Another late anti-vaxxer
Another last minute tune-changer:
An anti-vaccine right-wing radio host in West Palm Beach, Florida died Wednesday from COVID-19 complications.
Dick Farrel, 65, used his local talk show and social media to rail against Dr. Anthony Fauci, who he called a “power tripping lying freak,” and say that no one should get the coronavirus vaccine. When COVID-19 sent him to the hospital for three weeks, though, he changed his tune, urging friends to get vaccinated, friends told local station WPTV.
Of the two, which is more of a power-tripping lying freak? The medical expert with decades of experience with lethal viruses and how to prevent and treat them? Or the bloviating radio host who took it all back once the virus bit him in the ass?
I’m fed up with this shit. I’m fed up to the back teeth with lying grifting shouting screaming know-nothing murderous MEDIA HACKS busily undoing the work of people like Fauci. I’m all the more fed up because I’ve just been reading the Twitter rants of a former friend, someone who used to comment here, someone who used to be sane, who has now joined the campaign to persuade people that Fauci is evil, that vaccination is evil, that people who urge vaccination are evil. In the choice between urging people not to get COVID and urging people to get COVID, he’s chosen the second. It’s gruesome.
Back to dead radio host:
Farrel wrote in early July, “Vaccine Bogus Bull Shid!, Two peeps I know, got vaxed, now have Corona, hospitalized critical. Thank you Moderna, FOR NOTHING!” He erroneously told his followers they would not need the vaccine if they had already survived COVID-19. The CDC has advised former coronavirus patients to get vaccinated.
Two days later, he wrote, “Why take a vax promoted by people who lied 2u all along about masks.” He called Fauci “FOOT-chee” and said that the infectious disease expert and “power trip libb loons” Democrats were conspiring to make it seem like the pandemic was ongoing so they could grab more power.
In late June, he wrote, “So, u think it wasn’t a SCAM DEMIC? NOT ONE ELECTED DEMOCRAT ever tested positive.” He called masks “face diapers” and “face pantys.”
…
Farrel is one among several recent deaths of anti-vaccine advocates who have succumbed to COVID-19. Just this week, a Republican city councilman in Texas fought rapid and fatal bout with the virus that saw him hospitalized and dead within three days. He had used his position to advocate against vaccines and face masks.
People should stop doing that. They should stop using any position (including a Twitter account) to advocate against vaccines and masks. Doing that is evil and people should stop it.
I’m pretty sure that the pod people got to the former friend. I can’t explain all this otherwise.
I, too, am fed up, to the point of saying avoid the motherfuckers and let them die.
What the fuck is the matter with me. That was a nasty comment I made. It ain’t right. I retract it.
I know 4 people, all liberal-left, who refuse vaccinations:
1. 65 yo male w/ type 2 diabetes and CHF who peruses conspiratorial “big Pharma be eevill” websites
2. 65 yo female “all-natural” type and devotee of biodynamics and Rudolph Steiner
3. 60 yo female convinced she has “chronic Lyme” and glyphosate poisoning and can’t be vaccinated as a result
4. 34 yo female mother of 3 whose excuse is “but I’m breastfeeding”
I daresay I love all these people and don’t want them to sicken and die.
‘Two peeps I know, got vaxed, now have Corona, hospitalized critical.’
The other day on Twitter someone posted half a dozen screenshots of tweets with different names and avatars but the exact same text, which read something like ‘Well, I got Covid. I got both shots, isolated, wore a mask, followed all the rules, and I still got it and am now in the hospital.’ So someone has paid for ‘bots’ to post this disinformation.
Honestly, I can think of a few reasonable reasons for people to not want to get the vaccine. Particularly in the US, where so many people don’t have sick days and might actually lose a job if they miss a few days, and particularly sole carers who can’t afford the risk of potentially not being able to care for children or parents if the shot makes them sick for a few days.
How can you not “wear a mask ostentatiously”? It covers half your face!
Well there you go! You can’t wear it any way other than ostentatiously so you should NEVER WEAR IT and you should Twitter-rage about people who do wear it, and claim they think they’re in the Blitz. That’s not ostentatious, it’s…invisibletatious.
I wear my mask coquettishly.
Ostentatious is in the eye of the beholder, maybe the bedazzled masks are, but it’s PPE. Who before Covid thought that hospital workers were being ostentatious, or ridiculing them. Conspicuity does not equal ostentation. The real threat to society is toxic stupidity.
I’ve got a friend who works in chemical production, where his co-workers should have been wearing masks all along, but they weren’t. He’s glad that now that COVID has normalized mask-wearing, it’s easier for him to convince people to wear masks in the lab.
Thoughts and prayers? It is a tragedy…yada yada.
Zero sympathy left.
@ #3, same here I know a Polio survivor who is anti Vax FFS, these people are fruitcakes.
