In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee about the Twitter Files, a few words about why state-funded "anti-disinformation" and free speech can't coexist
"Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy."
This is the money quote that needs to be spread far and wide. Absolute truth.
Whether wayward or morally unmoored (I think many career politicians have themselves become unmoored), protecting Hunter from consequence promotes the pernicious idea that the elite and those connected to them don’t have to be subject to the laws to which the rest of us are held accountable. In Hunter’s case, his father may have become complicit. If the law looks the other way in their case, we have no rule of law. If the public media is complicit by also looking the other way, we have no check and balance on the elite with whom the media identify.
Don’t forget 10% for the Big Guy. Joe is right there with Hunter. He lied about not knowing anything about his son’s foreign business dealings and people have corroborated this info in person and in emails, photographs of meetings.
As of this moment, it would appear that Garland's DOJ and Wray's FBI are dutifully slow-walking (i.e. looking the other way) the "investigation" of Hunter's dealings, and the MSM remains silent (i.e. looking the other way) on the matter. Both DOJ and the FBI, unfortunately, appear to be treating it as a back-burner matter for which the outcome is already known (internally, I am told, the outcome HAS already been determined, much as Hillary's email scandal "investigation" conclusion was drafted long before the initial interviews were even conducted). Neither Garland nor Wray suffer any personal consequences by ignoring the matter, as Biden isn't going to fire them for doing nothing, and half the country already believes that it is all disinformation promoted by the MAGA cult - since that is the only story their MSM sources have peddled since the day Hunter's laptop showed up.
If there is nothing to hide, if Joe isn't a co-recipient of Hunter's graft, then common sense suggests that the proper agencies and MSM simply dig in and prove Biden's innocence, but they haven't done that for reasons that are all too apparent to those who are keen observers of the dynamics of belief in today's age of government-curated misinformation and disinformation.
I really think the very unfortunate truth here is the country I love, we love has a government that is no less corrupt than any other 3rd world banana republic. The difference is this one hold most of the cards and almost all of the power.
What you are describing is a precursor to a revolution if not fixed and corrected. The DOJ is corrupt and the FBI owned by the Democrat Party while other agencies choose sides against the voting public. How is one to fix this problem? Some say violent revolution, others say the voting booth. With rigged elections the side that appears to be winning is probably the wrong side. Democrats need to either be voted out or physically removed from the offices of government. They are currently criminals violating their oath of office to protect the Constitution. Most are far leftists tyrants. With no real DOJ what is to be done?
I believe it was Frederick Douglass who said that our liberties are held in four boxes. The soap box, which at this stage has been broken up and burned to warm the toes of the not free press, the jury box,which has been corrupted by money from people like soros, the ballot box, which is a bad joke, and the cartridge box. The only box a freeman can access currently and have equal access to for now, is the fourth box. So yeah, violent revolution is coming. Somehow these cretins in the halls of Washington think thus going to work in their favor. I will die to see that isn't so. And at my age, it's the least I can do.
I imagine that it's quite easy for children of privilege to become "morally unmoored."
Dwelling on Hunter's unmoored morals seems to fall into the MSM narrative trap that the laptop story is about a dutiful dad dealing with a drug addicted son when the important part, emails detailing lucrative influence peddling by a sitting VP & his family in an area we are sinking billions into, is the real story that keeps getting obscured by the fog created by Hunter's cracked out hook-ups with hookers.
I will also bet that, in the history of men, drugs & their penises, the things that Hunter did, other than obsessively filming everything, really weren't all that odd or original.
And, these days, the filming part probably isn't very original either.
The thing is, for me personally, I don’t give a shit about his drug use or him banging hookers. Literally zero fucks given. What does concern me is the fact he was on the board of Burisima (I’ve heard Pelosi’s and Romney’s kid were also not sure if that’s true).
Seems like all this is connected: Trump is a Russian asset, Nuland saying “Fuck the EU”, a CIA color revolution in Ukraine, Daddy’s Ball applied to geopolitics, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Hunter was a useful idiot because of his name. He even said as much himself. Everyone knows what he did, how he peddled his name to enrich himself and his family. No one can or will do anything about it. Different rules for Bidens and other politicians.
Hey, back in the day my buddy & I used to sell weed & hash to one of your sister Dominatrixes. She was cool as hell. Her stories about belittling rich guys for money were hilarious.
I agree with Kenneth Lodge that Hunter is far MORE than just a 'wayward son' whose dad loves him. How about he's a danger to national security by selling access to our White House and state secrets whose Dad profits from? Puh-leeze! Other comments you made I can somewhat agree with.
I have always felt that Matt is one of the few people out there who is not in it for the money. That fact explains why he stands out from the crowd as a journalist.
Over 1,000,000 people assembled in Washington DC to protest the legitimacy of the 2020 vote count, 1,000 of them tresspassed on Capitol grounds, and a smaller number engaged in vandalism and violence.
Of course we can, as well as redefine some of the “peaceful protests” of the past? We somehow have to stop mixing hydrochloric acid with sodium hydroxide to make salt water. There are less ideological paths to get to a middle ground, which takes compromise and discussion. If you want to make statements like that, go to MSNBC or Fox. Otherwise, I appreciate any thoughtful discourse on this or any other topic you want to discuss.
Mike, truth be told, we have no idea--not really--what happened on January 6, or why. So I think we need to refrain from naming it, for now. Need to keep an open mind on these things until all the facts come out.
Nah, I saw a riot. That was only part of the story but I'm not going to be like one of those libtards who can't say when people are acting criminally because it might be *their* people. If I went to the Capitol today I would have to go through security and not have free roam of the building, especially private offices. If we want to bitch about idiots on the left we should hold ourselves to our own standards of behavior. They never will, but I don't want to be like them.
Eyre, you are zealously attempting to create a destructive narrative. It was a demonstration that got out of hand due to the FBI’s et al., premeditated involvement (See Twitter files for one precedent but there are many more). It was deliberately manipulated to make Trump and Republicans look bad. The true facts will eventually come out in the end. It’s well understood that the deep state is trying to destroy the Republican party any way they can and create a Uniparty to serve Americans up to China on a plate and hand over the the keys. This is a globalist agenda. The senators that criticized Tucker for revealing unshared videos are globalists. Thank you Tucker for putting their names and faces up on your show so we know who they are and can have them all voted out of office.
Thank you to Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other reporters on Substack that are helping to improve honest reporting . Also a huge thank you to Elon Musk.The Democratic Senators at yesterday’s hearing were an embarrassment to America. It was a stunning group display of imbecility with no known antidote. If Pfizer performed directed evolution research on their collective stupidity, they might end up with a cackling fool. Oh, wait, it’s already been done - our vice president!
What's up, Fedpsar? Haven't heard from you in a while. I thought your handlers might have sent you to the gulag for insufficient revolutionary fervor. ; )
"Most sentient beings have a pretty damn good idea about "what happened on Jan 6."
Well, most people think they know what happened...that's 'cuz your side propagandized them them with cherry-pciked, edited BS. But the truth is coming out.
Exactly remember the cnn reporting on antifa and blm riots of ‘20? I believe they coined the phrase “Mostly peaceful but firey.” Seriously? They burned businesses attacked and murdered people all over the country yet the J6 thing led by many provocateurs (remember Ray Epps?) was an insurrection by maga terrorist. And yesterday through FOIA we find out that there were several calls between Epps and Pelosi the weeks leading up to the event. I rest your case.
You summed it well. Much of what has been pushed by the government and its closest supporters is an absolute. But as we've found in many cases, the truth can be complex.
Yet those in power, whether by intent or by design, fall into the "all or nothing" trap and push that without concern for what may actually be true.
That's why open discussion is important. It's the only way we do the best possible job of determining what is actually true.
A woman was murdered by a Capital Police Officer. Had she been African American and he a white officer he would have already been sentenced to jail for murder. Yet this coward was almost carried on the shoulders of the Democrats on the 1/6 farce hearings. But she was just a MAGA supporter and counted for nothing in their sick minds.
The video of government operative Ray Epps is definitive...he definitely was a primary instigator of the breech of the Capitol. Yet he was never charged or even arrested. The FBI has admitted that there were other undercover agents in the crowd that day, without specifying how many.
This is the real story that needs to come out. That day may be coming.
Those videos need to be amplified. Epps is seen the night before - January 5 - trying to incite a crowd of people who are just having a good time. He gets shouted down for being a Fed. If somebody had knocked his teeth out that night this country could have been saved a lot of trouble.
Exactly. I saw enough videos of Epps to realize he was probably planted there to incite things. There was even a video of people accusing him of that. He has not been publicly questioned. There's enough video out there of specifically and clearly him that he should have been one of the FIRST of the protesters to be rounded up. I don't understand why these basic facts are ignored by so many. It's pretty clear in my mind what he was doing, and I'll believe that until shown otherwise. Meanwhile, Epps remains at home or wherever he is hiding out, unquestioned, unchallenged, never in the MSM. And people don't find this suspicious? I would guess that the MSM readers/watchers have no idea Epps even exists, though. By design.
Hunter maybe a wayward son but he is in cahoots with his father to profit from illegal and unethical influence peddling that under normal circumstances (not involving a sitting VP and now President) would be sad and worthy of sympathy.
Levity, Satire and Irish Gallows Humor make for tremendous coping mechanisms. This is serious shit, and it's sad that it has come to this, but I am thrilled that Matt is involved, genuine and unafraid.
You’re right! If AOC had her way any twitter hecklers would immediately be banned for making jokes at her expense. It’s is both a bad and amazing time to be alive. It’s as though there’s a great awakening around the world and because the veil has been lifted it’s nearly impossible, even for those that don’t pay attention to politics or current events, for people to not be aware of what’s happening.
Actually it’s very possible for those who don’t pay attention to politics or current events to not be aware of what’s happening. Here, there and everywhere.
And regarding all this Taibbi stuff, that would encompass 99% of all humanity.
You have 90% of the media outlets lying everyday about the events of 1/6 and many, many other things. The average person actually believes dopes on CNBC, MSNBC and morning Joe. The View is a news show for many ignorant and uninformed people. America is a sad place where truth goes to die.
I went to get my hair done yesterday. I think the gal that does my hair is fairly main stream, and I like her in general, and how she does my hair, so we don’t talk politics. She mentioned the many train accidents lately., but hadn’t heard about the Ohio one that is causing so much chemical damage.
I told her it was worth looking up, and quickly changed the subject to my niece’s ultrasound that shows twins. The details in these new ultrasounds could SAVE babies. They are amazingly clear and show the actual baby that no one could credibily call a fetus, making it harder to justifiably kill.
Stuff like this is precisely why we need to organize better using technology. We The People need to create our own Decentralized 4th branch of government that holds the other branches accountable.
I was GOING to say,perhaps we should get Marianne Williamson to work with the GOP, to meditate and “conger” Franklin and oher great leaders, so we could hear it from them directly.
But that would be making sport of Ms. Williamson, and it’s Lent, so I won’t say it.
Amen. Thanks for all your work Matt. I really don't know where we would be right now without people like yourself, Aaron Mate, Sy Hersh, and a handful of others.
Thank you, Matt, for your courage, tenacity and moral clarity. Excellent opening statement - I hope the committee understands the dire straits we are in.
Agree 100%!!!! I also think he masterfully exposed some of the Dems wanting to go after his sources for the mean little totalitarian children they are. Maybe Matt can add a tip jar like locals? It’d be full today.
As a former journalist in a land far away, I hold political asylum in the U.S., given to me due to the prosecution and persecution I suffered sometimes three decades ago. You guys (Americans) can't even fathom how incredibly free & diverse, mesmerizing in fact, this country looked like to a guy like me, to someone who admired this magical land from afar, for decades.
Not only the power, the richness of the culture but for a journo living in me, the names like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Hunter R. Thomson, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were a stuff of legend. What a country. The "people are being created equal", "right to pursue happiness," the American Dream. I was truly happy here. I thrived. I loved the land. I crossed it three times by a car, I zig-zaged it... always in awe. Be it the Grand Canyon, the Central Park in NY, the Petrified Forest, Jeez, a miracle after a miracle.
I am not too naive - I know that the real story of America (at least to me) is not only in Hollywood or Wall Street, neither you can find it in Pentecostal fanaticism nor even in is baseball, you can find it in American pain, the pain you find as you listen to Johnny Cash while driving the Route 66 and than all the way up to less insane Portland and back.
I've been moderately rich in this country. I've been homeless in this country. I knew the rat people of New York City subways, the city I used to love and admire but now avoid; I walked the Sunset Boulevard in L.A. but never ready to accept that the dreams can really be broken. No!!, not in this land that supports you, not among the people that would encourage you to pursue your dream, no mater how insane it might seem.
I've been famous back home but when everything was stolen from me and I ended up on the streets of New York during coldest winter in February, the help I was given was not coming from the place that knew my name, nope, I was given help by the Americans I barely knew. Loans, gifts, jobs, everything just to get back on my feet. I'd be eternally grateful to this land and the people I was lucky to encounter.
Now, in the clutches of incomprehensible madness some call "woke" and some neo-Maoist Cultural Revolution, with almost every single institution being completely corrupted, de facto betraying all American principles that made it great, I look at the country I am unable to recognize.
How did you guys manage to piss away your freedoms, and soon it seems, your wealth and your happiness is beyond me. Average bridges in this country are 68 years old. When I was a kid I listened -- in awe -- my father's stories (he was an engineer) about the Golden Gate Bridge. He did not live to cross it walking, but after he had died I did it for him.
I crossed the Golden Gate, weeping. Not only for my father, but for the land we all are losing, willingly giving it away to most corrupt, ghoulish psychopath one can imagine. America of today -- I can hardly believe I write this -- is more difficult, psychologically, to live in, that was my own, under the communism or under the grenades during the war. We had hope, we fought, we knew it would not last forever.
In today's America I don't see true will to fight and I witness a vanishing hope. I do not know this land anymore, despite these few people like Matt Taibbi that keep the light flickering. I am so sorry.
