Layer upon layer of wrongness

In my effort to better understand our nations conservatives, I spent some time recently over at The Scratching Post, one of the shrinking number of amateur conservative blogs that don't spit invective toward liberals every paragraph. They accepted my contributions for a while, then the blogger (K T Cat) asked me to leave (nothing new there, very few people want to be questioned about everything). What's more interesting is that in the same post, he managed to show how conservatives use multiple layers of misinformation to not only draw the wrong conclusions, but ask the wrong questions.

In the post in question, an affirmation of a post by Ohioan@Heart on their blog, what we see is the continuation of a conversation from a claim I made that there have been no good studies that support the efficacy of ivermectin against covid19 (and to my knowledge, this continues to be true). One of K T Cat's old friends tried to find a couple of positive studies, and could only find a meta-analysis that relied on a retracted study for it's positive outcome, and a pre-print that hasn't been published in over 6 months. However, that's not the point of this post.

Notice that K T Cat makes/affirms a number of conclusions after starting with "I don't understand it at all, so I need to buy some time".

• First, Google is hiding the research.
• "... the wokesters ... take a side on Ivermectin"
• "The wokesters" would reflexively ban anything Trump promoted.

When I don't understand something, I try to avoid stating a bunch of conclusions, particularly those that lead to further jumps in logic. This is doubly true when you can easily research something.

So, from the first bullet (B1), what would be the best explanation for ivermectin not being listed in the first few pages? First, you should check out (from a non-Google source) how Google normally ranks its pages, and see if these are a sufficient explanation. Among other conditions, we find:

A site’s authority is determined by a number of factors, including the perceived value of the site’s content and the number of sites that link back to the site as a reputable source of information.

So before we can talk about Google putting their thumb on the scale, we should check whether the studies under discussion have perceived value for scientists and would get a lot of links back to them in other papers. Here, the answer is a resounding "no". One paper is a meta-analysis that used a fraudulent study (as in, the study was withdrawn for making up data and plagiarism), while the other is a pre-print that has been languishing for six months. These studies are far back in the list of studies because they don't deserve broader recognition.

Do "the wokesters" take a side against ivermectin (B2)? Well, you don't get more "wokester" that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who supports just about every genuine political position K T Cat seems to dislike. If you check out Kennedy's website, it's pretty clear he's pro-ivermectin, all the way.

As far as whether "the wokesters" (since K T Cat's not a "wokester", I suppose he's a 'sleeper') ban anything Trump promoted (B3), you don't really have to look any further than the covid19 vaccines to see a counter-example. However, maybe that's not enough for a 'sleeper' to see. So, lets look at some of the items in a summary by Politico, a slightly left-leaning publication.

• Strategy -- Trump refocused national security on great power competition
• Cannabis -- Legal marijuana spreads across most of the country
• Shell companies -- Trump made it easier to prosecute financial crimes like money laundering
• Defense spending -- Trump made it possible to follow the Pentagon's money

So, unless you think the "wokesters" are opposed to the vaccine, focusing security on major threats, legal cannabis, the rich having their wealth exposed, and more openness in defense spending, it's clear they don't hate everything Trump did.

With the preliminaries out of the way, let's look at the main point: how these falsehoods build upon each other and create a narrative that means you can't even ask a good question. His "something to ponder" is whether the rejection of ivermectin is based on Trump (using B3), layered over a notion that ivermectin is political in nature (B2), layered still further over this is the reason any positive papers are not prominent, as opposed to other reasons (B1). We have a top-level discussion point based on a totally false foundation. How can you have a reasonable discussion with position based on so many falsehoods, if a person does not wish to discuss the lower-level errors? I'll let you know if I ever find out.
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