Breaking news: some donuts have a hole! And other donuts have a filling! And some donuts have both a filling and a hole? How long are we still going to tolerate to be sold donuts?
Since I'm sure nobody got it: "a vinde gogoși" ("to sell donuts") is an euphemism for bullshitting in Romanian. And "a descoperi gaura de la gogoașă" ("to discover the hole in the donut") is pretty much to discover water is wet.
Anyway, my point is old news has been way oversold as shocking, you won't believe this revelation. The trivial has been twisted and turned and sold as something outrageous. I may have said this before, but if you come across anything that triggers a strong emotional reaction, maybe it's best to just turn it off and do some soul searching. Feed the pigeons or something. Because it's likely you're being sold donuts.
Breaking news, covid can cause myocarditis! Calm down, infections in general (viral, bacterial) can cause myocarditis. Viral infections have been the leading cause of myocarditis in the high income part of the world since before covid. Some non-breaking news pre-covid
reference on that.
Breaking news, the covid vaccine can cause myocarditis! Calm down, myocarditis is a rare side effect of the mRNA covid vaccines. As well as a rare side effect of some non-covid vaccines (and the risk isn't higher for the covid vaccines than for the non-covid vaccines) or some drugs (like antipsychotics). Know what else can cause myocarditis, in fact with a much higher chance of causing it than any vaccine? Alcohol or cocaine!
Fuck, is there anything that doesn't cause myocarditis? Dunno, petting a puppy? Unless the puppy has some parasitic infection that can cause myocarditis and passes it on to you... then I'm sorry because it was me who just suggested petting a puppy was safe. I retract that. There is no safe. There never was. Shit can happen and you can die tomorrow. Know the Swiss band Gotthard? Scroll down for the
English version.
Breaking news, covid has left some people debilitated for life! Calm down, plenty of other viral infections have done so before. Have you heard of smallpox? It fucked up people bad for millennia. Funny enough, you could read the previous sentence in two ways and they're both true... the mummy of Ramses V still had smallpox lesions when it was found some three thousand years after his death.
Breaking news, pharma companies are putting out an unsafe and insufficiently tested vaccine! Calm down, they totally would without giving a crap about the people affected by side effects if they could and if there was profit to be made. It's not like that hasn't happened before. That's why there was so much scrutiny now with the covid vaccine, a sort of not this time, Satan. If only that had been the case before covid.
"Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter."
A lot of bullshit starts from some truth. Sometimes truth gets distorted because it's passed through the filter of people who just don't know better. Other times, people know exactly what they're doing, they are looking to manipulate. And quite honestly, a lot of times I have no way of knowing the difference. Is the journalist just ignorant or taking money for that misleading photo chosen to illustrate the article?
There was a Romanian comedy where a couple can't go to a party because she's sick, so they call to say sorry, we can't come because this happened. And then people start speculating about the why and her being sick becomes him beating her, then people speculate the cause of the beating was her finding out about him having an affair with his secretary, which becomes the secretary being pregnant with his child, which becomes him getting a divorce to marry the secretary and her finally finding true love, then she gets a call asking when's the wedding with the handsome man she has met after divorcing the swine who cheated on her and almost murdered her.
A lot of bullshit catches on because it's simplistic. The world is complicated. We are complicated. We may know and understand more than a hundred years ago, but we still don't know and understand enough. Not about the world around us, not about ourselves. At the same time, humans crave certainties. And unfortunately, they are going to fall for the dumbed down confidently-presented-as-certainty bullshit.
I don't know if the hype around ChatGPT has spread outside my bubble, but a friend asked for this:
You know the thing just dropped the best known metal bands in there. It sounds confident and credible. And I do like those bands. But I'm sure actual humans I've talked about music with could come up with more complete, better lists. Even if it's unlikely they could write a poem. Confident and credible-sounding isn't necessarily accurate.
I'd say confidence is actually a pretty big red flag as things are seldom black and white.
