Strong words on/ from Ioannidis' view of current science:
< Being able to appeal to “hard scientific data” to justify one’s policy choices is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of governments – it is, in fact, the essence of technocracy. However, this means carefully selecting the “science” that is supportive of your agenda – and aggressively marginalising any *alternative views*, regardless of their scientific value.
This has been happening for years in the realm of economics. Is it really that hard to believe that such a corporate capture is happening today with regard to medical science? Not according to John P. *Ioannidis*, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University.
Ioannidis made headlines in early 2021, when he published, with some colleagues of his, a paper claiming that there was *no practical* difference in epidemiological terms, between countries that had locked down, and those that hadn’t. The backlash against the paper – and against Ioannidis in particular – was fierce, especially among his fellow scientists.
This explains his recent scathing denunciation of his own profession. In an article entitled “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science”, Ioannidis notes that most people – especially on the Left — seem to think that science operates based on “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism”.
But, alas, that is not how the scientific community actually operates, Ioannidis explains. With the pandemic, conflicts of *corporate interest* exploded – and yet *talking about* them became anathema.... >
I think Root's analysis overlooks one massive group in the middle class in flyover country who essentially work for the government, and whose interests must therefore always be aligned with the government: teachers. And during the pandemic, the federal government could print any amount of money needed for the fifty states to meet payroll.
I see a phenomenon here in Oregon: the wife works as a teacher in the public schools for the guaranteed income (she can't be fired if she makes it past probation), family health insurance, and pension, while the husband works in the private sector in hopes of striking it rich. Since both parents work, schools are free daycare for them too.
So printing money buys a lot of silence, middle-class silence.
That group need not be "massive" or necessarily monolithic within itself, for it to be disproportionally influential, esp. when joined by other members of the Clerisy, in their mutual disdain for the Yeomanry.
While all that is true, I don't think Root actually misses that. It's simply that, in the big scheme of things, teachers are a relatively small minority. Moreover, the type that you describe--and we have known such--are unlikely to be on board with the teachers unions' social and political agenda.
Who will speak for the middle class? Why bother? There is nobody to talk to. True, the left calculates, as in the next-to last paragraph, " This is how you destroy an economy, make tens of millions of middle-class people unemployed and dependent on government, kill off capitalism, and turn the USA into a socialist nation." It is also how you turn a hundred million middle-class people to regard the government as the enemy, to develop a brand of capitalism as detached from the government as possible, to figure out ways to defend themselves while keeping under the radar and even to prosper. Their children will openly mock the educational system and rather than go to College will educate themselves for essential trades, and on the side maybe self-educate in the Classics which will not be taught in our Universities. They need us. We don't need them. Big Brother and the top echelons will have all the luxuries, while everybody else dependent on government will barely subsist. We 'proles' will have the good life.
"Liberalism has taken on a religious aspect. It’s a belief system, and not a system that represents political interests..."
I think this is both right and wrong, I'd argue that it's both a religion AND a political ideology. To dismiss that is to completely disconnect the level of fanaticism you're actually dealing with.
Then again I also argue both left and right are equally guilty at creating religions from politics. If you tread to far into disagreement with either you end up with the same reaction as challenging sincerely held religious beliefs. Just as both sides suffer from sever political amnesia, else their belief system fails miserably.
After all what is a belief system beyond saying "I think", therefore "I believe", which is almost always followed with therefore "I feel" and "I defend" accordingly.
It's a great means of keeping that pesky reality monster from creeping in and peeing all over ones political saviors.
I'll politely say I disagree and I will use Trump's base as an example because I am a former supporter and I can't speak for the other side.
I kept questioning him while he was in office and excusing some of his poor choices of alignment and association to the complexities of DC governing.
Post election and post office however raised even bigger questions for me and in asking them you very frequently get the false prophet / political amnesia defense response from his base.
Just to explain myself in a few short examples...
Post election support of the party when it became overly obvious that the party in a nationwide effort, burned him. (Republican controlled senates of Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc). Just a few Mitch McConnell like bad leadership apples? My arse! That was a dual party coordinated effort and yet he expects me to believe otherwise.
His continued support of the Covid farce, to date he is still selling that as a positive and bragging about the vaccines his office brought in. How?
His call for boycotting entities for their actions against him like Fox News. But then where did he go for his first post office interview? How do you justify that hypocrisy? To me, you can't there were too many alternatives available.
