Occam's Razor

The stuff many Republicans believe I often find hilarious. I like to think that many of them don’t actually believe half of what they say, because otherwise I’d have to categorize them as remarkably stupid and incurious. But I guess if you can accept the notion of an alternative fact, then actual facts are irrelevant.

Anyhow, submitted for your consideration, as Rod Sterling would say, here are a few of these “facts”/assertions and why, if you think about it for just a little bit, calling them rubbish is actually assessing them too highly.

Claim. There’s a microchip in your covid-19 vaccine put in by the government to track/control you.

Response. Have you ever watched a doctor or a nurse draw vaccine from a vial? They pierce it with a needle and hold the bottle upside down. One vaccine bottle typically holds five doses, from which the practitioner withdraws the correct dosage manually. If there were microchips in there, they would be pretty easy to see and likely could not be sucked into the needle. And if there were, there is no guarantee a given dose would contain a microchip. But even if there were, what’s the smallest microchip out there? The smallest RFID chip is about the size of a period. That’s pretty small, but not so small that you could not see it in the vial. A more typical RFID chip is about the size of a grain of rice. But even so, the government doesn’t manufacture vaccines. The private sector does. A simple random sampling of vaccines would allow the hypothesis to be tested and disproved.

Claim. No one should trust covid-19 vaccines because they aren’t approved by the FDA.

Response. Three vaccines have been approved for emergency use. While none of these vaccines have yet won final approval, they have been approved for emergency use based on overwhelming scientific evidence that they are safe and effective. But even if you think the FDA made a mistake, you can simply look at the statistics for those who were immunized who subsequently acquired covid-19. With a few exceptions, today covid wards are almost entirely filled by people who are not immunized. Not getting the vaccine puts you at significant risk of acquiring the disease, particularly because new variants become increasingly transmissible.

Claim. Climate change isn’t happening but if it is happening, it’s due to a natural process, not a manmade one.

Response. Natural climate changes take thousands of years at best to be noticed because the earth’s climate evolves slowly in its natural state. But it’s not hard to change the climate in a few hundred years if you deforest much of the landscape (forests naturally remove carbon from the atmosphere) and if population growth and growth in general depends largely on using fossil fuels which when burned release carbon. A simple lab experiment will demonstrate that heat will be retained better and temperatures will be higher in containers with more carbon in it, compared to a similar container with less carbon. But even so, have you been out west recently? Isn’t 122F in Canada more than just highly abnormal?

Claim. The 2020 election was stolen and Trump actually won.

Response. Trump lost the popular vote by over 7 million votes. Regardless, the Electoral College selects the president. Trump needed 38 more electoral votes to win. Based on vote counts in the states where he lost narrowly, he would have needed to flip Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin to change the outcome. These states have undergone repeated audits that have not changed the results in any significant way. Moreover, Republicans control all these states with the exception of Wisconsin which has a Democratic governor but is otherwise Republican. So Republican officials in these states would have to have been trying to elect Biden for this to be true. At least 86 court cases claiming electoral fraud were filed and rejected as meritless, often by Trump-appointed judges.

Claim. A big wall on our southern border will keep out illegal immigrants.

Response. Of the few miles of wall constructed during Trump’s term, it was easily defeated by a relatively cheap and portable electric saw. Even if we constructed an impervious wall, it’s not that hard to scale a wall with a sufficiently tall ladder or to tunnel underneath it, as is happening now. Regardless, there are much easier ways to get into the country. The easiest way is to fly in and overstay your visa, which admittedly requires the money for a passport, possibly a visa and an airline ticket. The cheapest way to keep them out is to improve the living conditions and economies in these countries so they don’t feel the need to migrate. It’s likely that one tenth of our defense budget allocated for this purpose could fix the problem, much the way we fixed Europe after World War Two with the Marshall Plan. Regardless, we need a lot of immigrants anyhow, to do work we don’t do and because our economic growth will be stifled if we don’t. Also, decriminalizing drugs will naturally take care of a lot of the crime occurring in these countries, as well as reduce crime in our own country.

Claim. The Capitol riot on January 6 was actually caused by the left and Antifa.

Response. Over six hundred arrests have been made since the insurrection and not one of them has been linked to Antifa or leftist movements. Also, Antifa is not an organized movement.

Claim. The government is coming door to door to force you to get the covid-19 vaccine and to take away your guns and bibles.

Response. The Fourth Amendment prohibits entry by the government into your home without probable cause, so a judge would first have to approve entry based on evidence. There’s generally nothing prohibiting anyone from knocking on your door, but no law forces you to open it. If police do have a warrant, the warrant prohibits them from confiscating property unrelated to the warrant. So they won’t be taking your guns unless they have a warrant that you are harboring illegal guns, such as automatic weapons or bazookas. As for taking away your bibles, of course they won’t do that unless you carved out the inside of a bible to hide something illegal related to the warrant. Oh, and if you haven’t noticed, it’s not hard to get replacement bibles. It’s hard to walk down the street without tripping over one. Also, if you are alarmed by the idea of a government agent coming to your door, why aren’t you alarmed by the postman delivering mail to your door six days a week?