I am also a refugee from a communist country and can subscribe to your sentiment. I was very young when I decided to leave and spent my youth under the magnifying glass and in the paws of their so called “law enforcement”. Scary memories. I was naive because this country looked so rosy from the other side of the iron certain. Still it was a dream come true. I cannot express enough gratitude to this country for allowing me to be myself - to work hard and to be rewarded, but mostly to think and act in harmony with my inner self without fear of persecution or being ostracized. All this is gone now: the government that lies to its people and censorship feel like dejavu. I tell myself that at least I had years of being enormously happy. Never for a minute did I regret my decision to come here, no matter how hard it was at times. But the irony of my life journey making a full circle!
Heroes and dissidents are always rare. Thank you, Matt, for stepping up, for your courage and dedication to truth.
Déjà vu of our second lives, while so scarily similar to what's going on here, is insane.
I gave a talk about my experiences back home - it was at the AU Austin, TX back in 1996 - and I noticed one guy that was especially interested in what I was saying. At the party afterwards (far away from the academic setting) he approached me , tipsy a bit, and told me, with so much pain in his voice: "I never had a fu*king problem in my life!", as the biggest tragedy ever.
I often thought about it. It seems to me that America has lost her appetite for heroic efforts a long time ago. Look at the "heroes" from the "Time" Magazine cover pages - Bill Gates, even Dr. Mengele or not so far back, the "Masters of Universe," all those Financial Crime Cartel's thieves. Or that sycophant servant of the U.S. military that's The Hero of all Heroes, in Ukraine. (I lived there also, it breaks my heart but not to the point of blinding me)
On individual basis, with demise of religion (having God de facto replaced by Moloh) and destruction of family, it appears that America / its people, all of us / is going through an identity crisis of biblical proportions. No matter how insane woke BS is, all those kids, suddenly "trans" with "bunny" and "zir" pronouns are really searching for their own identity because their own identity as an American was taken from them. Even worse, the hero journey was stolen from them. They have nowhere to go.
So, what's left? Self-righteous madness of a society in which my ignorance is equal to your knowledge?
You can't rebel against an iPhone if it gives you the music you like. Or the Internet that feeds you garbage. You became an extension of your iPhone and a grotesque clown imitating garbage some degenerate is spewing from the screen, under the guise of "love" for yourself.
I can't see anything else but madness, rabies on all levels, as the American destiny. With beyond insane proxy war against Russia, plans to go to war with China, with Iran as a perpetual enemy, the madness of money-grubbing, blood-thirsty freaks will take us all down.
Unless the people start reading Matt, of course. A smiley here.
Trygve, yes, the cultural landscape of our country is frighteningly surreal. I am undecided if it is an early stage of Stalinist/Maoist regime or the last decadent days of the dying Roman Empire. We are not alone in this. Feels like the entire West is committing a collective suicide. But I don’t want to be a doom sayer. That this Substack is here and that intelligent people still exchange ideas in a mostly civil manner gives me hope. How long until we are banned or rounded up? 😀 What is discouraging is, as someone commented here, none of the recent revelations made a difference. People shrug off facts and prefer to remain in their bubble. Nothing can pop it: not the Russian collusion criminal enterprise, not suspicious business activity of Biden family, not news of COVID origin or vaccination side effects, and we know the list is endless. If none of this changed people’s position, what’s next?
Just an observer, to some extent I share your despair that facts appear irrelevant to all too many people.But we cannot give up the struggle or give up on hoping for a better future. And I do think that a change is coming. This comment thread is evidence of that. I do think this burgeoning awareness will, in time, spread to the larger population.
I believe I'd rather encounter Trygve's "madness and rabies on all levels" than the "burgeoning awareness" you say is free-flowing from these here Racket threads. And you're threatening the "larger population" with it too.
A Congresswoman Stacey E. Plaskett earlier today called Matt Taibbi "a co-called journalist". During his testimony. And her, Despicable side would cheer that rude clown (not that the Repulsive side is much better) for it. What I see here looks much more like the Stalinist/Maoist regime and its Cultural Revolution than anything else.
And what you wrote - "What is discouraging is, as someone commented here, none of the recent revelations made a difference" - is something I truly can't wrap my head around. And I have been, literally, hunted by the people of the same mindset. I had to hide, for months, witnessing hysteria that took the whole small country over one damn article of mine. Not even a good one at that.
And yet, despite all the personal experiences I can't understand. The mind boggles. That's perhaps my immigrant's love for America that blinds me in front of the obvious.
Trygve, I've lived in the US my whole life and can scarcely believe what is happening now. On the other hand, decades of neo-Marxist infiltration of our institutions--academic, corpporate, cultural, etc--has had a terrible consequence.
Ironically, a quote from Mao seems appropriate in this context" "it is always darkest before it is totally black." But after that total darkness, a new day must dawn. Maybe that is what we are on the verge of now.
Despite my fears that the flicker of hope would be lit by nuclear blasts, if there's a country with some hope left, that's the U.S.
Why? When the madness started - don't ask me when - I told a friend that the only hope Americans have could be found along the lines of George Carlin's "Life is Worth Losing" show. I said something like, Americans live in an illusion of freedom etc., (comparatively you can't find more more freedoms, but I spoke about corporatism, tax burdens, mortgages, health care, student loans chains squeezing the young people necks...) but once the powers that be start taking it away from them they'd be fully awake and would want it back.
On the other hand, decades of theorists (conspiracy trafficers) boorishly conjuring neo-Marxist hobgoblins at regular intervals and imagining them infiltrating our institutions like so many Transylvania vampires has been a reasonably amusing diversion to our politics as usual.
I'll add from the philosophy of Jake the Dog from Adventure Time: “To live life, you need problems. If you get what you want the minute you want it, then what's the point of living?”
This is the problem of this society-- it's too easy. Of course, one can point to suffering happening. Some of that is inescapable, though some act like it should be. Like the idle rich, we have a large swathe of the population that has no goals or challenges and is going loopy for the lack of them. Even the human body needs the adversity of running hard or plunging into cold water to keep itself in good running order.
As a fellow eastern European, I thank God that my parents had the nerve to escape that.
I've been saying that life in our society is too easy for a long time, too. When there are no real problems of survival to solve, you make stuff up. And here we are. It's why I say the solution to fixing society is to re-animate sabretooth tigers and put them on the prowl. There's be a lot less time for complaining how somebody got your pronouns wrong if you were busy hiding from a sabretooth tiger!
I know and have known 2 people who were bitten by a great white shark. One survived one did not. Brutal death. Did those keep me from paddling out? No. When you cherish freedom sooooo much you will do stuff that fraidy cats can’t fathom. I am not proud of that for I adhere to the seven deadly sins principle and that is the first one. I have been fortunate, but have done my ‘wax on wax off’ to hopefully increase my odds of survival. I have taken some hard falls in street life and leisure as well. What a beautiful world we live in as violent and unrelenting as it can be. Drinking beer. I apologize for running on.
Thank you. This modern medium of communication that we all participate in has many *sides*, many flavors….. many moralities. Until discernment becomes the responsibility of the individual social order will always be vulnerable. Yes, where are the heroes, the brave….? Love your description of Zelensky ! I call him the ‘fund raiser’. Good stuff Trygve!
It’s a great irony that the wokist’s riposte to those who want secure borders is that “this country was built by immigrants”, that is true only to the extent that it was built by immigrants like you, Trygve, (and their descendants) rather than people like them.
I am descended from Immigrants that came here in the early 1600's for religious freedom..... I have raised my children to think of themselves as Americans.... follow all laws, pay your taxes, be good citizens, follow the US Constitution.... We are a minority.
It’s what happens when people don’t understand how fragile everything is in this world. We are three generations now removed from my grandparent’s generation who grew up during a depression and then we’re shipped off to a world war. We take for granted the rights we have as if they’ve just always been there, not ever realizing that they can be taken away so fast.
@Trygve your comment resonates with me. I wish more of our own people appreciated what we have instead of finding stupid ways to destroy it.
In my former newspaper, after one of my columns, the government sent a Deputy of Interior Ministry (de facto a police force) to be our new President of the Board, some dictatorial BS like that, not sure about his intended function.
We, writers barely able to hold a gun, took arms, we literally had guns and riffles with us ready to die for our rights to write what we thought was the truth. It was gloriously pathetic for we would stood no chance even against a few policemen, not to mention a small army team, but there was no other way in our minds. We would've never, ever accepted to bow down.
When I look at the so-called journalists in America of today, all these shameless sycophants to The Party, in almost all mass media propaganda rugs, my blood boils. They even dare to attack Matt Taibbi and his integrity, cowardly bastards. They rub their shoulders with the powerful instead of holding them to account. To be a willing participant in destruction of your own country, the same place that gave you fame and wealth (for they are, unlike us, famous, not infamous, rich, not poor) is, in my estimation, a betrayal. A betrayal of the land, of its principles, of its goodness (I am aware how bad is the Empire but you know what I mean), of its people, of their own profession, of the Constitution, of our common future, of humanity as a whole; a betrayal that' would be hardly forgivable if the U.S. ever gets out of this mess.
But I will leave you with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his speech "A World Split Apart" delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University (it doomed him):
"At present, some Western voices already have spoken of obtaining protection from a third power against aggression in the next world conflict, if there is one. In this case the shield would be China. But I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. First of all, it is again a doomed alliance with Evil; also, it would grant the United States a respite, but when at a later date China with its billion people would turn around armed with American weapons, America itself would fall prey to a genocide similar to the in Cambodia in our days.
And yet -- no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being."
Trygve, thanks for the Solzhenitsyn quote. If I may say so, I think you might be a Solzhenitsyn for our time.
The Solzhenitsyn quote that comes to my mind is one from the post-Soviet era of relative freedom. Goes roughly like this: "Under Communism, nothing was published and everything mattered. Now, everything is published, and nothing matters."
But it could be that America in 2023 is our time of samizdat, i.e., a time when the suppression of dissenting views makes them all the more precious. Matt's work falls in that cafegory, as does, I think, yours.
In my novel, edited for proper English, titled "Tycho Brahe Secret" I play with the idea of societal healing. I call it "New Athens", a concept that's not crucial for the main plot but in which the people abandon this evil, corrupt and, frankly, incurable system by creating a parallel world for themselves.
The Cultural Revolution that's taking place in America has their insane "different way of knowing" so why not create a different way of living for ourselves? No one could cure Yale or Google during our lifetimes. Their obsession with Transhumanism is a direct predecessor to all kind "trans..." nonsense on a way to Perdition. ("demoralization" phase from old KGB books)
I've been thinking about Camus a lot lately --> “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” he wrote in The Myth Of Sisyphus . To Camus, “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” I’d like to argue the point that our collective suicide, be it total annihilation of life through the nuclear war or our slow demise through the climate change and adjunct fraud that goes with frightening people (and making trillions out of it) that would torn the society apart at the seams, is not the only truly serious problem (philosophical or otherwise) facing the humanity anymore. We're going mad.
Speaking in quotes: “What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light.” (Marshall McLuhan)
Hell yes, a cynic might even declare that annihilation of humankind would be a bliss for the Earth and all of its living creatures. (a frightening number of my friends think that's a good idea) While the humans do not seem to have achieved a pinnacle of rational behaviour capable of critical thinking as of yet, they have been rather vicious and unnecessarily cruel since they crawled out of their primordial caves and discovered technology. We went on, merrily killing animals and other humans alike with our first invention, a stone axe. A stone’s throw later and here we are: as our technology has made us indisputable masters of all living creatures on Earth, we’re dancing on the brink of extinction like there’s no tomorrow. And who leads this insanity?
Again, our own society. Our deranged, pathetic puppets, so-called "leaders" in worse mental shape than Soviet Politburo at the pinnacle of its senility.
Intercontinental nuclear missiles, like ghastly birds of doom wait for the plague of human madness to awaken them from their decades long slumber and fire them off to obliterate some happy city . Our pollution of Biblical proportions slowly suffocates and poisons the Mother Earth in a gruesome orgy of suicidal matricide. And we, mindless puppets on the strings put Ukraine's flag in our social profiles, go on parroting "Slava Ukraini" or whatever nonsense MSN is peddling and disregard our very future.
So yes, if we continue letting "them" to call Matt fucking Taibbi a "so-called journalist" like that psychopath ghoul in the Senate did earlier today it might not be a tomorrow.
PS Could not resist but to quote myself on the topic of "different way of knowledge", from "Tycho Brahe...":
"... a one-time US president from the annus horribilis of the second decade of the 21st Century, a man later deleted from history books by the Presidential Decency Act of 2036 (PDA-36) and thereafter known only as the Orange Menace, used “winning” as his mantra. Since the PDA-36 had also bravely “dismantled the white supremacy culture in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture by creating the Culturally Sustaining Math Space and Ethnomathematics,” no one in America seemed to be capable of counting to hundred any more.
Or noticing that the US had its 43rd, 44th, 46th, 47th and 48th presidents, but not the 45th, for all that it matters. The number 45 has hurt many people’s feelings so it was therefore put on an Exclude List, f.k.a. “blacklist,” a term also banned, where it now resides with the Orange Menace in a deserved eternal shame..."
Trygve, this fragment hints at what you--and every other survivor of totalitarian regimes--has to offer in our current struggle against a totalitarian regime--not an exaggeration. You and the others who have stared down tryanny and lived to tell about it, are the natural leaders of our resistance in the US to tyranny today.
No doubt you never imagined that you would have to oppose two tyrannies in one lifetime--but life is funny in that way, isn't it?
I lived in Santa Monica, CA during Obama's first presidential campaign. I immediately saw through him (he voted "present" in the most of his state senate votes and stabbed his political mentor in back) and told them, random people there who wanted to talk, that.
Immediately I was called a racist. Come on, get real & screw you guys, my granny was a real slave as 6 y.o. and I lived in a country without black people so I don't give a damn about your white guilt. Fast forward to today and I see the people that never had slaves knelling in front of the people that were never slaves. (including their families going back hundreds of years...)