Jan 6th protestors, the people he personally invited and asked to come to DC to support him. Rather than use his post office position and fund rasing means to get representative legal help he has abandoned them like useless garbage beyond using them as a political talking point. Granted I think those people were VERY naive, I said beforehand it was likely a trap... But both he and the party burned those people in obvious synchronicity.
That for me was the end of the end... Yet many still see him as a political prophet. Not all but many have made themselves cult like believers.
I'm really skeptical if anyone who speaks in terms of left and right anymore. To my ear, sounds like uniparty political theatre speak, it's all been laid bare, our "elite" betters are coming for us, have been coming for us for quite some time. Whatever you want to call them, I don't think right or left does them justice. I think criminal, fraudulent, totalitarian, elitist, neo-gnostic, globalist all fit the bill.
I know many disagree with me but my personal take is they both simply become parties of Progressives.
I state that on the basis that neither party stands for much of anything beyond the government being the only cure and answer to every social ilk we now encounter. Nothing can be left "as is" and both sides seem to agree that if it's not expressly legislated (pro or con) that it must be made so.
Few ask if the government "should" and both masses wrongly cheer for their sides perspective agendas.
We as both a country and society have passed the event horizon. All sides are trapped and I see no way of avoiding the result that's coming.
I do disagree. The tell is that on crucial votes only a minority of GOPers defects. That means that the parties are not the same. The GOP isn't monolithic, and it's not monolithically Uniparty, nor simply progressive either.
Having said that much, I agree that the situation isn't good. The reason is that even most of the solid GOPers vote not on conscious principle but on something more like gut feeling. That's good enough most of the time, but not sufficient all of the time. It leads to squishiness under pressure, a willingness to vote for expedient reasons.
And I say you excuse a whole hell of a lot of fraud and criminality when you reduce everything our elected officials are up to, not to say damn near the rest of the governing class, as a case of becoming more progressive. The uniparty is on cahoots all right, but it ain't for the purpose of ringing in a bra e new progressive era.
It's not YOU I'm skeptical of. It's the knee-jerk Trump bashers ( even after he's out of office!) Who like to pretend he was just some lucky shyster who tricked his way to POTUS and is still dissembling, wasn't CHANGED in any way by the four years as President, nope same old scamming Tycoon, he just somehow managed to stare down official Washington for four years and do everything he could to enact a pretty conservative agenda. Successfully. But he wasn't able to reform the DOJ or the IC or the State Department or congress or the judiciary. What a piker. You want him to take up the cause of the Jan 6 rioters? You maybe need to think about it a little more carefully, and give the man just a little benefit of the doubt, maybe not everything he does is for public consumption, maybe he is supporting them through Mike Lindell or Sidney Powell, they are both still on the job. You don't like them? They're not polished political actors enough for you? Let's cast back to post election when the very same Tucker Carlson was blasting Sidney Powell for promoting conspiracy theories without evidence. Well Sidney Powell is helping the Jan 6 Detainees, same way she helped Gen Flynn. Kinda seems her and Tucker are on the same side now. And what was Jan 6 about? Election 2020. The pantomimes here are sickening but I guess it's our job as citizens to stomach them and strive to do our part to improve the nation and society. One news cycle at a time. Maybe Durham'll clean out the Augean stables.
His difficulties had begun in 2015 with the rise of Donald Trump, a development that provoked a hysterical reaction in the establishment wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, which became far more severe after Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton.
Instead of asking themselves, why they and their policies had grown so unpopular, that a brash outsider who had been massively *outspent* on advertising could win, leading Democrats instead curled themselves into a fetal ball, adopting the lunatic excuse that Russian President Vladimir Putin had arranged Trump’s elevation, somehow managing to overcome their multi-billion-dollar presidential campaign with the help of a few *thousand dollars* of display ads on Facebook.
Only individuals with no *sense of reality*, or no self-respect, could swallow such absurdity with a straight face, but those debilitating conditions turned out to be widespread within our establishment media and political worlds, and this bizarre Russiagate narrative dominated the first couple of years of the Trump presidency, reducing American politics to a *laughingstock*.
Those few prominent journalists such as Greenwald, who refused to endorse such conspiratorial nonsense, and pointed to the total lack of supporting evidence, were increasingly ostracized as heretics, and excluded from most mainstream outlets.... >
Strong words on/ from Ioannidis' view of current science:
< Being able to appeal to “hard scientific data” to justify one’s policy choices is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of governments – it is, in fact, the essence of technocracy. However, this means carefully selecting the “science” that is supportive of your agenda – and aggressively marginalising any *alternative views*, regardless of their scientific value.
