The last three years have generated some interesting folk-sayings, such as the difference between a conspiracy theory and news being about six months, and “misinformation” being truth that those in power want to suppress. From the latter insight I think it’s possible to develop a screening test to assist those who are confused about what Latest Thing they should suspect of being a deception.
I’m thinking here of the way that many people have (as my church treasurer recently dropped in conversation) “stopped believing anything in the news,” and yet find themselves still on board with particular issues they presumably came to believe before their BS filters were fully functional. That’s true for us all – I, in particular, failed to comprehend during my working career just how deeply my own medical profession had been subverted by the pharmaceutical and food industries, even though I was aware of it in principle. Mea culpa.
And so, for example, there are many who reject the whole woke thing and recognise how complicit governments are with it, but assume the NHS is on their side in advising serial COVID boosters. Or there are those who’ve dismissed COVID as, in some form, a scam, yet are carefully avoiding plastic straws because of deadly climate change destroying the world’s poor. Or they’ve clocked that polar sea ice is recovering and extreme weather not increasing even on the IPCC’s own evidence, but still want the Mad Dictator Putin to be assassinated to save democracy. Or they have begun to understand how the Military Industrial Complex works, but are convinced that gender diversity is strength. And so on.
I suggest that the simplest tool to raise initial suspicion, and hence to focus independent investigation, is to see on what grounds people in general, and/or those in relevant professions, are cancelled for dissident views. For not all aberrant beliefs attract cancellation, and even more significantly, cancellation is not a general cultural, but a partisanly ideological, phenomenon, except where it produces a tit-for-tat response from those it targets.
How one labels the ideology that has developed cancellation as a weapon is still a moot point, partly because of the apparent wide disparity of reasons to cancel people. But most of us have come to identify the loose affiliation conveniently called “They” (as an understood descriptor, rather than a confusing gender pronoun), whether we emphasise the Deep State, Big Business, Big Philanthropaths, Big Science, Big Social Media, Cultural Marxism, the WEF or whatever. Disparate as these powers seem, it’s a fact that they all appear not only to support cancellation in principle, but also to endorse each others’ chosen demonisations. In my personal view, it’s because they’re all puppets of the same Demon, who would dearly love to cancel the entire human race, but that’s not part of my argument here.
This phenomenon of solidarity in cancellation demonstrates a shared underlying ideology. So you can be pretty sure that if a vicar is cancelled by his Bishop for questioning Transgender indoctrination in his church primary school, then BLM, social media and any passing climate scientists will chime in with “Good Riddance to Anti-vaxxers.” This seems to explain why the Progressive Left, which one might expect to despise the fraudulent track record of Big Pharma, is adamant in rejecting even the possibility that mRNA vaccines are less than 100% safe and effective, even as they acknowledge fatal myocarditis as a genuine side effect.
As I have suggested, not all aberrant beliefs are cancellable. Nobody has their PayPal account closed for believing in a flat or hollow earth – or both together, come to that. I suspect that even if an accredited scientist believed that America faked the moon landings, he might be mocked, and even lose some eputation in his chosen field, but he would not be cancelled, though I guess it would be fair game for NASA to sack him. So on issues not affecting this fuzzy ideology, you can be as mad as a fish, and escape censure. As many have realised, you can even keep your Facebook account if you threaten death to Israel or call for all Russians to be asset-stripped or jailed.
But dissidence with respect to COVID origins, public health measures, treatments or “vaccines” will get you cancelled whether you’re a Pfizer victim or a Nobel Prizewinner, and that ought to raise your antennae to investigate just what those cancelled were saying, as they were probably over the target. And is that cancelled activist really a violent Neo-nazi, or was he just exposing official corruption in covering up rape-gangs, seeing that the victims have been denigrated as well? Why do all the independent journalists in Donbas get sacked or fined when they expose Ukrainian war-crimes? These people may all be shills, but their very cancellation should make you look carefully behind the BBC headlines.
