That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘MMR’

We at TFS always like to hear the opposite side of the story from ours. We love to read other people’s opinions and well thought out ripostes.

But what we love even more than that are stupid people. People who have mastered the art of the hysterical keyboard mash, and who invariably fall into one of two categories:

1. Those who use the words “100%” in their posts, despite being an uneducated mouth-breather who will spout any form of quasi-reasonable sounding drivel as long as it comes from someone similarly white, middle class and boundlessly stupid. Daily Heil types, you know who they are.

2. Those who assume ironic, pseudo-pretentious poses and are utterly, utterly convinced that this impresses people with how clever he is, when in fact we openly attempt to bait him so that he will carry on churning out his own auto-back-patting postings with the aid of a thesaurus and a jar of Ribena.

We shall call them Trolls.

The Troll is a curious beast. It may lurk around in dark corners of the internet, avoiding sunlight, showers and nutritional food, and only delurking when suitably riled. These types are blessedly easy targets – it’s kind of like waving a steak at a pissed-off pitbull. You just know it’s gonna bite and bark and jump about like its arse is on fire, yet you do it anyway, don’t you?

This type will snap at the first provocation and will undoubtedly believe that TIPING THIGNS IN CAPS MAEKS THEM TRUE, I KNOW 100% THIS IS FACT!!!1.

They are the intellectual equivalent of the Youtube commentor. They haven’t really got much past the evolutionary equivalent of the “OMFG U’R SO GHEY” argument. These people are impossible to reason with; would you reason with a dog that shits on your rug then looks at you, proud of the steaming pile of turd he has produced?  No. You slap it down and banish it back to the dark corner whence it came.

Typical Internet Troll

Such Trolls as fall into category 1. have a propensity to use percentages to demonstrate FACT(TM). A prime example would be “i may not be medically trained but i am not stupid…i am the mother of a boy with acquired autism and i know 100% it was the MMR which caused the autism”.

It’s important to emphasise that Trolls like this are immune to reason (despite being against vaccinations, ironically enough) and do not let a plethora of studies and scientific evidence sway them from the path of FACT(TM). They are the only person in the debate in possession of FACT(TM), despite being a hysterical keyboard-basher jumping on an already-dismissed panicwagon created from an unholy mix of conviction that the authorities are conspiring against them and plain old middle class TEH FEAR. Of what? Who knows; maybe daylight, or other people, or rational, reasoned dialogue (most likely).

Trolls like this can be relied upon to descend in to badly spelled CAPSLOK RIDDEN HISTERIA at any point, which is always a really, really good indicator of your intellectual credibility.

They genuinely, really and truly believe that they alone are the maverick free-thinker among the sheeple masses. This makes them ripe for a bit of delusional paranoia – a really good Troll won’t let something lie until they have demonstrated their conviction that some government agency somewhere is watching them / withholding vital evidence that will prove the Troll right beyond all doubt, and that the lack of evidence to support their paranoid delusion is “pretty CONVENEINT, eh???!1”

Whilst fun to play with, having a set-to with someone like this is the rough equivalent of bear-baiting. Sure, it’s fun to see them shuffling and grunting and flailing whilst you repeatedly poke them, but it gets old pretty quickly.

The fun starts when one of the other types of Troll shambles onto the scene. The ones that are just about intelligent enough to believe they’re a wit, when in fact they’re only half a one.*

Such types will often come across in their posts as making painful yet hilarious attempts to sound supercilious and aloof, usually through the misuse of sarcasm. Phrases such as “Yes, splendid idea! let’s all do what you say, because obviously you know better than anyone else!” feature quite heavily in the blatherings of this particular Troll variant. Note that this Troll has picked up on the fact that the CAPS LOCK SARCASM approach does not work, and instead treads dangerously close to irony through reckless use of the Italics command.

Tragically, both of our pets have dropped off the radar. No doubt Bulldog has retreated to his kennel; no doubt  FrMaRiRoLu is busy creating more tinfoil hats to tide her through the summer.

So, we’re hiring. We need another pet Troll at whom we can poke much fun, wind up and who preferably contains just enough intelligence to make what they mash out in a sweaty, hysterical frenzy the type of stuff that makes people want to point and mock and laugh.

