F**king Mondays: Antivaxx Logic, Normalizing Ramaswamy, And The Return Of The Blogosphere!

Your favorite column is back.

Welcome to this week’s edition of “F**king Mondays”!! In the roundup today

The unwinnable war on idiocy

Screenshot

When Sam Harris is trending on Twitter these days, you can be sure it’s because of something he said about vaccines. This clip is doing the rounds because of Harris trying to explain why the anti-mRNA vaccine/pro Ivermectin crowd should be considered bonkers even if they turn out to be right in the future. Says Harris:

Let’s say five years from now we learn that Ivermectin is actually perfect, right, for just any reason; the studies we had back in 2020 and 2021 were poorly run, but we did this perfect study, and Ivermectin is perfect, and what’s more the vaccines are way more dangerous than anyone thought, and you know, you don’t want any of that mRNA stuff in you. So Bret [Bret Weinstein], it turns out he was right about everything. Will he be vindicated? Not really, because at the time, his reasons for thinking what he was thinking at the time were insufficient.

In the new age of Alt intellectualism, this is a controversial view. Self professed vaccine expert Justin Hart — who has no background in science, medicine, virology, vaccines or even journalism — believes in the Bret Weinstein model for evaluating medical efficacy. This means promoting whatever supplement you have a hunch about and hoping the evidence supports it at some point in the future.

Harris’s point isn’t sexy — it is cautious and nuanced, like the process of scientific evaluation. This was particularly important during the pandemic where we were dealing with a novel virus that was killing millions of people. We had to make decisions based on the evidence we had, much of which turned out to be wrong or incomplete. We now know that lockdowns probably didn’t help much for example, and that Covid vaccines aren’t that great at stopping transmission. This is entirely normal, and reasonable people have changed their minds in line with the emerging evidence. The antivaxx crowd however believes this is proof that their own personal feelings about vaccines have been vindicated and that they were right all along.

This was an argument I had many times with an antivaxx friend of mine during the pandemic. He refused to get a vaccine on the basis that mRNA vaccines might turn out to be dangerous. He cited people like Bret Weinstein and Dr. Robert Malone, and believed people who got the vaccines were incapable of thinking for themselves. I tried to explain to him that I too had doubts about the vaccine, and that he might well turn out to be right. I argued that getting the vaccine was the right thing to do because at that time the evidence supported their efficacy, and that given the scale of suffering it was a moral responsibility.

Despite the many mistakes made by governments and public health officials following the best science at the time, the consensus view turned out to be far, far more right than wrong. In the US alone, mRNA Covid vaccines saved millions of lives and trillions of dollars. The vaccines allowed us to get back to normal life and remain an incredibly effective tool in preventing serious Covid complications. Ivermectin on the other hand has proven to be 100% ineffective in treating or preventing Covid.

Again, Harris’s point is that none of this actually matters. What really matters is how we evaluate evidence and make decisions as a society. Unfortunately a new and incredibly powerful industry has emerged that profits from teaching people how not to think.

Normalizing Ramaswamy

image via The Hill

Back in May, Andrew Sullivan wrote that he’d like to see RFK Jr. and Tucker Carlson provide voters with an alternative to President Biden and Donald Trump. Sullivan said that he found them “appealing, in a way Trump and Biden could never be.”

“Kennedy,” he went on, “sees clearly how the Dems have become the party of big corporations, HR authoritarians, and the mega-wealthy. Carlson sees the totalitarian essence of wokeness, its denial of core American values, and the cynical distraction of critical theory madness when most middle-class Americans are overwhelmed, overworked, and dying prematurely in large numbers.”

Sullivan hasn’t mentioned his dream match up again, but he has moved on to another novelty in the form of Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaire Republican conspiracy theorist running for 2024. Sullivan invited Ramaswamy on his podcast for a jolly chat about wokeness, woke capitalism, why he wants to decimate the federal government. “I’ll get ahead of you guys and confess that I liked him in our chat,” wrote Sullivan in the preface to his audio post. He also “decided I wasn’t going to repeat the now-familiar trope of trying to get him to denounce Trump.”

Expect to see a lot more of this in the coming months as the media looks desperately for a new shiny thing.

The return of the blogosphere! (sort of)

An early iteration of The Daily Banter (back when we were sympathetic to Hugo Chavez!)

This post from the higher ups at Substack was particularly meaningful for me :

If the early 2000s was the golden age of blogging, then the 2020s welcome its renaissance, and it’s happening on Substack. 

What we’re seeing now feels a lot like that early blogging boom. There was an intimacy we felt reading our favorite blogs, a personal connection to the writers and the communities that grew around them. We stacked our Google Reader with their RSS feeds and turned to them for restaurant recommendations, recipes, home decor trends, crafting inspiration, gossip, political analysis, and life advice. Writers on Substack are providing that same intimacy and connection with the communities they create. No media conglomerates edit their words and ideas. We have access to our favorite writers, just as we did in those fast blogging days. We see ourselves in the personal stories they share; we trust them.

As someone who started blogging back in 2006, I can attest to this feeling. Furthermore, Substack is providing a way for independent publishers to professionally monetize their work, unlike the early days of the blogosphere where even the top bloggers were struggling to bring in beer money.

There are of course real issues with Substack, particularly their decision to allow antivaxxers to use and monetize their platform. But overall their impact on the publishing industry has been hugely beneficial. The Banter is growing at a fast and more importantly sustainable pace, meaning we won’t have to shut down if a tech billionaire decides to switch off access to our followers. Substack can’t do this given we can move our subscribers to another platform with relative ease. Substack has done this deliberately in order to build trust with publishers, and I believe they have. As a publisher, I get the sense that Substack really is on our side, that they’d rather close up shop than turn into a greedy tech platform that exists solely to hoover up user data. Substack takes its cut of course (and a fairly significant one), but I’m happy to support a company that supports me. This could all end badly, but right now we really are living in a golden age for independent publishing. It won’t last forever, but I think it’s worth recognizing, and more importantly, enjoying.

See you next week!

Support The Banter by becoming a paid member. Banter Members get access to all premium articles, The Emergency Meeting podcast, and exclusive member chat threads!

Listen to the latest episode of The Banter Roundtable Podcast!:

For Banter Members: