Psychopathy and mass murder

 I'm interrupting the series on the philosophy and practice of science for something really, really important. Here is Claire Berlinski on the anti-vax campaign:

 

A small handful of activists have used the Internet to persuade a very significant proportion of the public the world around—roughly one in every five people2—that contrary to overwhelming evidence, vaccines are not the safest, most effective and most consequential invention in medical history, but rather a sinister and dangerous menace that should be eschewed. It is an achievement on a par with persuading people to mix their drinking water with their sewage.

It should not be possible to convince so many people to believe something that is at once so unfounded in any evidence and so contrary to the most fundamental of human drives: staying alive. What does it mean that it’s possible? It strongly suggests that so long as social media is configured the way it is, anything is possible. The Internet, as it’s now structured, may be used to persuade at least one in five people that up is down, black is white, and if you leap off the top of a skyscraper, you’ll fly.

For open societies in particular, this is a massive vulnerability. It is trivially easy for hostile states and sociopaths to exploit this, and they do exploit it. They’ll continue to exploit it this way until one of two things happens: We find a more rational way to organize the Internet, or we’re destroyed by it.

She links to a study that finds that twelve people are responsible for 73% of the vaccine-related disinformation on Facebook, with Joseph Mercola  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being 1 and 2. The other 10 names are less familiar but she links to the PDF if you want to read the full report. It's conceivable that for some reason some of these people actually believe their own bullshit, at least on some level, but their main motivation is money, and whatever ego gratification they get from having a cult following. RFK Jr. is one of the world's most despicable people. His father and uncles were famous, influential and widely admired and apparently he assumed that was his due by birth. Lacking any actual talent, however, he saw this anti-vax scam as his path to riches and glory. That a byproduct is mass murder evidently doesn't bother him.

What is most disturbing, however, is not that these con artists are able to persuade people of a monstrous falsehood -- nothing new about that alas, viz. Lydia Pinkham. However, that Republican politicians including the governors of states have adopted this murderous cult is horrific. The Republican party is a massively insane death cult. It must be extinguished.

Yep, there are idiots and flaming assholes in other countries as well. Duly noted.