Deep dive into stupid: Meet the growing group that rejects germ theory

Germ theory denialist Facebook group went from 147 members in April 2020 to 18.4K now.

Read the whole story

 

[poltroon]

It would be great if grazing animals never got sick but that's not how it is.

I wonder if they wash out wounds when they have an injury.

 

[ArsBackwards]

This stuff is all crazy and idiotic and followers should be called out on it actively. But nonsense about gods, lords, ghosts and afterlives - every bit as moronic and irrational - is all fine and to be respected; certainly never called "utterly idiotic and abhorrent" on a fairly serious website?

Now watch this comment get well downvoted. Because people are quick to call out others' stupidity while ignoring their own.

YES!

Here we have people condemning others for being ignorant, yet all the while believing that they'll survive their own deaths, only to rejoin their deceased loved ones, forever after, in a perfect happy place.

It's a wonderful thought, but without any evidence whatsoever, it's just as silly as a flat earth.

 

[bungalowbernard]

What next, a group that rejects gravity?

Apples release a small jet of downward-firing propulsive gas when they naturally detach from trees.

 

[poltroon]

I would imagine that not very many of the group members actually believe this - there are lots of trolls on the internet. This is the sort of thing the /b-tards used to do all the time, and perhaps there are less visible groups now engaged in the same sort of pranks.

Probably not, when they joined. But this kind of propaganda isn't harmless or without impact, even to people who think they're just looking for lulz. Deliberate misinformation is deliberate and it can be powerful... ask any con artist.

 

[graylshaped]

This smells like propaganda. It's almost too stupid to have manifested organically.

You are correct. It manifested algorithmically. Facebook brought these people together, and once again, Facebook's "strong action" is neither.

 

[grumpyhoser]

Our former president has proved that no matter how far removed from the facts, if you stick to the same lie and repeat it loud enough and often enough, you will attract believers. Ironically, these people like to call others sheep, when in fact they too are sheep who just happen to follow a different shephard.

 

[commod0re]

As insane as rejecting the germ theory of disease is, you can sort of see how they got there. These people don’t trust the for profit medical system to be working in their best interests and to be honest, it probably isn’t. What kind of a world do we live in where people are denied or can’t afford necessary medical treatment and have to spent insane amounts of money just to stay alive if they have a chronic condition?

That is a world that doesn’t make any sense and if the world doesn’t make any sense, the next step is to retreat into fantasy to try and explain what’s going on in a way you can comprehend. This is similar to the argument Matt Taibbi made in The Great Derangement regarding 9/11 conspiracy theories. His argument there was that the Bush era congress was lying and conducting business in secret to enrich their friends while not doing anything about pressing issues facing the country. The 9/11 conspiracy movement fed off of that as people retreated into fantasy to try to understand why the government wasn’t working for them. Once you have that fundamental break with trusting the “system” it’s easy to go way off the deep end.

Again, I think rejecting the germ theory of disease is abhorrent, but I can see the starting point that sent these people off and I think there is a real valid issue that needs to be addressed there.

 

[dlux]

Facebooks monitors constantly for misinformation

Is there anything but misinformation in this Facebook group?

No. It's all lies, from top to bottom. Even the stuff that might be factually correct (by accident) is framed in the wrong context and therefore wrong.

 

[Deleted member 1]

Paris has a new power source. They just need to wrap the corpse of Louis Pasteur in wire and put him in some magnets. They can probably get 80 kilowatts out of the guy.

 

[crazedgironemo]

As a microbiology major, I'm simply... speechless.

 

[SixDegrees]

"Terrain model"? That's ridiculous. Everyone knows that disease is caused by an imbalance of the four humors. All we need is more leeches.


/s

The Supersizers explored humors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH5O_fCstyI

I love this series. They're all available on YouTube, but they're in the old 10-minute-limit format, but autoplay normally picks up the next in sequence.

 

[unequivocal]

I got blood and urine sepsis last summer due to a deep tissue bacterial infection. I spent 3 days in the hospital and was uncomfortably close to dying. Without the intravenous antibiotics I would certainly have died.

