Today I learned about the Egyptian Fayum mummy portraits. These are amazingly lifelike portraits that were painted on wooden boards and attached to mummies from BCE 1st Century until the 3rd century, many hundreds of years before the Renaissance. These Fayum portraits exquisitely capture the personalities of the subjects. If you haven't before seen these, take a look.
This is an excerpt from article by highly regarded Stanford Researcher, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose account was shut down by Twitter, recently restored. An excerpt:
About a year later, after historian Phil Magness made a FOIA request, I learned a part of the story of how the U.S. government-sponsored propaganda campaign against the GBD came into being. Four days after we wrote the GBD, Francis Collins, the geneticist and lab scientist who was then the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, the immunologist and lab scientist who is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In the email, Collins called Martin, Sunetra, and me “fringe epidemiologists” and called for a devastating public takedown. The attacks on the three of us, aided by the cooperation of supposedly private social media platforms like Twitter, were launched shortly after Collins sent that email.
But this is not an article about the ethics of social media companies whose profits depend to a large extent on the friendliness of government regulators and whose employees may see themselves as partisan political activists. This is a critique of our best universities, which are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge—yet which turn out to be no different than government propagandists and private corporations in their self-seeking, amoral behavior.
. . . .
Stanford failed to meet the higher standard of positive academic freedom, which would have required it to promote an environment where faculty members engage with each other respectfully despite fierce disagreement.
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The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.
The analogy goes further, unfortunately. The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did. Top universities, like Stanford, where I have been both student and professor since 1986, are supposed to protect against such orthodoxies, creating a safe space for scientists to think and to test their ideas. Sadly, Stanford has failed in this crucial aspect of its mission, as I can attest from personal experience.
The title to the article: "How Stanford Failed the Academic Freedom Test: For America’s new clerisy, scientific debate is a danger to be suppressed."
Matt Taibbi argues the need for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reboot respectable journalism after years of Russiagate Insanity:
We have a lot of problems in this country, and there are serious arguments to be had between blue and red about all sorts of issues, from immigration to the wealth gap to abortion and race. But the country is currently paralyzed by distrust of media that runs so deep that it prevents real dialogue, and that situation can’t be resolved until the corporate press swallows its pride and admits the clock has finally run out on its seven years of loony Russia conspiracies.
It’s over, you nitwits. It’s time to stow the Mueller votive candles, cop to the coverage pileup created by years of errors, and start the reconciliation process.
You’ll be tempted to shout, “But Trump, Stop the Steal, QAnon — Derp!” Don’t do it. Don’t be the Japanese soldier still clutching a bayonet to defend the forgotten atoll in 1960. Forget Trump: you need to clean your own house first. Expunging the years of absurd deceptions has to happen, if media companies ever want wide audiences to trust them again, and that starts with admitting the obvious screwups — like this case.
I just spotted this review of The Revolt of the Masses by Greg Lukianoff." Greg's review has convinced me to order my own copy of The Revolt of the Masses.
Excerpts:
“The Revolt of the Public” explains that the shifts in media technologies that we believe accelerated American political polarization and played havoc with young people’s mental health were actually part of a much larger global transformation that Gurri calls “The Fifth Wave.” Essentially, the empowerment of vast multitudes of people to communicate directly with the world and with each other has genuinely transformed society. Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down; institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. cancel culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.”
. . . . Gurri shows how this manifested in the 2011 Arab Spring and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. Gurri also argues that these movements generally were rich with targets: people, institutions, and ideas that needed to be torn down, but those same movements were often very hesitant to offer constructive solutions or realistic reforms. This hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism, according to Gurri—usually not the kind of nihilism of the philosophers, but a de facto nihilism in which nothing constructive is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down.
You can see this in American society in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to cancel culture on both the right and the left, and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by the QAnon conspiracy.
One thing that must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation is that very often what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was truly based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts, and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous. Negation is indeed tearing things down that needed to be torn down; unfortunately, it seems to be taking everything else with it.
Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse interview Martin Gurri in their article, "Former Top CIA Analyst Condemns FBI For Censorship & Misinformation "Joe McCarthy would have loved to have that kind of control," says Martin Gurri, author of the seminal 2018 book, "The Revolt of Public," about government influence over Twitter." Here is an excerpt:
For some perspective, we reached out to former CIA analyst Martin Gurri. In 2018 Gurri published a major book, The Revolt of the Public, which argues that the Internet is disrupting modern society and politics as much as the printing press did in the 15th Century. The book influenced us so much that we named our Substack publication after it. (Above, you can see a video that one of us, Leighton, made about it.)The Internet in general, and social media in particular, argues Gurri, mean that the elites can no longer control the public conversation as they once could. They struggle to “manufacture consent.” Anybody can start a Substack or Twitter account, and anybody can go viral. That technological revolution is resulting in political revolutions.
“What you’re seeing [in the Twitter Files] is a reaction to the revolt of the public,” said Gurri, who concludes that the United States needs a truth and reconciliation commission, similar to the one used in South Africa, to get to the bottom of what happened.
In the end, Gurri doesn’t believe we can return to the pre-Internet era of information control. But the Twitter Files, he notes, reveal just how hard they’ve been trying.