Eye Patch Jack
pacificnarrations.substack.com
It’s tough blogging when you have a day job. I don’t mean to whinge, but it really takes a while to write these things. Often I’ll just delete my progress and start again several hours in, and spend another few hours rewriting everything. But that’s nothing compared to the amount of time that must have gone into this provax hitpiece by Stuff’s Charlie Mitchell that showed up on my radar this week. Coming in at over 4000 words it is the product of some dedicated research, some borderline harassment and even some creepy social media stalking.
First off, let’s give the devil his due. This was some Grade A hogwash using few outright lies and some advanced techniques. One of those techniques was to be actually fair in places such as when he gave the last word (and a reasonable one at that) to one of his subjects, a doctor named Matt Shelton. Good show.
Which outright lies? They’re easy so let’s get them out of the way. Charlie asserts breakthrough cases are rare. The latest data out of Public Health England contradicts this statement, where the vaxxed are recorded as being infected at far higher proportions than unvaxxed for most age groups. The other was a lie of omission. Charlie attributes high vaccination rates as the reason Sweden, Norway and Denmark have been able to get back to normal. This one turned my stomach a bit, as it’s a gross little bit of gaslighting. Sweden and Norway are currently sitting at 68% fully vaxxed, which is less than New Zealand’s current 75.5% and Denmark is only at 76% (https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations). Furthermore, none of those countries has the kind of two-tiered, traffic light society that currently awaits New Zealanders once they hit the 90% mark. By Charlie’s logic, NZ should be back to “near-normality” today because of their already “high” vaccination rates.
The rest is a little harder to dissect. I’m sure plenty of people can read Charlie’s article and know something is not quite right but I feel it is important to state exactly what. The two biggest sins (among others I’m sure, as evidenced by his creepy social media stalking) Charlie is guilty of are nut-picking and deliberately confining the scope of his article to bolster his argument.
Nut-picking is the deliberate selection of people with extreme opinions from the other side to refute or present as representative. It is similar to strawmanning where one refutes an argument nobody made, except somebody did make the argument in this case, it just wasn’t representative or their best.
Charlie debunks claims of vax-induced magnetism and laughs at claims of microchip contamination in the vaxxes. For some reason, his research misses real-world examples of vaccine contamination such as the one in Japan that claimed the lives of several people. He emphasises how the vaccine is so unlikely to cause instant death but does not address concerns about the unknown long-term effects or the strange string of heart problems affecting otherwise extremely healthy people all of a sudden (e.g. soccer player Sergio Aguero).
All this is not to call the subjects of Charlie’s article nuts. The first I’ve heard of them was in Charlie’s piece (thanks Charlie!) and I withhold my judgement of them. The opinions Charlie chooses to attack are definitely on the extreme side and this is by design, both because they are the easiest to refute and they make his ideological opponents look crazy.
Charlie’s confinement of the scope of the article is more subtle but certainly present. He talks about the vaccines but forgets about the coercion to take them from people like him and the government who plan to incentivise businesses to lock people out of facilities if they don’t take them (assuming they could even afford to use them anyway after being fired from their jobs).
He mentions Pfizer only, but not Moderna and AstraZeneca which have had more negative press, and had their use restricted in some countries. He does not mention Pfizer’s 2.3 billion US dollar criminal fine for unlawful prescription drug promotions or that they are immune to lawsuits regarding side effects or death from their vaccine. He admits that breakthrough cases are a thing but doesn’t explain why a high vaccination rate in the population is still so necessary. He mentions 6500 doctors signed a letter supporting the vax and calls them a majority, but doesn’t mention that that’s less than half of the 16000 or so registered and practising in New Zealand or why people might be hesitant to speak out. He criticises NZDSOS doctors for not being the right kind of doctor (practising and emergency) but doesn’t apply this criticism to experts on his own side like Pink Jabba.
He does not address the fact that the narrative has changed so many times it is hard to keep up (I’m old enough to remember when lockdowns were to flatten the curve) and that this damages trust. All of these are very good reasons to be put off the vax entirely but Charlie picks the old “microchips in the vax” argument to focus on. We can guess why.
All in all Charlie’s piece is a good example of the sophistication of today’s political messaging and why we must all be very wary. There was a lot here to go through and I’ve left a bit on the cutting room floor. I was quite impressed and I hereby nominate him for apparatchik of the year.
People like Charlie may have atrocious judgment, but they are clever and sometimes very competent at what they do. But with a little calm and collected effort, even small novels like Charlies fall apart under scrutiny. They might be good, but we can be better… and way less creepy about it too.
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