I'd encourage these nuts to give themselves a bacterial culture infection and tough it out with fruits, vegetables, and a clean lifestyle and see how it feels.

 

[Worminator]

I'm actually a little shocked to realize how little I know or understand about viruses, bacteria, and disease. I seem to have managed to avoid learning about the subject during my student years (I elected to take maths/physics rather than biology) and its not something that interests me, so I'm left with a layman's view of "yeah, germs and bacteria cause disease if your immune system can't fight it off" without knowing where the experimental proof of it call comes from, or any of the nitty-gritty details.

That said, even the most cursory observations re. contagion (you catch a cold after being around someone with a cold, or after your kids catch it at school, etc, let alone any kind of survey of the transmission of cholera, plague, and, oh, I dont know, Covid) should immediately allow you to cotton onto the notion that such diseases are not generated internally on the basis of individual lifestyle.

There's ignorance, there's willful ignorance, then there's the people posting on this facebook group.

 

[sheyingshi]

What next, a group that rejects gravity?

Probably true, BS holds us down.

 

[orwelldesign]

While we all agree that this type of thing is wrong I have come to a different conclusion than Beth. I don't believe that being so dismissive of these people is the correct approach, I prefer to understand how and why they came to the conclusion that this is correct instead of what hundreds of years of science says.

Whether this is a type of mental illness or just a some sort of mass hysteria that is occurring we need to understand what is going on and how we can address it

Nope. There's no "why" involved. They didn't reach their position via logic, nor evidence, so they're useless as tools to change their minds.

You don't get to misalign mental illness with being a moron. People afflicted with genuine mental illness can often be treated by drugs which address a chemical imbalance in the brain. There's an actual cause for clinical depression, or bipolar disorder, ADHD, or schizophrenia.

This? This isn't caused by a chemical imbalance, this is caused by the too-strong American "my ignorance is just as valid as your expertise" strain of thought that has percolated through our discourse since... forever, basically.

Tldr: dismiss away! There's no argument you can present that will change these minds.

Just let ´em make the Ebola bet. In the same way that there's no atheists in foxholes, I guarantee you won't have any takers. Offer them a hundred million dollars to be exposed to Ebola. I wish I had enough money to make that offer to the administration of this group.

Hey Soros? Where you at. We need a check.

 

[Bill T.]

What next, a group that rejects gravity?

Gravity is just a theory.

 

[Oldmanalex]

While we all agree that this type of thing is wrong I have come to a different conclusion than Beth. I don't believe that being so dismissive of these people is the correct approach, I prefer to understand how and why they came to the conclusion that this is correct instead of what hundreds of years of science says.

Whether this is a type of mental illness or just a some sort of mass hysteria that is occurring we need to understand what is going on and how we can address it

You can't fix stupid. Knowing something that almost nobody else knows gives the stupid the power to imagine that they are not only not stupid, but somehow smarter than the rest of us. Such intoxication can only be obtained in la-la land.

 

[prc117f]

In Bernard and Béchamp's defense, they were reacting to a new theory. Pasteur's work was revolutionary and overthrew centuries of classical medical theory on disease causation. The germ theory didn't gain general acceptance in the scientific and medical communities for another couple of decades, largely due to Pasteur's and Koch's work. Joseph Lister applied germ theory to wound care by treating wounds with carbolic acid solutions and created antiseptic surgery in 1865 but that didn't entirely convince the medical community. A story I was told, possibly apocryphal, was that when John Shaw Billings was designing the new, modern hospital at Johns Hopkins in the 1880s he had the basement asphalted just in case miasmatic theory wasn't entirely disproven by the germ theory.

Oh that explains why the surgical wards JH are asphalted. Never new that.

 

[prc117f]

The level of Morons will increase as the pressures of natural selection in the human race has significantly decreased.

 

[poltroon]

Here is an article describing an idea that I think is directly relevant:

Eating Toward Immortality: Diet culture is just another way of dealing with the fear of death.

The basic premise is, diet is a thing you can control. If only you're good enough, and pure enough, then surely you won't die. It's in its own way a variant of anorexia, a similar way to take control over life when you have no control.