I’m about the only one still mask wearing at the softball games, but I don’t fuss about it and neither does anyone else. I have compromised breathing plus I have a history of pulmonary embolism. I’m not taking (most) chances.
“FOOT-chee”
What is it with low information people and these dumb homophone (ish) name modifications. I see it very frequently amongst the TRA crowd too. Do they think they are making a point? Or that they sound clever? This is schoolyard silliness.
– Everyone who used to read B&W when it was about universal human rights, feminism and religious misogyny, and before it became a vile transphobic cesspit.
Like seriously, you look at Josh? – now you know how we feel when we see someone who used to be feminist spreading harmful hatemongering crap. And you know what Josh’s gateway into reactionary lunacy was don’t you? Transphobia. A certain blogger radicalised him into believing batshit conspiracy theories about trans people (along with others like Stacy Kennedy and your surviving overwhelmingly male commenters), and if you can believe utter bullshit like “AGP”, or “cotton ceiling”, or “ROGD”, or “social contagion”, or a host of other TERFist garbage, you can talk yourself into believing any paranoid reactionary madness.
It’s okay, I won’t comment again. Just a last-ditch, years-late effort to reach the rational person who used to be Ophelia Benson before you got radicalised into science-denying right-wing nutjobbery and snap you out of it, now that you’ve noticed the exact same thing in someone else.
Oh. Tucker Carlson says Hi, and keep up the great work.
Oh, Josh. It’s so disappointing. I’ve avoided watching any of his videos since I first heard about him going anti-vax. Even I don’t want to punish myself that much.
It is still possible to refuse vaccination and to refuse to wear a mask. If Broadway theaters are going to require proof of vaccination, and you aren’t vaccinated, then don’t go. If Walmart requires wearing a mask, don’t shop there. The world is still navigable for people who refuse, and there are alternatives.
It would be nice if the pandemic was over though, and we were returned to a state of not needing masks and vaccinations. Do the refusers not want this also, or do they want variant after variant until the next big virus comes along? Wanting to return to prepandemic conditions is not compatible with refusing to do one’s part. It can’t be wished away, and it can’t be politicized away. Bullying Covid into submission by promoting antimask and antivaccine propaganda will not work.
Hey, antimask/antivax dipshits: If you don’t want to do your part then fine, stay home and keep your mouth shut. Don’t try to convince people who are stupider than you are to do the wrong thing. You’re not going to eliminate the virus by shouting stupid shit on “social” media. It’s like we’ve all been dumped in the ocean, with the potential to drown — meanwhile people who actually care are passing out life jackets and you want them to refuse and take their chances? What kind of sociopathy is that?
guest #5, I definitely understand that, having been there, The problem is, if they get COVID, they will be in the same boat, only with the potential for much worse. And many of them are working in the service industries. If their customers refuse to mask or vaccinate, they are in harm’s way every time they go to work.
I wish I had the solution. Actually, I do have a solution, but it is not politically workable in this ridiculous country, and would certainly be termed ‘socialist’. Because it is socialist, Which isn’t a bad word to me.
ah, another spreadneck from the American South (Florida Man) falls. What a tragedy.
Why did Too Loud Bob $15 choose a thread explicitly not about trans rights to vent? Strange,
Good question. On the one hand vaccine-denial during a deadly pandemic, on the other hand people who think they’re “in the wrong body,” or who think they think that but are really just befuddled by a stupid fad – which is more important? Gee, that’s a tough one, isn’t it.
@15 Here’s the main problem, FS. You are politicizing the trans issue. The other problem is that your feelings about trans people don’t matter to actual biological facts. Feminists who know that women are adult human females are feminists. People who think men can be women have proven themselves to be misogynists. Have you been following the issue at all? Misogynists cannot by definition be feminists. Sorry, that’s the way it is. It’s actually pretty simple if you leave your personal politics out of the equation. But really, who is the science denier here? Biology is science, fella, not your feelings. You can terf, transphobe, cis all day, and men still won’t be women. Talk about radicalized — succumbing to the trans cult dogma is about as woke as you can get. Have fun with that. :P
lol, that one was stuck in moderation, I would have been so much more uncivilized yesterday… :D
We definitely need more dissenters here, but toxic stupidity is boring.
Former Silentbob #15
Oh yeah? How do you know? Did you really do a survey of B&W readers to establish their “inner sense of self”? I smell thoughtcrime…
Re being “radicalized”, Josh is obviously saying things now that are a 180° reversal of his own words less than 5 years ago. I see no evidence of anything similar in Ophelia’s case. I know I didn’t change. I thought that biological sex was real, that being a “man”/”woman” was about physical traits rather than thoughts/feelings/behavior/”presentation”, that biological females were an oppressed group in its own right etc. 10 years ago, as did most of the people now riding the gender bandwagon (as we can tell by their own words from back then). It’s just that sometime in the last decade holding those views became blasphemy. We weren’t radicalized, you were.
