The Case for Investigating Anthony Fauci

Elon's Musk has announced that his "pronouns" are "Prosecute/Fauci." This is over the top for me, yet Musk has the right to say this and I have the right to criticize Musk that it's over the top. That's how free speech works. We don't yet know enough to prosecute Fauci. Maybe we never will. Maybe Fauci is completely innocent of the things Musk wants to "prosecute."

I don't know all the facts about Fauci, but I know enough of them to be suspicious. There are a LOT of suspicious facts. I want very much to get to the bottom of this because COVID disrupted the lives of billions of people and hurt or killed millions of them. Since when do we ignore calamitous situations just because someone calls them a conspiracy theory, someone like David Frum (who doesn't understand the import of major media coordinating with the U.S. spy state to squelch the story of Hunter Biden's laptop)? Stevemur wrote an excellent response to Frum:

In invite you to walk through stevemur's thread, step by step, then ask yourself whether you too are suspicious.  Note stevemur's conclusions:

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How the People Expressed Themselves on Twitter

Twitter presented itself as a place where the People speak freely, but Twitter was playing a nefarious instrument. By hitting certain keys, Twitter shut down certain opinions. By hitting others, it opened up the floodgates. This makes it look like the People are speaking, but Twitter tilting the tables to make it look like the losers in many debates were the losers.

And I see that Matt Taibbi recently explained the importance of last night's revelations. These are not "Nothing Burgers," as the media elite try their damndest to shout into cyber-space. These hucksters will do their best to avoid addressing Taibbi's indictment head-on, I guarantee you. Here is one of many from Taibbi's writings today:

ELECTION INTERFERENCE? When @BariWeiss proved once and for all that Twitter does indeed engage in shadow-banning, or what they call “visibility filtering,” it was a significant step forward in our understanding of how internet platforms affect our perception of reality. In this batch of Slacks it’s unmistakeable that Donald Trump — whatever you think of him — was being “visibility filtered” even before the election. One of the first things new Twitter chief Elon Musk brought up with me was the question of whether or not Twitter interfered with elections. “For instance, is this candidate actually more popular than another, or did Twitter put a thumb on the scale?” he asked. Even these first document reviews make it pretty clear Twitter the company did do this. Again, it is very hard to look at these internal discussions and not conclude that the firm interfered with elections.

Now, what we don’t have (yet?) is proof that federal law enforcement or intelligence was heavily involved with electoral questions. We’ve seen individual reports filed from the FBI about smaller political accounts, and we have a sizable pile by now of communications showing that executives like Roth were in regular contact with those agencies. But so far these are just outlines. Nonetheless, they’re significant.

We now have plenty of evidence that those running Twitter and their allies in the elite media saw their job censoring dissent and feeding red meat to their niche audiences, thereby poisoning our conversations, often making them impossible. And doing it for advertising $. I'm reevaluating who is more excellent at hurting Americans for money, Journalists or Big Pharma?

I encourage readers to go to Taibbi's website to read more, following the link to his source materials on his website but mostly on Twitter.

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Matt Taibbi’s Commentary on the Tearing Down of Old Twitter and (Hopefully) its Rebirth

As I've expressed repeatedly on this site (but more often and with detailed substantiation on my website, Dangerous Intersection), I have no little respect for much of what passes as "journalism" at America's best known legacy media outlets. They have repeatedly preached to us and censored dissenting views on major stories instead of letting the facts fall where they may and inviting us to evaluate those facts on our own. That is why trust in major media is at an all time low: only 11% of us have a lot of confidence in our newspapers and television news. For years, Twitter has been the water cooler for those seeking to shape media narratives and jam them down our throat. That is changing and I am ever cognizant of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, along with the gaslighting, I am hearing from the increasingly disempowered "journalists" who have been the most active at censoring. I applaud the efforts of Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and others who are now revealing the many ways in which Twitter has been falsely presenting itself as a forum for free speech.

Today, Matt Taibbi posted background on the ongoing Twitter revelations. I expect that many people will appreciate these revelations but will not comment publicly (though many will applaud these development privately to me, as they have been doing for several years on many contentious issues). I also expect that more than a few people will publicly respond to Taibbi's comments (and my own) with a creative barrage of ad hominem comments--that's exactly what people do when can can't make honest arguments. Every time I see this behavior, I recognize it as stark symptoms of Nietzschean ressentiment. Here is an excerpt from Taibbi's most recent article, "Note to Readers on the "Twitter Files"":

A lot has been made about the line about how I “had to agree to certain conditions” to work on the story. I wrote that assuming the meaning of that line would be obvious. It was obvious. Still, the language was just loose enough to give critics room to make mischief, and the stakes being what they are, they of course did. That’s on me, and a lesson going forward. For the record, the deal was access to the Twitter documents, but I had to publish on Twitter. I also agreed to an attribution (“Sources at Twitter”). That’s it.