What fresh hell is that I wonder, daily. But than I recall a guy, smarter than myself, a deep thinker who told me, a minute after I called John McCain a "deranged warmongering fascist" (nowadays everyone is a "fascist," then it was fresh) but scolded Obama for his empty babbling ('we're the change we've been waiting for," give me freaking break) that I am worse than "my guy McCain." (!???)
"I just called him a deranged warmongering fascist so how did you conclude I am on his side?" Because I don't like "your guy"?
That was my first insight into what's to come. Total inability to have a real conversation. Tyranny phase is just around the corner.
Beautifully stated, and so very true. I especially like your characterization of journalists as "shameless sycophants to The Party". I have read more than a few young "journalists" who said they view their jobs as "activists", and that has become abundantly clear. They no longer follow the basic tenets of true journalism, nor did they ever even learn what those basic tenets actually are, or were. What is odd about this, is that so much of the reading public continues to believe journalists are following the traditional journalistic rules and thus believe everything they read is the absolute truth. Solzhenitsyn has imparted a lot of wisdom to the world, which the world mostly ignores.
We pissed/are pissing it away by embracing illiberal ideologies AT THE EXPENSE of conservative (little c) ideals. That, and remaining in a media fueled bubble that has resulted in atrophying our intelligence and experience. Truth is, most Americans never see anywhere else in the world, so they have ZERO comprehension of a perspective like yours. Worse yet, those that do travel around a bit most often due so as tourists while on vacation, so their experiences are packed into a suitcase, etc.
Good luck today. I’ll be thinking about you and Michael, sending you courage. Thank you for protecting free speech and for “standing in the fire” for all of us.
You both are heroes but I just feel like it may be too late. Too many people, when confronted with evidence that they were wrong (jan 6, COVID lab leak theory, efficacy of COVID shots.. the list is long), cannot go back. These beliefs have become the center of who they are, and they cannot change course. Half of this country has determined that they are morally correct - evidence be damned.
Stuff like this is precisely why we need to organize better using technology. We The People need to create our own Decentralized 4th branch of government that holds the other branches accountable.
"Half of this country has determined that they are morally correct - evidence be damned."
Agreed. The mechanism appears to be that civil disobedience today has no bounds, and can be justly used any time for any purpose whatsoever. Once the "correctness" of a change has decided in today's versions of "smoke-filled rooms", neither physical nor legal resistance, nor even debate, will henceforth be tolerated. The change will be forced "by any means necessary".
This attitude has been achieved through a decades-long, "frogs-boiling" process overturning the very meaning of democracy an replacing it with a hierarchical-based opposite (all the while retaining the word), both in MSM and the schools. The movement toward "untouchable" topics started with wide national support for "no-brainers" such as the (original kind of) racism reflected by Jim Crow laws and civil disobedience against egregious enforcement of those laws, but it has finally reached a maddening watershed for at least half the country.
Just watch today's jaw-dropping moral panic at Tucker Carlson toward his stab at getting to the most accurate version of Jan 6 following his tapes review, correct or not. We are told he cannot be assumed to be acting in good faith, or even as a disinterested lawyer presenting a defense of a POV. No, he is "evil", and must be burned at the stake -- that is, silenced by getting him fired from Fox. So, all the troops in the MSM (with Gov behind the wings, as Matt et al uncovered) descending in force. Debate cannot be permitted!!
It seemed weird that they were questioning Matt about "who gave you the Twit files?". I thought EVERYONE knew where he got them. Idiots in Congress don't know???
Agree but I think it applies equally to both sides, not just the left. I’m certainly not getting the impression when I interact with many folks on the right that they’re any more willing than many on the left to admit error when it comes to things they’ve insisted on in the past.
Wouldn’t agree with you on the issue of efficacy of the Covid vaccines, by the way - as a PCP my eyes and ears tell me that they’re highly effective and generally safe.  On balance, I think the left was correct when it came to predicting the eventual scope of the pandemic and the benefits of vaccination in terms of mitigating illness, i.e., as a personal protection measure. But it seems clear they were incorrect when it came to the efficacy of masking and woefully wrong about things like the social / health costs of prolonged lockdowns as well as the push for blunt-force vaccine mandates targeting non-vulnerable populations.
I think a dose of humility would be good for everyone, on the left as well as the right.
1- efficacy of vaccines for kids: more risk than reward. The lies of protection from transmission, infection.. the list of COVID vax lies is quite long, and they were LIES, they did know that that it wasn’t designed to prevent transmission. NEVER before has a shot been deemed necessary (& mandated no less) for EVERYONE regardless of their individual risk/reward profile. Never. The denial of legitimacy of natural immunity.. seriously? Please show me one instance of the left admitting - even in the face of irrefutable evidence - any misstep? Masks? Masks have never been thought to protect against anything but large droplets, ie. Your surgeon sneezing into a surgical wound... Nothing to do with COVID. And, not for any length of time. There are still children wearing masks in certain schools across this country - against ALL evidence to the contrary. Btw- I’m an independent politically and vote for individuals not parties, but I’ve never seen an administration lie and be supported by media quite so fully.
I already told you I didn’t agree with vaccine mandates - I actually wrote a few letters on behalf of patients trying to get exemptions - and I certainly never believed the vaccines would effectively interrupt transmission and/or were appropriate for children.
But you went well beyond that in your previous post and echoed a claim that was and still is frequently being made on the right which I feel is also a lie, namely that the vaccines are ineffective in a more general sense. This flies completely in the face of everything I and my four colleagues have seen in our 15,000-patient panel, as do claims spread from the right that the vaccines are grossly unsafe / lethal and/or that 90+% of Covid deaths were actually due to some other cause and were hence “faked” by the medical community.
My colleagues and I once did a calculation to see how many side effects and/or deaths we should theoretically expect among our 15,000 patients if the claims with regard to side effects / lethality were correct. It was well into the dozens, i.e., an essentially unmissable excess that we couldn’t have failed to notice.
Again, I think there’s plenty of blame to go around for both sides. Both sides were disseminating untruths for their own particular political purposes.
Keep in mind that people essentially did not have the choice and children died or ended up with real life consequences of taking a shot that they did not need. That was not the choice of the government, pfizer, moderna nor teacher's unions to make. No one gives vaccines in a "GENERAL SENSE." They are administered to individuals based upon their individual risk/reward profile. You made my argument for me.
But people also died as a result of not getting vaccinated when they should have, Brammy. I feel a bit passionate about this because one of them was my wife’s boss, a 50-something-year-old obese but otherwise generally healthy guy with a wife and three young kids who believed the right’s claims that the Covid vaccine was potentially lethal, caught Covid, and died within 4 days in an ICU of fulminant bilateral pneumonia. His vaccinated wife caught Covid at the same time but did fine, I might add.
I wasn’t his doctor but got the story through my wife.
I see no reason to defend the left’s excesses with regard to masking, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns, but on the other hand where are the people on the right apologizing for their lies with regard to the Covid vaccines? Those lies were also lethal.
Yes obesity is a comorbidity. Again you are making my point for me - individual risk/reward profile. People should never had e had to take on risks from a vaccine when they had diminished rewards for doing so. To this minute we do not know long term adverse affects and people are living with vax injury. This shot was sold to everyone as “you need to take this shot to protect grandma.” That was a known falsehood perpetrated by the government and the pharma industry. Medical professionals lost their jobs after they already had natural immunity
Of course, the Omicron wave changed the risk/benefit calculation tremendously, because of decreased virulence and increased prevalence of natural/vaccine immunity. And more data on myocarditis in younger people.
So now we have this crazy situation where one side claims the vaccines were never effective at all, and the other side claiming that we can't do updated controlled trials in young people because of--- equipoise, expense, the vaccines are safe.....
To this minute, there are moves to mandate annual COVID shots to children as a part of their standard schedule of shots needed for school. There has also been evidence that the more boosters one has, the more likely one is to contract another case of COVID. The shots were needed for a segment of the population (elderly, overweight, diabetes, lung and heart issues, cancer compromised individuals), during the initial stages. COVID has now mutated (as viruses will quickly do), and like all viruses that want to infect the most people, they become more virulent and less lethal.. However, the pharma industry - in connection with our government, threw out the knowledge about vaccines, about medicine, about individual rights and mandated this shot for everyone, all of the time. Pharma makes max $$, government controls and maximizes power. One Argentinian study, not widely analyzed, cannot change the facts. We kept children out of school while other european countries did not. We've seen the results. Other countries quickly dismissed vaxxing children, yet we persist. Please ask yourself some questions.
Totally agree. I am a school nurse for early childhood & elementary & there is no danger to children from covid unless there are serious comorbidities. I watched this for 2 years and it never varied. Some kids felt like they had the flu, some had zero symptoms, none were in danger. Pushing this vaccine onto children (the govt is still advertising on TV) is absolute insanity. There has never been worse medical malpractice with political/media coercement in my lifetime and my skepticism of public health is now at a deep mistrust level. I choose my doctors carefully bc some of them got Ds in medical school & you can usually tell which ones did. From 2020 forward, I had several students' parents pediatricians who I relied on for real data and information versus public health's data, which ALWAYS has a political edge. Remember always that they PAID hospitals extra if the pt had covid or died of covid, and I am convinced due to my experience with a previously-trusted hospital while my Mom was there with covid that there was serious financial motivation to keep pts in hospitals. My sister & I told my Mom's doctor that we were leaving AMA (against medical advice) if he didn't discharge her, which he did finally do after we begged for days----we knew she would die in the hospital if we didn't get her out of there. Think of all the Americans who died because they didn't have medical knowledge and didn't know what to do! This is in a very nice hospital in Nashville where my surgeon father practiced for years. These years have really changed my mind on how I feel about the government, public health, the medical world in general, academia and most especially "The Science." A pitiful and avoidable situation. I almost fully blame the Left & especially the idiot Woke.
I’ve repeatedly said at this point that I did not support vaccine mandates, didn’t / don’t support vaccinating children, didn’t support prolonged, lockdowns, and don’t support masking. I don’t know how much more repetitive and explicit I can be when making these points.
Yes, the left told lies about these things, or at best stretched the truth well beyond what evidence could support. But again, the right did the same thing when it came to the scope of the pandemic, the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccines, and the efficacy of certain treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
Rather than challenging me again on what I’ve already said I agree with you on, could you perhaps address my points with regard to the right’s lies?
By the way, I live in Massachusetts and we haven’t had school closures or masking for something like a year and a half at this point. I’m guessing you live in California?
My interpretation of the data in children, particularly adolescent boys / young men, is that the (small) risks of vaccination are probably roughly equal to or slightly greater than the (small) overall benefit.
I don’t think the vaccines ever demonstrated a clear effect in terms of interrupting transmission, which makes sense to me given the underlying epidemiology of a highly contagious infection with many asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic individuals and a vaccine that was far better at preventing or mitigating clinical illness than preventing actual infection.
Overall, in light of all this, I don’t think there was all that great a case to be made to vaccinate children. Have to say, I actively recommend against vaccination when counseling young men in my clinic.
I notice you said, “.. recommend” vs recommended. Does that mean you recommend it now to others? Isn’t the current vaccine out of date for the current variant? Why would anyone take the risk, no matter how low, of getting any C19 vaccine today? Also, you said you don’t agree with the issue on efficacy; then why does virtually every person I know who was vaccinated get Covid? That doesn’t sound efficacious to me. And sorry, I’m finding it hard to believe it mitigates severe illness/hospitalization.. esp. when there is no control group.
Ah, the good old "Btw" qualifier- "I’m an independent politically and vote for individuals not parties..." blah blah blah. Mark my words, it's the BTWs who will be the first cohort offloaded into the gulags regardless of who's running them.
I think about this sort of posture all the time. Our climate now does not support any sort of nuanced views. In general, it's easier to just come down on one side or the other and many people will not look into matters. People who try to tease out the actual facts, like our brave Matt, will instantly be categorized as a right wing fanatic. Both the right and left do this and it's a shame.
I remember so fondly my father's admonition. When I was a teenager, I tended to see "the other side" as wholly mistaken. When I neglected to add that "the other side" got something right, my Dad would interject, "Give the devil his due, Jane!"
I totally agree. Matt has done a great job revealing what the left’s been doing in terms of covert censorship of social media but at least in my case I’m not going to go ahead and assume based on that that the right is morally pristine and somehow intrinsically much more committed to the courageous and apolitical search for the truth.
True. Children no longer learn the art of debate, the art of taking the opposite position. If everyone actively tried to see the other side, the world would be a much better place.
That aside ( I won’t say anything further about masks), I think you are correct that the problem is on both sides. The left ( more accurately, corporate liberalism) has control of the mainstream press but that doesn’t mean the right would be any better if they were in power. Politics and culture war issues bring out the worst in a great many people. Far too many want to believe in a fantasy of good vs evil which happens to line up precisely with their political ideology on all issues, when in reality there are liars on every part of the political spectrum.
There are indeed liars on both sides - the question that Taibbi, Shellenberger and those posit is whether the government has the right to decide who is lying, about what, and to censor them for it. I looked at the opinion piece in the NYTimes that you cite describing Cochrane study, but find that it also makes the point that masks and mandates didn't do what the government said they did:
"Others have come to think mandates represent illogical rules. To be sure, we did have many illogical rules: mandating masks outdoors and even at beaches, or wearing them to enter a restaurant but not at the table, or requiring children as young as 2 to mask in day care but not during nap time (presumably, the virus also took a nap). Some mask proponents and public health authorities have also used weak studies to make overblown or imprecise claims about masks’ effectiveness."
I'm not a doctor and wouldn't think of challenging your actual experience with your patients. But I'm perplexed by your assertion of the efficacy of the vaccines, given that Fauci himself, in a peer-reviewed paper released in January of this year, just admitted that the performance of vaccines for viruses like SARS-Cov2 is "suboptimal."
3000 patients on my panel. Five deaths from Covid, all in unvaccinated patients, not counting multiple hospitalizations and near fatalities.
Zero deaths among the 80% of my patients who’ve been vaccinated and only one hospitalization.
Four colleagues with similar panels and more or less identical experiences. Between all five of us, we’ve had only one vaccinated patient die of Covid.
