Systematic review and meta-analysis should not just be a reflection of power — who can fund the most RCTs, who can perform the most statistical wizardry. They should be about gathering the most high quality information from wherever we can find it to create the most comprehensive picture of any problem and any proposed remedy.
The rational and calculating human mind’s ability to deliver something approaching personal contentment to you has been massively oversold during your lifetime. While these modes of cognition can accomplish many wonderful things, they also have a known ability, when the human mind is left exclusively in their care, to create suffocating closed circuits of thought that can lead to a sense of listlessness and despair.
“Truth” has become more or less a “preference”. Sort of like you may like chocolate; I may like vanilla. You like a Chevy while I like a Ford. When we ask which is the “better” car, we can both truthfully say what we think. Has the meaning of “truth” just evaporated? Or is something more at work?
We know that the modern West has developed a jaw-dropping degree of totalitarianism, wherein the bureaucracies of the state and the corporate sector coordinate together to cripple humans outside their power networks and media channels. But what are the mechanics of this coordination? To understand one of the games they play, consider the rise of measures and standards associated with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance).
We need legislators, and the public, to reclaim public health ethics and to return to credible concepts of health and well-being – as the WHO once did – “physical, mental and social.” This is what was intended when previous generations fought to overthrow dictators, striving for equality and for the rights of individuals over those who would control them. History tells us that public health professions tend to follow self-interest, taking the side of those who would be dictators. If our democracies, freedom, and health are to survive, we must accept reality and address this as a basic issue of individual freedom and good governance for which we are all responsible. There is too much at stake to leave this to self-interested corporatists and the notorious enforcers they control.
We Must Save Ourselves from the Public Health Professionals Read More
In the holiday season, we are reminded of the importance of community, of our connection with one another. We join together with our family and friends. We extend help and understanding to those we perceive in need. We seek out acts of grace and hope.
If you live in a Chinese city, or even in London, you are probably so used to surveillance cameras all around you – on lamp posts, the corners of buildings, and so on – that you would hardly bat an eyelid. Yet what contemporary city-denizens take for granted was not always the case, and most people would be surprised to know that surveillance has a long history, and was linked to modes of punishment from early on.
Living Everywhere in a Carceral Surveillance State Read More
Throughout, my unimpaired eyes and ears told me that the Covid response was an extreme overreaction that was causing widespread harm. Instead of following a gullibly unhinged crowd, I found new friends who knew bad Scamdemic music when they heard it. Instead of “staying safe,” buying the hysteria and flailing their arms, my new tribe stayed sane and moved, vitally and on-time, to their own, unmistakable beat of reality.
The Grateful Dead Succumbed to Coronamania, but We Didn’t Conform Read More
The mistake we made was in believing that there is logic to history. There isn’t. There is only the march of good ideas and bad, and the forever competition between the two. And this is a central message of Mises’s 1954 overlooked masterwork Theory and History. Here he offers a devastating rebuttal to determinism of all sorts, whether from old liberals or Hegel or Fukuyama.
The Historian of Decline: Ludwig von Mises’s Relevance Today Read More
There was a rhythm to the pandemic. It was a rhythm of nothingness, a blend of day into day. It was a rhythm detached from time, a metronome of stay in, click on, stay in, stay afraid. What information that was available was tailored to create unsettled obedience, a state of wide-awake nervous exhaustion that feedback fed the rhythm itself.
The agencies promoting the hegemony of digital technology – which is also what makes AI possible today – would like nothing better than to neutralise your ability to think independently. This is even more true today than when Stiegler wrote his texts. But by using this technology anyway, for your own critical purposes, you would be defusing their attempts at undermining human intelligence.
Could it be that most of us, in fact, are pre-programmed to surrender our agency at the first sign of a canceling putdown or threat of ostracism, however absurd, emanating from someone presented to us as being authoritative, even when that “authoritative” figure issuing the “conspiracy theorist” or “disinformation” fatwa these days is often nothing more a 26-year-old twit with an overly-expensive diploma working in a Silicon Valley cubicle or a Brooklyn coffee shop?
