Category Archives: Culture

On Broken Science

"More research is needed."

Paper published by Net Zero Watch (PDF).

Introduction:

A fascinating experiment was conducted not too long ago. An experiment about experiments. About how scientists came to conclusions in their own experiments. What happened was this: social scientist Nate Breznau and others handed out identical data to a large number of researchers and asked each group to answer the same question. The question was: Would immigration reduce or increase ‘public support for government provision of social policies’?

That can be difficult to remember, so let’s reframe this question in a way more memorable, and more widely applicable to our other examples. Does X affect Y? Does X, more immigration, affect Y, public support for certain policies?

That’s causal language, isn’t it? X affects Y? These are words about cause, about what causes what. Cause, and knowledge of cause, is of paramount importance in science. So much so that I claim – and I hope to defend the idea – that the goal of science is to
discover the cause of measurable things. We’ll get back to that later.

Just over 1200 models were handed in by researchers, all to answer whether X affected Y. I cannot stress enough that each researcher was given identical data and asked to solve the same question.

Breznau required each scientist to answer the question with a ‘No’, ‘Yes’, or ‘Cannot tell’. Only one group of researchers said they could not tell. Every other group produced a definite answer. About one quarter – a fraction we should all remember –answered ‘Yes’, that X affected Y – negatively. That is, more X, less Y.

Now researchers were also allowed to give some idea of the strength of the relationship, along with whether or not the relationship existed. And that one-quarter who said the relationship between X and Y was negative ranged anywhere from a strongly negative, to something weaker, but still ‘significant’. Significant. That
word we’ll also come back to.

You can see it coming…about another quarter of the models said ‘Yes’, X affects Y, but that the relation was positive! More X, more Y, not less! Again, the strength was anywhere from very strong to weak, but still ‘significant’.

The remaining half or so of the models couldn’t quite bring themselves to say ‘No’: they all still gave a tentative ‘Yes’, but said the relationship was not ‘significant’.

You see the problem. There is, in reality, only one right answer, and only one strength of association, if it exists. That a relationship does not exist may even be the right answer. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I do know only one can be. Yet the answers – the very confident, scientifically derived, expert-investigated answers –
were all over the place and in wild disagreement with each other.

Every one of the models was science. We are told we cannot deny science. We are commanded to Follow The Science.

But whose science?

UK Government Conspired with Social Media, A.I. Firms to Monitor and Censor Lockdown Critics – Report

Originally in the Telegraph, reported by Breitbart

Writes Peter Caddle:

The UK government worked with social media and A.I. firms to surveil and censor critics of coronavirus lockdowns, a report has claimed.

Officials within the UK government reportedly worked clandestinely with social media companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter as well as A.I. firms to monitor critics of the lockdown regime, as well as to identify and ultimately censor speech criticising the draconian government policy.

Published by The Telegraph, the claims bear many similarities to the so-called “Twitter files”, which revealed how U.S. authorities worked hand-in-glove with social media firms to censor criticism of government COVID-19 policy.

Continue reading here.

Here is some more about Covid revisionism:

We’ve been firmly in the grips of Covid revisionism for a while. Celebrities and pundits and politicians have all taken steps to downplay their complicity or talk about how “crazy” the pandemic was, as if it was impossible not to get caught up in it.

Further, there is an onslaught of policy “re-evaluation” that ranges from nit-picking to sweeping but is united in its reinforcement of Covid myths. The re-writing of the role ventilators played was especially unpleasant.

However, this one might be more grating, simply for the smallness of it.

A couple of days ago the Telegraph ran a “scoop”, revealing that the UK government’s counter-disinformation unit censored lockdown critics at the height of the pandemic (This really isn’t news, but more on that in a few days). Former editor of the Sunday Times Andrew Neil tweeted about it, neglecting to mention (or apologise for) his column in the Daily Mail calling for “vaccine refuseniks” to be “punished”.