I’m not sufficiently skilled in math to calculate the probability of this observational difference arising by chance, but I’m pretty sure based on my memory of my college statistics course that the likelihood is remote.
I’ll admit I haven’t read that paper, but the word “suboptimal” is certainly not the same thing as “ineffective”.
For starters, hats off to you and your colleagues for the stellar outcomes and obvious good doctoring you're providing. That is no doubt immensely gratifying.
Completely separate from that undisputed fact, and something you'd no doubt admit you have little control over, is the whole issue of correlation vs. causality. How can you know that the vaccines were the key contributing factor to the positive outcomes, as opposed to simply correlative to those outcomes?
As we’ve known for some time now (and the powers-that-be knew this far earlier), Covid didn't and doesn’t represent an outsized threat to the vast majority of reasonably healthy people. Overwhelmingly, fatalities were amongst the elderly, the obese and the immunocompromised.
Unless your practices focused largely on those groups (and maybe they did), you’d have a high likelihood of good outcomes.
Moreover, though I’m a committed anti-Covid-vaxxer, it's obvious that the vast majority of people who got the vaccine didn't experience serious side effects. As such, again, chances are excellent that most of your patients emerged relatively unscathed.
Though, as the saying goes, “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”
In response to your question, which I think is a fair one, I would say that I can’t “know” absolutely whether the vaccines made a crucial difference, but the observation that our clinic population divided itself into two groups, a larger one which got vaccinated and a smaller one which chose not to, with a subsequent marked increase in both the number and rates of hospitalization and death among the unvaccinated group while we were following them in parallel over the same time period, strikes me as strongly suggestive.
By the way, had it been the other way around, with a markedly higher number of deaths and hospitalizations in the vaccinated group, I would’ve concluded the exact opposite and stop vaccinating. Would you be questioning me then for having drawn conclusions and changed my recommendations and clinical practice based merely on “correlation and causation”?
There’s plenty of evidence from research studies and epidemiologic analyses from many countries around the world at this point supporting the efficacy of vaccination in terms of preventing severe illness and mortality. It’s fair to question the validity of this given how a lot of what we’ve heard here in the US from our government has been shown to be either false or exaggerated, but on the other hand the efficacy of vaccination has been demonstrated so many times and in so many diverse places around the globe that I find that argument more than a bit tenuous. There’s essentially no government anywhere that isn’t promoting vaccination, including governments that use different vaccines from non-US companies and are otherwise hostile and/or ideologically opposed to the US.
As for the side effects issue, I think it’s incumbent on those who claim that short-term side effects are common and/or lethal to demonstrate this in an evidentiary format given that most of us ordinary folks on the ground, providers as well as patients, just aren’t seeing it.
As for the long term side effects issue, the jury is still out on that but in my mind there’s not a particularly good reason based on the biology of the vaccines to have a heightened concern.
Let me just finish by reiterating that I never supported vaccine mandates, never believed in vaccinating children, and never believed that the vaccines were effective in interrupting transmission. I pretty much restricted myself to believing they were effective in preventing
severe illness and death and that, as such, they served as a highly effective and generally safe “personal protection measure” while the pandemic was at its height.
Oh, and by the way, about 270,000 of those Americans who died of Covid were under the age of 65. Yes, maybe a lot of them were obese, but on the other hand about half the adult population of America is obese so it seems a bit gratuitous to simply “offshore” these people as having been so intrinsically unhealthy that death was a not unexpected or perhaps inappropriate outcome for them, so to speak.
"I think a dose of humility would be good for everyone, on the left as well as the right."
Yes. The reason is that, in the final analysis, there are no such things as (fully accessible) facts, there are only beliefs. The cog-dis rejecting this is, to me at least, shockingly wide.
I get where you’re coming from, but I fear this goes too far. Facts are what change beliefs, and without them beliefs are just opinions and there’s never *any* reason to change them. We are left in a state of unending conflict.
I’m neglecting your qualification “fully accessible” of course. To suppose anyone has a direct line to the unvarnished Truth that others lack is certainly an error, but that shouldn’t make us fall into nihilism.
I don't think it's nihilism, but a clarification of the real problems facing us. The point of diving into philosophy is that it's become stunningly relevant. We're not just in a political crisis, we're in an epistemological one.
I'm confident you recognize the following, but will flesh out my position to be clear...
"Facts are what change beliefs"
Evidence is what changes beliefs. It is either your belief in certain perceptions taken as evidence, and/or your trust in someone/something testifying to *their* belief in some evidence, and/or your thought processes over and above those things, etc., that changes your mind. It's all human-centered, by necessity.
"I fear this goes too far"
It gets people most confused, I'll grant you that. Which is one reason I'm feeling a bit pessimistic about the future of democracy, especially when we have a "Revolt of the Elites" situation like the current one. We need leaders who allow people to be given all the evidence, and then to arise to their level of ability to interpret it, and only after then take "smarter" ones' word on it. People will follow *those* leaders.
I'm convinced belief in accessible truth at the root of the supposed non-resolveability of political problems. Political problems rarely resolve simply because some level of study reveals "the truth", meanwhile the voters' values are all the same. No, they resolve themselves primarily by compromise, because it is most often the case in this incredibly complex world that we never get to the bottom of the facts, nor do we all agree on values. That's the whole point of a (real) democracy, not the Potemkin version we have today that shoves supposedly indisputable "facts" and someone else's values down our throats.
The sad truth is humans will devote themselves to a leader who leads them to doom and many or most would rather die than recant that belief.
Democracy really isn't a solution to that general human problem, and this country is demonstrating that just like past experiments - you can't take the human flaws out of democracy.
"[H]umans will devote themselves to a leader who leads them to doom"
Agreed, but (almost) never by choice. It's easy to blame someone for their choices while looking through our own eyes. But that's a serious moral error, IMO.
"[M]any or most would rather die than recant that belief."
The reason they are stubborn is *not* because they don't ever know when their thinking or knowledge is inferior -- it's that they simply can't *trust* the large majority of people with greater skills/assets, at least those they don't know. Especially these days, with elite abandonment. It's a huge myth (on the Right) that the majority are both fully-consciously yet stubbornly lazy. (On the Left of course many think that anyone that doesn't want whatever the Left wants is an idiot.)
Better to limp along on one's own, imperfect though it may be, rather than risk being lured into the cave of near-certain doom. You could call it the " 'stupid' person's dilemma" **. I'm now convinced it drives a *lot* of behavior in politics. It's actually rational, just not in the way we expect, or that we demand it to be.
"Democracy really isn't a solution to that general human problem"
Democracy comes in all sorts of flavors. I'm speaking of the most simple goal, that of allowing us masses to live a reasonable life. On the technological side something more achievable than ever, but it's increasingly and unnecessarily threatened.
--------------
**To be clear (and following on my first point here), we are obviously all stupid -- and consequently victims of it -- at some points in our lives. I've been pretty well educated on my own stupidity by others. What matters is that some suffer drastically worse consequences than others through no *moral* fault of their own. It's absurd to think anyone somehow chooses to live this way, yet that's conventional thinking today. As if people author their own minds!
Define "too late", please! Polarization is not new to this country. Whether looking at the Vietnam aera, the W years, or even going back to the very early years of our republic, you will find over and over again periods of extreme polarization and heated debates on fundamental issues.
I'm currently teaching John Stuart Mill and liberty of thought and discussion in my Political Theory seminar -- so each year at this time I am reminded of just how important it is teach our kids the critical importance of free speech. That discussion has evolved for me over the past 35 years, but now it has the precise outline that Matt describes here. A centerpiece for Mill was his assertion that quieting dissenting ideas/opinions was to assume the mantle of infallibility -- and that is dangerous territory we cannot turn a blind eye to or casually accept. Thank you, Matt, for providing this week's supplemental class reading!
Yes, assuming "the mantle of infallibility" is to play God. Growing up that was called being self-righteous. Judgment is for your own actions; perception/openness is for dealing with others.
Geoff, how in the world do you get away with teaching JS Mill in this academic climate? Aren't uyou accused of propagating "white supremacy?" Must be Hillsdale College--can't think of anywhere else it would fly. In any case, keep on.
Pacificus, I focus on the students, keep my head down, and commit to the right thing. Helps me continue to also teach the likes of not only Plato and Aristotle, but Edmund Burke and Alexis deTocqueville -- all before college! The West isn’t dead yet.
I’m blessed with great, naturally curious and engaged students -- and I work hard to make it relevant and worthwhile. Once they start to see the value in the words, they do the reading. I also try not to let anyone hide, and find ways to let them know I value what they have to say/contribute. Continual reference to, and quoting from, the texts during class discussion or presentation is helpful in that regard. It’s easier than one might think -- sometimes we don’t give kids enough credit for wanting to make it over a high bar!
Throw in a little Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, Bentham, and Ayn Rand (there’s an “Anthem” I can get behind) ... and there you have the core of one heck of an indispensable course. Add a good delivery that gives nobody any inkling of my own inclinations and the students love it.
Keep on going Matt. As an indy journo myself, coming back decades after leaving a big career to report on C-19 policy failures, I couldn't be more proud that people like yourself, Bari, Michael and Leighton are kicking down the walls of propaganda. You all and Elon give us hope. Thank you.
Hey anyone reading this, if you don’t know/follow Trish, she’s like a Canadian answer to Matt and has been killing it with her podcast, Trish Wood is Critical, and her Substack, and is my go-to for the ongoing saga of the Canadian Freedom Convoy. Keep it up, Trish!
Signed up free-level based on Bryan's comment. Too much Canada/not enough US for me to justify a sub just now but your writing, layout looks great! Give us southerners more attention :)
Well positioned Matt. I am sure you will be anxiously awaiting the times and post’s Defense for their complicity. Paradoxically and perhaps unfairly, the more they defend it, the more correct you will have been. Let’s see if they can do so without smearing the author. I don’t believe they will do so but I hope they at least use real facts so that it can be debated. Which I know you would be able to engage in honestly.
thy will try to ignore this - I give them a very high chance for success. No one wants to find out they are wrong or that they were lied to. Its like finding out you have counterfeit money. Better just to pretend its still real pass it on and pretend it nothing happened
It would be good if many individual journalists came out in the open and publicized how they became complicit with the government, disavowing the meaning of the First Amendment. I suspect they’ve been overcome by the percs and clubbiness that Matt has also described, so it’s not likely to happen, unfortunately.
Journalists craft narratives that help the pols they support, which helps to build a loyal, monetizeable audience of people supporting the same pols and wanting to believe the narratives. The pols have always tried to manage the press, rewarding them with “access”, and feeding editors daily with spin and “suggested stories” from partisan activists and think tanks. And then a few decades ago, the journalists started to manage themselves voluntarily. Remember “Journolist”?
And cancel and woke culture is in some ways an active tool of narrative management and a vehicle for loyalty oaths.
Social media helps monetize these narrative-loving audiences, but is also incredibly inconvenient in potentially exposing audiences to other narratives or…even “facts”.
The US has a long history of scurrilous partisan media and pamphleteering. Somehow we survived, but political machines back in those days always attempted to crush ideological opponents and ensure that none of them got jobs in government or contracts for government. Of course this happens today when it is easy to develop a profile of everyone’s browsing, shopping and donation habits. Wrong-thinking people don’t get jobs in government or academia and don’t get accepted to top universities.
What beautiful writing. It takes real talent to combine clarity, completeness of thought and discipline of content to create elegance in expression. Some of the Founding Fathers had this ability in spades and I am glad to see it is not entirely lost to societal decay. And by the way, the content does reveal a horrifying and damnable fact pattern.
I don't own a gun, live in NYC, so I never felt the need. That said, we really need 2A to defend our free speech. Otherwise you become Canada and Australia.
I have a son with Autism, and I do believe that some of the school shootings were from people on the Spectrum who have been isolated. This stuff is super complicated.
"We the People" need to stop hiring politicians who say nice things to make us feel good, give us free stuff. Enough.
I will remain an independent until one party brings some REAL talent to the table.
the uniparty will never bring significant talent to the table that will serve the people of the land. they are the ultimate club for attracting people with sociopathy and psychopathy. the people that want the power are the last we should ever allow to have it.
I think you are describing a fatal flaw in any government—it attracts sociopaths and psychopaths to lead it. This was the reason for three branches of government and the 1st Amendment. I knew we had a problem in 2016 when we had two extreme sociopaths running for President.
It will be interesting to see how the people Matt describes in his testimony twist and turn to refute his statement afterwards. A well-written statement!
Any institution with power will attract sociopaths and psychopaths, the way catnip attracts cats.
That said, separation of powers only delays the corruption, but it also means that once the sociopaths and psychopaths take over, they are that much harder to root out.
The Iron Law Of Institutions always wins in the end.
Then you'll forever be an independent (haha). I too am an independent, but have been dipping my toe in the Libertarian pool since witnessing the way our government handled covid, which made me realize how much I valued my rights and freedoms. I don't agree with everything the Libertarians stand for, but since freedom has become my top issue, they're looking pretty good.
You live in NYC and don't feel the need to own a gun??? New Yorkers need 2A more than almost anyone. Too bad it's been taken away from them, effectively.
"Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy."
This is the money quote that needs to be spread far and wide. Absolute truth.
Yes, absolutely.
It applies to all of us though.
- bad things *were* done by some protestors on Jan 6. But the "insurrection" was a lie.
- Covid vaccines were life-saving to some of the vulnerable. But the "do-or-die" rhetoric was a lie.
- Hunter is just another wayward son, being protected by a dad that loves him. But denial of Hunter's wrongs is a lie.
I hope there are people out there who care more about truth than some private belief. I think Matt's in that category.
I like Matt because he seems to remain clear headed and logical. It's hard to do when you're in a space that's all about baiting subscribers.
You might not get rich Matt Taibbi, but thanks!
I agree with your comment except I think Hunter is much more than "...another wayward son". He seems morally unmoored.
