Articles tagged with "message"

Last week I received a text supposedly from NZ Post (sent from linsystefanoq@resquar.help as an iMessage, rather than an SMS message):

After many months of radio silence, the odd Global Flourishing group that I wrote about last year briefly stirred before going quiet again. Rest assured, if anything comes of this, I'll be watching it closely and writing about it. Here are the messages that appeared on the group's Discord channel last week:

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time hanging around at my best friend's house. His family were committed Christians, and I was a young atheist. This was a time before I converted to Christianity, as a 17 year old, and I enjoyed arguing with Christians about the age of the earth, the fossil record, etc. It's weird that so many evangelical Christians hang their hat on the idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary that was so easy to grasp that even a clueless 15 year old like me could figure it out. Anyway, I digress…

Over the past couple of weeks, people have been reporting getting unsolicited messages via Facebook Messenger from various religious accounts. I got one myself, and thinking it was just ridiculous, immediately blocked the account. Here's a couple:

Alex Jones has been sued by parents for his claims on his TV show that the Sandy Hook school massacre was faked by the government as a way to take away people's gun rights. These parents are suing because, as a result of Jones' rhetoric, they have spent years dealing with abuse up to and including death threats - and this is after they lost their children in a massacre that Jones has been telling people never happened.

The controversial conservative US radio host Rush Limbaugh died this week. Although this isn't something that the NZ Skeptics feel is okay to celebrate, we do acknowledge that Limbaugh was responsible for the spreading of many damaging and harmful conspiracy theories, and was very mean spirited to people he saw as the enemies of the US, including those who were black, gay, liberal, female and/or atheist. Unsurprisingly, the work Rush Limbaugh undertook spreading his divisive message was recently rewarded with America's Medal of Freedom. Rather than going into more details of Limbaugh's life, I will leave it to the (hopefully impartial) BBC's obituary if you would like to know more.

Unfortunately, those same algorithms aren't smart enough to detect the baby in the soiled bathwater, and seem to be defenestrating the lot, blocking misinformation as well as videos debunking anti-vaccination misinformation. YouTuber Stephen Woodford was one who found himself scooped up in the cleansing. He recently posted a video to his YouTube channel Rationality Rules called 'The Covid-5G Conspiracy – Debunked'. It was taken down and he was sent a letter explaining why. Woodford made the letter he received from YouTube public, highlighting the reasoning given; “we think it violates our medical misinformation policy”. You can see Woodford's response here.

BBC - Newsweek

An Australian woman with a newborn has passed whooping cough onto her daughter, and now wishes she'd taken the vaccine she was offered:

A Washington think-tank has announced a breakthrough in the search for a pattern in the seemingly random episodes of US military aggression since the war.

IT'S BEEN a quiet old time in the Waikato, these past few months. My cat hasn't channelled any past lives, nor has she been abducted by aliens.

by John Allen Paulos. Vintage Books, 1990. 180pp. $23.95

You know those little white areas you don't see at the bottom of newspaper columns, it would be nice if we could avoid them here too. Were it not for this message you would be looking at a blank (possibly shaded) space. In order that this catastrophe be avoided in future issues we make the following appeals: