Tulsi Gabbard Blasts Gender Ideology

Tulsi Gabbard now has a show. In this episode, Gabbard makes a powerful case that many teachers and medical professionals are betraying and permanently harming our children. The first 12 minutes of this video including video of many of these professionals spouting dangerous gender ideology. This includes several doctors who work at Boston Children's Hospital.

At minute 12, Tulsi talks with Chloe Cole, a young women who got caught up in gender ideology, At the encouragement of others, she came to believe that she was a boy named Leo at the age of 13. Two years later, she underwent a double mastectomy. After the surgery, Chloe felt a deep sense of regret. On November 10, Chloe announced that she had secured attorneys to bring a lawsuit against those who misled her.

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The Biggest Dangers of Tribes

What should you make of the fact that you are passionate about your position on an issue?

Is that passion justified by real world facts and a careful and conscious cost/benefit analysis? Or did unconsciously adopt your position as a result of becoming a member of a tribe? Did social pressures and desires nullify your intellectual defenses to bullshit, allowing rickety beliefs to find a welcoming space in your head? Did you aggressively attack your new position, making sure that it is solid? Or did it slip in like the trojan horse after your sentries became completely distracted by their cravings to be liked (and not disliked) by others? After all, because called "inappropriate" "misguided," "a tool for the [bad people]" or "racist" hurts, especially when done in public arenas. Those slings and arrows take a toll and they have put Americas institutions at great risk. It takes a special person to be able to shake off those accusations and stay true your need to hyper-scrutinize all issues, especially your own position on those issues.

It takes courage and strength to constantly attack your own ideas and it needs to be constant because truth-seeking is never-ending work. And it's not enough to try as hard as you can to be skeptical of your own ideas, because we are blind to the problems with our own thought process.

We know this for sure, based on the work of many scientists who have studied the confirmation bias, including Jonathan Haidt:

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

From The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

You can't cure this problem alone. You need to expose yourself to viewpoints you find distasteful or even odious. That is the only solution because the confirmation bias is that strong. You cannot see the problem as long as you are clinging only to your favorite sources of information. You need quit being a coward and engage with people and ideas that challenge you. You need to visit websites and read books that you would rather not. That is your only chance to test your ideas, identify those that work and don't work. This need to constantly expose your thoughts to the marketplace of ideas was described with precision by John Stuart Mill (and see here). Recently, Jonathan Rauch has taken a deep dive on this challenge in his excellent book, The Constitution of Knowledge.

There will be many who read this who say "I'm not concerned because I am immune to both dumb things and the pressures of tribes." They are wrong to be complacent for two reasons.

Reason One: People think they are immune because they feel certain that they have things right. They feel this way even though ALL OF US change our opinions over time. We are guaranteed to change our views in the future just as we have in the past, but we don't remember how much we change over time.  We simply sit there smug and certain that we've got things figured out at each present moment. What is that feeling of certainty worth? Nothing, as explained by Robert Burton, in his book, On Being Certain.

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How the CIA Convinces Lazy Journalists to do its Bidding

Ed Snowden: "The most important video of the year was filmed in 1983. The entire thing is much longer, but *entirely* worth the watch. The government sued Snepp in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled intelligence workers had to submit any statement for censorship, even those unrelated to secrets."

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The Long Slow Demise of Twitter

Walter Kirn has personally and repeatedly seen the corruption of Twitter. An excerpt from his article at Common Sense:

My forebodings were confirmed with the launch of the “Russiagate” investigation. I doubted its premises highly from its inception, but when I voiced these doubts on Twitter curious things occurred. My tweets on the subject, my followers reported, often were invisible to them, and yet, to my eye, they drew engagement. Strange. The Twitter users who “liked” my tweets tended to have tiny followings, I found, and they didn’t follow me. Their profile photos were often stock images. I ran an experiment one night and sent out a tweet of a controversial nature which I expected would be suppressed or screwed with, and then, when it was, I used screenshots of the mischief to prove to my followers that Twitter was dishonest.

I looked crazy. Concerned DMs arrived. One accused me of grandiosity for thinking I mattered enough to provoke intervention from on high. Innocence about Twitter still prevailed then; its cheerful bluebird logo still charmed the public mind. We had yet to learn, as we finally did this week (in a manner which confirmed my worst suspicions) of the hidden but direct coordination between Twitter’s management and the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, to suppress and guide opinion on topics from war to public health. (“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is cognitive infrastructure,” one government official put it.)

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CDC Misconduct and Coverup

For two years I have been amazed at the news media's non-interest in the origin of the COVID virus, especially given my presumption that many news outlets serve as the lapdog for the U.S. government. Here is a summary of where we are, as well as an itemized list of significant events, including what appear to be cover-ups of the lab origin story. First, from Reason Magazine, Zach Weisssmueller and Regan Taylor have this to say (this is an excerpt) in their article, "The Lab Leak Deception: Public Officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp":

Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.

More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.

"Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically," says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It's also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.

The above article refers us to this timeline compiled by Emily Kopp: "Timeline: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." Here are some excerpts:

In February 2020 — about a month before a pandemic had been declared — five top virologists huddled to examine aspects of a rapidly emerging coronavirus that seemed primed to infect human cells. (The furin cleavage site kept one virologist up all night.) A few days later, they concluded the virus had not been engineered. In March, their conclusions were published in Nature Medicine.

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