The thing is ‘Bob’, you’ve always been such a contrarian here that I’ve never known what the hell your real position on anything at all has been. Being prepared to shrug off the destruction of tens of millions of women for what amounts to a cultural fashion statement was kind of breathtaking though, even by your standards. Then again, of all the people here, I never had you pegged as a great defender of anyones rights or dignity.
The asymmetry evinced by Bob is worthy of note. On one side, we by and large have a group of people committed to human freedom and fairness who assert the primacy of reality and the ideal that each of us should be able to dress, speak, act, think, and live in whichever ways suits us without overly-encumbering the rights of others. This very much includes the right for male-bodied people to “present as female” (or vice-versa) without threat of harm to life, limb, or livelihood, along with the right for extra-super-duper-speshul people to dye their hair a funny colour to express deep and fundamental truths about their ineffable multitudinous inner being.
On the other side, we have a group of vicious thought-police with Cluster B personality disorders who call people murderers when they object to forcing everyone in the world to recite empty shibboleths which contradict easily-observable reality. We are demanded to accept a religious dogma which is easily seen through as materially false. We are demanded to deny the occurrence of social phenomena for which there is ample evidence, because acknowledging the existence of these phenomena would contradict the central reality-denying dogma. We are demanded to invert our values, to accept the primacy of unprovable assertions about inner states of being, to support the existence of rigid and immutable gender roles whose membership happens to be fungible based on an ever-evolving set of contradictions. We are expected to build a reality in which everyone who isn’t “marginalised” in some way is constantly walking on eggshells in order to avoid offending anyone who is “marginalised”, and which “marginalised” offended parties (or their “allies”) are allowed to act as anti-socially as can be conceived in order to redress their supposed grievances.
And yet Side B gets to say that they are merely protecting a “harmless minority”, which therefore justifies all of their reforging of reality and their viciousness to their perceived enemies, including constant witch-hunts for wrongthink. Nevermind that most of the people in this “harmless minority” just want to be able to live their lives without being “centered” by their so-called “allies”, nevermind that there is a great deal of harm being wrought in real time on this “harmless minority” by those “allies” in pursuit of their agenda, nevermind that this “harmless minority” is composed of people, and people are messy, complicated, and very rarely entirely harmless; no matter, every single trans-identifying person is a saint and no threat to anyone and therefore any trans-claiming person who *is* demonstrably a threat is discursively *not trans* and therefore irrelevant, and anyone who says otherwise is a murderer.
Christopher Hitchens was wrong. Religion doesn’t poison everything; it is merely one vial on the shelf.
Well, I think that Bob did a hit-and-run post, so he won’t see replies.
That being said, Josh sees people in terms of how they are affected by borderline and cluster-B personalities. It’s a narrow focus, but it’s his lens for nearly everything. He loathes anyone who exhibits any sort of indication that they may have a personality disorder. They can’t be cured, and any indication that they are aware of their disorder and seeking help for it is subterfuge. He insists that everyone he meets who doesn’t exhibit a disorder to have been affected by the disorder.
And so, he assigns malice or being affected by malice as a response to nearly everything. And that extended to the BLM protests, and then after that towards anyone who wanted to use science to avoid getting or spreading the Covid-19 virus.
The transgender issue is not Josh’s cause celebre, it’s to him a symptom of disorder and it really has nothing to do with being influenced by Ophelia. It’s a result of his skewed perspective on people. So, Bob, if you come back to see how people responded, you have to see Josh for who he is rather than foist it off on the “TERFs.”
Meanwhile Bob sees everything through the lens of trans allyship. Monomania turns out to be not all that good for the thought processes.
No, this is a lie. You know as well as anyone else here that this is not an effort to reach anyone’s mind. If you really wanted to do that, your post wouldn’t be so snide and abusive. No, this is an attempt to berate, browbeat, insult; to get your righteous indignation jollies.
Right? It’s very abusive-ex, that “It’s okay, I won’t comment again” fakery, as if we were cowering and begging him to stop. Twerp.
Former Silentbob – can I call you “Former”, I feel like we’re friends? – Former:
As Bjarte said, we’re not the ones who changed. We’re still applying skeptical analysis to unlikely truth claims. You’re the one who stopped doing that. We’re still skeptical of radio hosts who say we shouldn’t get vaccinated and anti-mask podcasters in their rocking chairs. We remain dubious when we’re told that a centuries-dead cult leader can be so upset by a cartoon that slaughter is the only moral recourse. We continue to raise a quizzical eyebrow at homoeopathic cures, ancient prophecies and magical underpants. We still think Bigfoot is probably just made up.
