Many excellent demands in Eric Weinstein's Twitter list. It's a long excellent thread. We wouldn't be in this state of desperation if we had a strong and independent news media, one that constantly fails to demand answers to obvious questions. A "news" media that considers that it main job is to do PR for one (or the other) of our two dominant corrupt political parties.
Tweet by Glenn Greenwald citing Pew Surveys:
What do these numbers mean to those people who are thoughtful, who take the time to extrapolate into the future?
You would think colleges and universities would "get" the importance of free speech, especially given that they are so top-heavy with administrators who could study these sorts of things (Yale has 6,000 undergrads but more than 6,000 administrators). Further, many of these universities have law programs. Couldn't the administrators walk across campus and make sure they aren't acting unconstitutionally?
This excerpt is from FIRE's annual list of failing colleges. FIRE is a non-partisan organization dedicated to defending free speech at colleges and universities:
"There’s no shortage of colleges and universities that will go to great lengths to stifle free speech. Some institutions are worse than others, which is why each year for over a decade, FIRE compiles a list of the worst-of-the-worst.
Since our first list in 2011, FIRE has named and shamed 80 institutions in 33 states for actively working to shut down student and faculty speech rights."
Law professor Jason Kilborn is forging ahead in the battle to vindicate academic freedom rights at University of Illinois Chicago, which punished him for a test question that included two redacted slurs.
- University forces professor into sensitivity course that uses the exact same redacted slur in the training materials.
- UIC’s level of hypocrisy and cluelessness boggles the mind.
“UIC crucifies Kilborn for using a redacted slur, then turns around and forces him into anti-racism training that uses that same slur,” said Ronnie London, head of FIRE’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund. “Kilborn is effectively showing up to re-education and being handed his own text.”
The Mission of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE):
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates students, faculty, alumni, trustees, and the public about the threats to these rights on our campuses, and provides the means to preserve them.
Why do so many people distrust the authorities, our "leaders," regarding COVID? Here are some of the reasons collected by Matt Taibbi:
If the fact-checkers are themselves untrustworthy, and you can’t get around the fact-checkers, that’s when you’re really screwed.
This puts the issue of the reliability of authorities front and center, which is the main problem with pandemic messaging. One does not need to be a medical expert to see that the FDA, CDC, the NIH, as well as the White House (both under Biden and Trump) have all been untruthful, or wrong, or inconsistent, about a spectacular range of issues in the last two years.
NIAID director Anthony Fauci has told three different stories about masks, including an episode in which he essentially claimed to have lied to us for our own good, in order to preserve masks for frontline workers — what Slate called one of the “Noble lies about Covid-19.” Officials turned out to be wrong about cloth masks anyway. Here is Fauci again on the issue of what to tell the public about how many people would need to be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity,” casually explaining the logic of lying to the public for its sake:
When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.
We’ve seen sudden changes in official positions on the efficacy of ventilators and lockdowns, on the dangers (or lack thereof) of opening schools, and on the risks, however small, of vaccine side effects like myocarditis. The CDC also just released data showing natural immunity to be more effective in preventing hospitalization and in preventing infection than vaccination. The government had previously said, over and over, that vaccination is preferable to natural immunity (here’s NIH director Francis Collins telling that to Bret Baier unequivocally in August). This was apparently another “noble lie,” designed to inspire people to get vaccinated, that mostly just convinced people to wonder if any official statements can be trusted.
To me, the story most illustrative of the problem inherent in policing “Covid misinformation” involves a town hall by Joe Biden from July 21 of last year. In it, the president said bluntly, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” pretty much the definition of Covid misinformation:
It was bad enough when, a month later, the CDC released figures showing 25% of a sample of 43,000 Covid cases involved fully vaccinated people. Far worse was a fact-check by Politifact, which judged Biden’s clearly wrong statement “half true.”
“It is rare for people who are fully vaccinated to contract COVID-19, but it does happen,” the site wrote. They then cited CDC data as backup. “The data that the CDC collected before May 1 show that, of 101 million people vaccinated in the U.S., 10,262 (0.01%) experienced breakthrough cases.” Politifact’s “bottom line”: Biden “exaggerated,” but “cases are rare.”Anyone paying attention to that story will now distrust the president, the CDC, and “reputable” mainstream fact-checkers like the Pew Center’s Politifact. These are the exact sort of authorities whose guidance sites like the Center for Countering Digital Hate will rely upon when trying to pressure companies like Substack to remove certain voices.
This is the central problem of any “content moderation” scheme: somebody has to do the judging. The only thing worse than a landscape that contains misinformation is a landscape where misinformation is mandatory, and the only antidote for the latter is allowing all criticism, mistakes included. This is especially the case in a situation like the present, where the two-year clown show of lies and shifting positions by officials and media scolds has created a groundswell of mistrust that’s a far bigger threat to public health than a literal handful of Substack writers.
Could some of this problem be lessened if our "Leaders" are required to also state their confidence level whenever they make future statements about COVID?