cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/176030

I have posted this here for its particular relevance to the current awfulness of a plethora of far right crackpots bullying a vaccine scientist in an attempt to force him into a farce of a debate.

The nearest analogy I can come up with is putting a researcher in a room with a monkey. Then, tell the researcher that to win, he has to convince the monkey of his research. Then, tell the monkey that to win it has to completely smear the researcher with fecal matter.

These farcical calls for debate are a sham, designed only to keep quacks, cranks, and charlatans in the spotlight, to continue to give them a platform with which to spread their brand of snake oil. While rigorous debate can be an useful tool to find truth and meaning, it has its limits. For a debate to be a tool of truth, it requires at a bare minimum that the parties involved are acting in good faith, and that both parties share a common ground in that they have a healthy respect for empirical truth. RFK Jr. has neither good faith or an interest in truth. He just wants more opportunity to spread his metaphysical cancer to more, to convince people to willingly forego their faculties of logic and reason.