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Brownstone Journal features in-depth articles, news, research, and commentary on public health, science, economics, social theory, and related policy issues — offering critical perspectives on institutional failures, government interventions, and threats to liberty.

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Ukraine proxy war
By | | , | 26 minute read

Ukraine as a Proxy War: Conflicts, Issues, Parties, and Outcomes

In a very real sense, Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War. This explains the ambivalence of most non-Western countries. They are no less offended by Russia’s war of aggression. But they also have considerable sympathy for the argument that NATO was insensitively provocative in expanding to Russia’s very borders. 

Ukraine as a Proxy War: Conflicts, Issues, Parties, and Outcomes Continue Reading

after covid
By | | , , | 17 minute read

After Covid: Twelve Challenges for a Shattered World 

No question that the administrative bureaucracies would lock down again under the same or new pretext. Yes, they will face more opposition the next time and trust in their wisdom has fallen off a cliff. But the pandemic response also granted them new powers of surveillance, enforcement, and hegemony. The scientism that drove the response informs everything they do. So the next time, it will be harder to restrain them. 

After Covid: Twelve Challenges for a Shattered World  Continue Reading

competing interests
By | | , , | 15 minute read

A Failure to Disclose Competing Interests

This is a story of an author who promoted COVID-19 vaccine uptake among adolescents while failing to disclose significant competing interests (e.g., his holding of an unrestricted research grant from Pfizer). This is also a story of a failure of the author’s publisher Nature Reviews Cardiology to enforce Nature Portfolio’s declaration-of-competing-interests policy.

A Failure to Disclose Competing Interests Continue Reading

parent child state
By | | | 5 minute read

Who Is Better at Raising Your Child, You or the State?

Just as the state cannot trust the weighty job of parenting to parents, it cannot trust the job of childcare to childcare providers. They will therefore have to be subjected to strict protocols, as befits a good bureaucracy. And those protocols will be designed by experts who have scientifically determined which conditioning techniques lead to the best adapted little New Citizen.

Who Is Better at Raising Your Child, You or the State? Continue Reading

Prozac
By | | , , | 5 minute read

Prozac Is Unsafe and Ineffective for Young People, Analysis Finds

Antidepressants like fluoxetine double the risk of suicide and aggression in children and adolescentso, they often lead to decreased quality of life, they cause sexual dysfunction in about 50% of users, and these harms may continue long after they try to quit. There seems to be no rationale for using fluoxetine in young people for treating depression – the new analysis concludes the drug is unsafe and ineffective.

Prozac Is Unsafe and Ineffective for Young People, Analysis Finds Continue Reading

medical ethics
By | | , | 22 minute read

The Four Pillars of Medical Ethics Were Destroyed in the Covid Response

Individual patients can and must affect change. They must replace the betrayed trust they once held in the public health establishment and the healthcare industry with a critical, caveat emptor, consumer-based approach to their health care. If physicians were ever inherently trustworthy, the COVID era has shown that they no longer are so.

The Four Pillars of Medical Ethics Were Destroyed in the Covid Response Continue Reading

Treason of the Experts
By | | , | 10 minute read

How and Why the Intellectuals Betrayed Us

Will we renew our trust in the dignity, moral autonomy and inherent miraculousness of each individual human being? Or will we, in our absent-minded drift away from the only true sources of life and spiritual renewal—things like love, friendship, wonder and beauty—resign ourselves to the idea of living a new version of medieval serfdom, wherein our bodies and our minds are seen as, and used by, our self-appointed masters as a renewable resource for the execution of their megalomaniacal dreams? 

How and Why the Intellectuals Betrayed Us Continue Reading

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