What People are Missing if They Aren’t reading X (Twitter)

It's wild out there in the lands of Politics and Culture. I've been doing some collecting and I'd like to offer some of the things that especially caught my attention recently.

Glenn Greenwald is on fire. Here he is once again pointing out DNC/Corporate Media Hypocrisy:

I've lost count of the people who have told me that they don't know what Robert F. Kennedy actually says and they don't want to find out. And then They claim that he is "anti-vax" and a "conspiracy theorist," as though saying that is a substitute for knowledge. Michael Shellenberger comments:

This really happened. How could EVERYONE in the corporate media forget?

The Ukraine war (which has killed 600,000 Ukrainians so far) must must must go on because . . . trust us . . . says Anthony Blinken, neocon in Joe Biden's cabinet and one of the architects of the Iraq War.

Tulsi Gabbard was really put on this list this year after she expressed a political position in support of Trump. Everything else here is absolutely true. Does this sound like America?

It's guaranteed won't hear these things about Matt Gaetz at your favorite corporate media outlets. Independent journalist Lee Fang will tell you:

If really you'd like to learn RFK, Jr's positions on important topics (and you should want to know them), here are some of his main points, succinctly set out and annotated:

Continue ReadingWhat People are Missing if They Aren’t reading X (Twitter)

Big Pharma (Merck) and Vioxx: A Case Study

Dr. Aseem Malhotra Presents:

Dr. Aseem Malhotra: " So when the FDA were alerted that there was a cardiovascular problem with Vioxx, that at least double the risk of heart attack, strokes, death, for example, they wrote to Merck. And what did Merck do? They ignored that the FDA said there should be a black box warning on the packaging. And they doubled down on their marketing."

"They purchased more reprints from the Journal of Medicine, where the original trial was published, because their aim was that every single doctor in the United States... which should have a copy of that so-called peer-reviewed journal article in Jung Journal Medicine so they could prescribe Vioxx."

"Now, when I give lectures and I explain this to people, I ask people from the audience, and they're shocked, like, how would he describe this behavior? And people come up with all sorts of things—evil, murderer. But the actual definitive or the best diagnosis to describe this behavior by these companies, which isn't my opinion, although I agree with it, it comes from Robert Hare, forensic classification of psychopathy."

"And he says big corporations, in the way that they conduct their business, they're pathologically self-interested, actually fulfill all the criteria for psychopath as entities. So that means incapacity to experience guilt, repeated lying, conning others for profit. You know, there are so many criteria that they fulfill."

Continue ReadingBig Pharma (Merck) and Vioxx: A Case Study

RFK, Jr.: The Problem with Experts

RFK, Jr.:

Newsweek asked RFK Jr. "why he doesn't stop promoting conspiracy theories".

This was his reply:

"My father told me when I was a little boy that people in authority lie and the job in a democracy is to remain skeptical. I've been science-based since I was a kid. Show me the evidence and I'll believe you, but I'm not going to take the word of official narratives."

"The way you do research is not by asking authoritative figures what they think. Trusting experts is not a feature of science, and it's not a feature of democracy. It's a feature of religion and totalitarianism."

Compare with this passage from The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (p.88):

I argue that liberal science’s distinctive qualities derive from two core rules, and that any public conversation which obeys those two rules will display the distinguishing characteristics of liberal science. The rules are

- The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else’s fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’ errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based.

- The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based...

Here is a problem, though, with the funnel metaphor. The boundaries of the reality-based community are fuzzy and frothy, not hard and distinct, and the same is true of knowledge itself. What has and The Constitution of Knowledge has not been validated? Who qualifies as an expert reviewer? Who is doing good science or journalism, who is doing bad science or journalism, and who is not doing science or journalism at all? Distinguishing science from pseudoscience and real news from fake news and knowledge from opinion will never be cut and dried. Among philosophers of science, a debate over what kind of thing is and is not science, the so-called demarcation problem, has been going on for a long time without resolution, which makes philosophers unhappy.

