElyea did remark on ivermectin. There's very few ivermectin overdoses, but to McElyea, they're a) new, b) the most trivial to prevent. Put it this way. The number of aspirin overdoses that hospitals had to deal with, was: none. The number of ivermectin overdoses was: very low. But it could *also* have been: none, as for aspirin, and as it was the previous years.
This is a totally reasonable position for a doctor to have. Note also that McElyea did not call ivermectin "horse dewormer". He's a doctor, he knows what ivermectin is, he is not a snide lefty journalist who wants to demean "the stupid republican tribe", he wants people to not get hurt by a futile overdosing. As for ICUs they are overbooked by COVID, with or without those few ivermectin overdoses.
It is *Rolling Stone* who said, quote, "Dr. Jason McElyea told KFOR the [ivermectin] overdoses are causing backlogs in rural hospitals, leaving both beds and ambulance services scarce".
While linking to a text where McElyea has *said no such thing*.
RS are being slimy fact-twisters dunking at the right. But surely, the right shall slam them hard for this?
Yea... you wish.
Fox news, quote: "Dr. Jason McElyea told a local news station that hospitals were being overrun from patients overdosing on ivermectin".
Washington Examiner, quote: " McElyea blamed the lack of hospital beds on an influx of patients who had taken ivermectin".
Except, no.
*He did not*.
Fox and WE could have and should have slammed RS for making a bullshit claim of RS's own fabrication, falsely attributing it to a doctor.
Instead, Fox and WE have related that the doctor really has uttered a bullshit claim, while letting off RS as saints who had merely "repeated what an esteemed doctor has said".
Own goal, hello?
Anyhow, this "caught on" on the right, and the rebuttal soon took its target to be McElyea (the retweeting of NHS Sequoya etc.), instead of RS.
How much flak did McElyea get? I also can't survey the whole internet, but it is certainly more than just that one quoted redditor who called McElyea a liar. I mean, what do you expect will happen, when at the outset the right's reaction gets *steered* against McElyea much more than against RS? And as I said, McElyea has not. Done. Anything. Wrong.
About your hamhanded metaphor, can I propose a somewhat different hamhanded metaphor?
Alex is at some party. Betty and Carl, each going their own way, at one conjecture pass by Alex, when Carl suddenly snatches Betty's handbag, and swings it into Alex's groin. Irate at having been ignominiously suckerpunched, Alex swings his fist wildly in the direction of Carl and Betty. Carl dodges the counterpunch (almost) completely, and grins back derisively at Alex. Betty doesn't dodge it.
My stance on this? It's quite fine for Alex to administer to Carl the punching that Carl needs. And Carl needs quite a bit of it. Whereas, the more *precise* the punching delivery, the better. I do believe we are in agreement on this.
Can we also agree about not punching Betty?
My alternative hamhanded metaphor refuses to fuse Carl and Betty into the same person, *which they are not*. Because if *you* are not able to tell the difference between RS and McElyea - a muckracking twisting manipulative media and a doctor who's trying to help people - then RS has indeed succeeded, to a degree that I find depressing.
(theoretically *I* should also not fuse Peter Wade and Rolling Stone into the "same person", but RS has already made such a habit of deploying this kind of writing, that I am taking that liberty)
At some point you've drifted into a conversation Scott barely touched on, and a part of conversation I never criticized in how Scott handled it as your main thing. I don't understand why. Scott didn't make the claims you are making; the articles related to McElyea didn't throw him under the bus like you've claimed.
I don't think you are reading anybody involved very closely here; I'm not sure how productive I can be continuing with this.
I'd say I'm reading the related articles (KFOR/McEleya, RS, Fox, WE...) quite closely. And this is exactly why, although I understand what you're trying with your two metaphors (bleeding on the carpet and frogs in the sky), I think that both of your metaphors are missing the point. I'm trying to give the perspective why so.
Your central grudge is that Scott has qualified both "act 1" and "act 2" in the same manner, as if they were "morally equivalent". "Act 1" was that RS's bad-faith fabrication was "debunked" by the NHS Sequoia statement, and "act 2" was "the debunking of the debunking" of that NHS Sequoia statement. Which you protest with your "half the sky not covered in frogs" metaphor.
This is the first missed point. NHS Sequoia is not *half* of the sky. Check out the size of Oklahoma. NHS Sequoia's statement is correct - Scott never said it was false - but nonetheless, formally it does NOT constitute the debunking of the RS fabrication. Which is basically what Scott is saying, even if Scott said it in a manner that offended you. Factually, McElyea *really did* have a gunshot wound patient he couldn't put in any ICU, whatever NHS Sequoia's ICUs may have been like at that time.
Put it this way. The right writes about how BLM is instigating burning looting ravaging riots on a large scale. Then comes a lefty journo to claim "Vile rightist propaganda! No they don't! I've been through the entire BLM demonstration in Poshtown CA, and it has been a completely peaceful and dignified affair. Bzzzt DEBUNKED!"
Did that journo lie about Poshtown, CA? No.
Did he debunk what he claims to have debunked? No.
Is Poshtown, CA "half the sky"? No.
OK, those 3 questions were real easy. Now, for a slightly harder one: would you have been as cross with Scott if he had answered "No" to the second question above?
What *does* debunk the RS fabrication, if not NHS Sequoia? Well, for one, comprehensive statistics *do* debunk it. And this is exactly what all of Scott's "act 3" was dedicated to!
OK I get it, the problem with Scott "morally equating" the RS fabrication and the retweeting of the NHS Sequoia statement. I.e. the "bleeding on the carpet" metaphor. Because the RS fabrication is morally reprehensible, and the NHS Sequoia rebuttal is morally clean.
OK so this is where I'm trying to get you to reconsider the perspective a bit.
If the point of the RS article was to smear the right - which it was - the point of retweeting the NHS Sequoia was to smear McElyea. With RW reddit and twitter calling McElyea a liar.
This is where I had to draw that Alex/Betty/Carl metaphor, which quite more accurately describes the incident than the bleeding-on-carpet metaphor (where you "fused" the offender into a single person). McElyea never said that the ICUs were overbooked by ivermectin overdosers. That bullshit is a fabrication that was specifically created by RS. Read the articles in question. Alex was hit by Carl, and is counterpunching Betty. That was an "ad hominem" attack against a "hominem" who did nothing wrong to you, a doctor trying to help people.
And it was *barking up the wrong tree*. The right tree to bark up is RS and not McElyea.