The Drunken Skeptic

01/08/2025

Not a petrified fish. Devils Tower is also not a petrified giant tree and Uluru-Kata in Australia is also not a melted ancient building.

All of those aforementioned are conspiracy theories based solely on people's evolutionary cognitive dissonance of patternicity. A term coined by Dr. Michael Shermer to describe the evolutionary ability, our ancestors gained to aid in survival, to recognise patterns. The technical term in psychology is called Pareidolia. The ability of humans to recognise patterns and shapes such as faces or creatures or structures when there aren't any of those around. Seeing the face of a woman or Jesus in the bottom of your coffee cup or on your piece of burned toast is another example.

The reason why people believe these online conspiracy claims is because it somehow affirms their beliefs. Almost like it just confirms to themselves that what they put their faith in is actually true. Combine that to their Dunning-Kruger mentality and you have someone completely convinced that what they think they know is 100% true and they will not stray from that belief. Even when the most compelling of evidence known to man is placed right in front of their eyes, they will refuse to move from their position.

Such people are, unfortunately, unteachable and have completely lost their ability to critically think about the information they are fed. Their beliefs are formed by whatever confirms their biases rather than shaping beliefs and knowledge around the evidence.

29/07/2025

The meme suggesting that being “up-to-date on all your shots” leads to harm couldn’t be further from the truth. Here are the facts:

Vaccines save millions of lives every year. Decades of research and real-world evidence show that vaccines are one of the most effective ways to prevent serious illness and death from diseases like measles, polio, and influenza.

Safety is always the top priority. Vaccines go through extensive clinical trials and ongoing safety monitoring before and after approval. Rare side effects are monitored and addressed by independent experts. The covid-19 mRNA vaccine was in development from the year 1993 already with the looming threat of swine flu. And when that vaccine technology was used for the covid-19 pandemic they ran several clinical trials around the world on a total of about 500,000 people to test for safety and efficacy before rolling it out to the public.

Being up-to-date on vaccines protects both you and your community. Vaccines don’t just prevent illness in individuals, they also protect those who can’t be vaccinated, like people with weakened immune systems, through herd immunity.

Immunity fades over time, so boosters are needed. Diseases and viruses can adapt, and our immune protection decreases over time. That’s why health experts recommend keeping up with boosters, just like your annual flu shot or the updated COVID-19 vaccine.

Anecdotes of a person's great Aunt's cousin twice removed and five of his friends dying "under mysterious circumstances" after receiving the COVID vaccine isn't evidence. There could be a list of confounding variables that could have lead to a person's death, and you wouldn't know any of them unless you have the person's full medical history. Which I can guarantee you, you don't. The fact that they died shortly or even some time after receiving an injection is pure correlation and that doesn't necessarily mean causation.

Does that mean that the vaccine is 100% after effect free? No, of course not. You would have to prove it though. And even with after effects detected in patients during the clinical trials the results are clear, the benefits vastly outweigh the risks.

As for the possibility of side effects surfacing years after receiving the vaccine is highly unlikely. Since the ingredients in the vaccine works out of your body within 24 hours, if you're to have an adverse effect to the vaccine it would happen during that time and not years later. If you suffer from myocarditis years after receiving the vaccine it is most likely that there had already been a problem with your heart for years, possibly before you even had the vaccine, and you simply didn't know about it.

Vaccines work, it has been proven time and time again, and being current on your vaccines is one of the easiest and safest ways to protect yourself and those around you!

28/07/2025

Because they're the only ones that actually and actively use evidence and data to predict where they will find the fossils and actively go out to find them there. Not like some people that spend their life watching rubbish on YouTube and then think they know better than actual scientists.

FYI. Fossils, they find dinosaur fossils. Not bones. Although some dinosaur bones have been found, the organic materials have largely been replaced by minerals during fossilization they have been considered bones although they are technically fossils. Do you follow?

Aaaaannd that's still not evidence that the Earth is flat. Sorry Flat Earth Library...

28/07/2025

"The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal has dismissed an appeal by a Colac doctor against his registration suspension for writing fake COVID-19 vaccination exemptions.

In 2021 Denes Borsos issued 189 vaccine exemption certificates in the space of a week.

The tribunal found Dr Borsos failed to carry out adequate clinical assessments to justify issuing the medical certificates."

He basically lied for profit.
-AMV

28/07/2025

So a graphic artist uses a bit of artistic licence in a piece of digital art and poetic words to promote a natural phenomena (That is only possible on a spherical Earth by the way) and this *clears throat* gentleman ... tries to tie it into the decades old All seeing Eye/Evil Eye conspiracy theory.

Now, many conspiracy theorists bemoans the fact that many people often belittle, berate, mock or insult them whenever they post such things. And although I admit, mocking and insulting them is probably not the best approach, as some would argue, it's not difficult to see why people would use that approach. When people would conjure up such imaginary evils and promote it as some catastrophe or cataclysmic tragedy one cannot help but wonder if they actually think of themselves as rational thinking people.

The truth is, yes, they do think of themselves as rational thinking adult human beings. And this is exactly what is meant by the term Dunning-Kruger. And although I probably don't need to define the term to most of you, dear readers, for those of you unfamiliar with the term... The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias named after an experiment performed by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger wherein they found that people with low ability at a task overestimates their competence.

However, the term has undergone a bit of an evolution, as many do over the years. In this modern age the term is largely used to describe someone who has little to no knowledge on the subject and whether it is true or not, but yet they promote the subject as with such high levels of confidence that some might perceive them as very knowledgeable on the subject and thus believe that what they proclaim is in fact true. Which would be a very dangerous thing indeed. The subject in the below image might be completely harmless, but imagine that being a post against life saving vaccines or a post by a health influencer giving medical advice to cancer patients. Then suddenly it's no longer so harmless.