Notice how climate change, although bracketed with other scams by many sceptics, retains for even many COVID dissidents exemption from suspicion. It cannot just be the relentless propaganda that is to blame, because that is remarkably similar to the scaremongering over COVID they have seen through. They may not have noticed that the scaremongering comes from the exact same sources, from the mainstream press to the UN and WHO via the WEF and globalist governments, but why question one and not the other?
My own experience helps me understand why global warming often gets such a free pass. I’d more or less taken the warming thing for granted before 2019, because of the claimed consensus of “97% of scientists,” and therefore because I assumed the dissidents insisting we should “think for ourselves” on WUWT were disgruntled laymen or paid by oil companies. But in 2019, when writing my e-book on propaganda and deception, it was the lies told about dissidents, and their silencing through cancellation, that encouraged me to look further. When you think about it, it’s not only odd that questioning the validity of climate predictions cost the popular TV botanist David Bellamy his entire career, but that the dissident scientists tend to be those who through retirement or independent means are no longer dependent on government or industry grants. The common “cancellation trick” of calling such people psycho-geriatrics ought to be a signal to heed what they say.
But although the Club of Rome, back in 1970 when the world was cooling, had already decided to use climate change as a weapon to change the world order, in public consciousness (including mine) the narrative and the whole apparatus was set up before the purity of science began to be discredited in other fields. Even now most doctors have failed to appreciate the way their profession, its regulators, and the research programme informing it has sold out to Big Pharma, as this important (and inspiring) video from cardiologist Aseem Malhotra demonstrates. That is despite the work of those like John Ioannidis, the most cited medical scientist alive, and Peter Doshi, Associate Editor of the BMJ. Note that Ioannidis was effectively cancelled over his evidence on COVID – we still await the disappearance of Doshi, but it cannot be long delayed.
The Climate Science industry was quicker off the mark than the medical profession in discrediting its dissidents like Judith Curry and Willie Soon, perhaps because in the public view Big Oil, unlike Big Pharma, had no “science saving lives” fig-leaf, and so could be used to smear the innocent with impunity. Since Big Oil is at the forefront of profiteering from green energy, it is happy enough to be a pantomime villain all the way to the bank. The irony is that fossil fuels have saved more lives than pharmaceuticals ever have, as Malhotra notes in passing.
I am pretty certain, then, that cancellation is a good proxy for “We have something to hide,” and therefore shows us where to find truth, though it may – possibly – produce false positives as to one underlying ideology. For example, what are we to make of the way that, in the cosmological physics field, it became difficult to get a job unless one was on board with String Theory. As I understand it, the Large Hadron Collider has more or less killed String Theory, so I’m not sure what the prevailing power dynamics are now.
Decades before this, cancellation was a feature in evolutionary biology, most notably in the crushing of those questioning the sufficiency of Neodarwinism because they might encourage the Creationists. Perhaps this is just the time-honoured scientific practice of packing the academy with those who agree with you, as the Mutationists and Structuralists were unceremoniously muscled out when the Modern Synthesis gained ascendancy in the 1930s.
But it is interesting that both String Theory and Neodarwinian Evolutionary Theory carry hidden ideological baggage in seeming to remove the need for God from the Universe. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting cancelled for fundamental disagreements over quantum computing or linguistics. So once again cancellation seems to be the result of ideology, and my tool remains useful in looking for truth.
Maybe the ideology in these last two instances is not the same as that behind Critical Theory or the Rules Based World Order. But then, it may conceivably point to the same Demon.
Divining misinformation from all that we take as givens is a much more difficult task than either side or anyone generally perceived until recently. How did I smell a rat with the EUA drugs? I simply read Ioannidis on the Diamond Princess analysis and considered why would authorities push an undertested drug into the majority of the global population? As opposed to the GBD I actually recommended against my then 85 yo mum ingesting such a thing, though as traditionally, she would give anyone feverish or barking a wide berth. I am not a son who flippantly played with his mothers life but I wanted her to have a worthwhile life, not to be incarcerated in an overly risk averse manner. Whilst others argued that surely all the world’s governments can’t be wrong I preferred to think of lemmings, the pied piper. Satisfied with my decision I nonetheless got to wondering how would I consistently avoid being tricked into drinking koolaid? I like your analysis as it addresses the quandary of the boy crying Wolf whereas a significant number of us now buy the logic that whatever the institutions recommend we will do the opposite. But we mustn’t cut our nose to spite our face? I honestly can’t predict what I’d do if injured and requiring a blood infusion. Could I insist on unvaccinated blood? I used to think the Jehovah’s Witness stand was mad, now I could well be in a similar contretemps. Rebuilding the trust will be difficult.