Whether wayward or morally unmoored (I think many career politicians have themselves become unmoored), protecting Hunter from consequence promotes the pernicious idea that the elite and those connected to them don’t have to be subject to the laws to which the rest of us are held accountable. In Hunter’s case, his father may have become complicit. If the law looks the other way in their case, we have no rule of law. If the public media is complicit by also looking the other way, we have no check and balance on the elite with whom the media identify.
Don’t forget 10% for the Big Guy. Joe is right there with Hunter. He lied about not knowing anything about his son’s foreign business dealings and people have corroborated this info in person and in emails, photographs of meetings.
As of this moment, it would appear that Garland's DOJ and Wray's FBI are dutifully slow-walking (i.e. looking the other way) the "investigation" of Hunter's dealings, and the MSM remains silent (i.e. looking the other way) on the matter. Both DOJ and the FBI, unfortunately, appear to be treating it as a back-burner matter for which the outcome is already known (internally, I am told, the outcome HAS already been determined, much as Hillary's email scandal "investigation" conclusion was drafted long before the initial interviews were even conducted). Neither Garland nor Wray suffer any personal consequences by ignoring the matter, as Biden isn't going to fire them for doing nothing, and half the country already believes that it is all disinformation promoted by the MAGA cult - since that is the only story their MSM sources have peddled since the day Hunter's laptop showed up.
If there is nothing to hide, if Joe isn't a co-recipient of Hunter's graft, then common sense suggests that the proper agencies and MSM simply dig in and prove Biden's innocence, but they haven't done that for reasons that are all too apparent to those who are keen observers of the dynamics of belief in today's age of government-curated misinformation and disinformation.
I really think the very unfortunate truth here is the country I love, we love has a government that is no less corrupt than any other 3rd world banana republic. The difference is this one hold most of the cards and almost all of the power.
I always remind myself. It's because these people are voted for, even after all this, why should anything happen
What you are describing is a precursor to a revolution if not fixed and corrected. The DOJ is corrupt and the FBI owned by the Democrat Party while other agencies choose sides against the voting public. How is one to fix this problem? Some say violent revolution, others say the voting booth. With rigged elections the side that appears to be winning is probably the wrong side. Democrats need to either be voted out or physically removed from the offices of government. They are currently criminals violating their oath of office to protect the Constitution. Most are far leftists tyrants. With no real DOJ what is to be done?
I believe it was Frederick Douglass who said that our liberties are held in four boxes. The soap box, which at this stage has been broken up and burned to warm the toes of the not free press, the jury box,which has been corrupted by money from people like soros, the ballot box, which is a bad joke, and the cartridge box. The only box a freeman can access currently and have equal access to for now, is the fourth box. So yeah, violent revolution is coming. Somehow these cretins in the halls of Washington think thus going to work in their favor. I will die to see that isn't so. And at my age, it's the least I can do.
"He seems morally unmoored."
I imagine that it's quite easy for children of privilege to become "morally unmoored."
Dwelling on Hunter's unmoored morals seems to fall into the MSM narrative trap that the laptop story is about a dutiful dad dealing with a drug addicted son when the important part, emails detailing lucrative influence peddling by a sitting VP & his family in an area we are sinking billions into, is the real story that keeps getting obscured by the fog created by Hunter's cracked out hook-ups with hookers.
I will also bet that, in the history of men, drugs & their penises, the things that Hunter did, other than obsessively filming everything, really weren't all that odd or original.
And, these days, the filming part probably isn't very original either.
The thing is, for me personally, I don’t give a shit about his drug use or him banging hookers. Literally zero fucks given. What does concern me is the fact he was on the board of Burisima (I’ve heard Pelosi’s and Romney’s kid were also not sure if that’s true).
Seems like all this is connected: Trump is a Russian asset, Nuland saying “Fuck the EU”, a CIA color revolution in Ukraine, Daddy’s Ball applied to geopolitics, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
10% for the big guy.
Hunter was a useful idiot because of his name. He even said as much himself. Everyone knows what he did, how he peddled his name to enrich himself and his family. No one can or will do anything about it. Different rules for Bidens and other politicians.
Haha, you’re right spiderbaby! As a retired Dominatrix I can attest to this first hand.
Hey, back in the day my buddy & I used to sell weed & hash to one of your sister Dominatrixes. She was cool as hell. Her stories about belittling rich guys for money were hilarious.
Yeah, we pretty much see it all and then some.
Hell of a drug
Hunter is no worse than his daddy.....Plagiarist Cop Lover Joe...
I agree with Kenneth Lodge that Hunter is far MORE than just a 'wayward son' whose dad loves him. How about he's a danger to national security by selling access to our White House and state secrets whose Dad profits from? Puh-leeze! Other comments you made I can somewhat agree with.
"You might not get rich Matt Taibbi, but thanks!"
I have always felt that Matt is one of the few people out there who is not in it for the money. That fact explains why he stands out from the crowd as a journalist.
Can we agree to be more specific about 'bad things' on 1/6 and call it a riot?
Over 1,000,000 people assembled in Washington DC to protest the legitimacy of the 2020 vote count, 1,000 of them tresspassed on Capitol grounds, and a smaller number engaged in vandalism and violence.
Going off the reported DC crowd size versus the number of January 6 defendants, the vast majority who simply tresspassed,many unkowingly.
Of course we can, as well as redefine some of the “peaceful protests” of the past? We somehow have to stop mixing hydrochloric acid with sodium hydroxide to make salt water. There are less ideological paths to get to a middle ground, which takes compromise and discussion. If you want to make statements like that, go to MSNBC or Fox. Otherwise, I appreciate any thoughtful discourse on this or any other topic you want to discuss.
I know of no conservative who has a problem calling Jan 6 a riot. That's what it was, no more, no less.
Mike, truth be told, we have no idea--not really--what happened on January 6, or why. So I think we need to refrain from naming it, for now. Need to keep an open mind on these things until all the facts come out.
Nah, I saw a riot. That was only part of the story but I'm not going to be like one of those libtards who can't say when people are acting criminally because it might be *their* people. If I went to the Capitol today I would have to go through security and not have free roam of the building, especially private offices. If we want to bitch about idiots on the left we should hold ourselves to our own standards of behavior. They never will, but I don't want to be like them.
Eyre, you are zealously attempting to create a destructive narrative. It was a demonstration that got out of hand due to the FBI’s et al., premeditated involvement (See Twitter files for one precedent but there are many more). It was deliberately manipulated to make Trump and Republicans look bad. The true facts will eventually come out in the end. It’s well understood that the deep state is trying to destroy the Republican party any way they can and create a Uniparty to serve Americans up to China on a plate and hand over the the keys. This is a globalist agenda. The senators that criticized Tucker for revealing unshared videos are globalists. Thank you Tucker for putting their names and faces up on your show so we know who they are and can have them all voted out of office.
Thank you to Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other reporters on Substack that are helping to improve honest reporting . Also a huge thank you to Elon Musk.The Democratic Senators at yesterday’s hearing were an embarrassment to America. It was a stunning group display of imbecility with no known antidote. If Pfizer performed directed evolution research on their collective stupidity, they might end up with a cackling fool. Oh, wait, it’s already been done - our vice president!
Ray Epps?
Mike, we don't, as yet, know the full story of what happened on J6. Why not wthhold judgment?
The coming out of what "facts?" What "facts" are you awaiting? Most sentient beings have a pretty damn good idea about "what happened on Jan 6."
What's up, Fedpsar? Haven't heard from you in a while. I thought your handlers might have sent you to the gulag for insufficient revolutionary fervor. ; )
"Most sentient beings have a pretty damn good idea about "what happened on Jan 6."
Well, most people think they know what happened...that's 'cuz your side propagandized them them with cherry-pciked, edited BS. But the truth is coming out.
You're trying to be clever but that sentence doesn't make any sense.
Exactly remember the cnn reporting on antifa and blm riots of ‘20? I believe they coined the phrase “Mostly peaceful but firey.” Seriously? They burned businesses attacked and murdered people all over the country yet the J6 thing led by many provocateurs (remember Ray Epps?) was an insurrection by maga terrorist. And yesterday through FOIA we find out that there were several calls between Epps and Pelosi the weeks leading up to the event. I rest your case.
Link for that Epps/Pelosi tidbit?
You summed it well. Much of what has been pushed by the government and its closest supporters is an absolute. But as we've found in many cases, the truth can be complex.
Yet those in power, whether by intent or by design, fall into the "all or nothing" trap and push that without concern for what may actually be true.
That's why open discussion is important. It's the only way we do the best possible job of determining what is actually true.
No
J6 is FBI sting
All vaccines are dangerous
Agree with you on both.
I think the Jenny McCarthy and RFK, Jr. Substack pages are what you're after.
"bad things *were* done by some protestors on Jan 6"
Gotta amend this one: "At the instigation of government provocateurs, bad things were done by some of the protestors on January 6."
A woman was murdered by a Capital Police Officer. Had she been African American and he a white officer he would have already been sentenced to jail for murder. Yet this coward was almost carried on the shoulders of the Democrats on the 1/6 farce hearings. But she was just a MAGA supporter and counted for nothing in their sick minds.
I have yet to see any evidence of government provocateurs. Can you share some?
The video of government operative Ray Epps is definitive...he definitely was a primary instigator of the breech of the Capitol. Yet he was never charged or even arrested. The FBI has admitted that there were other undercover agents in the crowd that day, without specifying how many.
This is the real story that needs to come out. That day may be coming.
Those videos need to be amplified. Epps is seen the night before - January 5 - trying to incite a crowd of people who are just having a good time. He gets shouted down for being a Fed. If somebody had knocked his teeth out that night this country could have been saved a lot of trouble.
Exactly. I saw enough videos of Epps to realize he was probably planted there to incite things. There was even a video of people accusing him of that. He has not been publicly questioned. There's enough video out there of specifically and clearly him that he should have been one of the FIRST of the protesters to be rounded up. I don't understand why these basic facts are ignored by so many. It's pretty clear in my mind what he was doing, and I'll believe that until shown otherwise. Meanwhile, Epps remains at home or wherever he is hiding out, unquestioned, unchallenged, never in the MSM. And people don't find this suspicious? I would guess that the MSM readers/watchers have no idea Epps even exists, though. By design.
Hunter maybe a wayward son but he is in cahoots with his father to profit from illegal and unethical influence peddling that under normal circumstances (not involving a sitting VP and now President) would be sad and worthy of sympathy.
Mr. Matt Goes to Washington! Outstanding!
Almost EVERYONE understands the levity of this. The rub is that the 'policymakers' actively seek to undermine the concept.
Levity, Satire and Irish Gallows Humor make for tremendous coping mechanisms. This is serious shit, and it's sad that it has come to this, but I am thrilled that Matt is involved, genuine and unafraid.
You’re right! If AOC had her way any twitter hecklers would immediately be banned for making jokes at her expense. It’s is both a bad and amazing time to be alive. It’s as though there’s a great awakening around the world and because the veil has been lifted it’s nearly impossible, even for those that don’t pay attention to politics or current events, for people to not be aware of what’s happening.
Actually it’s very possible for those who don’t pay attention to politics or current events to not be aware of what’s happening. Here, there and everywhere.
And regarding all this Taibbi stuff, that would encompass 99% of all humanity.
You have 90% of the media outlets lying everyday about the events of 1/6 and many, many other things. The average person actually believes dopes on CNBC, MSNBC and morning Joe. The View is a news show for many ignorant and uninformed people. America is a sad place where truth goes to die.
I went to get my hair done yesterday. I think the gal that does my hair is fairly main stream, and I like her in general, and how she does my hair, so we don’t talk politics. She mentioned the many train accidents lately., but hadn’t heard about the Ohio one that is causing so much chemical damage.
I told her it was worth looking up, and quickly changed the subject to my niece’s ultrasound that shows twins. The details in these new ultrasounds could SAVE babies. They are amazingly clear and show the actual baby that no one could credibily call a fetus, making it harder to justifiably kill.
Did you tell her that so many people in power would be ok with aborting those twins the day before birth? Just in case the mother changes her mind...
Stuff like this is precisely why we need to organize better using technology. We The People need to create our own Decentralized 4th branch of government that holds the other branches accountable.
Imagine if we did this:
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/lets-build-a-4th-branch-of-government
I was GOING to say,perhaps we should get Marianne Williamson to work with the GOP, to meditate and “conger” Franklin and oher great leaders, so we could hear it from them directly.
But that would be making sport of Ms. Williamson, and it’s Lent, so I won’t say it.
Amen. Thanks for all your work Matt. I really don't know where we would be right now without people like yourself, Aaron Mate, Sy Hersh, and a handful of others.
Thank you, Matt, for your courage, tenacity and moral clarity. Excellent opening statement - I hope the committee understands the dire straits we are in.
Segue to 'Industrial Disease'...............
Agree 100%!!!! I also think he masterfully exposed some of the Dems wanting to go after his sources for the mean little totalitarian children they are. Maybe Matt can add a tip jar like locals? It’d be full today.
Sharyl Atkisson
https://sharylattkisson.com/
As a former journalist in a land far away, I hold political asylum in the U.S., given to me due to the prosecution and persecution I suffered sometimes three decades ago. You guys (Americans) can't even fathom how incredibly free & diverse, mesmerizing in fact, this country looked like to a guy like me, to someone who admired this magical land from afar, for decades.
Not only the power, the richness of the culture but for a journo living in me, the names like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Hunter R. Thomson, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were a stuff of legend. What a country. The "people are being created equal", "right to pursue happiness," the American Dream. I was truly happy here. I thrived. I loved the land. I crossed it three times by a car, I zig-zaged it... always in awe. Be it the Grand Canyon, the Central Park in NY, the Petrified Forest, Jeez, a miracle after a miracle.
I am not too naive - I know that the real story of America (at least to me) is not only in Hollywood or Wall Street, neither you can find it in Pentecostal fanaticism nor even in is baseball, you can find it in American pain, the pain you find as you listen to Johnny Cash while driving the Route 66 and than all the way up to less insane Portland and back.
