From Pine View Farm

Facebook Frolics, Fallacious Flummery Dept. 0

At Psychology Today Blogs, David Kyle Johnson reacts to a meme circulated by a person he calls, “Bob,” in which Bob lists all the world-ending crises he has survived. Said meme equates, to cite one example, Harold Camping’s rapture prediction* with avian flu.

Johnson points out that one thing is not like the other thing and warns against false equivalences in a time of COVID-19. A snippet:

There is a huge difference, for example, between the Mayan 2012 “end of the world” prediction, and the Ebola outbreak of 2014. Yes, neither one of them killed Bob. But the Mayan 2012 calendar prediction was complete cockamamie pseudoscience from the beginning. But the Ebola outbreak of 2014 was a real thing—a real threat.

Given the amount of stupid flowing down the disinformation superhighway, his piece is well worth the three minutes it will take to read it.

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*Man, I didn’t remember this one at all, but I don’t pay attention to crackpot preachers who are only in it for the money.

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