I will never get my reputation back as it once was. However, I will not give up fighting for our freedoms, whether it be to bring back integrity to the FDA, CDC, NIH, DoD and HHS or whether it be reining-in the intelligence agency. We all must continue to bring our government to heal.
Even if the disease itself is not mild, a pandemic wave through a population tends to reduce local stress and anxiety and focuses people on a singular goal. This has been called the “typhoon eye effect,” reported during outbreaks of SARS, people closer to the pandemic were less anxious and more able to accurately estimate their own risks. Conversely, those on the periphery or outside the outbreaks, who received their information from media sources rather than personal experience reported increased anxiety and distress. There’s nothing more effective than having your irrational fears debunked firsthand.
Explaining the Nocebo Effect, Emotional Contagion, and Mass Hysteria Read More
What we have with this book and article is an important step. It is just one step. Lockdowns utterly shattered the protocols of public health, settled law, and freedom itself all over the world. They wrecked myriad institutions, wrought an incredible economic and cultural crisis, demoralized the whole population, and built up a leviathan of command and control that is not only not backing down but growing ever more. Far more will be required to utterly and completely repudiate the methods and madness of our epoch.
Moral emergencies are the times when our principles are most vulnerable to negotiation and even complete collapse.
The struggle underneath many headlines and events in our times – and this is true of the reshuffled alliances with hot war in the Middle East – is the desperate clamor to avoid accountability for those who opened the Pandora’s box of hate, division, state power, propaganda, and violence. That appears to be evolving into a civilization-wrecking dynamic of all against all, even as the instigators cower in the shadows.
If left unaddressed, the top-down trauma our “leadership” class seems bent on serially inflicting upon us leads to widespread psychic numbing and a nation of people who learn to comport themselves in the fearful and overly circumspect ways of that “dog that’s been beat too much.”
The Drumbeat of Trauma-Inducing Events in Our Lives Read More
The conundrum for free and open societies has always been the same: How to protect human rights and democracy from hate speech and disinformation without destroying human rights and democracy in the process. The answer embodied in the recent coordinated enactment of global censorship laws is not encouraging for the future of free and open societies.
The possibility of reforming the science writing profession seems very unlikely, as science writers remain locked inside their own community—constrained by partisanship, class, education, and cozy ties to their sources. Any criticism pointing this out is often either ignored or deemed to be proof that the critic is politically conservative, lacks education, or does not have the contacts in science to understand the complexities of research.
The Future of Alternative Media Is Unknown, But Critical Read More
Those who have grounded themselves in politics rather than principles have created a great unmooring that has left us vulnerable to the latest political huckster and led us down a dark, dark, path. Is the speed and force of this shift enough to convince those who had abandoned free speech to renormalise it as a principle? The shoe is now on the other foot.
The Post-Cold War Origins of the Surveillance State Read More
Propaganda is a form of public opinion manipulation involving creation of a specific narrative that aligns with a political agenda. It uses techniques like nudging, repetition, emotional appeals, selective information, and hypnotic language patterns to influence the subconscious mind, thereby bypassing critical thinking and shaping beliefs and values.
Unfortunately, many of these examples are not becoming outdated. Mask mandates have returned in some places, including schools, despite no high-quality supporting evidence. Same for COVID vaccine booster recommendations for healthy people under 65. Many European countries, including Denmark, have altered their recommendations based on careful risk/benefit analyses. Once again, although it would seem obvious that U.S. leaders should have followed suit, that didn’t happen.
For more than three years, there have been burning questions about Trump’s role and precisely why this hell was visited upon us. It will undoubtedly be studied for years. More frustrating still has been the general unwillingness even to ask questions of the great/evil man who Republicans cheer and Democrats loathe.