By creating and following diets, humans not only eat to stay alive, but they fit themselves into a cultural edifice that is larger, and more permanent, than their bodies. It is a sort of immortality ritual, and rituals must be performed socially. Clean eating rarely, if ever, occurs in secret. If you haven’t evangelized about it, joined a movement around it, or been praised publicly for it, have you truly cleansed?

This is why arguments about diet get so vicious, so quickly. You are not merely disputing facts, you are pitting your wild gamble to avoid death against someone else’s. You are poking at their life raft. But if their diet proves to be the One True Diet, yours must not be. If they are right, you are wrong. This is why diet culture seems so religious. People adhere to a dietary faith in the hope they will be saved. That if they’re good enough, pure enough in their eating, they can keep illness and mortality at bay. And the pursuit of life everlasting always requires a leap of faith.

Basically, that an obsession with strict diet can be explained by terror management theory. Only the weak die, and I'm not weak. Therefore I'm invulnerable.

 

[LuisMercado]

This stuff is all crazy and idiotic and followers should be called out on it actively.

Now watch this comment get well downvoted. Because people are quick to call out others' stupidity while ignoring their own.

I propose we use a screenshot of this quote as the main picture in the Cognitive Dissonance Wikipedia entry.

 

[NezumiRho]

What next, a group that rejects gravity?

Gravity is just a theory.

Au contraire! It isn't just a nice theory.

It's the Law.

 

[OOPMan]

This is hilarious

 

[DarthSlack]

As a microbiology major, I'm simply... speechless.

I admire your restraint. I screamed obscenities until I was hoarse.

 

[kessdawg]

What next, a group that rejects gravity?

Intelligent falling

 

[Static and Noise]

What next, a group that rejects gravity?

Gravity is just a theory.

Au contraire! It isn't just a nice theory.

It's the Law.

Which version? Einstein's or Newton's?

 

[VelvetGlove]

"Terrain model"? That's ridiculous. Everyone knows that disease is caused by an imbalance of the four humors. All we need is more leeches.


/s

The Supersizers explored humors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH5O_fCstyI

I love this series. They're all available on YouTube, but they're in the old 10-minute-limit format, but autoplay normally picks up the next in sequence.

Thou must not drink ye water, for it shall put thy humors out of balance and thou shalt become ill, even unto death. Drink ye ale and purify thy soul.

 

[OtherSystemGuy]

Sigh. The bell curve of human intelligence has so many tails.

 

[Static and Noise]

What next, a group that rejects gravity?

Intelligent falling

Indeed

"Although it was originally intended to be satire, some fundamentalist Christians, such as Jack Chick,[2] have actually taken up the idea."

 

[graylshaped]

While we all agree that this type of thing is wrong I have come to a different conclusion than Beth. I don't believe that being so dismissive of these people is the correct approach, I prefer to understand how and why they came to the conclusion that this is correct instead of what hundreds of years of science says.

Whether this is a type of mental illness or just a some sort of mass hysteria that is occurring we need to understand what is going on and how we can address it

We are capable of being utterly disdainful of people who are utterly disdainful of the rest of society, while also looking to understands how they have come to act as they do, including the role of apologists who enable their behavior.

 

[nimelennar]

And here I was, thinking that flat-earthers are the bottom of the barrel...

I don't want to live on this planet any more.

I would submit that there is nothing wrong with the planetary mass itself and your problem is, in fact, with the inhabitants.

Which is to say:

(s/you/they)

 

[newbrain]

What next, a group that rejects gravity?

Well not exactly gravity (but there are examples of that too), but here's some folks who, among all the other moon conspiracies, assert that rockets cannot function in a vacuum.

I think a "Rule 34++" should be defined, stating that for every conceivable topic, there's a conspiracy theory about it on the internet.

I warn you not to linger too much on that site, unless you need your IQ reduced.

 

[Kjella]

In the 1960s a vaccine for chickenpox was decades away. It wasn't a question of "if" you would get chickenpox at some point in your life, but "when". Your parents getting it over with on their own terms when they were prepared to deal with it made perfect sense. That's especially true since the older you are when you get chickenpox the worse it is likely to be.

