Empty Howling, Empty People, Empty Culture
The prevalence of anti-discourse discourse, of stories told only for the purpose of ideological prophylaxis — here’s something you definitely shouldn’t allow yourself to think about! — is the most pathetic feature of a moment full of pathetic features. Here’s a story about Robert Malone’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, for example:
It’s a Yertle the Turtle of strawmen, one piled on top of the other, reaching halfway to the sky. People have been discussing “mass formation psychosis” in the context of the pandemic for a fairly long time, the idea didn’t start with Robert Malone’s decision to talk about it, and Robert Malone is a medical doctor who is working on new COVID-19 vaccines as this mindless adult child calls him an anti-vaxxer. Picture me screaming this next sentence from the rooftops:
SHE’S CALLING A VACCINE SCIENTIST AN ANTI-VAXXER.
The emptiness of this writing cannot be exaggerated; it has no content, nothing inside it. It exists only to draw a limit for your mind — to stop you from thinking rather than to get you to think a particular way. It doesn’t analyze fact claims, pursue an understanding of an analysis, or engage with a serious competing argument. It just screeches STOP. Wind blowing across a beach has more meaning. Dogs barking, the garbage disposal, a truck running something over and making noise: all more important.
Any storyteller that leans this hard on slogans that you hear all the time — “far-right,” “anti-vaxxer,” cultural signals that exist to tell you that you already know what something is and shouldn’t look into it any farther — is inherently dishonest, manipulative, and empty. Greet this style of argument with profound hostility. It exists to empty you.
And then, having said at the top of the story that people on the right think we're living through mass formation psychosis **because Malone just said so**, she says this farther down in the same story, not noticing at all that she's just fatally undermined her opening claim:
"Discourse about mass formation psychosis has been bubbling up in far-right circles for a while. Malone himself has been talking about it for weeks. A book published in November makes the same argument that COVID has given rise to the phenomenon, which has various names, including mass delusional psychosis and mass hysteria."
People who don't INTEND logically consistent arguments -- people who are just making noise -- have no way of noticing that paragraph six shits all over paragraphs one and two. They're just typing up a set of slogans.
I welcome this sort of thing. It's so easily ridiculed, and it's so obviously ineffective. Each new instance is a new invitation to question the premise. They keep independently and unwittingly rediscovering the Streisand Effect.