You’re right, this kind of content does not convince people they’re wrong. I agree with you.
If you’re unfamiliar with Tim Minchin, here’s a bit of context: this is part of his standup routine, so it’s not made to convince people or change their minds. It’s made to make people laugh.
And yeah, I know, there are those who will criticize comedians for their mockery. In fact, that’s what started this whole discussion: we’ve been served a garbled, incoherent conspiracy theory and we’ve reacted with the mockery we believe it deserves and someone took offense at that mockery, because… reasons, I guess.
Here’s the thing, though. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I personally don’t give a shіt. If you or @Glurin or anyone else won’t change your mind because you dislike my tone, I don’t care.
At this point in this thread, it’s not worth my time to even try. If you only skimmed the thread and decided to jump in, that’s on you. If, on the other hand, you’ve read all of it, you should be aware that @Glurin has been deliberately misrepresenting a whole bunch of things. If you aren’t aware of that, that’s on you. If you are aware of it, but you would still rather side with his dishonest criticism of those who won’t blindly believe without evidence, that’s on you.
Oh, and the one thing I was hoping you might take away from “Storm” is how science works, which includes retractions that you mention. Peer review is not perfect, but it’s the least imperfect method the society has found so far to do these things.
The whole point of peer reviews is to get other people with lots of specific knowledge to scrutinize your data, and methods, and findings, and evidence. And if it turns out that their scrutiny failed to uncover a problem before publication, the retraction is a way to deal with that when the problem is uncovered after the publication.
Do honest errors slip through? Yes. Does corruption or conflict of interest slip through? Yes. Are there problems – or at least, room for improvement – with how all of this works? Yes.
People should be aware of all that and acknowledge it, but that doesn’t mean we should throw the whole system away and replace it with some vague, hand-wavy concept of “always keeping an open mind”. It doesn’t mean that you can take conflate reasonably rational people and rabid deniers, and misrepresent the former as the latter by insisting on calling the latter “skeptics”.
Things aren’t black and white. Finding out what’s true and what isn’t is often much harder than we’ve been taught it would be when we were kids. Despite what @Glurin would have you believe, I’ve never claimed any different, and neither have really any of the Big Bad Skeptics here.