I had it as a slightly older kid, I was a bit sick but I don't remember it as particularly bad however my dad caught it too and he'd never had it as a child so he got really, really sick for weeks. We still deal with in the same way here in Norway, they vaccinate against measles, mumps and rubina but not chickenpox. (Also rota virus, tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, poliomyelitis, meningitis, hepatitis b, pneumococcal vaccine and HPV)

 

[Bloater51]

Why the hell hasn’t Facebook taken the whole group down yet?

Why does Facebook do or not do anything? Money. I'm sure gullible people have amazing click-through rates on ads. Someone diving down a flat earth/Q-anon/elites are lizard people/breathing is a myth rabbit hole wracks up loads of ad impressions. Toxic stupidity sells.

Because this is just an extreme arm of a very, very profitable market that existed long before Facebook; Wellness.

I could go into a long rant but if you look at a lot of the anti-vax conspiracy theories they all stem from Western “Alternative Medicine” groups that make money from demonising Western medicine to sell a lifestyle based off “Ancient Eastern Medicine”.

Until we start regulating the Wellness market like we do actual medicines they’ll always have the advertising spend that means companies like Facebook will turn a blind eye.

Not disagreeing but we're not all that good at regulating 'actual medicines'. Witness the latest Alzheimer's drug. And, unfortunately, that wasn't all that unique. What the US really needs is a top down revamp of the FDA and a revamp of the enabling legislation. Of course the likelihood of that happening is kinda low.

But at least they are regulated. I’m British but I believe our agencies operate in a similar enough fashion for this. Wellness products circumnavigate regulations because they are classed as food, therefore they don’t have to prove anything other than the actual products aren’t unsafe as a food source.

There are a lot of restrictions on food labelling in the UK though. You can claim a foodstuff is 'healthy', which is essentially meaningless, but not that it will prevent or cure disease.

 

[numerobis]

Meanwhile, Béchamp—considered a bitter crank and rival of Pasteur—suggested that pathogenic bacteria are produced by human tissue as a response to a harmful change in the terrain.

Actually, this isn't so off the wall: it more or less describes cancer.

Not at all. Cancer is human cells, not bacteria.

 

[marsilies]

Here is an article describing an idea that I think is directly relevant:

Eating Toward Immortality: Diet culture is just another way of dealing with the fear of death.

The basic premise is, diet is a thing you can control. If only you're good enough, and pure enough, then surely you won't die. It's in its own way a variant of anorexia, a similar way to take control over life when you have no control.

There's probably an element of that psychology on some people dieting, but dieting came about because our bodies crave sugar, salt, and fat, and our industrial societies have made those plentiful and cheap, while often separating them from all other nutrients, and also promoting a more sedentary lifestyle than ever before (sit to travel, sit to work, etc.). Our bodies have evolved to store all excess energy due to the previous likelihood of going some days without food, and our society has changed quicker than our bodies can genetically adapt to.

It's like exercise. Sure, some people take it to extremes, but there's also the idea of just burning off the calories that would've been previously been expended by physical work, and making sure muscles don't atrophy.

 

[PeterWimsey]

This stuff is all crazy and idiotic and followers should be called out on it actively. But nonsense about gods, lords, ghosts and afterlives - every bit as moronic and irrational - is all fine and to be respected; certainly never called "utterly idiotic and abhorrent" on a fairly serious website?

Now watch this comment get well downvoted. Because people are quick to call out others' stupidity while ignoring their own.

Neoatheists are as bad as vegans when it comes to hijacking a thread so they can talk about what *they* want to talk about.

Stop interrupting.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Meanwhile, Béchamp—considered a bitter crank and rival of Pasteur—suggested that pathogenic bacteria are produced by human tissue as a response to a harmful change in the terrain.

Actually, this isn't so off the wall: it more or less describes cancer.

It's incredibly off the wall. It's basically Spontaneous Generation, which was not entirely discredited at the time (especially for a contemporary who hated Pasteur's debunking of it).