A willing spreader and consumer of propaganda, suddenly claiming to realise propaganda was terrible…pretty nauseating.

As the UK gears up for the latest hearing in its farcical “Covid Inquiry” we can expect more and more of this rewriting of history.

The war on disinformation is just a war on dissent

The British state’s monitoring of lockdown sceptics is a democratic outrage.

Writes Tom Slater:

We need to retire the word ‘disinformation’, the apparent dread of governments, BBC specialist reporters and NGOs everywhere. Or at the very least we need to remember what it actually means. The definition of disinformation is ‘false information which is intended to mislead’. Until recently, it was largely used to describe propaganda pumped out by hostile foreign states. But in the great disinformation panic of our time, sparked by the populist revolts of 2016 and sent into hyperdrive by the paranoia of the pandemic, the word has come to mean something very different among our elites. It has come to mean inconvenient facts, or a differing opinion. Tackling disinformation is now just a euphemism for demonising and silencing dissent.

Just take a look at the latest revelations about the British state’s monitoring of lockdown sceptics during the pandemic. A new blockbuster investigation by the Telegraph and civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch details the shady activities of the Counter-Disinformation Unit, which is still operating and was set up by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the now-closed Rapid Response Unit, which was run out of the Cabinet Office. They compiled reports about prominent lockdown sceptics including Carl Heneghan, director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and Molly Kingsley, co-founder of UsForThem, which valiantly campaigned against Covid school closures. The government also employed an artificial-intelligence firm to ‘scour social-media sites’ for wrongthink.

Read on here.

Video: World Health Organisation ‘desperate’ to have global pandemic treaty

Sky News Australia

Sky News Australia discuss the WHO’s drive to a global pandemic treaty and correctly recognise that this is a crucial world government building block. A path towards a new Tower of Babel. They also correctly recognise the fact that the pattern resembles the discussion on climate change. It’s not left vs. right but authoritarianism vs. freedom. The collective “greater good” vs. individualism. (6 min)

Far-left extremism linked to narcissism: study

From the “Postmillennial”:

A study out of the University of Bern in Switzerland has revealed that those who partake in far-left activism are more likely to exhibit narcissistic personality traits and psychopathic tendencies.

Researchers Alex Bertrams and Ann Krispenz found that many activists do not believe in what they purport to stand for, and are simply using the cause to prop up their own perceived moral superiority and social standing.

In an interview with PsyPost, Bertrams and Krispenz explain that narcissists are drawn to endorsing left-wing antihierarchical aggression via the dark-ego-vehicle principle, which arues that activism can be used “as a vehicle to satisfy their own ego-focused needs instead of actually aiming at social justice and equality.”

“In particular,” they argued, “certain forms of activism might provide them with opportunities for positive self-presentation and displays of moral superiority, to gain social status, to dominate others, and to engage in social conflicts and aggression to satisfy their need for thrill seeking.”

They made sure to note that, “involvement in (violent) political activism is not solely attributable to political orientation but rather to personality traits manifesting in individuals on the (radical) left and right of the political spectrum.” Essentially, narcissists tend to gravitate towards whichever side “seems to be more opportune to them given a specific situation.”

Bertrams and Krispenz lamented the fact that while there has been exhaustive research into right-wing authoritarianism, literature on their left-wing counterparts is lacking.

The pair have completed a number of studies on left-wing activism, including one which argued that those who took part in LGBTQ protests were more likely to exhibit pathological narcissism, which can be described as “an exaggerated sense of uniqueness, immodesty, and a desire for high praise by others.”

They pointed out that “exploitativeness (e.g., ‘I can make anyone believe anything I want them to’)” was a major draw, as it could give participants a feeling of superiority.

Like the Curious Bride in “Bluebeard”

Investigating the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex leads inexorably to a place of horror.

