Truth Unrestricted - Brief: Selective Rejection
Aired: 2024-01-04
Duration: 04:15


=== Cigarette Joke Ritual (04:09) ===

[00:00:01]  When I was in high school, all of my friends were smokers except for me.
[00:00:05]  They hung out in the smoking area outside the school, and I hung out there with them because they were my friends.
[00:00:11]  The topic of if and when I might start smoking came up often.
[00:00:16]  At some point, one of my friends decided it would be funny to offer me a cigarette, which I declined.
[00:00:22]  The joke persisted, though, and soon it became a regular thing.
[00:00:25]  Friends offering me cigarettes that they knew I would decline.
[00:00:30]  I decided that I wanted to be in on the joke rather than merely the butt of it, so I started riffing on their bit.
[00:00:36]  I decided to reject their offer based only on the nature of the cigarette.
[00:00:41]  It went something like this.
[00:00:43]  A friend would offer me a cigarette.
[00:00:45]  I would ask them if the cigarette was a menthol.
[00:00:48]  They might say yes, to which my reply would be, I don't smoke menthols.
[00:00:53]  And uproarious laughter ensued.
[00:00:55]  At least it does in my memory.
[00:00:57]  Sometimes a person would be standing nearby that wasn't in on the joke and would have a cigarette of the other kind and would consequently offer it once I give my punchline.
[00:01:06]  At which point, I would be forced to carry on the joke and say, I don't smoke non-menthol cigarettes.
[00:01:12]  I would never say either because that would give the thing away.
[00:01:16]  It was much funnier to leave them guessing about what was really going on.
[00:01:21]  It was always better to know what was happening and be in on the joke than be on the outside wondering what was going on.
[00:01:27]  This is called selective rejection.
[00:01:30]  When you want to reject something entirely, but you don't want to be seen as rejecting it entirely, so you only reject one subsection or selection of that thing.
[00:01:40]  I was doing it for comedic effect as a 16-year-old.
[00:01:43]  We are seeing this done now for a very different reason.
[00:01:47]  Just this morning, on January 3rd of 2024, the Surgeon General of Florida, a man by the name of Joseph Ladapo, announced a halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in the state of Florida.
[00:02:01]  He hasn't been explicit about his feelings on the non-mRNA vaccine choices, but his previous actions and rhetoric involving vaccine safety reporting are relevant.
[00:02:11]  In April of 2023, he personally altered key findings in a COVID-19 vaccine safety study.
[00:02:19]  The alterations drastically changed the risk metric and were not justified by any available data.
[00:02:26]  His announcement today is based in part on a conspiracy belief that the mRNA technology can change or contaminate the DNA of people who receive it.
[00:02:36]  This belief has been debunked many, many times.
[00:02:40]  The notes for this brief will include a link to a YouTube video by Dr. Dan Wilson doing exactly that.
[00:02:47]  We also see this in RFK Jr.'s rhetoric about vaccine use.
[00:02:52]  That's the same RFK Jr. who, as of this moment, is still running for president as an independent candidate and just yesterday announced that one of the other biggest anti-vaxxers, Del Bigtree, would be the communications director for Kennedy's campaign.
[00:03:08]  Kennedy claims that he isn't an anti-vaxxer, that he is, instead, only against the unsafe vaccines.
[00:03:17]  This is also selective rejection.
[00:03:19]  In truth, Kennedy is against all vaccine use.
[00:03:23]  His rhetoric is meant to disguise himself in a cloak of reasonableness.
[00:03:28]  Kennedy is attempting to make the world very marginally more safe by protecting people and, in his rhetoric, the children, from the rare and mostly innocuous vaccine side effects.
[00:03:41]  While he does this, he will also make those same people many times more vulnerable to the many diseases which these vaccines are helping to keep at bay.
[00:03:50]  We learn something important about the nature of our social environment when we look closely at what the extreme people among us attempt to do to disguise their actions.

=== Acceptable Positions (00:19) ===

[00:04:00]  It means that they know what is a reasonable position and that they know how to imitate it.
[00:04:06]  They know what position the majority of the population will accept.
[00:04:11]  We need not worry about giving them the benefit of the doubt in these cases.