“Rebuilding the trust will be difficult.”
When a woman’s been badly let down by a man, she may well find it hard to trust “men” (or vice versa, of course). Rebuilding trust is a moral task for her based on finding a trustworthy man, not on taking the old one back, which is a recipe for disaster.
I will trust new institutions, or thoroughly reformed ones after a process of establishing justice. But it’s probably safe for now to do the opposite of what we’re told when we can’t check it for ourselves! I have enough professional knowledge to feel safe visiting the doctor… not so sure about calling the police!
Dear Jon
Trusting institutions is comfortable and practical because one doesn’t have to remember endless facts or screening procedures to eliminate bad advice. The USP of Which and similar magazines was to fact cross check advertised product claims by independent assessment but that was against profit motivated blurb and didn’t involve life threatening exposure.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, bigger fool me….
The most crucial advice review us non medics need in view of recent events which have compromised our assessment of the purity of doctors vocational motivations is now to much more thoroughly validate or discount the advice of our “state endorsed” physician or preferably to identify a good egg and just do as we’re told.
How badly is the well polluted? How does a layman like me who would previously have reasonably calmly and happily closed his eyes as a premed took effect surrender myself or a loved one to a procedure of any sort in future? Are Andrew Wakefields contentions now to be fully accepted?
I have had first hand dealings with mandarins at Richmond House regarding reforming elements of the Health infrastructure of this country but probably especially because of that experience would hesitate to judge an Institution sufficiently reformed. As a Management Consultant I was used to presenting old wine in new bottles. I get your point re “a process of establishing justice” by which you presumably mean “pour encourager Les autres” sending some of those guilty of the malfeasance to prison? That will take some time. Tragically mixing metaphors do we have no option but to throw the baby out with the bath water? Asking for 67 million people!
Richard
Hard, isn’t it?
I suspect one needs to find the always-rare type of doctor who’s willing to discuss and critique his/her own suggestions. Once, critical thinking was a core medical discipline – now it seems training is orientated to following NHS guidelines religiously, which means seeking out a heretic.
Unfortunately, most heretics also talk baloney – hence the critical thinking criterion. I’m in two minds about Wakefield, who was wrong about a good deal, but hesitation over vaccines (not just COVID) isn’t just him, but is shared even by vaccinologists, so that’s an area in which I would invest personal research both for myself and children known to me. I’d be asking first, “What is the actual risk of the disease, numerically and medically, and what’s the number needed to treat with vaccine to prevent it?” Then I’d look for the reported adverse reactions, knowing that the studies were probably done by the manufacturers.
Vaccines apart, the corruption of the profession mainly appears to be in the field of common chronic conditions and their prevention/management, because the profit comes from getting a lot of well people on treatment. Nobody gets that rich on acute rarities.
So I’m a lot more likely to trust my GP on ingrowing toenails or a stiff shoulder than if he offers me statins and ACE inhibitors because my BP is slightly up on one occasion in the surgery… that’s assuming I’m ever invited to the surgery again!
many truths here. BUt good people in our nations, especial the english ones, need a great equation accusation to fight the bad guys.
We must see today as only a degree different from yesterday and yesterdays.
I say it shows the folling. Forceful people in moral, intellectual, using forceful mediums like government and the media etc etc.
nothing is a result of the people, or the peoples divisions, even if they do accurately reflect them.but only tiny tiny numbers of people are running things. AS USUAL. We on;y notice more now because its more extreme.
In short its not neutral or based on democratic votes. All that is done is a demand that this or that is true and right and righteous and the opposite is untrue, wrong, and evil.
