What we want is for you to stop shouting your mouth off and being the embodiment of the expression "confidently wrong". What we want is for you to have even the smidgen of humility necessary to actually earnestly check your assumptions. What we want is for you to actually do your damn homework. What we want is for you to stop reflexively digging your heels in when you're corrected and childishly asserting that since the correction doesn't make sense to you that it's necessarily ridiculous. What we want is for you to stop being such an insufferable hypocrite who insists that his unevidenced claims cannot be disproven because he believes they're right while insisting that people supplying him with entire semesters' worth of explanation hadn't provided him with anything because he couldn't be bothered to read it and only skimmed what little he did read (often only via the ctrl+f method) to look for any pretext to dismiss it out of hand.
What we want is for you to stop acting like a spoiled brat, and and to instead actually try to hold an adult conversation. And you have consistently demonstrated for
years now that you are either incapable or unwilling to do either.
The problem isn't your opinion on Khalil, it's
how you reach your conclusions and consistently close yourself off to new data as soon as you reach those conclusions. It's how you
lie about your awareness of and familiarity of the topic and then double-down whenever anyone corrects you. It's how you turn any engagement with you into a war of attrition because you'd sooner quibble over the exact meaning of the word "is" than so much as admit that you had been presented with information you were unaware of and needed to do some more reading on the topic.
I personally have literally argued with you for weeks about a paper that you were making false assertions about. I quoted it repeatedly and at length to you, only for you to keep firing back that - because I was telling you that it very obviously didn't make the claims you were attributing to it - I
clearly hadn't read it. And then, after you
finally realized (again, after
weeks of insisting that I couldn't have actually read it) that the paper wasn't even about that the topic you claimed (
as I had been telling you), you brushed it off by saying that 'in your defense'
you hadn't looked at it in months. You legitimately could not be bothered to crack the damn thing open even while arguing with the people telling you that you were getting its contents wrong. And rather than learning from the experience
you just keep on doing it! I cannot stress enough that that is a
perfect representation of how you act on these topics!
You cite a paper that you claim proved that there was no relationship between long covid and covid? I point out that the paper says no such thing that but is instead tracking the effectiveness of laypeople's ability to self-diagnose, with labwork indicating that people were bad at self-diagnosing. Your response was to argue for weeks that that can't be the case because you presumed that the labwork would be unable to identify a recent covid infection (despite your initial misinterpretation being wholly predicated on their ability to do just that), leading me to explain the methodology that the same paper -
the one you cited - had used, only for you to keep treating it like I was spitballing wild ideas rather than quoting
your own source's methodology back to you!
You come in citing something that you read on Twitter or in a youtube video that said that Study X said Y. We present you with the actual study, explain that it said nothing of the sort and quote its results and conclusions back to you, and you hypocritically assert that we must not have actually read it because we're telling you that you misunderstood it! We keep on explaining it, and you keep mindlessly repeating that our explanations can't actually be true because of some quibble over a snippet that your objection makes quite clear that you don't understand. And yet as we continue to explain these topics to you, you just continue to dig your heels in until the people get frustrated with your stonewalling, which you then treat as a victory.
You make a ill-informed declaration about an industry, and the people on these boards
who work in that industry explain that what you said is genuine nonsense, and you scoff and say that your claims must be accurate because you half-remember a show (Food Theory, in the case where you were condescending to me about my own field of marketing) making you believe otherwise! We keep explaining, and you just keep reasserting that you must be right because you heard it on such-and-such show!
You come in treating a fringe view as mainstream and "the
real science". We explain that the assertion you're parroting does not reflect the data. Then you turn around and insist it has to be what you claim because you believe the self-promoting puffery that your source is the best-of-the-best, and you believe that they believe it! We walk you through the data, explaining what it actually says and how it has been misrepresented. And your response is just to repeat that you heard that this same guy disagreed therefore the claim you're championing has to be the real science, while puffing up their credentials to try and defend your claim through a brazen appeal to perceived authority fallacy. You genuinely do not understand the topic well enough to do anything but argue about the
person that you attribute the claim to (as opposed to the merits of the claim itself), and yet you still try and act like you're the resident expert on the topic, clearly believing that your own 'expertise' exceeds those of people who have have academic and professional experience within the field, and who - unlike you - are actively reading up on the subject again and providing the receipts during the same exchange!
Every. Goddamn. Time. You
always do this.
You shoot your damn mouth off about topics you hardly have even a perfunctory awareness of, refuse to check your information even after your claims are challenged, and treat your sources (or rather the conclusions you ascribe to them) as sacrosanct, despite frequently ending up reflexively arguing against them when their actual content is quoted back to you! And then, after they've thrown veritable volumes of information at you, while you're pointedly turning your nose up at them and doing little more than repeating your initial assertion, you fucking have the
gall to declare that nobody has been able to provide any supporting evidence!
That you're too lazy to read the reams of information you've been given
is not the same thing as you not being provided with that information, and it's disgustingly hypocritical of you to make such a claim when you provide far less, consistently demonstrate that you clearly don't understand the contents of what you post, and then demand that we treat your claims about it as the definitive word on the subject.
