The oft-repeated saw of the past year, “If it saves one life,” is patently a preposterous objective. It’s use, you could argue, is very effective however. The linguistic design is emotional and irrational, with a legitimizing façade of science. Genius propaganda, one could argue.
Laying out the “covid suppression” arguments flaws, in sequential reasoning, highlights its futility, and makes it clear that we have an endemic disease which will continue to infect everyone until there is built-up immunity across the entire community. Even then it will remain with us just like the cold and flu.
We have a highly transmissible virus that is transmitted human to human via aerosols (these are tiny particles that we exhale, with a diameter of less than 5 micrometers, and can stay suspended in the air for a long time). For this reason as long as there are people in circulation the virus continues to transmit. Stop the spread means stopping all movement of people, which is not possible.
It’s not possible because about 25% of the workforce have to turn up at production plants, drive trucks across borders, load and unload goods, stock shelves etc. About half that number again, work at the frontline services of health and policing. All of these people mix and contract viruses off each other. So even if total lockdown, which required martial law, were to be imposed, you still have this pool of spreaders who occasionally deliver your post, or your cooked food, or your groceries if you are afraid of going to the local store and can afford to stay at home. Of course, martial law also requires people to impose the force of decree so even that ultra draconian measure ends up with people interacting and spreading the virus.
This seems so irrefutable that its lack of acknowledgement seems either to be a callous disregard towards manual workers, or simply an inexplicable mass delusion; a secondary virus of cognitive dissonance if you will.
On top of this, we now know that we have a rapidly mutating virus and it moves across species, so even if we managed through a herculean effort of repressive dictatorship to eradicate it from the global human population, there will always be animal reservoirs where it can re-emerge from.
It is interesting that the word endemic is being subbed with “Permanent Pandemic” which sounds much scarier. Another propaganda technique.
The message of this labeling is ‘be afraid for all eternity’. Covid is the new Hell in the new-age religion of scientism.
All of this leaves me very uneasy that Science is being captured by an autocratic centralizing elite, who will use sophistry and motivated pseudo-science to impose a global ideology which is justified by paternalistic politics. Whether this happens or not – and the only thing stopping such direction of travel is public resistance- the public dialogue reads more like a dystopian novel than a rational and empirical search for insight.
Good scientific information after all is only one of the factors that should affect our decisions. As the economist Thomas Sowell says, “there are no solutions, only trade offs”. This is a basic fact that NPHET should review as they fantasize about zero covid at any cost. Even they must be able to acknowledge that at some point saving one person from covid will lead to losing at least one person because of that very same action.
The lack of rational acknowledgment of this fact of trade-offs has lead to some very unsettling totalitarian trends in the science world. It is not the first time that the empirical thesis of Science has bowed to an insane political ideology. Soviet Marxist-Scientist (anything with a hyphen in the title, is as a rule ideologically corrupted beyond recognition) Trofim Lysenko ruled over the field of science in Russia in the 1940s and 50s, persecuting scientists who dared view their scientific work through an empirical rather than a Marxist-leninist lens.
Why is it that the assumption has shifted away from science being a process of hypothesis, trial, and empirical deduction; to being a faith in an institutional structure that delivers the “truth.” It seems that skepticism, the ability to question old dogmas despite who they descend from, has been deemed no longer wanted or needed in the pursuit of “The Science.”
If we take a step back we can see that the search for objective truth which the scientific process embeds has been replaced with a veneration of an illusionary concept of “The Science.”
Richard Feynman, one of the smartest, most intelligible, and most vigorously empirical scientists ever to live once said: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
There is nothing in that truism about scientific consensus. That’s because scientific fact doesn’t depends on some committee decree. Tautologically ordering concept such as democracy and consensus might sound “fair” but they are not scientific.
Listen to the debate on Covid – the supposed scientific debate – and it is rife with rhetorical tactics designed to subdue political opposition. The term “Misinformation” comes out of the political world not the empirical world of science. It is a slur designed to oust debate and conform the public space to an ideology. We have seen Covid used as an excuse to impose an autocratic and totalitarian control over not just the communication space, but even over the public space.
Why? It is plain at this stage that Covid is not an existential threat to civilization and yet the absolute war of the worlds footing is still insisted upon. It may well prove that the response to Covid will cause the starvation of more people than the virus could kill even if completely ignored.
The deceptions in the Covid discourse are sometimes transparent. Why does Google, a company of coders not engaged in knowledge divining medical trials, decide that the work of Pierre Kory should not, and cannot be seen by the world? Pierre Kory is a Critical Care Physician who is treating people suffering from Covid with documented success, but his work apparently doesn’t count because he doesn’t have a WHO label on him; or something similarly institutionally sanctified. Most likely, he is also not an advertiser on Google.
