Brownstone Institute Articles ⋆ Page 76 of 208 ⋆ Brownstone Institute

Was this Deceptive Trade? Paxton v. Moderna

Brownstone Institute / May 2, 2023 / Law, Vaccines / 4 minute read

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Suing vaccine makers is notoriously difficult by design. Alone among private producers, they are indemnified against nearly all harm thanks to government privilege. That makes them mostly off-limits for legal liability from vaccine injuries. Eliminate that provision and the companies would not likely even be in business at all, which tells you all you need to know. However, deceptive claims are a separate issue. Finally we might have here a perfectly crafted legal position to hold these run-amuk companies accountable.

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An Authoritarian Death Meditation

Alan Lash / May 2, 2023 / Philosophy / 7 minute read

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The Samurai faced real physical danger every day of their lives. It seems natural that they would develop a code to deal with death. Maybe we don’t need meditation for death. Maybe we need a meditation on the fear of authoritarianism, and thus garner the courage to carry on.

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When I Lost My Sense of Claret

Thorsteinn Siglaugsson / May 2, 2023 / Public Health / 4 minute read

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For I lost my “sense of claret:” I couldn’t any more distinguish between a 2005 second growth Haut-Médoc and a 2019 cru bourgeoise Graves. Both smelled like sulphur, both tasted like watered-down fruit juice gone a bit bad: I couldn’t drink claret any more.

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The Freezer-Truck Canard

Jeffrey A. Tucker / May 1, 2023 / History, Media, Policy / 6 minute read

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The excuse that we had to lock down because of freezer trucks does not hold water. The lockdown edict was issued on March 16, 2020, following the declaration of emergency on March 13, three days after Trump’s advisers convinced him to issue the lockdown. In that time, the funeral parlors and morgues closed too, as did most all medical services. The country was also in panic, which is not generally good for public health.

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Where Have the Adults Gone?

Paul Frijters,

Gigi Foster,

Michael Baker / May 1, 2023 / Policy, Society / 22 minute read

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The last three years show us what happens when specialists are in charge. If you want to know whether it is a good idea to lock down a whole city, it helps if you can quickly see the many effects lockdowns will have among many different parts of the city’s population and economy. Only with a broad view of many factors do you have hope of making a reasonable judgment.

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Lockdowns and Vaccines: Lessons from Denmark

Eyal Shahar / May 1, 2023 / Public Health / 6 minute read

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If the vaccines were highly effective against death, why was excess mortality in Denmark so much higher than in the previous flu year? Why was it so much higher than excess mortality in Sweden in the first pandemic year — without vaccines — when the virus was much more virulent than Omicron? Unlike Sweden, there was no “mortality deficit” to account for.

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No, Washington Post, the Experts Were the Whole Problem

John Tamny / April 30, 2023 / Media, Policy / 5 minute read

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In 2020, rather than encourage the very wealth creation that has long been the biggest foe of death and disease (by far), panicky politicians quite literally chose economic contraction as a virus mitigation strategy. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the U.S. political class, but not the Post’s editorialists or the authors of a report that the editorialists remarkably find insightful.

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What Kind of Culture Are They Planning for you?

Thomas Harrington / April 29, 2023 / Philosophy, Society / 7 minute read

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Those who in this very moment are seeking to radically change our core conceptions of liberty and our relationships to our own bodies though their aggressive culture-planning have, so far, faced relatively little serious intellectual opposition to their efforts. This is mostly because the salaried inhabitants of universities and key institutions of culture, who under the implied rules of democratic liberalism are supposed to act as a critical check upon such efforts, have mostly failed to do so.

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My Visit to the Artificial Land of Lies

Mark Oshinskie / April 29, 2023 / Government, Society / 8 minute read

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Typically, government dysfunction and corruption have occurred behind the scenes. The effects of these failings have usually been sufficiently diffuse, and daily life was challenging enough, that such chicanery went unnoticed. But given American governments’ open, audacious dishonesty and crassly abusive actions during the past three years—after all of the propaganda, censorship, blatantly unconstitutional and life-wrecking lockdowns, closures, restrictions and mandates—trust is irretrievably broken for anyone who has paid attention. Any residual American reverence for their government and their capital is delusional and child-like.

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Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend

Michael Tomlinson / April 28, 2023 / Philosophy, Society / 14 minute read

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The establishment consensus on COVID-19 is built on sand and should be challenged. It arose from premature closure of the scientific debate, followed by suppression of contrarian evidence-based analysis. Dissidents include scientists, who are clearly not anti-science but are opposed to flawed science based on ‘low cognitive ability’ and confirmation bias in favour of establishment ideas. They are pushing for better science.

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Meet the VLOPs! The EU Extends its Censorship Powers

Robert Kogon / April 28, 2023 / Censorship, Law, Media / 3 minute read

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The European Commission announced its first list of designated Very Large Online Platforms – or VLOPs – that will be subject to “content moderation” requirements and obligations to combat “disinformation” under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). As VLOPs, the designated services will be required “to assess and mitigate their systemic risks and to provide robust content moderation tools.”

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The Censorship-Industrial Complex

Andrew Lowenthal / April 27, 2023 / Censorship, Law, Media / 14 minute read

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Big Media and Big Tech fell completely out of sync with material reality, smearing criticism that had previously been normal, and explicitly banning topics from social media such as discussion of a possible lab leak, or vaccines not stopping viral transmission. Polite society agreed with such bans, stayed silent, or even, as in the case of the Virality Project and its partners, led the censoring. A cadre of North American and European anti-disinformation elites meanwhile had been slowly convincing NGOs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that their biggest problem was not too little but too much online freedom, the solution to which was more corporate and government control in order to protect human rights and democracy.

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