I've been moderately rich in this country. I've been homeless in this country. I knew the rat people of New York City subways, the city I used to love and admire but now avoid; I walked the Sunset Boulevard in L.A. but never ready to accept that the dreams can really be broken. No!!, not in this land that supports you, not among the people that would encourage you to pursue your dream, no mater how insane it might seem.
I've been famous back home but when everything was stolen from me and I ended up on the streets of New York during coldest winter in February, the help I was given was not coming from the place that knew my name, nope, I was given help by the Americans I barely knew. Loans, gifts, jobs, everything just to get back on my feet. I'd be eternally grateful to this land and the people I was lucky to encounter.
Now, in the clutches of incomprehensible madness some call "woke" and some neo-Maoist Cultural Revolution, with almost every single institution being completely corrupted, de facto betraying all American principles that made it great, I look at the country I am unable to recognize.
How did you guys manage to piss away your freedoms, and soon it seems, your wealth and your happiness is beyond me. Average bridges in this country are 68 years old. When I was a kid I listened -- in awe -- my father's stories (he was an engineer) about the Golden Gate Bridge. He did not live to cross it walking, but after he had died I did it for him.
I crossed the Golden Gate, weeping. Not only for my father, but for the land we all are losing, willingly giving it away to most corrupt, ghoulish psychopath one can imagine. America of today -- I can hardly believe I write this -- is more difficult, psychologically, to live in, that was my own, under the communism or under the grenades during the war. We had hope, we fought, we knew it would not last forever.
In today's America I don't see true will to fight and I witness a vanishing hope. I do not know this land anymore, despite these few people like Matt Taibbi that keep the light flickering. I am so sorry.
I am also a refugee from a communist country and can subscribe to your sentiment. I was very young when I decided to leave and spent my youth under the magnifying glass and in the paws of their so called “law enforcement”. Scary memories. I was naive because this country looked so rosy from the other side of the iron certain. Still it was a dream come true. I cannot express enough gratitude to this country for allowing me to be myself - to work hard and to be rewarded, but mostly to think and act in harmony with my inner self without fear of persecution or being ostracized. All this is gone now: the government that lies to its people and censorship feel like dejavu. I tell myself that at least I had years of being enormously happy. Never for a minute did I regret my decision to come here, no matter how hard it was at times. But the irony of my life journey making a full circle!
Heroes and dissidents are always rare. Thank you, Matt, for stepping up, for your courage and dedication to truth.
Déjà vu of our second lives, while so scarily similar to what's going on here, is insane.
I gave a talk about my experiences back home - it was at the AU Austin, TX back in 1996 - and I noticed one guy that was especially interested in what I was saying. At the party afterwards (far away from the academic setting) he approached me , tipsy a bit, and told me, with so much pain in his voice: "I never had a fu*king problem in my life!", as the biggest tragedy ever.
I often thought about it. It seems to me that America has lost her appetite for heroic efforts a long time ago. Look at the "heroes" from the "Time" Magazine cover pages - Bill Gates, even Dr. Mengele or not so far back, the "Masters of Universe," all those Financial Crime Cartel's thieves. Or that sycophant servant of the U.S. military that's The Hero of all Heroes, in Ukraine. (I lived there also, it breaks my heart but not to the point of blinding me)
On individual basis, with demise of religion (having God de facto replaced by Moloh) and destruction of family, it appears that America / its people, all of us / is going through an identity crisis of biblical proportions. No matter how insane woke BS is, all those kids, suddenly "trans" with "bunny" and "zir" pronouns are really searching for their own identity because their own identity as an American was taken from them. Even worse, the hero journey was stolen from them. They have nowhere to go.
So, what's left? Self-righteous madness of a society in which my ignorance is equal to your knowledge?
You can't rebel against an iPhone if it gives you the music you like. Or the Internet that feeds you garbage. You became an extension of your iPhone and a grotesque clown imitating garbage some degenerate is spewing from the screen, under the guise of "love" for yourself.
I can't see anything else but madness, rabies on all levels, as the American destiny. With beyond insane proxy war against Russia, plans to go to war with China, with Iran as a perpetual enemy, the madness of money-grubbing, blood-thirsty freaks will take us all down.
Unless the people start reading Matt, of course. A smiley here.
OK, Trygve, I think you need to start your own Substack site, and share your insights and experience more widely.
Not sure if I told you, but it's here: https://trygvewighdal.substack.com/ :)
Trygve, yes, the cultural landscape of our country is frighteningly surreal. I am undecided if it is an early stage of Stalinist/Maoist regime or the last decadent days of the dying Roman Empire. We are not alone in this. Feels like the entire West is committing a collective suicide. But I don’t want to be a doom sayer. That this Substack is here and that intelligent people still exchange ideas in a mostly civil manner gives me hope. How long until we are banned or rounded up? 😀 What is discouraging is, as someone commented here, none of the recent revelations made a difference. People shrug off facts and prefer to remain in their bubble. Nothing can pop it: not the Russian collusion criminal enterprise, not suspicious business activity of Biden family, not news of COVID origin or vaccination side effects, and we know the list is endless. If none of this changed people’s position, what’s next?
Just an observer, to some extent I share your despair that facts appear irrelevant to all too many people.But we cannot give up the struggle or give up on hoping for a better future. And I do think that a change is coming. This comment thread is evidence of that. I do think this burgeoning awareness will, in time, spread to the larger population.
I believe I'd rather encounter Trygve's "madness and rabies on all levels" than the "burgeoning awareness" you say is free-flowing from these here Racket threads. And you're threatening the "larger population" with it too.
A Congresswoman Stacey E. Plaskett earlier today called Matt Taibbi "a co-called journalist". During his testimony. And her, Despicable side would cheer that rude clown (not that the Repulsive side is much better) for it. What I see here looks much more like the Stalinist/Maoist regime and its Cultural Revolution than anything else.
And what you wrote - "What is discouraging is, as someone commented here, none of the recent revelations made a difference" - is something I truly can't wrap my head around. And I have been, literally, hunted by the people of the same mindset. I had to hide, for months, witnessing hysteria that took the whole small country over one damn article of mine. Not even a good one at that.
And yet, despite all the personal experiences I can't understand. The mind boggles. That's perhaps my immigrant's love for America that blinds me in front of the obvious.
Trygve, I've lived in the US my whole life and can scarcely believe what is happening now. On the other hand, decades of neo-Marxist infiltration of our institutions--academic, corpporate, cultural, etc--has had a terrible consequence.
Ironically, a quote from Mao seems appropriate in this context" "it is always darkest before it is totally black." But after that total darkness, a new day must dawn. Maybe that is what we are on the verge of now.
I see you're an optimist.
Despite my fears that the flicker of hope would be lit by nuclear blasts, if there's a country with some hope left, that's the U.S.
Why? When the madness started - don't ask me when - I told a friend that the only hope Americans have could be found along the lines of George Carlin's "Life is Worth Losing" show. I said something like, Americans live in an illusion of freedom etc., (comparatively you can't find more more freedoms, but I spoke about corporatism, tax burdens, mortgages, health care, student loans chains squeezing the young people necks...) but once the powers that be start taking it away from them they'd be fully awake and would want it back.
The freedom.
On the other hand, decades of theorists (conspiracy trafficers) boorishly conjuring neo-Marxist hobgoblins at regular intervals and imagining them infiltrating our institutions like so many Transylvania vampires has been a reasonably amusing diversion to our politics as usual.
I'll add from the philosophy of Jake the Dog from Adventure Time: “To live life, you need problems. If you get what you want the minute you want it, then what's the point of living?”
This is the problem of this society-- it's too easy. Of course, one can point to suffering happening. Some of that is inescapable, though some act like it should be. Like the idle rich, we have a large swathe of the population that has no goals or challenges and is going loopy for the lack of them. Even the human body needs the adversity of running hard or plunging into cold water to keep itself in good running order.
As a fellow eastern European, I thank God that my parents had the nerve to escape that.
Ah, another escapee from tyranny, one generation removed. That's close enough.
Maybe all of you survivors of tyranny need to get together and to begin acting/speaking in unison. It would be a big big help.
I've been saying that life in our society is too easy for a long time, too. When there are no real problems of survival to solve, you make stuff up. And here we are. It's why I say the solution to fixing society is to re-animate sabretooth tigers and put them on the prowl. There's be a lot less time for complaining how somebody got your pronouns wrong if you were busy hiding from a sabretooth tiger!
I loved reading this conversation. Thank you!
I know and have known 2 people who were bitten by a great white shark. One survived one did not. Brutal death. Did those keep me from paddling out? No. When you cherish freedom sooooo much you will do stuff that fraidy cats can’t fathom. I am not proud of that for I adhere to the seven deadly sins principle and that is the first one. I have been fortunate, but have done my ‘wax on wax off’ to hopefully increase my odds of survival. I have taken some hard falls in street life and leisure as well. What a beautiful world we live in as violent and unrelenting as it can be. Drinking beer. I apologize for running on.
JRod, I predict someone would start a group to save the tigers, pointing out how wrong it is to kill animals.
THESE are the people with too much time on their hands, searching for something, anything to grouse about .
Thank you. This modern medium of communication that we all participate in has many *sides*, many flavors….. many moralities. Until discernment becomes the responsibility of the individual social order will always be vulnerable. Yes, where are the heroes, the brave….? Love your description of Zelensky ! I call him the ‘fund raiser’. Good stuff Trygve!
Easy there Trygve...easy there.
It’s a great irony that the wokist’s riposte to those who want secure borders is that “this country was built by immigrants”, that is true only to the extent that it was built by immigrants like you, Trygve, (and their descendants) rather than people like them.
I am descended from Immigrants that came here in the early 1600's for religious freedom..... I have raised my children to think of themselves as Americans.... follow all laws, pay your taxes, be good citizens, follow the US Constitution.... We are a minority.
It’s what happens when people don’t understand how fragile everything is in this world. We are three generations now removed from my grandparent’s generation who grew up during a depression and then we’re shipped off to a world war. We take for granted the rights we have as if they’ve just always been there, not ever realizing that they can be taken away so fast.
@Trygve your comment resonates with me. I wish more of our own people appreciated what we have instead of finding stupid ways to destroy it.
In my former newspaper, after one of my columns, the government sent a Deputy of Interior Ministry (de facto a police force) to be our new President of the Board, some dictatorial BS like that, not sure about his intended function.
We, writers barely able to hold a gun, took arms, we literally had guns and riffles with us ready to die for our rights to write what we thought was the truth. It was gloriously pathetic for we would stood no chance even against a few policemen, not to mention a small army team, but there was no other way in our minds. We would've never, ever accepted to bow down.
When I look at the so-called journalists in America of today, all these shameless sycophants to The Party, in almost all mass media propaganda rugs, my blood boils. They even dare to attack Matt Taibbi and his integrity, cowardly bastards. They rub their shoulders with the powerful instead of holding them to account. To be a willing participant in destruction of your own country, the same place that gave you fame and wealth (for they are, unlike us, famous, not infamous, rich, not poor) is, in my estimation, a betrayal. A betrayal of the land, of its principles, of its goodness (I am aware how bad is the Empire but you know what I mean), of its people, of their own profession, of the Constitution, of our common future, of humanity as a whole; a betrayal that' would be hardly forgivable if the U.S. ever gets out of this mess.
But I will leave you with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his speech "A World Split Apart" delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University (it doomed him):
"At present, some Western voices already have spoken of obtaining protection from a third power against aggression in the next world conflict, if there is one. In this case the shield would be China. But I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. First of all, it is again a doomed alliance with Evil; also, it would grant the United States a respite, but when at a later date China with its billion people would turn around armed with American weapons, America itself would fall prey to a genocide similar to the in Cambodia in our days.
And yet -- no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being."
Trygve, thanks for the Solzhenitsyn quote. If I may say so, I think you might be a Solzhenitsyn for our time.
The Solzhenitsyn quote that comes to my mind is one from the post-Soviet era of relative freedom. Goes roughly like this: "Under Communism, nothing was published and everything mattered. Now, everything is published, and nothing matters."
But it could be that America in 2023 is our time of samizdat, i.e., a time when the suppression of dissenting views makes them all the more precious. Matt's work falls in that cafegory, as does, I think, yours.
In my novel, edited for proper English, titled "Tycho Brahe Secret" I play with the idea of societal healing. I call it "New Athens", a concept that's not crucial for the main plot but in which the people abandon this evil, corrupt and, frankly, incurable system by creating a parallel world for themselves.
The Cultural Revolution that's taking place in America has their insane "different way of knowing" so why not create a different way of living for ourselves? No one could cure Yale or Google during our lifetimes. Their obsession with Transhumanism is a direct predecessor to all kind "trans..." nonsense on a way to Perdition. ("demoralization" phase from old KGB books)
I've been thinking about Camus a lot lately --> “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” he wrote in The Myth Of Sisyphus . To Camus, “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” I’d like to argue the point that our collective suicide, be it total annihilation of life through the nuclear war or our slow demise through the climate change and adjunct fraud that goes with frightening people (and making trillions out of it) that would torn the society apart at the seams, is not the only truly serious problem (philosophical or otherwise) facing the humanity anymore. We're going mad.
Speaking in quotes: “What may emerge as the most important insight of the twenty-first century is that man was not designed to live at the speed of light.” (Marshall McLuhan)
Hell yes, a cynic might even declare that annihilation of humankind would be a bliss for the Earth and all of its living creatures. (a frightening number of my friends think that's a good idea) While the humans do not seem to have achieved a pinnacle of rational behaviour capable of critical thinking as of yet, they have been rather vicious and unnecessarily cruel since they crawled out of their primordial caves and discovered technology. We went on, merrily killing animals and other humans alike with our first invention, a stone axe. A stone’s throw later and here we are: as our technology has made us indisputable masters of all living creatures on Earth, we’re dancing on the brink of extinction like there’s no tomorrow. And who leads this insanity?
Again, our own society. Our deranged, pathetic puppets, so-called "leaders" in worse mental shape than Soviet Politburo at the pinnacle of its senility.