And we impose exactly the same scrutiny on the truthclaims of the trans. We find some of those claims lacking. Skeptical enquiry tells us that humans can’t change sex; that there are no man-brains and lady-brains; that the most effective cure for gender dysphoria is puberty. Along the way we learn of the long-term harms of irreversible puberty blockers; the railway rushing confused children toward life-changing surgery and the political manoeuvring to prevent other therapeutic options being presented. We see the conflict between women’s rights and the demands of gender identity extremists; the compromise of women’s safety and dignity in the removal of their spaces and the very language they use to organise and defend their rights; the opportunities opened by decades of their campaigning being swallowed by the inclusion of men. We see similar rights to safety, dignity and autonomy of homosexual men and women being gleefully eroded and rampant homophobia surfacing again in the name of an ideology that folds like a house of cards the moment you so much as glance at it.
And we question all that. We apply our skeptical enquiry. And we can only conclude the obvious. Now you may question our conclusions, but you cannot argue that we’ve changed. We’re doing the same things we’ve always done: examine extraordinary claims and see where the evidence takes us.
But you have changed. You’re the one like Josh, because you’ve abandoned all skeptical principles entirely in this one area alone. You accept truth claims you’d never have accepted from evangelical Christians or muslims or from the mouth of the Loch Ness Monster itself. But you’ve changed even more than that, because all of this special pleading is in the name of ideology. For you, ideology trumps thought, reason, evidence and compassion.
You’d never have stood for that in the old days, Former, and we won’t stand for it now. We don’t have an ideology. We won’t have one. An ideology would blind us, as it has blinded you.
So why the drive-by, if you’re really reaching out? Hang out. Engage. If you think we’ve fallen to an ideology, show us where it’s compromised our reasoning. If you think there’s a problem with ideas of AGP or social contagion, show us how we’re wrong. You know many of us, we’re mostly friendly. Unlike the commentariat of certain blogs we’ll argue but we won’t dogpile. We’ll pick apart your points, if we can, but we won’t try to stop you making them.
My guess is that you won’t, because you know I’m right. You believe things now that you’d never believe in any other sphere of human foolhardiness. But we’re not the ones scared of a fight, or of being proved wrong. So if you want to discuss these things, I’m sure you’d be welcome. If not, then I hope you remain, forever, Former.
Back to the main topic for a moment, if Josh happens to stop by since he’s been named:
What is the basis for not believing that a contagious virus which catches rides on the droplets from our noses and mouths when we breathe and speak has its progress retarded by cloth masks which greatly reduce the volume of droplets we expel? How is wearing something that does that ostentatious? Are people using jewelry to decorate theirs?
[…] a comment by latsot on Another late […]
Former SilentBob #15 wrote:
Since our objection is that substituting “gender” for “sex” disempowers feminism, this puts us all on the same side: Feminism Good.
“Women are oppressed on the basis of sex, through the means of gender.” Behind this core statement of Feminism are clear definitions of all the meaningful terms, global historical narrative, numerous specific examples, and a consistent explanatory framework based on science and encompassing politics and law.
Or, perhaps not. You think it inadequate.
So what is the alternative core statement of Feminism?
And why is the new rational, scientific, skeptical understanding of Feminism incapable of defining “Woman” without breaking completely down and changing the subject? I think that’s the part that first started to bother me.
Michael @32 Maybe Josh should look up the definition of ostentatious. See my reply @9. Yes, people are using jewelry, sequins, written messages, etc., and there’s a whole cottage industry of “designer” masks actually. He’s trying to call it virtue signalling, which it surely can be if Josh thinks people are wearing them only to make him look bad for not wearing one, but it’s a weird thing to be offended by.
Michael: Well, there are actually people who deny the Germ Theory. For those who live on a flat earth held up by turtles all the way down all disease is caused by unvirtuous diets and bad thought.
I also want to note that I am highly resentful of the people that refuse to take the virus seriously; and choose instead to demonstrate their moral and intellectual superiority over us mask-wearing and vaccinated performance artists.
If they would have been thinking straight, Mr. Disaffected, and looked into facts instead of conspiracy bullshit, then all of this would have been a memory of a bad year. But because they are standing outside the London Underground shouting that the bombs are just a hoax, or something, or that security in the tunnels is just the government’s way of controlling us, then we are seeing stores and music venues and schools seriously considering whether or not they should shut down.
Stevie Nicks has decided to cancel her tour because the risk continues. Bands are firing long-time members who refuse to vaccinate. Kirk Cousin has decided that the risk to his career is less important to him than the risk of getting the “Fauci Ouchy,” would could harm his team’s chances if he has to isolate for Covid-19 again.
Just shut up, stop trying to prove how above it all you are and get the fucking shot. Wear the goddamned mask and let’s put this all behind us for good.