25/07/2025

23/07/2025

The Galileo Fallacy, also known as the Galileo Gambit or the Galileo Argument, is a logical fallacy where a person claims their idea, ideology, beliefs, etc., must be correct because it's ridiculed or rejected by the mainstream or experts or scientists or just the majority of people.

They fail to accept the possibility that they could simply just be wrong. In this individual's case he believes that all of medical science and immunology is wrong about the vaccines and the human immune system and all you need is his exclusive range of supplements which he graciously supplies a link to in the comments section to his frontline store. On there he sells anything from HGH supplements and gells to STEM cell patches and Gold IRA.

His credentials that makes him more qualified to give health advice to people than actual medical professionals and research scientists? The fact that he created his "Fighting Fit" online courses and the fact that he was the presenter of the Digital Warriors Chat show. He also describes himself as a "dedicated truther fighting for health" and "Fight for Life" is his motto. Man... riveting credentials!! And his peer reviewed medical research papers published in reputable medical journals tally up to the incredible number of *inhaling sharply* zero.

And yet he wants everyone to believe him and buy his products because he is the Galileo of the medical and immunology world and therefore his claims are all true.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what a grifter looks like. The "trust me bro, it's true because I say it is" snake-oil salesman. The one that will happily sell you "cures" for hundreds of dollars all the while preying on the vulnerable and gullible, not caring that his products aren't regulated or tested for efficiency or safety. Using vaccine skepticism and fear to garner wealth for himself.

Always be careful who or what you believe online. Always ask for evidence and peer reviewed research papers from reputable science journals. Critical thinking starts with you. Cheers all 🍺🍺🍺!

22/07/2025

Some Christians find it almost unbelievable to fathom that there are fellow Christians out there that use the Bible to try and convince people of their pseudoscience and conspiracies. The problem is that one can interpret the writings of any ancient texts to fit one's presuppositions and then claim that as evidence that they are true.

Most ancient texts are written in very artistic, almost poetic and ambiguous language as people tried to convey ideas, stories and ideologies with their limited knowledge of the world around them. Which is why it takes educated individuals to unravel, translate and interpret what those texts are saying and what is meant by them for us. That's where archaeology, paleontology, anthropology and Bible scholars (or scholars of the Qur'an) comes in. They attempt to translate interpret and verify such ancient texts for us so we may learn and understand more about our past as a species. Because if we leave the interpretation of such ancient texts up to the lay men and preachers out there, the result below is what you get.

PS. They would be closer to the truth if they swapped the text of the meme around.

17/07/2025

Apart from thinking that memes somehow provide empirical evidence that they are correct. When faced with actual verifiable and testable evidence the Flat Earther often let's go of any and all pretentiousness and reinforces their Double Down Bias with puerile insults.

As we all know prominent flat Earth grifters have all admitted that a 24 hour Sun would be impossible to observe on a flat Earth. So Will Duffy picked up the challenge and extended an invitation to 5 people who believe the Earth is a globe and 5 Flat Earthers to take a trip to Antarctica with him. The seats for the Globe supporters filled up almost immediately. The Flat Earth seat took a helluva lot longer to fill up as all those vociferous Flat Earthers on YouTube were very quick to decline a free and fully paid trip to Antarctica to go see the 24 hour Sun. With excuses ranging from "I'm not going to allow the spawn of Satan to influence me" to "I know the truth! The Earth is Flat and I don't need to be bought with a free trip for them to spread their lies! I can't be bought!"

However, after a long wait the seats filled up as 5 brave souls from the Flat Earth community agreed to have their beliefs challenged. Full disclosure, I honestly take my hat off to every Flat Earther that went and changed their minds after being faced with undeniable evidence that they were wrong. In the words of the late great philosopher of science Daniel Dennett: "It's not easy convincing someone that they've dedicated their lives to a lie".

The rest of them, like this one, went bezerk and scrambled to simply just doubled down on their grift. Accusing Pastor Will Duffy of faking the whole trip. That he somehow convinced 5 Flat Earthers to let go of their deeply held personal beliefs and join him in attempting to deceive all the dedicated Flat Earthers out there. With accusations like "The whole thing was shot in the dome projector in Las Vegas" to "They used a green screen and vapes!" To try and explain away the now captured on video evidence of the 24 hour Sun circling the sky in Antarctica. A place flat Earthers maintain, people cannot go due to the Arctic treaty.

The rest, also like this one here, simply resorted to, and still does as evident here, puerile schoolyard, tossing their toys out the cot, insults. Because nothing shouts EVIDENCE more than a good old session of name calling and derogatory references and comparisons.

I am reminded of a saying I once heard from Dr. Jonathan N. Stea that reads "Never play chess with pigeons. They just knock over all the pieces, s**t all over the board and then strut around like they've won".

Some people are not interested in the truth, even though they claim they are, they're simply interested in defending their deeply invested personal beliefs.

16/07/2025

Via: Sgt Scholar

More examples of what Dr. Michael Shermer described as patternicity.

15/07/2025

Sing it from the roof tops Dr. Sammy! Say it with me... AUTISTIC CHILDREN ARE BORN WITH AUTISM!! AUTISM IS GENETIC!! It's not contracted through diet or vaccines! And diet cannot "cure" Autism! Oh and Dr. Chaffee is a Neurosurgical resident, NOT a geneticist or a nutritionist with zero, count it, ZERO experience with Autism or published peer reviewed research on the subject of Autism or Dieting!

Via: Atheists Against Pseudoscientific Nonsense