Everybody does it a little but the arrogant upper classes do it more or any uppity group.
What are our fundamental rights and liberities and government in governing us??
They can’t censor anyone except what always was censored and so has precedent like pornography. today they demand censoring porn is evil and illegal but censoring other stuff is okay.
This blog is good for pointing things out but we need a effective artillery. We must demand our ancient rights and liverities and form of government and not be governed by the tiny forceful folks in society. Governing is a contact sport.
The “democratic deficit” is the overarching problem in Western countries. The systems were set up when adversarial politics was a reality – so the public could decide to become socialists or conservatives, within sane limits, by voting.
Now whoever you vote for you get a globalist WEF government (unless you’re in Hungary or Russia!), and in countries with proportional representation the balance defaults to the same.
Under such circumstances there is a point at which politics truly does become a contact sport, after the fashion of bare-knuckle boxing. The warning signs are all there.
But re Hungary see this. It’s pretty bad when politicians fix the votes in their own country to get in power, and then fix the votes in every other country that isn’t already a vassal state.
As I understand it democratic deficits are increasing significantly right now in that supranational technocratic decision making especially through the WHO is increasing (the promoted cause being to save us from infectious diseases, the ulterior motive being one world government). Robert Malone published an essay promoting decentralisation of decision taking which more closely holds decision takers accountable to the meaningfully enfranchised with the added benefit being that variety throws up improved means.
The electorate, particularly in the U.K. manipulated via red top and broad sheet opinion formation, in clamouring against post code lotteries in health services benefit not from transfer of best practice, but suffer from imposition of cumbersome uniformity. This accelerated not just as an unintended consequence but by design as Blair/Mandelson turned the census manifesto process to not just be soliciting the populace’s views to feed back priorities into manifestos but as censuses were harnessed to drive opinion formation. The subtlety of this has continued to develop as cultural cues are less fed through media opinion pieces, but more into not only drama but particularly advertising and of course as a slow burn through education. But this is only a conspiracy theory, how could alien forces possibly coordinate something as unwieldy and between so many disparate people, right? Wrong. That’s the point of Gramsci et al.
In recent years we know that modern communications conditional visibility algorithms together with the well funded FAANGS overt employee political profile effectively move enough voters (whilst bypassing campaign contributions rules) but it’s the WEF Young Leaders pervasiveness which has cancelled democracy possibly ably abetted by dominion machines imperfect chain of custody and postal vote registration. Plus theres the Cambridge Analytica data driven phsycholgical profiling nudge approach or the Steele dossier type dirty games.
Unfortunately all these influences are so opaque particularly wherever two party systems rule that real choice doesn’t exist. This is especially compounded wherever professionalisation of politics has evolved an educational feeder system further corrupted by corporate lobby lures rather than consumer pressure and of course the jobs merry go round.
Can we identify how to get out of this subverted mess? Possibly, based on hidden agenda entryism to reverse the steps which led us here? Whatever happens we have that old problem, if I was going to be going to there I wouldn’t want to be starting here… And it’s going to take decades. I’m still shocked I didn’t realise we’d strayed so far from the meandering path of effective democracy into sham, manipulated imposed government.
“I’m still shocked I didn’t realise we’d strayed so far from the meandering path of effective democracy into sham, manipulated imposed government.”
A near-universal feeling amongst those who are awake to it.
Here’s the dilemma: for a future society to be worthwhile, it will have to reverse not only the values of the current one, but the methodologies. So a “conservative” (or “liberal,” or “commonsense”, or whatever) “Long March through the Institutions” would only produce an abusive society with another face. To be transparent, good people have to act transparently – which never seems the route to power (and hence is the subversive message of true Christianity).
This is the problem Putin inherited, with corrupt factions within threatening the whole existence of Russia, as I’m reading in Sakwa’s book, and he seems to have addressed it with an unstable mixture of openness and manipulation of the system. But he does have the point that once a democratic system has been so thoroughly corrupted by all the things you mention, any reform has to be radical and somewhat single-minded.