Doctors’ freedom of speech. Amazon accepted it! Scientific method.
20231101
The loss of our freedom of speech has been one of the greatest casualties of the Covid 19 era. Whatever one thinks of the merits of the jabs, we should have the opinion to talk about them. We need the freedom to share information. We need to be able to talk about alternatives such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine without being censored and thrown off of YouTube and Twitter. We need the freedom to question public health measures such as social distancing, lockdowns and masks. We need the freedom to question what they are doing to our language with the invention of terms such as “social distancing.”
Freedom of speech is critical. St. Augustine said “The truth is like a lion. Set it free and it will defend itself.” The question is setting it free. Investment blogger Quoth the Raven raised the question today, linking to a video by Dr. Paul Offit, who serves on the FDA’s vaccine committee. The video on MedPage Today was open for comments from other doctors.
Offit’s title is “Should Scientists Openly Debate Vaccine Policies?” As QTR noted, Offit himself would have been blackballed by the FDA, his employer and everybody else if he came up with an unacceptable opinion. QTR gives him credit for venturing as close to the truth as he could be expected to dare. However, the exchange among the doctors in the comments is very enlightening. It is a balanced debate among people who all seem to believe in vaccines, Covid and others, to some degree or another. They cover most of the issues.
None of the doctors come to the conclusion that I have reached, that the process by which vaccines are produced is so fatally flawed that we are better off getting none of them. That doesn’t bother me. The fact that the majority of them seem to favor free speech is very heartening.
Quite a few of these doctors question whether we hoi polloi, the great unwashed, have the wit to participate intelligently in discussions of our own health. Should doctors be content simply to offer take-it-or-leave-it recommendations? Should they coerce patients to take a course of treatment? Should they take the time to have extended conversations?
There is also the question of how physicians form their opinions. The average medical school graduate has an IQ of around one standard deviation above the average. For most of them, the demands of work preclude reading outside of their specialty, and even limit reading within it. Doctors themselves are subjected to a lot of brainwashing, starting in med school. They are certainly subject to peer pressure, as well as pressure from the organizations for which they work. How reasoned, independent and valuable are doctors’ opinions?
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This question is relevant to our household. Grandpa Sasha is in the hospital again. His lungs are filling with fluid. The doctors were disappointed that he is not taking the seven medications they prescribed for him last year. Oksana explained that he got everything he needed from her magic Fitline vitamins. The nurse noted that his overall health appeared fairly good, and his blood was thin enough to draw easily despite not taking blood thinners. Oksana is with him now as the doctors confer about what to do with his lungs.
Sasha is fatalistic. To him, all doctors are experts, and he is not going to argue with them. He will be inclined to take whatever they prescribe. I have told Oksana I will research everything on the Internet and share my opinion with her. My guess is that in the end Sasha will wind up pretty much following what the doctors recommend.
How much difference does it make? It is highly likely he will be bedridden for the rest of his life. His major contributions to the family – and they are appreciated – are first, to entertain Marianna while Grandmother Nadia is busy with other things, and secondly, to slice apples to be dried and crack walnuts. We have accumulated a couple years’ supply of each.
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Reader Camilla gigged me for writing about seeking evidence in support of a hypothesis. What one does this to seek evidence to test a hypothesis. It is global warming fanatics who are scrambling to find evidence to support their hypothesis while disregarding evidence that does not. Point well made.
Here are the steps in the scientific method, per the Khan Academy
Make an observation.
Ask a question.
Form a hypothesis, or testable explanation.
Make a prediction based on the hypothesis.
Test the prediction.
Iterate: use the results to make new hypotheses or predictions.
Step one dominates in the realm of climate science. There are a vast number of domains from which observations can be collected. A big part of the game is deciding what data should be collected and mechanisms for collecting them. The process becomes one of continuing to tinker with hypotheses, looking for the best fit for a growing body of evidence. This is Vinos’ point, toward the end of my review.
The body of evidence collected between the years 2000 and 2015 stopped supporting the hypothesis that carbon dioxide was contributing to global warming. CO2 grew exponentially, temperature hardly budged. The fanatics should have realized it was time to abandon that hypothesis. Unfortunately, huge industries – solar, wind power, electric cars and the like – were built on the CO2 global warming premise. There was a lot of money invested on the basis of what increasingly appears to be a mistaken hypothesis.
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I’ve had a bit more success with the Amazon game, writing my reviews in a format that they will accept. They surprised me by accepting this review of The War On Whites: How Hating White People Became the New National Sport. It is of course watered down from what I posted here. They also accepted The Global Currency Plot. One would think that Bezos would be more eager to defend the current monetary regime, but apparently not so. My reviews of books on the Federal Reserve and banking in general have not encountered any pushback.
Yesterday I had to chop down my review of Climate of the Past, Present and Future from 27,000 to Amazon’s limit of 20,000 characters, and also eliminate the diagrams and the hyperlinks. No problem at all – the restrictions make sense. If I had a strong desire, they would accept a movie. They have not generally given me trouble with global warming reviews either.
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That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is recovering from a light case of sniffles, the same that Oksana had last week, has kept Marianna down for three days and is keeping Eddie home from school. It is a blessing not to have anything that I really have to do. I am going to practice my Toastmasters speech; you may see a video and a couple of days.
I don't think that there is an issue of freedom of speech, or precisely the lack of freedom of speech. We are all free more or less to express our ideas to each other in person. It is when we want to invade the public square to share our opinions and commentary that we have been restricted to "community standards," i.e. what they want us to say. I watched a video on Dark Horse in which Brett Weinstein and Chris Mortenson agreed that the Covid narrative and lies was derailed by the podcast. The powers that be, the establishment, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, they didn't know about the podcast and now they want to crush it because it is becoming more powerful than the legacy media, the political lies, and the BS TV lies, which they control. In fact, one of them, I don't remember which, said that they hire trolls to invade the commentary sections to derail agreement and create dissonance. As long as we the prols are unenlightened, we can be controlled. And the purpose is to control us.
I watched Elon Musk on Joe Rogan this morning, and Elon said something that I have been saying for some time. To the left, anything right of them is far-right. They are on the far left so anything across the vast spectrum of thought that is not far left is far right. That's the danger. I'd love to put a chart here which shows the full spectrum of thought in which about 5% of it is far left, while the other 95% is far-right.
The one great thing about the Internet is that I have been able to listen to such voices as John Campbell, Robert Malone, Brett Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, Chris Mortenson, even the unherd people like Freddie Sayers. Norman Fenton, a brilliant math whiz, who lost his job at a UK university because he diverted from the narrative has provided a context that is vastly better than anything offered by the narrative. There are many others with brilliant thoughts and insights contrary to the "narrative." It is this freedom of speech which the deep state, the various Wizards of Oz who hide behind the curtain of anonymity that can inform and organize us, That is what the hidden rules don't want.
Personally, I have been blocked on Facebook. I know I am shadow banned on YouTube, but censorship like this only makes people more creative. We see the blacklists forming. They have gone after Russell Brand who now has 5 million followers on YouTube, and who is now switching to Rumble. They have gone after Joe Rogan, but they have a problem. They must shut down the Internet top stop the communication among the non-believers, but they can't shut it down because of business. It's how they make money.