Everyone involved with the project, including myself as well as Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, has editorial control. We’ve been encouraged to look not just at historical Twitter, but the current iteration as well. I was told flat-out I could write anything I wanted, including anything about the current company and its new chief, Elon Musk. If anything, the degree of openness on that front freaked me out a little initially, being so far from any other experience I’ve had.

In our initial meeting, Musk talked about how he thought a “full confessional restores faith in the company,” and everything I’ve seen since seems to confirm he’s sincere about his desire for full open-kimono transparency with the public. He says we’re “welcome to look at things going forward, not just at the past,” and until I run into a reason to believe otherwise, I’m taking him at his word. I’d be crazy not to, considering the access we’ve already been given. This is a historic opportunity, and I think we’re all trying to treat that opportunity with the appropriate respect, which among other things means staying as focused as we can be on the documents, and trying to make as much sense of them as we can, as quickly as we can....

In this particular instance, the story has to come out on Twitter. There’s the obvious deep irony of using the familiar drip-drip-drip format and uncontrollable virulality of Twitter to roast Twitter itself. We’re also using an inherently destabilizing medium to expose efforts to turn Twitter into an authoritarian instrument of social control. There’s genius in this. Now I would feel wrong even thinking of doing it any other way.

This is especially the case since a major subtext of the Twitter Files project is what a burn it is on conventional/corporate media, whose minions tried for years to turn Twitter into a giant conformity machine, and cheered each new advance in censorship and opinion control. Those same people now have to watch in helplessness as one horrifying revelation after another spills out, guerrilla-style, into what was not long ago their private playground. This, too, couldn’t be scripted better. It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with.

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Everyone Sometimes Goes Off the Rails: Sam Harris Takes a Pratfall in the Limelight

Some people call the problem "hubris," which makes it sound like it's a problem stemming from conscious conceit. I see the problem as more insidious. The cause is completely silent and invisible, capable of toppling us in broad daylight even when we are trying to be step-by-step careful with our facts and analysis. Daniel Kahneman warned us ever so clearly in Thinking: Fast and Slow.

The silent process by which our thought-process falls off the rails is based on a cocktail that includes confirmation bias (evidence that conflicts with our view of the situation is invisible) and WYSIATI (We tend to focus on the thing in front of us to the exclusion of everything else). Jonathan Haidt warns us that the only way to protect ourselves from the confirmation bias is to engage with a heterodox crowd, constantly and enthusiastically subjecting ourselves to many viewpoints and perspectives, including those we find distasteful and sometimes even odious. Engaging with otherly others is the only way to protect ourselves from falling off the rails. The key is that you can't merely pretend to listen to other viewpoints. You gain nothing by trying to simply look open-minded. You need to consciously entertain those viewpoints and to let those often distasteful challenge your deepest convictions.

I suspect that "hubris" mostly caused by the thought that although other people fall off the rails, we are immune because we are especially smart/careful/creative/self-critical. That overconfidence makes us vulnerable to massive intellectual failures that can only be seen by others, not by ourselves. Sam has been brilliant for many years on many topics. He has engaged with some of the most serious-minded people in the world on complex topics. The paradox is that even though his work serves him well as an intellectual gymnasium, it seems to have given him the false confidence that he was so good that there was no risk that he would fall off the rails. Maybe he assumed that his own impressive intellect (and it has been impressive) did its on self-critical thinking. It often did. But that is not enough. One cannot really also be one's own critics, not day in and day out.

Choosing to test our views by subjecting them to views other other people that we find distasteful is John Stuart Mill 101. Those who fail to do this don't understand the views of anyone else and they don't even understand themselves. JSM: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."

Sam Harris has been running through more than a few stoplights over the past few years. He has often become intensely personal in his attacks against extraordinarily thoughtful people such as Glenn Greenwald and Brett Weinstein. His recent decision to cancel his Twitter account also seems to be a personal attack aimed at Elon Musk's quest to disband most of the censorship department at Twitter.  Sam's recently-expressed hesitance about free speech, however, is a dangerous short-term myopic reaction. Sam didn't appreciate it, but he needed more exposure to more viewpoints that challenged his own. He needed this strong medicine regarding his rigid views on CDC guidance re COVID, for example, something that he finally seemed to admit a few days ago on his visit with Bill Maher on the Club Random podcast. [More ... ]

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