First, for an essay that features my name and image so much—especially one that unfairly depicts me as the epitome of a shabby public debater and communicator with "low skill," written by someone who is only going off one conversation they have had with me and not a proper review of my overall history of the dialectic—you should have at least tagged me.
Second, you depicted yourself in the entire debate as the one employing Aristotle's rules of ethos, pathos, and logos without citing examples of where I did so. I was the first one to use humour to diffuse the tension at different points in the conversation. Unlike your friend—whom, interestingly, you had very little to say about in your article—I called no one names and showed grace even to those who directly insulted me repeatedly. I don't know why you did that, but I would only refer your readers to go check out the entire conversation to see whether I did the stuff you accused me of or not.
Third, you made a number of errors about my position in this article—for example, claiming I attacked a strawman when I said apologists typically say science is "a slave to philosophy" as an excuse to justify Christianity having no defensible grounds. Not only was it true that some of those on 'your' side said this that day, but it was also true that I shared a post from a popular Christian apologist where he used that exact same quote unedited. That cannot be a strawman! Your claim that "Nobody said that. Not once. Not in any formulation" is utterly false!
Fourth and finally, your clear ultimate goal in this article was to defend your friend's rude and uncouth debating approach, which is why you delineated between "respect" and "politeness." To me, that delineation makes no sense. To engage a person's work is to, at some level, engage their person. A lecturer who engages a student's work and dismisses it without proper feedback is not simply being impolite; they are also being disrespectful to the person. You cannot tell an interlocutor they have no brain and claim this is merely a matter of politeness. It IS equally a matter of respect for the person!
Anyway, I won't write a full rejoinder to the article because I have much more important things to do with my time. I'll only ask that anybody who reads the article go back and check my record of debating on social media, both as a Christian and as an atheist, and check to what extent I have displayed the attributes ascribed to me therein.
This is exactly the same thing I’ve been thinking about for a while. It appears like we’ve confused good policy design with good policy outcomes.
Subsidy removal, FX liberalisation, tax reforms and those “hard economic policies” sound good and they appear correct on paper. But these policies assume a functioning safety net, productive capacity that can absorb the shock, and a state that reinvests the savings into the people. Strip those away and you’re not implementing any reform, you’re just transferring pain downward which is what this administration has been doing.
Three years in and the people have not benefited from these policies. Commodity prices up 3–4x, school fees unaffordable but ofc, there is NELFUND lol, real wages destroyed. The “savings” from subsidy removal haven’t visibly returned to citizens in any form.
Good policies without structural follow-through aren’t good policies. They’re just austerity disguised as improvements and we all would be used as collateral damages for the perceived improvement.
The 22M+ people who saw this tweet are missing the real story here.
This research is from 2019. Dr. Eva Ramón Gallegos at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute published these results six years ago. It went viral then too. Salma Hayek posted about it on Instagram. ABC News ran a fact check. It resurfaced in January 2025 across Mexican media. And now it’s recycling through your feed again as “BREAKING” with 22 million views, because an engagement account slapped a siren emoji on six-year-old science.
The actual study treated 29 women in Mexico City using photodynamic therapy, a technique where you apply a light-sensitive chemical to the cervix, wait four hours, then hit it with a laser. HPV cleared in 100% of patients who had the virus without lesions. In patients with both HPV and premalignant lesions, it cleared in 64.3%. Those numbers are real and published in peer-reviewed journals.
Here’s what 22 million people aren’t asking: why hasn’t this scaled in six years?
Three reasons. First, the sample size. Twenty-nine women is a pilot study. The FDA requires thousands of patients across multiple sites before approving a therapy. Gallegos ran earlier studies on 420 women in Oaxaca and Veracruz with similar clearance rates, but nobody has funded the Phase III trials needed to move this toward approval.
Second, PDT has a physics limitation. The light that activates the drug can only penetrate about one centimeter of tissue. That means it works on surface-level cervical HPV, but the virus also hides deeper in tissue and in other parts of the body. The National Cancer Institute flagged this exact constraint years ago. You can clear what you can see. You can’t guarantee you’ve cleared what you can’t.
Third, 50% of high-risk HPV infections clear on their own within one to two years without any treatment. A 100% clearance rate in 29 patients with no lesions, measured at six months, sits in a window where spontaneous clearance is already happening. Without a proper control group, which this study lacked, you can’t isolate how much the therapy did versus what the immune system would have done anyway.
A separate Chinese study in 2024 randomized 60 patients and found PDT hit 100% HPV clearance at six months versus conventional treatment. That’s more rigorous. Multiple research groups worldwide are now publishing PDT results for cervical HPV. The science is real and progressing.
The gap between “promising pilot results in 29 women” and “successfully eliminates HPV” is about a decade of clinical trials and a few hundred million dollars in funding. Gallegos has been doing this work for 20 years. The bottleneck was never the science. It’s that nobody writes the check for Phase III trials on a non-patentable therapy that competes with a multibillion-dollar vaccine market.
That’s the actual story worth 22 million views.
One could reasonably argue that the issue is not about capacity but rather proclivity.
Perhaps those you mentioned are simply noting that their interactions with the average African Christian reveal a predisposition towards crude petition rather than existential inquiry.