In fact, however, efforts to define who is or is not a scientist or what science does or does not do miss the point. The beauty of the reality-based community is that it can acquire all kinds of propositions and organize all sorts of arguments, and it can do all kinds of things to resolve those arguments, so long as its methods satisfy the fallibilist and empirical rules. In the real world, checking does not need to mean falsifying a factual statement in some precise, authoritative way. It means finding a replicable, impersonal way to persuade people with other viewpoints that a proposition is true or false. The reality-based community is thus not limited to handling factual disputes. It can work its will on any kind of proposition which its members and rules can figure out how to adjudicate, and it can drive many kinds of conversation toward consensus.

Continue ReadingRFK, Jr.: The Problem with Experts

RFK, Jr. Discusses the DPT Vaccine All Cause Mortality

RFK, Jr. on why we need to test the long term safety of vaccines. He focuses on the all cause mortality related to the DPT vaccine in this discussion.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

Let me just give you one quick other example. The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. We banned, we got rid of it in this country because it was causing injuries, brain injuries, severe brain injuries or death to one in every 300 children.

We used it in the 80s, and that's why there was all this litigation against vaccine companies that precipitated the passage of the Vaccine Act that then gave them immunity from liability, but... In Europe, they don't use it. In America, they don't use it. But we give it to 161 million African children a year.

So Bill Gates asked the Danish government to support that program and said it saved 30 million lives. The Danish government said, show us the data. He wasn't able to. So they went to Africa and did their own studies. And they looked at 30 years of DTP data. And what they found shocked them all.

They found that girls who got the DTP were dying at 10 times the rate of unvaccinated girls. But they were dying of things that nobody had ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of anemia, malaria, bilharzia, pulmonary disease, respiratory disease, and pneumonia. And nobody noticed for 30 years that it was the vaccinated girls and not the unvaccinated girls who were dying.

And what had happened is these girls were not dying of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. The vaccine had protected them against those. But it had also ruined their immune systems. And they were unable to defend themselves against other just minor diseases that were that other kids who had hearty immune systems we're able to fend off.

So that's why you need these long-term studies, and that's why I'm worried that we don't do that here in the United States.

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What it is Like to Start Seeing the Progressive Left for What it is.

Fascinating video. This woman recently started seeing the DNC and progressive left for what they are. She describes the experience of scales falling from her eyes.

I created a transcript of her 3-minute video:

I feel like I have a unique perspective with this whole election thing. Because I used to be very, very far left, like I was one of the people having a fucking mental breakdown in 2016 when he won, right? And I didn't even like him up until six months ago, when it became very obvious that they were staging a coup and tried to assassinate him. And then some shit started clicking. So I'm still very new to this whole side of things. But the thing is, when I was very far left, like, radically far left, I thought I knew what was going on. I genuinely believed I was informed. I thought I knew better than everybody else, and that's what these people think, too. And the thing is I would get so triggered and so angry when people would question me because I didn't actually know what the hell I was talking about. I thought I did, but really I didn't actually know any policies. I didn't actually know any politics. All I actually knew was what I had seen online, in mainstream media, and because everybody was saying, I just assumed it had to be right, right. And I think where a lot of this comes from is like, people just don't want to be wrong. Like, it's humbling and it's embarrassing to acknowledge that you were wrong or that you didn't know as much as you thought you did, but I would get so defensive and fly off the handle when and whenever somebody would question me, because I didn't actually have any talking points, and the talking points I did have were inaccurate.

But I didn't want to be wrong so I just kept fucking regurgitating. I just kept echoing the same shit that I was hearing over and over again, and that's what people are still doing. And I I don't blame them. I'm not mad at them, because really, I mean, if you're only exposed to that, then that's what you're gonna believe.

But it's crazy to be on the other side of it for this election and see just how misinformed people are, and they will argue with you, and I won't have a card, because they will argue with you till they're blue in the face because they are just so convinced that they're right, and I was one of those people, and the fear they're feeling is very real. I'm not invalidating the fear. I'm just it's just that the fear is not founded in anything factualbecause it's not the things that they're scared about. It's not going to happen. It didn't happen last time, it's not going to happen this time.

And it's just it's so crazy. It's like being the sober person at a party full of drunk people.

Continue ReadingWhat it is Like to Start Seeing the Progressive Left for What it is.