(Ed) Corona Virus Conspiracy Theories....

[Resume]

Originally Posted by varwoche

In other words, you're promoting nonsense that starkly contradicts the science, providing no facts other than inane anecdotes that defy simple arithmetic/probabilities, and while so doing you accuse others of failing to apply critical thinking. Par for the course.

An argument from personal incredulity vs . . . medical science. Hmmm, which one of these?

[Foster Zygote]

Originally Posted by Childlike Empress

You are in no position to force me to do anything, "Foster Zygote". You can't even insult me. But I shared an anecdote recently when a young man randomly approached me at the bus station facing a high-rise building, asking me if I had ever seen a human jumping out of a high-rise building.

Just because you think you are doing fine in this insanity (and I am doing fine as well, not personally complaining), doesn't mean that countless people, especially the young and the old, aren't crushed by these "measures" more than they could ever be by any real "pandemic".

In other words, you don't know "a lot" of people who have died or been made sick by social distancing. You lied. For all your dramatics, you haven't denied that you lied.

[Tom Palven]

Originally Posted by Childlike Empress

Hilarious. Nice to have you here on the forum, Tom!

Thank you.

I feel the same about you, and can empathize with Caroline, too.

[Matthew Ellard]

Originally Posted by Tom Palven

This isn't a music video, Matthew, it's George Carlin making a relevant prediction about germs in 2008:

Quote from opening of your comic's video "It is one more way they can take your liberty...."

No Tom. George Carlin is a stage comedian and not a scientist. Where does he predict 500,000 Americans would die?

What freedom did you lose compared to those 500,000 dead American citizens?

Reply using your own words Tom Palven.

[Matthew Ellard]

Originally Posted by Childlike Empress

Hilarious. Nice to have you here on the forum, Tom!

What was "hilarious" in the 2008 George Carlin video?

He said, in his 2008 stand up comedy routine, "that Americans are now scared of germs? Do you think that in 2021 that after 500,000 deaths "from germs", that Americans should not be scared of Covid-19?

Perhaps Tom Palven, Caroline13 and yourself could explain this, to us, as a team effort.

[Pixel42]

I liked George Carlin's stand up but the man battled drug and alcohol addiction and died of heart failure when he was just 71, he's not exactly a reliable source of medical advice.

Germs have always been one of humanity's biggest killers, it makes sense to be scared of the potentially fatal ones, at least until you've been vaccinated against them.

[beachnut]

Originally Posted by Tom Palven

This isn't a music video, Matthew, it's George Carlin making a relevant prediction about germs in 2008:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...add28be51db94f

he was humorous, but what else do you expect from drugs, and BS.

lol, an expert at humor... this is your evidence for germs... classic BS

After three court martials, lots of drugs, what do you expect... comedy... not evidence except for wild conspiracy theories about your fictional virus theories.

[jimbob]

Originally Posted by Foster Zygote

Nanopatticles that let you travel back in time? Sign me up! Gonna go back and buy a crap-load of Apple stock the minute they go (went) public!

Guess I'd better dust off my copy of Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.

I think I was being too generous:

EvOH0hMXIAANU0c.jpg

[jimbob]

Originally Posted by Big Les

Another Twitter denizen 'Just Asking Questions'. Joel Smalley - 'quantative analyst' - loves to dance around the point and protest that he's not a lockdown/mask 'sceptic' or an antivaxxer, yet is very clearly suggesting that the third wave of COVID-19 in the UK is due to vaccination;

https://twitter.com/RealJoelSmalley/...64949136793601

See also the last 30mins or so of this interview;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWTaEtkZiA4

Poisoning the well/ad hominem perhaps, but see also this;

https://committees.parliament.uk/wri...nce/13446/pdf/

And this light debunk of his earlier claim; https://nealokelly-41602.medium.com/...t-7511e95439fb

None of it passes the 'smell test' for me for obvious reasons, but I am out of my depth on his methodology, so if anyone with the skills can debunk, I would be interested.

He's dodgy AF. And isn't above fudging his data.

https://twitter.com/ParkinJim/status...90390608953345

and my overlaying of the government data from that:



ETA: Note that he uses *his* model and the data *(which he's done some silly smoothing to, if I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt)doesn't fit. But that's somehow suspicious and it's his (undisclosed) model which obviously reflects reality.

[Tom Palven]

Originally Posted by beachnut

he was humorous, but what else do you expect from drugs, and BS.

lol, an expert at humor... this is your evidence for germs... classic BS

After three court martials, lots of drugs, what do you expect... comedy... not evidence except for wild conspiracy theories about your fictional virus theories.

It's too bad George is not around to comment on Pope Anthony (Fauci).

It could have been classic.

[Pixel42]

My guess is Carlin would be making fun of people like you, rather than Fauci, Tom. His modern equivalents certainly are.

[jimbob]

Originally Posted by Big Les

Another Twitter denizen 'Just Asking Questions'. Joel Smalley - 'quantative analyst' - loves to dance around the point and protest that he's not a lockdown/mask 'sceptic' or an antivaxxer, yet is very clearly suggesting that the third wave of COVID-19 in the UK is due to vaccination;

https://twitter.com/RealJoelSmalley/...64949136793601

See also the last 30mins or so of this interview;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWTaEtkZiA4

Poisoning the well/ad hominem perhaps, but see also this;

https://committees.parliament.uk/wri...nce/13446/pdf/

And this light debunk of his earlier claim; https://nealokelly-41602.medium.com/...t-7511e95439fb

None of it passes the 'smell test' for me for obvious reasons, but I am out of my depth on his methodology, so if anyone with the skills can debunk, I would be interested.

