The event: “Medicine, Science and Public Health: Restoring Trust and International Ethical Principles,” premiered March 20, 2022. What follows is a complete transcript of this important meeting.
Concerned Ontario Doctors’ Covid-19 Summit Part II: Complete Transcript Read More
It is not only about resistance but also rebuilding, not giving up on the dream of peace and prosperity, along with logic, science, and truth, even when so many have stopped believing. We welcome supporters of this vision. Indeed we need you and so does the future of civilization.
Trust in government and its ability to solve problems has always tended to be higher in more urban areas. Government solutions tend to constrain individual action, and this too tends to be tolerated more in more populated areas. Across cultures and times, areas of higher population density have been associated with more politically and culturally progressive attitudes, manifested in a greater willingness to trust governmental power and to follow its lead.
Now that the population has gotten used to one form of mobilization and a sizable fraction has found it enjoys the opportunities that mobilization opens up for bullying, new mobilizations for new excuses will be harder to resist.
And now I see this country as split, but not down political lines anymore; that is just a facade. There is a distinct divide between those caught up in the revolving stories of war and disease through tech addiction and those who are – or have become – truth seekers, science followers, and truly critical thinkers.
Not too long ago, the cultivation of a wholesale disjunction between one’s inner thoughts and outer presentation was broadly seen as pathological. Now, however, the ability to propagate free-floating images of the self (and with it one’s chosen causes) is now presented as proof of good sense and high intelligence.
Some old friends have disappointed while others have surprised me—including some new friends I had not previously known while at the University. Recently, a professor of English at UCLA sent this unsolicited letter to the UCI Chancellor. I am publishing his extraordinary letter here with his permission.
If there is one element that is found in virtually all of the fascist movements of the 20th century it is their leaders’ rhetorical pose of being above the frequently off-putting hurly-burly of politics. But, of course, no one operating in the public arena is ever above politics, or for that matter, ideology, both of which are just two more examples of the structure-engendering cultural practices alluded to above.
Biden, Putin, and the CCP all face the same problem: they preside over systems that are underperforming and generating enormous unrest at all levels. The leaders blame each other while the people in all countries are left to suffer. We are just at the beginning, but this strategy of deflection could end very badly for the arrogant political class that imagines no limit to their power.
To everyone who dumped on me for questioning the shutdown of civilization and calling out the damage it inflicted on the young and the poor: you can take your shaming, your scientific posturing, your insufferable moralizing, and stuff it. Every day, new research knocks more air out of your smug pronouncements.
These results point to one conclusion: between one-half and two-thirds of the public believe that the pandemic response was an enormous flop, and that their own liberties are far less secure now than they were before. Further, none of it worked to achieve that goal. That is a devastating indictment on the biggest expansion of government power and control in our lifetimes, one that happened not only in the US but almost everywhere in the world.
How Public Opinion Ended Covid, and Started the Next Thing Read More
As we step into year three, we urgently need to widen the lens beyond Covid metrics, beyond epidemiology, beyond even science itself. With Covid easing into endemicity, we need to grapple with big-picture concepts like costs, benefits and tradeoffs. We need to ask the tough questions. We need to name the hulking elephants in the room, to lift up their trunks and see what lies beneath.