This has been happening for years in the realm of economics. Is it really that hard to believe that such a corporate capture is happening today with regard to medical science? Not according to John P. *Ioannidis*, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University.
Ioannidis made headlines in early 2021, when he published, with some colleagues of his, a paper claiming that there was *no practical* difference in epidemiological terms, between countries that had locked down, and those that hadn’t. The backlash against the paper – and against Ioannidis in particular – was fierce, especially among his fellow scientists.
This explains his recent scathing denunciation of his own profession. In an article entitled “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science”, Ioannidis notes that most people – especially on the Left — seem to think that science operates based on “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism”.
But, alas, that is not how the scientific community actually operates, Ioannidis explains. With the pandemic, conflicts of *corporate interest* exploded – and yet *talking about* them became anathema.... >
From Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, at https://unherd.com/2021/11/the-lefts-covid-failure/ .
I think Root's analysis overlooks one massive group in the middle class in flyover country who essentially work for the government, and whose interests must therefore always be aligned with the government: teachers. And during the pandemic, the federal government could print any amount of money needed for the fifty states to meet payroll.
I see a phenomenon here in Oregon: the wife works as a teacher in the public schools for the guaranteed income (she can't be fired if she makes it past probation), family health insurance, and pension, while the husband works in the private sector in hopes of striking it rich. Since both parents work, schools are free daycare for them too.
So printing money buys a lot of silence, middle-class silence.
I'd say that group isn't actually "massive" or necessarily monolithic within itself.
That group need not be "massive" or necessarily monolithic within itself, for it to be disproportionally influential, esp. when joined by other members of the Clerisy, in their mutual disdain for the Yeomanry.
That's not the point Root was trying to make.
While all that is true, I don't think Root actually misses that. It's simply that, in the big scheme of things, teachers are a relatively small minority. Moreover, the type that you describe--and we have known such--are unlikely to be on board with the teachers unions' social and political agenda.
Who will speak for the middle class? Why bother? There is nobody to talk to. True, the left calculates, as in the next-to last paragraph, " This is how you destroy an economy, make tens of millions of middle-class people unemployed and dependent on government, kill off capitalism, and turn the USA into a socialist nation." It is also how you turn a hundred million middle-class people to regard the government as the enemy, to develop a brand of capitalism as detached from the government as possible, to figure out ways to defend themselves while keeping under the radar and even to prosper. Their children will openly mock the educational system and rather than go to College will educate themselves for essential trades, and on the side maybe self-educate in the Classics which will not be taught in our Universities. They need us. We don't need them. Big Brother and the top echelons will have all the luxuries, while everybody else dependent on government will barely subsist. We 'proles' will have the good life.
"Liberalism has taken on a religious aspect. It’s a belief system, and not a system that represents political interests..."
I think this is both right and wrong, I'd argue that it's both a religion AND a political ideology. To dismiss that is to completely disconnect the level of fanaticism you're actually dealing with.
Then again I also argue both left and right are equally guilty at creating religions from politics. If you tread to far into disagreement with either you end up with the same reaction as challenging sincerely held religious beliefs. Just as both sides suffer from sever political amnesia, else their belief system fails miserably.
After all what is a belief system beyond saying "I think", therefore "I believe", which is almost always followed with therefore "I feel" and "I defend" accordingly.
It's a great means of keeping that pesky reality monster from creeping in and peeing all over ones political saviors.
"both left and right are *equally* guilty at creating religions from politics".
Much depends on which left and right you are talking about.
If you mean the Dubya right, yeah. If you mean the Trump right, *far* less so.
If you mean the Greenwald left, not much. If you mean the (huge majority) anti-Greenwald left, hugely so.
I'll politely say I disagree and I will use Trump's base as an example because I am a former supporter and I can't speak for the other side.
I kept questioning him while he was in office and excusing some of his poor choices of alignment and association to the complexities of DC governing.
Post election and post office however raised even bigger questions for me and in asking them you very frequently get the false prophet / political amnesia defense response from his base.
Just to explain myself in a few short examples...
Post election support of the party when it became overly obvious that the party in a nationwide effort, burned him. (Republican controlled senates of Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc). Just a few Mitch McConnell like bad leadership apples? My arse! That was a dual party coordinated effort and yet he expects me to believe otherwise.
His continued support of the Covid farce, to date he is still selling that as a positive and bragging about the vaccines his office brought in. How?
His call for boycotting entities for their actions against him like Fox News. But then where did he go for his first post office interview? How do you justify that hypocrisy? To me, you can't there were too many alternatives available.