Intercontinental nuclear missiles, like ghastly birds of doom wait for the plague of human madness to awaken them from their decades long slumber and fire them off to obliterate some happy city . Our pollution of Biblical proportions slowly suffocates and poisons the Mother Earth in a gruesome orgy of suicidal matricide. And we, mindless puppets on the strings put Ukraine's flag in our social profiles, go on parroting "Slava Ukraini" or whatever nonsense MSN is peddling and disregard our very future.
So yes, if we continue letting "them" to call Matt fucking Taibbi a "so-called journalist" like that psychopath ghoul in the Senate did earlier today it might not be a tomorrow.
PS Could not resist but to quote myself on the topic of "different way of knowledge", from "Tycho Brahe...":
"... a one-time US president from the annus horribilis of the second decade of the 21st Century, a man later deleted from history books by the Presidential Decency Act of 2036 (PDA-36) and thereafter known only as the Orange Menace, used “winning” as his mantra. Since the PDA-36 had also bravely “dismantled the white supremacy culture in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture by creating the Culturally Sustaining Math Space and Ethnomathematics,” no one in America seemed to be capable of counting to hundred any more.
Or noticing that the US had its 43rd, 44th, 46th, 47th and 48th presidents, but not the 45th, for all that it matters. The number 45 has hurt many people’s feelings so it was therefore put on an Exclude List, f.k.a. “blacklist,” a term also banned, where it now resides with the Orange Menace in a deserved eternal shame..."
I commented once that if every member of the Sierra Club committed suicide then San Francisco wouldn't need the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.
Trygve, this fragment hints at what you--and every other survivor of totalitarian regimes--has to offer in our current struggle against a totalitarian regime--not an exaggeration. You and the others who have stared down tryanny and lived to tell about it, are the natural leaders of our resistance in the US to tyranny today.
No doubt you never imagined that you would have to oppose two tyrannies in one lifetime--but life is funny in that way, isn't it?
Yeah, it's truly surreal.
I lived in Santa Monica, CA during Obama's first presidential campaign. I immediately saw through him (he voted "present" in the most of his state senate votes and stabbed his political mentor in back) and told them, random people there who wanted to talk, that.
Immediately I was called a racist. Come on, get real & screw you guys, my granny was a real slave as 6 y.o. and I lived in a country without black people so I don't give a damn about your white guilt. Fast forward to today and I see the people that never had slaves knelling in front of the people that were never slaves. (including their families going back hundreds of years...)
What fresh hell is that I wonder, daily. But than I recall a guy, smarter than myself, a deep thinker who told me, a minute after I called John McCain a "deranged warmongering fascist" (nowadays everyone is a "fascist," then it was fresh) but scolded Obama for his empty babbling ('we're the change we've been waiting for," give me freaking break) that I am worse than "my guy McCain." (!???)
"I just called him a deranged warmongering fascist so how did you conclude I am on his side?" Because I don't like "your guy"?
That was my first insight into what's to come. Total inability to have a real conversation. Tyranny phase is just around the corner.
Beautifully stated, and so very true. I especially like your characterization of journalists as "shameless sycophants to The Party". I have read more than a few young "journalists" who said they view their jobs as "activists", and that has become abundantly clear. They no longer follow the basic tenets of true journalism, nor did they ever even learn what those basic tenets actually are, or were. What is odd about this, is that so much of the reading public continues to believe journalists are following the traditional journalistic rules and thus believe everything they read is the absolute truth. Solzhenitsyn has imparted a lot of wisdom to the world, which the world mostly ignores.
We pissed/are pissing it away by embracing illiberal ideologies AT THE EXPENSE of conservative (little c) ideals. That, and remaining in a media fueled bubble that has resulted in atrophying our intelligence and experience. Truth is, most Americans never see anywhere else in the world, so they have ZERO comprehension of a perspective like yours. Worse yet, those that do travel around a bit most often due so as tourists while on vacation, so their experiences are packed into a suitcase, etc.
Trygve, what a beautiful statement...I wish I could say it's not true. Thanks.
Wighdal, apparently, was birthed by the same algorithm that gave us "Moe."
Good luck today. I’ll be thinking about you and Michael, sending you courage. Thank you for protecting free speech and for “standing in the fire” for all of us.
Thank you for all your work, and thank you to Elon Musk for allowing all this to be brought to the surface.
You both are heroes but I just feel like it may be too late. Too many people, when confronted with evidence that they were wrong (jan 6, COVID lab leak theory, efficacy of COVID shots.. the list is long), cannot go back. These beliefs have become the center of who they are, and they cannot change course. Half of this country has determined that they are morally correct - evidence be damned.
It may be late, but we have to keep trying to bring Americans back to their senses. As long as there are people like Matt, there is still hope.
Stuff like this is precisely why we need to organize better using technology. We The People need to create our own Decentralized 4th branch of government that holds the other branches accountable.
Imagine if we did this:
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/lets-build-a-4th-branch-of-government
"Half of this country has determined that they are morally correct - evidence be damned."
Agreed. The mechanism appears to be that civil disobedience today has no bounds, and can be justly used any time for any purpose whatsoever. Once the "correctness" of a change has decided in today's versions of "smoke-filled rooms", neither physical nor legal resistance, nor even debate, will henceforth be tolerated. The change will be forced "by any means necessary".
This attitude has been achieved through a decades-long, "frogs-boiling" process overturning the very meaning of democracy an replacing it with a hierarchical-based opposite (all the while retaining the word), both in MSM and the schools. The movement toward "untouchable" topics started with wide national support for "no-brainers" such as the (original kind of) racism reflected by Jim Crow laws and civil disobedience against egregious enforcement of those laws, but it has finally reached a maddening watershed for at least half the country.
Just watch today's jaw-dropping moral panic at Tucker Carlson toward his stab at getting to the most accurate version of Jan 6 following his tapes review, correct or not. We are told he cannot be assumed to be acting in good faith, or even as a disinterested lawyer presenting a defense of a POV. No, he is "evil", and must be burned at the stake -- that is, silenced by getting him fired from Fox. So, all the troops in the MSM (with Gov behind the wings, as Matt et al uncovered) descending in force. Debate cannot be permitted!!
It seemed weird that they were questioning Matt about "who gave you the Twit files?". I thought EVERYONE knew where he got them. Idiots in Congress don't know???
Agree but I think it applies equally to both sides, not just the left. I’m certainly not getting the impression when I interact with many folks on the right that they’re any more willing than many on the left to admit error when it comes to things they’ve insisted on in the past.
Wouldn’t agree with you on the issue of efficacy of the Covid vaccines, by the way - as a PCP my eyes and ears tell me that they’re highly effective and generally safe.  On balance, I think the left was correct when it came to predicting the eventual scope of the pandemic and the benefits of vaccination in terms of mitigating illness, i.e., as a personal protection measure. But it seems clear they were incorrect when it came to the efficacy of masking and woefully wrong about things like the social / health costs of prolonged lockdowns as well as the push for blunt-force vaccine mandates targeting non-vulnerable populations.
I think a dose of humility would be good for everyone, on the left as well as the right.
1- efficacy of vaccines for kids: more risk than reward. The lies of protection from transmission, infection.. the list of COVID vax lies is quite long, and they were LIES, they did know that that it wasn’t designed to prevent transmission. NEVER before has a shot been deemed necessary (& mandated no less) for EVERYONE regardless of their individual risk/reward profile. Never. The denial of legitimacy of natural immunity.. seriously? Please show me one instance of the left admitting - even in the face of irrefutable evidence - any misstep? Masks? Masks have never been thought to protect against anything but large droplets, ie. Your surgeon sneezing into a surgical wound... Nothing to do with COVID. And, not for any length of time. There are still children wearing masks in certain schools across this country - against ALL evidence to the contrary. Btw- I’m an independent politically and vote for individuals not parties, but I’ve never seen an administration lie and be supported by media quite so fully.
I already told you I didn’t agree with vaccine mandates - I actually wrote a few letters on behalf of patients trying to get exemptions - and I certainly never believed the vaccines would effectively interrupt transmission and/or were appropriate for children.
But you went well beyond that in your previous post and echoed a claim that was and still is frequently being made on the right which I feel is also a lie, namely that the vaccines are ineffective in a more general sense. This flies completely in the face of everything I and my four colleagues have seen in our 15,000-patient panel, as do claims spread from the right that the vaccines are grossly unsafe / lethal and/or that 90+% of Covid deaths were actually due to some other cause and were hence “faked” by the medical community.
My colleagues and I once did a calculation to see how many side effects and/or deaths we should theoretically expect among our 15,000 patients if the claims with regard to side effects / lethality were correct. It was well into the dozens, i.e., an essentially unmissable excess that we couldn’t have failed to notice.
Again, I think there’s plenty of blame to go around for both sides. Both sides were disseminating untruths for their own particular political purposes.
Keep in mind that people essentially did not have the choice and children died or ended up with real life consequences of taking a shot that they did not need. That was not the choice of the government, pfizer, moderna nor teacher's unions to make. No one gives vaccines in a "GENERAL SENSE." They are administered to individuals based upon their individual risk/reward profile. You made my argument for me.
But people also died as a result of not getting vaccinated when they should have, Brammy. I feel a bit passionate about this because one of them was my wife’s boss, a 50-something-year-old obese but otherwise generally healthy guy with a wife and three young kids who believed the right’s claims that the Covid vaccine was potentially lethal, caught Covid, and died within 4 days in an ICU of fulminant bilateral pneumonia. His vaccinated wife caught Covid at the same time but did fine, I might add.
I wasn’t his doctor but got the story through my wife.
I see no reason to defend the left’s excesses with regard to masking, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns, but on the other hand where are the people on the right apologizing for their lies with regard to the Covid vaccines? Those lies were also lethal.
Yes obesity is a comorbidity. Again you are making my point for me - individual risk/reward profile. People should never had e had to take on risks from a vaccine when they had diminished rewards for doing so. To this minute we do not know long term adverse affects and people are living with vax injury. This shot was sold to everyone as “you need to take this shot to protect grandma.” That was a known falsehood perpetrated by the government and the pharma industry. Medical professionals lost their jobs after they already had natural immunity
There is robust evidence that COVID vaccines in children saved lives, even in the Omicron wave. https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj-2022-073070
Of course, the Omicron wave changed the risk/benefit calculation tremendously, because of decreased virulence and increased prevalence of natural/vaccine immunity. And more data on myocarditis in younger people.
So now we have this crazy situation where one side claims the vaccines were never effective at all, and the other side claiming that we can't do updated controlled trials in young people because of--- equipoise, expense, the vaccines are safe.....
To this minute, there are moves to mandate annual COVID shots to children as a part of their standard schedule of shots needed for school. There has also been evidence that the more boosters one has, the more likely one is to contract another case of COVID. The shots were needed for a segment of the population (elderly, overweight, diabetes, lung and heart issues, cancer compromised individuals), during the initial stages. COVID has now mutated (as viruses will quickly do), and like all viruses that want to infect the most people, they become more virulent and less lethal.. However, the pharma industry - in connection with our government, threw out the knowledge about vaccines, about medicine, about individual rights and mandated this shot for everyone, all of the time. Pharma makes max $$, government controls and maximizes power. One Argentinian study, not widely analyzed, cannot change the facts. We kept children out of school while other european countries did not. We've seen the results. Other countries quickly dismissed vaxxing children, yet we persist. Please ask yourself some questions.
Totally agree. I am a school nurse for early childhood & elementary & there is no danger to children from covid unless there are serious comorbidities. I watched this for 2 years and it never varied. Some kids felt like they had the flu, some had zero symptoms, none were in danger. Pushing this vaccine onto children (the govt is still advertising on TV) is absolute insanity. There has never been worse medical malpractice with political/media coercement in my lifetime and my skepticism of public health is now at a deep mistrust level. I choose my doctors carefully bc some of them got Ds in medical school & you can usually tell which ones did. From 2020 forward, I had several students' parents pediatricians who I relied on for real data and information versus public health's data, which ALWAYS has a political edge. Remember always that they PAID hospitals extra if the pt had covid or died of covid, and I am convinced due to my experience with a previously-trusted hospital while my Mom was there with covid that there was serious financial motivation to keep pts in hospitals. My sister & I told my Mom's doctor that we were leaving AMA (against medical advice) if he didn't discharge her, which he did finally do after we begged for days----we knew she would die in the hospital if we didn't get her out of there. Think of all the Americans who died because they didn't have medical knowledge and didn't know what to do! This is in a very nice hospital in Nashville where my surgeon father practiced for years. These years have really changed my mind on how I feel about the government, public health, the medical world in general, academia and most especially "The Science." A pitiful and avoidable situation. I almost fully blame the Left & especially the idiot Woke.
I’ve repeatedly said at this point that I did not support vaccine mandates, didn’t / don’t support vaccinating children, didn’t support prolonged, lockdowns, and don’t support masking. I don’t know how much more repetitive and explicit I can be when making these points.
Yes, the left told lies about these things, or at best stretched the truth well beyond what evidence could support. But again, the right did the same thing when it came to the scope of the pandemic, the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccines, and the efficacy of certain treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
Rather than challenging me again on what I’ve already said I agree with you on, could you perhaps address my points with regard to the right’s lies?
By the way, I live in Massachusetts and we haven’t had school closures or masking for something like a year and a half at this point. I’m guessing you live in California?
My interpretation of the data in children, particularly adolescent boys / young men, is that the (small) risks of vaccination are probably roughly equal to or slightly greater than the (small) overall benefit.
I don’t think the vaccines ever demonstrated a clear effect in terms of interrupting transmission, which makes sense to me given the underlying epidemiology of a highly contagious infection with many asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic individuals and a vaccine that was far better at preventing or mitigating clinical illness than preventing actual infection.
Overall, in light of all this, I don’t think there was all that great a case to be made to vaccinate children. Have to say, I actively recommend against vaccination when counseling young men in my clinic.
I notice you said, “.. recommend” vs recommended. Does that mean you recommend it now to others? Isn’t the current vaccine out of date for the current variant? Why would anyone take the risk, no matter how low, of getting any C19 vaccine today? Also, you said you don’t agree with the issue on efficacy; then why does virtually every person I know who was vaccinated get Covid? That doesn’t sound efficacious to me. And sorry, I’m finding it hard to believe it mitigates severe illness/hospitalization.. esp. when there is no control group.