And after all that...after years of dealing with this from you across so many topics, you think that all we want from you is for you to parrot the Trump administration's "sorry, not sorry" that tries to paint this shit as a simple "administrative error" and non-issue that's hardly worth a second thought, much less redress? Are you for real? You think
that's the issue?
He says without even a smidgen of self-awarenes...
You've paid
so little attention to the story that you even failed to recognize that Abrego Garcia is the same guy that the Trump administration itself has themselves acknowledged as a wrongful deportation and have been trying to downplay as a simple "Administrative Error". For fuck's sake,
the very article you cited goes on to say that the accusation of gang membership has never actually been meaningfully substantiated.
The allegations about his affiliation with MS-13 stem from a 2019 arrest outside a Maryland Home Depot store, where he and others were looking for work. County police asked if he was a gang member and - presuming that he was one - demanded information about other gang members. After explaining that he wasn’t a gang member and had no information, he was turned over to ICE, whom they told that Garcia was a gang member.
ICE argued against Abrego Garcia’s release at a subsequent immigration court hearing because local police had “verified” his gang membership (read: profiled him as such and simply refused to believe that he wasn't in the gang). The evidence they cited was that he was wearing of a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and that a confidential informant’s claim that Abrego Garcia belonged to MS-13’s “Westerns clique” in Long Island, New York,
despite having never lived there. That's it.
The claim that he was found to be a gang member by the court is unequivocally false. It is a misrepresentation of the initial proceedings, in which Ice
claimed that he was a verified gang member because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and because an confidential informant made what is ultimately a vague and uncorroborated allegation that Garcia was a gang member in Long Island (which once again, was not credible both because of lack of corroborating evidence and because Garcia has never even lived there. For Pete's sake, it's 240 miles away!).
Even at this early stage, the judge was skeptical, but treated the allegation as a given
as far as posting bond went. That's pretty standard procedure and literally means nothing more than the fact that due to the severity of the allegation, Garcia would be treated as a flight risk
before the trial and therefore would not be allowed to post a financial guarantee that he would appear in court to be released until that court date.
And the above is literally all the evidence that the prosecution presented to claim that Garcia was a gang member. Garcia, in turn, offered sworn testimony, character witnesses, and voluminous evidence that not only was he
not a gang member, but that he was also eligible for protection under Federal law. The court found that Garcia was credible, that the testimony for his case was internally and externally consistent, was corroborated by substantial documentation, and appeared free of embellishment. As the court also established that he was at substantial risk of persecution, it further ruled that he had a right not to be deported to El Salvador. The government never tried to appeal the ruling. And Garcia has, as ordered, checked in with immigration consistently since then.
Garcia has been living in the United States since 2011, when he was 16. He has lived here for 14 years, literally almost half his life, and has never been charged with a crime. That in and of itself makes his treatment in recent weeks unequivocally heinous, as imprisonment is a response to
criminal action. Which again, he has never even be charged with, much less convicted of! Moreover, the court
did not find that he was a gang member (in fact, the reason that was granted protected status was because he and his family had been
fleeing gang extortion), they just
entertained the assertion during initial proceedings to determine whether or not to let him out
on bail. When the case itself came around, the court in fact found the opposite: that there was
no credence to the claim that he was a gang member. What Ice and the Trump administration has been doing is repeating the initial
accusation and
misrepresenting it as the court's verdict.
So again, either do your damn homework - and I mean really do it, rather than just skimming it to look for a pretext that you think validates your extant opinions (which you just did
yet again) - or shut the fuck up.
Except you aren't doing that. You are uncritically swallowing the Trump administration and Ice's characterization of the events, declaring that it must reflect the true story without doing any additional research, and then judging the veracity of the news based on how well it aligns with that same characterization.
Which, as noted above, is
very much in line with your general approach to information. You find a story, decide that it has to be true, declare anything conflicting with it to be 'obviously' wrong and then insist that anyone who tells you otherwise must not have seen the truth like you have, even as they start pointing to flaw after flaw in the story you're pushing, often very glaring ones at that. Because you aren't evaluating the merit of the claims, you're just championing your preferred one and looking for any pretext to declare that any disagreement with it must be wrong.
Hell, that's seen in you keep on getting the case of Garcia wrong in this very post. You didn't look at the information skeptically (such as checking the court records or filings), you just dismissed the stories that said he was falsely imprisoned, embraced the Trump administration's characterization of it as a simple administrative error or minor injustice purely on technicality, and then found something that you thought said the courts proved he was a gang member (again, not what the records show), and championed that as the true version of events that proved that everyone else was being deceived and that you were clever for championing the Trump party line.
That's not being a skeptic, that's
pseudoskepticism, dogmatism that masquerades under a wan
pretense of skepticism. You're calling yourself a "skeptic" but all you're doing - and indeed, all you ever seem to do - is cherry picking evidence that conforms to your preexisting belief and dogmatically insisting that it is necessarily true as a matter of principle. And you have been called out on this time and time again over many,
many different topics, including but not not limited to topics such as medicine, nutrition, law, and psychology.
You genuinely don't know what you're talking about and have made it more than clear that you can't be bothered to learn. So stop trying to bluff that you do.
en.wikisource.org
