[FRIAM] a different kind of credibility (risk)

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Thanks for the medpagetoday link...  I have only obliquely followed the
falderal generated from this stage show without realizing anything much
about the original event (the "press conference" by these folks)...  

I had the odd pleasure of having a strong conspiricist (Tami) living in
my house for a year.  She kept *most* of it to herself because I also
had a strong skeptic (Ed) who was always looking for a chance to knock
her down a peg.   I was prone to let her run out some of her more
extreme "theories" and even encourage it when I could, because I
*wanted* to take the pulse of that faction (which is far from
monolitic...  a fractionated faction?).   Tami was a strong anti-vaxxer
and anti-globalist and anti-several-things-at oncer, which for the most
part I was able to accept as overzealous or underinformed skepticism
which was not too hard for me to balance.  

Where my face couldn't stay straight was the ad-hominem stuff that she
was prone to.   "Michele Obama was a man with a sex-change",  "Chelsea
Clinton wasn't Bill's daughter", and some more extrema like "I believe
in Evolution but human's could never have evolved from monkeys...  it
was aliens who visited and spliced some of their DNA into monkeys to
create humans and they come back regularly to check on our
development...  there is an 'area  51' place at LANL where they keep the
bodies of the ones who crash-landed or were shot down by our military
... and you can find all this in the Bible."  

Her best "truism" was "I believe that everyone has the right to believe
anything they want".   I could never argue against that point, nor did I
try.  Ed did once very dryly respond (after she had left the room) with
"I don't want to know what you 'believe', I want to know what you
'think' ".   She has since moved to NW NM with a very fine man who is
also very intensely "self-made" but doesn't (openly?) show any of the
more extreme opinions about the world.  Meanwhile Ed moved on to the
next plane of existence, but I still hear his voice of skepticism in
counterpoint to Tami's specific style of "anything's possible, you never
know!"

What a wonderful world of magical thinking we (all) live in (from time
to time)!   As inconvenient as it seems to rational and coherent life
and progress, it also seems to be a necessary part of being human FWIW.

- Steve

On 7/29/20 10:17 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> No Evidence That Doctor Group in Viral Video Got Near COVID 'Front Lines'
> — Who are the physicians behind America's Frontline Doctors?
> https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/87797
>
> I feel a bit sorry for the *other* actual doctors on this list, other than Stella Immanuel [⛧]. 
>
> Simone Gold, MD, JD
> James Todaro, MD
> Bob Hamilton, MD
> Dan Erickson, MD
> Richard Urso, MD
>
> Let that be a lesson to you credible people out there. As soon as you allow one of *us* wackos into your ranks, you risk losing all credibility.
>
>
> [⛧] I might be in love with Stella! But now all those beautiful websites have been taken down ... talking about things like "Deliverance from family line witchcraft" and other insightful topics. Luckily YouTube has our backs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LedtG25Yy6w You be you YouTube! Don't let The Man tell you what's real and what's fake.
>