When he talked to the US Senate about Ivermectin, Youtube thought that was information that should not be heard, and so they removed the video of his testimony from youtube and it and it has been memory-holed.
If you can label anything disinformation you don’t need an excuse for its censorship. There is obviously something wrong with this thinking. This is obviously modern heresy scrubbing.
There is no consensus amongst experts on Covid. That is a delusion spread by censorship.
In another example amongst too many to mention, the evolutionary biologist, Eric Weinstein, has had many of his discussions with experts in their fields removed from youtube because he touched on the “verboten”. Weinstein, a left-wing liberal who I believe has always been stubbornly focused on trying to understand the world as it manifests, has been advocating hard for a discussion on Ivermectin. His position is that after surveying the reports on its use, he is convinced that it looks very promising as a treatment for Covid. Anyone who has listened to one of his Dark Horse Podcasts will know that he examines the evidence and prefers to seek an explanation based on evolutionary sense making, but that he doesn’t make rash or outrageous claims that have no evidentiary explanation. That’s why it was perplexing to see the libertarian publication, Quillette, make personal attacks on his legitimacy to even talk about this subject. Quillette employed the elitist trick (very common on the left who have a natural deference to authority) of appealing to authority while smearing his ability to even think critically.
Quillette, in the opinion of this writer, was a little too cosy and self congratulatory on the “flatten the curve narrative” which was used to usher in compliance on a temporary measure at the start of the Covid era. Anyone with their eyes open was, after about 1 month, starting to suspect that flatten the curve was a Motte and Bailey tactic. Flatten the curve was the Bailey, and the lockdown was the Motte. This lockdown thing has since turned into a directionless global experiment that has no objective aims (zero covid is not a realistic objective) or means of quantifying when an end could be declared.
‘Slow the spread so you could deal with the public health problem’ was not the objective in the opinion of this writer. The suspicious amongst the public voiced this in 2020 and were scorned by many, but now the authorities have been saying it directly for nigh on a year. The madness of NPHET is mainstreamed now when they call for zero-covid, and throughout all this the so called media -the corporate media that is- have not questioned them or highlighted the inconsistencies in this erratically changing narrative.
The utilitarian view of saving lives at all costs (a logical fallacy that we have pointed out many times here) loses sight of what life is about.
This is an existential question which might be best explained with a story. A bizarre story is sometimes best to get a fundamental philosophical metaphor across and so here we have ‘The Borg’ from the sci-fi Star Trek world. These are a race of people who find they are more effective when they link their minds in a matrice, acting as single conscious entities. The bodies are comatose but their collective mind network is more powerful. This is not living but it has its utility. Ironically we see many utilitarian commentators praising the “stability” of the oppressive Chinese regime for their Borg-like structure. Why would we surrender our lives and autonomy to this collective control?
This is more than a question of science. In fact, the insistence to “follow the science” by people who have no ability to follow basic empirical reasoning is beginning to sound more like a religion with each passing day. The shrill insistence that non conformists are “science deniers” has the unsettling tone of witch-finding. The hysteria is mainly driven amongst these faithful, these frightened masses; and it is controlled and amplified by the big tech giants who claim they are just watching out for disinformation. The emergent truth is that it is a clamp-down on the non-sanctioned.
If we follow the discourse according to the rules of RTÉ, Facebook, and Google/Youtube we don’t have a discussion at all, we have a set of predigested conclusions. We, the infantalised public, are encouraged to pretend that this set of conclusions emerges from evidence. We are not allowed to inspect and discuss this evidence for contradictions or inconsistencies -of which there are many- and we are not to seek any other evidence or explanation other than the prepared conclusions which come from a politicized science complex.
The manifest truth is that the institutions of science have become subservient to, and captured by the political. The science is playing out an idiomatic conflict as a proxy over a deeper subset of values. The issue, one could deduce after a year of observing the covid era unfold, is a clash of philosophies; deference to authority, federality and collectivism, as opposed to autonomy and individualism. It’s not that one of these values is scientific and the other isn’t, but what’s clear is that the Covid pandemic is pitching these two philosophical outlooks against each other. At a deeper level it pitches two onthological or theological propositions against each other. The framing of this in a discourse of science is Plato’s shadows on the cave.
The politicization of science in the Covid-sphere, where declared “truth” depends on whose mouth it came from, and where questions of fact –such as the covid lab leak theory- move from being within, to without the Pale, show us that empirical fact is no longer the apotheosis of the new captured world of “science.” Is “Science” only a word now, co-opted by linguistic anthropologists to give propagandistic credence to the politically powerful? It appears it does not describe exclusively a method of empirical observation, testing and deduction. That process may happen incidentally, but increasingly it looks like; if the elite want a certain answer, science will provide it. This does not bode well.