I guess it might evolve from this ( my take on an earlier analysis)


https://twitter.com/ParkinJim/status...834997249?s=20

And this very bad graph of his:

Eur5zaeXEAESdDS.jpg


There are several things wrong with this (discussed in the thread) but notice how he has attributed the 2021 excess to either "unexplained" or "denial of healthcare" with nothing to do with COVID-19

This is what the raw weekly numbers in England and Wales look like running from wk10 to wk9 (to show the full effect of a year of Covid) and for 2014wk10 to 2021. With the 5 year average for 2015-2019 added in.

The red line is deaths where COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate, i.e. as a contributory factor - and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the underlying cause, unlike with flu.



Note also the attributing of about a thousand "excess" deaths a week to denial of healthcare - including in the summer... when to quote an actual actuary:

https://twitter.com/longevitymatt/st...631645698?s=20

Quote:

Matt Fletcher
@longevitymatt
Unknown
Replying to
@ParkinJim
Standardised deaths in the third quarter of 2020 were the lowest on record (i.e. the lowest ever) - against what baseline could anyone claim that was an excess, much less a significant one?

Joel Smalley's justification involved more technobabble than an episode of ST-TNG

Those deaths he's decided were due to denial of healthcare are just there to make it seem as though lockdown killed more than Covid.

[Pixel42]

"Denial of healthcare" is an odd one. Lack of capacity to treat other illnesses is due to the pandemic, not lockdown. Needing medical treatment has always been a valid reason to leave your home, even in the most stringent of lockdowns, but people are understandably reluctant to risk catching Covid and keep away from hospitals and surgeries, sometimes when they shouldn't. Lockdown, by stopping health services from being overwhelmed, has actually reduced the size of the problem.

[jimbob]

Originally Posted by Pixel42

"Denial of healthcare" is an odd one. Lack of capacity to treat other illnesses is due to the pandemic, not lockdown. Needing medical treatment has always been a valid reason to leave your home, even in the most stringent of lockdowns, but people are understandably reluctant to risk catching Covid and keep away from hospitals and surgeries, sometimes when they shouldn't. Lockdown, by stopping health services from being overwhelmed, has actually reduced the size of the problem.

Indeed it is, but it's a way of blinding people with pseudoscience.

https://twitter.com/RealJoelSmalley/...47463242915841

Quote:

Joel Smalley
@RealJoelSmalley
Normal
3%
Replying to
@RealJoelSmalley
For the data geeks, my excess death model is a "contemporary" baseline carefully created from the 2-factor polynomial fit of natural log of weekly deaths for the prior 5 years, adjusted to fit the current period based on data points that are assumed to be unaffected by COVID.

Why a two-factor polynomial (which I like to call a quadratic, as sounding less mysterious) instead of a 5-year average as used by the ONS? If you start getting more um... "sophisticated" why not see what actual professionals do.

And when your analysis disagrees with both a simple look at the data, and the full-on actuarial analyses, it's not them that's wrong.

ETA.

The whole, "Lockdown caused the NHS to be overwhelmed", at least that was the unspoken insinuation, seems to be the equivalent of "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams"

[Foster Zygote]

Originally Posted by Tom Palven

It's too bad George is not around to comment on Pope Anthony (Fauci).

It could have been classic.

Does concentrating your vitriol on Dr. Fauci help you to ignore the overwhelming scientific consensus, of which he is merely the most prominent public representative in the U.S.?

And while I certainly apprehend the devastating rhetorical power of derogatory nicknames, at least as far as the rubes are concerned (look to the reputation for public oratory of our last president), you're little different from a creationist incessantly referring to someone like Richard Dawkins as "Dick Dorkins", but never offering the slightest empirical evidence against the theory of evolution by natural selection.

And finally, I'd still like your take on how it is that you came to be so much smarter and more authoritative than virtually the entirety of the world's medical community.

[Steve]

Originally Posted by Tom Palven

It's too bad George is not around to comment on Pope Anthony (Fauci).

It could have been classic.

Seems awfully UScentric. Are you aware that there is an entire planet out there, full of people who know full well, without any involvement whatsoever of Dr Fauci, that there is a pandemic going on? And most countries are doing a significantly better job of dealing with the pandemic than the "land of the free", where denial is rampant.

George Carlin was a bright man and would have known these things. He would most certainly not have used you for source material.

[The Great Zaganza]

During Ebola, Fauci used to be quite the darling of the Right, because he gave them material to imply that Obama wasn't doing enough.

[zooterkin]

Originally Posted by Childlike Empress

Yes. we did. In the heavy flu season 2017/2018 for example, the RKI estimated 25,000 deaths by flu. Nobody made a fuss about it.

I don't know whether anyone made a fuss about it, but Covid-19 deaths in Germany are nearly 3 times that.

[zooterkin]

Originally Posted by Childlike Empress

Yeah, that's nice. As I said in the thread where I originally posted, I live in the center of a big city in the middle of one of the most densely populated regions on earth. And I still don't know anybody who is sick and dying of "Covid-19" while I take public transportation almost daily and go shopping several times a week. And while I'm a bit autistic like all of us who sport tens of thousands of posts in some internet backyard, I know quite a lot of people.

Lucky you. How many people do you know well enough that you would be informed if they were taken ill?

I know several people who have had Covid-19. Some have recovered fully, others have ongoing problems. I also know several people who have lost friends and relatives to it; the most recent friend of a friend to die is the guitarist Tony Morrison (aka Tony Perfect, aka Tony Feedback); he was 61 and otherwise fit, from what I've heard.

[Big Les]

Originally Posted by jimbob

Joel Smalley's justification involved more technobabble than an episode of ST-TNG

Many thanks for taking the time jimbob, and I also enjoyed this reference

ETA - more scepticism of the 'sceptic' here; https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1365650856566263809