Jan 6th protestors, the people he personally invited and asked to come to DC to support him. Rather than use his post office position and fund rasing means to get representative legal help he has abandoned them like useless garbage beyond using them as a political talking point. Granted I think those people were VERY naive, I said beforehand it was likely a trap... But both he and the party burned those people in obvious synchronicity.
That for me was the end of the end... Yet many still see him as a political prophet. Not all but many have made themselves cult like believers.
I'm really skeptical if anyone who speaks in terms of left and right anymore. To my ear, sounds like uniparty political theatre speak, it's all been laid bare, our "elite" betters are coming for us, have been coming for us for quite some time. Whatever you want to call them, I don't think right or left does them justice. I think criminal, fraudulent, totalitarian, elitist, neo-gnostic, globalist all fit the bill.
I know many disagree with me but my personal take is they both simply become parties of Progressives.
I state that on the basis that neither party stands for much of anything beyond the government being the only cure and answer to every social ilk we now encounter. Nothing can be left "as is" and both sides seem to agree that if it's not expressly legislated (pro or con) that it must be made so.
Few ask if the government "should" and both masses wrongly cheer for their sides perspective agendas.
We as both a country and society have passed the event horizon. All sides are trapped and I see no way of avoiding the result that's coming.
I do disagree. The tell is that on crucial votes only a minority of GOPers defects. That means that the parties are not the same. The GOP isn't monolithic, and it's not monolithically Uniparty, nor simply progressive either.
Having said that much, I agree that the situation isn't good. The reason is that even most of the solid GOPers vote not on conscious principle but on something more like gut feeling. That's good enough most of the time, but not sufficient all of the time. It leads to squishiness under pressure, a willingness to vote for expedient reasons.
And I say you excuse a whole hell of a lot of fraud and criminality when you reduce everything our elected officials are up to, not to say damn near the rest of the governing class, as a case of becoming more progressive. The uniparty is on cahoots all right, but it ain't for the purpose of ringing in a bra e new progressive era.
I'm sorry you're so skeptical of me.
It's not YOU I'm skeptical of. It's the knee-jerk Trump bashers ( even after he's out of office!) Who like to pretend he was just some lucky shyster who tricked his way to POTUS and is still dissembling, wasn't CHANGED in any way by the four years as President, nope same old scamming Tycoon, he just somehow managed to stare down official Washington for four years and do everything he could to enact a pretty conservative agenda. Successfully. But he wasn't able to reform the DOJ or the IC or the State Department or congress or the judiciary. What a piker. You want him to take up the cause of the Jan 6 rioters? You maybe need to think about it a little more carefully, and give the man just a little benefit of the doubt, maybe not everything he does is for public consumption, maybe he is supporting them through Mike Lindell or Sidney Powell, they are both still on the job. You don't like them? They're not polished political actors enough for you? Let's cast back to post election when the very same Tucker Carlson was blasting Sidney Powell for promoting conspiracy theories without evidence. Well Sidney Powell is helping the Jan 6 Detainees, same way she helped Gen Flynn. Kinda seems her and Tucker are on the same side now. And what was Jan 6 about? Election 2020. The pantomimes here are sickening but I guess it's our job as citizens to stomach them and strive to do our part to improve the nation and society. One news cycle at a time. Maybe Durham'll clean out the Augean stables.
With limited clout, Greenwald is, in his way, trying.
At https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-giants-silenced-by-pygmies/ are the following vivid views, about GG's efforts to tell truth about RussiaGate:
His difficulties had begun in 2015 with the rise of Donald Trump, a development that provoked a hysterical reaction in the establishment wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, which became far more severe after Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton.
Instead of asking themselves, why they and their policies had grown so unpopular, that a brash outsider who had been massively *outspent* on advertising could win, leading Democrats instead curled themselves into a fetal ball, adopting the lunatic excuse that Russian President Vladimir Putin had arranged Trump’s elevation, somehow managing to overcome their multi-billion-dollar presidential campaign with the help of a few *thousand dollars* of display ads on Facebook.
Only individuals with no *sense of reality*, or no self-respect, could swallow such absurdity with a straight face, but those debilitating conditions turned out to be widespread within our establishment media and political worlds, and this bizarre Russiagate narrative dominated the first couple of years of the Trump presidency, reducing American politics to a *laughingstock*.
Those few prominent journalists such as Greenwald, who refused to endorse such conspiratorial nonsense, and pointed to the total lack of supporting evidence, were increasingly ostracized as heretics, and excluded from most mainstream outlets.... >