Any takers?

*Thank you Terry Pratchett for that line; you are a flying spaghetti monster among men.

It would appear we might have accidentally made a single copy of this file for critical review and debate. Full story can be found here, here and here. There are also other posts and updates on MMR here.

EDIT

If you wish to make some form of complaint to OFCOM under the broadcasting code, specifically the section quoted below then you can do so here.

Presenters and reporters (with the exception of news presenters and reporters in news programmes), presenters of “personal view” or “authored” programmes or items, and chairs of discussion programmes may express their own views on matters of political or industrial controversy or matters relating to current public policy. However, alternative viewpoints must be adequately represented either in the programme, or in a series of programmes taken as a whole. Additionally, presenters must not use the advantage of regular appearances to promote their views in a way that compromises the requirement for due impartiality. Presenter phone-ins must encourage and must not exclude alternative views.

Here’s an update on the number of measles cases:

Statistically speaking, this means that about 100 children suffered complications and four died in 2008 because of this easily preventable disease.

Well done, douchebags.

I’m not an expert, but blah blah blah MMR blah blah not in my back yard blah blah my grandma lived to a million blah blah

Jeni Barnett, bleating on about MMR without knowing anything at all about vaccines, medicine, health, or herd immunity.

See how long you can listen without stabbing your ear drums out with knitting needles. You can email her here and tell her what a twat you think she is.

After all, why let facts get in the way of an impassioned argument?

UPDATE: The mp3 of the Jeni Barnett MMR blatherings has been removed from Ben Goldacre’s blog by LBC’s lawyers. Anyone got the mp3 cached? I have a cunning plan…

Continuing the current theme of expanding on the misconceptions of the ignorant I thought I would share this wonderful comment which was made on another site related to the MMR debate:

Why are we made to give this artificial drug to our kids? Drugs like this are known to create superbugs that kill more people.

I totally love that shit. Mutant superbugs are at your door waiting to rape your daughters and kill your sons! Clearly it’s all because of the drugs that these superbugs exist and kill our grannies when they go into hospital for some completely unrelated reason.

Hysteria aside there does appear to be a common misconception that antibiotics cause germs to mutate into strains that are either more virulent or are resistant to those antibiotics. This is a variation of the classic correlation/causality fallacy where it is assumed (by idiots) that if two things are related then it follows that one thing causes the other (which is *sometimes* the case but not *always* the case and even when it is the case it’s hard to prove which one causes the other). Viruses mutate, that’s a given, but it’s not assumed by rational thinking people that the mutation is caused directly by the antibiotics because mutations have been observed in controlled environments where no antibiotics are present. What *has* been observed is that when antibiotics are used to remove the population of a particular bug, what remains is likely to be resistant to the antibiotics; otherwise it too would have been wiped out.

This is a crass analogy but if I were to engineer a method of killing everyone who has brown, black or blonde hair (but not ginger) and leave it on earth for a great many years while observing from a secret space station I would return to earth to find a lot of ginger folk. I would not have *turned them all ginger*, I would have merely selectively removed the dark haired and blonde haired people and allowed the gingers to thrive and pass on their ginger genes. It follows that if I wipe out the population of a virus that is not resistant to my antibiotics, whatever is left (if there is anything left) will be resistant to the antibiotics.

So how did they get resistant in the first place? Pretty much the same way we have ginger people, albino people, white people, black people, hairy people, bald people or any of the other myriad of variations in our own population; pure chance. When the genetic information is passed from one generation to another there is often a little bit of scrambling along the way, this is what introduces variations in organisms that reproduce asexually. It’s actually a little more complex in organisms like us that reproduce sexually, our genetic information is a milkshake of our parents’ genetic information along with the odd random mutation, but essentially there is randomness in all living things.

For those with a few cells of grey matter, you might be thinking:

“Oh, shit, that sounds an awful lot like that theory of evolution thingumy!”

Yes. Yes it does, doesn’t it. It’s another observable example of the theory in action. If you can find a better explanation using the scientifically observed information (and can prove it to a point where peers in the scientific community can’t fault your theory) then you should let everyone know by sending your answers to:

I.want.one.of.those@nobelprize.org