Dr. Peter McCullough, MD, MPH says he has found strong indicators of “eminent Scripps Institute virologist, Kristian Andersen”, changing his tune on the possibility of the Covid virus having been engineered. On 31st January 2020 he still thought parts of the genome “(potentially) look engineered”. Then, on 4th February 2020, “shortly after a phone conference with Dr. Fauci and others—Dr. Andersen completely changed his tune. By then, the decision had been to submit a letter to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

For more than a year thereafter, anyone suggesting an artificial, lab-engineered source of the virus was vilified mercilessly in the press. Then suddenly and strangely, it became an allowed opinion. Despite however the enormity of this suggestion, the media are strangely silent about it.

McCollough comments:

What on earth could inspire a virologist to adopt a posture of such Machiavellian duplicity about an infectious agent that—as he well knew—was about to inflict a catastrophe on all of mankind? He had to have known that such pronouncements—coming from a virologist of his eminence—would likely retard a thorough and impartial investigation of the virus’s origin.

Contemplating this question this evening, I thought Bluebeard’s young bride when she discovers the chamber of horrors in her husband’s castle. I suspect that Tess Lawrie felt the same way in her encounter with Dr. Andrew Hill, which she recounted in the short documentary film Dear Andy.

I have blogged about that documentary film here.

Propaganda Restricts Speech More Than Censorship Does

Writes Caitlin Johnstone:

The biggest impediment to free speech is people’s belief that they have it. Not censorship. Not refusal to platform critical voices. Not the war on journalism. It’s the fact that most people are propagandized into saying what the powerful want them to say, and don’t know it.

What makes our dilemma so historically unique is that we live under an empire which makes extensive use of the post-Bernays science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to trick its subjects into believing that they are thinking, speaking, and gathering information freely. In this way our rulers suppress any revolution long before it starts, not by making people’s lives better, nor by violent repression, but by manipulating people into thinking there’s nothing to revolt against, because they have no rulers and they are already free.

[. . .]

This problem can be addressed simply by bringing awareness to it in every way we can. Manipulation only works if you don’t know it’s happening, so drawing attention to it and describing how it happens in as many ways as possible helps people start seeing through it.

The Proper Attitude Towards Truth

It exists, but is never fully knowable by humans

The Christian, or at least Christian-based attitude towards truth is that an objective truth exists, but is never fully knowable. Not by humans, that is. Only God knows the whole truth. However, truth is approachable. We can come close to it – or move away from it. We are called by God to come as close to it as we possibly can. As we say during baptism: “With the help of God, we will.”

Part of the age-old struggle against Christianity is to call this stance into question. It can be done in two ways. One is to insist that the objective truth is out there AND that it is knowable by humans. This is the enlightenment or “modern” stance. (The – usually unspoken – implication is that those who know the truth automatically have the right to rule over those who don’t – and be it only for benevolently guiding and protecting the latter.)

The other way to negate the Christian theory of truth is to deny the existence of an objective truth altogether. This is the “post-modern” stance. Ironically, this theory leads necessarily and immediately to the proclamation of an ostensible, incontrovertible “truth”, namely that there is only one driving force in society, and that is the will to power. (Everything else, including the Christian claim, is a clever ruse to cover up this will to power.)

Interestingly, the “modern” and “postmodern” stances complement each other: If there is no truth but power, then those who “know the truth”, i.e. “have the power”, have the right to use it no matter what.

Did anyone say “satanic”?

I was prompted to write the above after reading this. Thierry Breton, an EU commissioner, who unironically calls himself “the enforcer”, is going to the US to tell Big Tech companies to “join the [EU] code of practice on disinformation”. The author of the above linked article comments:

And who gets to decide the truth? Hunter Biden? Joe Biden? Dr. Anthony Fauci? Hillary Clinton and her totally discredited Russia campaign? I guess the answer of the day is Thierry Breton. As “The Enforcer”, he is apparently in a unique position to understand the truth about everything. 

When Pilate asked the famous question: “What is truth?” (John 18:38), Jesus chose not to answer the man of power.

Not to worry: We now have Thierry Breton.

Something smells of sulphur.