100%
Ah, the good old "Btw" qualifier- "I’m an independent politically and vote for individuals not parties..." blah blah blah. Mark my words, it's the BTWs who will be the first cohort offloaded into the gulags regardless of who's running them.
I think about this sort of posture all the time. Our climate now does not support any sort of nuanced views. In general, it's easier to just come down on one side or the other and many people will not look into matters. People who try to tease out the actual facts, like our brave Matt, will instantly be categorized as a right wing fanatic. Both the right and left do this and it's a shame.
I remember so fondly my father's admonition. When I was a teenager, I tended to see "the other side" as wholly mistaken. When I neglected to add that "the other side" got something right, my Dad would interject, "Give the devil his due, Jane!"
I totally agree. Matt has done a great job revealing what the left’s been doing in terms of covert censorship of social media but at least in my case I’m not going to go ahead and assume based on that that the right is morally pristine and somehow intrinsically much more committed to the courageous and apolitical search for the truth.
I’m an equal opportunity cynic, let’s say, LOL.
As we all should be.
True. Children no longer learn the art of debate, the art of taking the opposite position. If everyone actively tried to see the other side, the world would be a much better place.
"If everyone actively tried to see the other side, the world would be a much better place."
Yeah. We used to call that "a liberal arts education." But wokeness hates that. It's strictly Good vs Evil with them.
The left has gotten too powerful. To your point, however, I wouldn't want the pendulum to swing too far to the right.
If you are basing your views on masks on the Cochrane study, you might want to look again.
https://archive.ph/yV3x8
That aside ( I won’t say anything further about masks), I think you are correct that the problem is on both sides. The left ( more accurately, corporate liberalism) has control of the mainstream press but that doesn’t mean the right would be any better if they were in power. Politics and culture war issues bring out the worst in a great many people. Far too many want to believe in a fantasy of good vs evil which happens to line up precisely with their political ideology on all issues, when in reality there are liars on every part of the political spectrum.
There are indeed liars on both sides - the question that Taibbi, Shellenberger and those posit is whether the government has the right to decide who is lying, about what, and to censor them for it. I looked at the opinion piece in the NYTimes that you cite describing Cochrane study, but find that it also makes the point that masks and mandates didn't do what the government said they did:
"Others have come to think mandates represent illogical rules. To be sure, we did have many illogical rules: mandating masks outdoors and even at beaches, or wearing them to enter a restaurant but not at the table, or requiring children as young as 2 to mask in day care but not during nap time (presumably, the virus also took a nap). Some mask proponents and public health authorities have also used weak studies to make overblown or imprecise claims about masks’ effectiveness."
I completely agree that the government should not be in the business of censorship.
Well said
I'm not a doctor and wouldn't think of challenging your actual experience with your patients. But I'm perplexed by your assertion of the efficacy of the vaccines, given that Fauci himself, in a peer-reviewed paper released in January of this year, just admitted that the performance of vaccines for viruses like SARS-Cov2 is "suboptimal."
Here's one story about the paper:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/fauci-admits-covid-vaccines-are-suboptimal
And here's the paper itself:
https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(22)00572-8
3000 patients on my panel. Five deaths from Covid, all in unvaccinated patients, not counting multiple hospitalizations and near fatalities.
Zero deaths among the 80% of my patients who’ve been vaccinated and only one hospitalization.
Four colleagues with similar panels and more or less identical experiences. Between all five of us, we’ve had only one vaccinated patient die of Covid.
I’m not sufficiently skilled in math to calculate the probability of this observational difference arising by chance, but I’m pretty sure based on my memory of my college statistics course that the likelihood is remote.
I’ll admit I haven’t read that paper, but the word “suboptimal” is certainly not the same thing as “ineffective”.
For starters, hats off to you and your colleagues for the stellar outcomes and obvious good doctoring you're providing. That is no doubt immensely gratifying.
Completely separate from that undisputed fact, and something you'd no doubt admit you have little control over, is the whole issue of correlation vs. causality. How can you know that the vaccines were the key contributing factor to the positive outcomes, as opposed to simply correlative to those outcomes?
As we’ve known for some time now (and the powers-that-be knew this far earlier), Covid didn't and doesn’t represent an outsized threat to the vast majority of reasonably healthy people. Overwhelmingly, fatalities were amongst the elderly, the obese and the immunocompromised.
Unless your practices focused largely on those groups (and maybe they did), you’d have a high likelihood of good outcomes.
Moreover, though I’m a committed anti-Covid-vaxxer, it's obvious that the vast majority of people who got the vaccine didn't experience serious side effects. As such, again, chances are excellent that most of your patients emerged relatively unscathed.
Though, as the saying goes, “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”
A side-effects-occurrence rate of even 1%, given the roughly 13 billion doses administered worldwide (Bloomberg, 10/22; https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/) still translates to a vast amount of human suffering and death (~130 million).
And, of greater concern to many is what will the coming years bring in terms of delayed side effects.
Just some thoughts, of which I'm happy to be disabused... ;)
In response to your question, which I think is a fair one, I would say that I can’t “know” absolutely whether the vaccines made a crucial difference, but the observation that our clinic population divided itself into two groups, a larger one which got vaccinated and a smaller one which chose not to, with a subsequent marked increase in both the number and rates of hospitalization and death among the unvaccinated group while we were following them in parallel over the same time period, strikes me as strongly suggestive.
By the way, had it been the other way around, with a markedly higher number of deaths and hospitalizations in the vaccinated group, I would’ve concluded the exact opposite and stop vaccinating. Would you be questioning me then for having drawn conclusions and changed my recommendations and clinical practice based merely on “correlation and causation”?
There’s plenty of evidence from research studies and epidemiologic analyses from many countries around the world at this point supporting the efficacy of vaccination in terms of preventing severe illness and mortality. It’s fair to question the validity of this given how a lot of what we’ve heard here in the US from our government has been shown to be either false or exaggerated, but on the other hand the efficacy of vaccination has been demonstrated so many times and in so many diverse places around the globe that I find that argument more than a bit tenuous. There’s essentially no government anywhere that isn’t promoting vaccination, including governments that use different vaccines from non-US companies and are otherwise hostile and/or ideologically opposed to the US.
As for the side effects issue, I think it’s incumbent on those who claim that short-term side effects are common and/or lethal to demonstrate this in an evidentiary format given that most of us ordinary folks on the ground, providers as well as patients, just aren’t seeing it.
As for the long term side effects issue, the jury is still out on that but in my mind there’s not a particularly good reason based on the biology of the vaccines to have a heightened concern.
Let me just finish by reiterating that I never supported vaccine mandates, never believed in vaccinating children, and never believed that the vaccines were effective in interrupting transmission. I pretty much restricted myself to believing they were effective in preventing
severe illness and death and that, as such, they served as a highly effective and generally safe “personal protection measure” while the pandemic was at its height.
Oh, and by the way, about 270,000 of those Americans who died of Covid were under the age of 65. Yes, maybe a lot of them were obese, but on the other hand about half the adult population of America is obese so it seems a bit gratuitous to simply “offshore” these people as having been so intrinsically unhealthy that death was a not unexpected or perhaps inappropriate outcome for them, so to speak.
"I think a dose of humility would be good for everyone, on the left as well as the right."
Yes. The reason is that, in the final analysis, there are no such things as (fully accessible) facts, there are only beliefs. The cog-dis rejecting this is, to me at least, shockingly wide.
I get where you’re coming from, but I fear this goes too far. Facts are what change beliefs, and without them beliefs are just opinions and there’s never *any* reason to change them. We are left in a state of unending conflict.
I’m neglecting your qualification “fully accessible” of course. To suppose anyone has a direct line to the unvarnished Truth that others lack is certainly an error, but that shouldn’t make us fall into nihilism.
I don't think it's nihilism, but a clarification of the real problems facing us. The point of diving into philosophy is that it's become stunningly relevant. We're not just in a political crisis, we're in an epistemological one.
I'm confident you recognize the following, but will flesh out my position to be clear...
"Facts are what change beliefs"
Evidence is what changes beliefs. It is either your belief in certain perceptions taken as evidence, and/or your trust in someone/something testifying to *their* belief in some evidence, and/or your thought processes over and above those things, etc., that changes your mind. It's all human-centered, by necessity.
"I fear this goes too far"
It gets people most confused, I'll grant you that. Which is one reason I'm feeling a bit pessimistic about the future of democracy, especially when we have a "Revolt of the Elites" situation like the current one. We need leaders who allow people to be given all the evidence, and then to arise to their level of ability to interpret it, and only after then take "smarter" ones' word on it. People will follow *those* leaders.
I'm convinced belief in accessible truth at the root of the supposed non-resolveability of political problems. Political problems rarely resolve simply because some level of study reveals "the truth", meanwhile the voters' values are all the same. No, they resolve themselves primarily by compromise, because it is most often the case in this incredibly complex world that we never get to the bottom of the facts, nor do we all agree on values. That's the whole point of a (real) democracy, not the Potemkin version we have today that shoves supposedly indisputable "facts" and someone else's values down our throats.
The sad truth is humans will devote themselves to a leader who leads them to doom and many or most would rather die than recant that belief.
Democracy really isn't a solution to that general human problem, and this country is demonstrating that just like past experiments - you can't take the human flaws out of democracy.
"[H]umans will devote themselves to a leader who leads them to doom"
Agreed, but (almost) never by choice. It's easy to blame someone for their choices while looking through our own eyes. But that's a serious moral error, IMO.
"[M]any or most would rather die than recant that belief."
The reason they are stubborn is *not* because they don't ever know when their thinking or knowledge is inferior -- it's that they simply can't *trust* the large majority of people with greater skills/assets, at least those they don't know. Especially these days, with elite abandonment. It's a huge myth (on the Right) that the majority are both fully-consciously yet stubbornly lazy. (On the Left of course many think that anyone that doesn't want whatever the Left wants is an idiot.)
Better to limp along on one's own, imperfect though it may be, rather than risk being lured into the cave of near-certain doom. You could call it the " 'stupid' person's dilemma" **. I'm now convinced it drives a *lot* of behavior in politics. It's actually rational, just not in the way we expect, or that we demand it to be.
"Democracy really isn't a solution to that general human problem"
Democracy comes in all sorts of flavors. I'm speaking of the most simple goal, that of allowing us masses to live a reasonable life. On the technological side something more achievable than ever, but it's increasingly and unnecessarily threatened.
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**To be clear (and following on my first point here), we are obviously all stupid -- and consequently victims of it -- at some points in our lives. I've been pretty well educated on my own stupidity by others. What matters is that some suffer drastically worse consequences than others through no *moral* fault of their own. It's absurd to think anyone somehow chooses to live this way, yet that's conventional thinking today. As if people author their own minds!
Define "too late", please! Polarization is not new to this country. Whether looking at the Vietnam aera, the W years, or even going back to the very early years of our republic, you will find over and over again periods of extreme polarization and heated debates on fundamental issues.
Yes, but we are the other half, this is giving us hope.
I'm currently teaching John Stuart Mill and liberty of thought and discussion in my Political Theory seminar -- so each year at this time I am reminded of just how important it is teach our kids the critical importance of free speech. That discussion has evolved for me over the past 35 years, but now it has the precise outline that Matt describes here. A centerpiece for Mill was his assertion that quieting dissenting ideas/opinions was to assume the mantle of infallibility -- and that is dangerous territory we cannot turn a blind eye to or casually accept. Thank you, Matt, for providing this week's supplemental class reading!
Yes, assuming "the mantle of infallibility" is to play God. Growing up that was called being self-righteous. Judgment is for your own actions; perception/openness is for dealing with others.
It is also called hubris, and how the people of our past have tried to warn us about it! It’s behind the fall of every great civilization.
Hubris was well understood by the ancient Greeks - but they're all a bunch of old, dead, white guys, so what do they know!
Geoff, how in the world do you get away with teaching JS Mill in this academic climate? Aren't uyou accused of propagating "white supremacy?" Must be Hillsdale College--can't think of anywhere else it would fly. In any case, keep on.
Pacificus, I focus on the students, keep my head down, and commit to the right thing. Helps me continue to also teach the likes of not only Plato and Aristotle, but Edmund Burke and Alexis deTocqueville -- all before college! The West isn’t dead yet.
I’m blessed with great, naturally curious and engaged students -- and I work hard to make it relevant and worthwhile. Once they start to see the value in the words, they do the reading. I also try not to let anyone hide, and find ways to let them know I value what they have to say/contribute. Continual reference to, and quoting from, the texts during class discussion or presentation is helpful in that regard. It’s easier than one might think -- sometimes we don’t give kids enough credit for wanting to make it over a high bar!
Throw in a little Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, Bentham, and Ayn Rand (there’s an “Anthem” I can get behind) ... and there you have the core of one heck of an indispensable course. Add a good delivery that gives nobody any inkling of my own inclinations and the students love it.
BUt how do you get them to actually do the reading? Outside the passion and insight of your lectures of course.
Say what? You are a HS teacher? With that reading list? Almost like its 1958. Good job.
Matt, all I can say as an American is, Thank You!’ You are doing what so many refuse to do.
Keep on going Matt. As an indy journo myself, coming back decades after leaving a big career to report on C-19 policy failures, I couldn't be more proud that people like yourself, Bari, Michael and Leighton are kicking down the walls of propaganda. You all and Elon give us hope. Thank you.
Hey anyone reading this, if you don’t know/follow Trish, she’s like a Canadian answer to Matt and has been killing it with her podcast, Trish Wood is Critical, and her Substack, and is my go-to for the ongoing saga of the Canadian Freedom Convoy. Keep it up, Trish!
I second this!
Signed up free-level based on Bryan's comment. Too much Canada/not enough US for me to justify a sub just now but your writing, layout looks great! Give us southerners more attention :)
Well positioned Matt. I am sure you will be anxiously awaiting the times and post’s Defense for their complicity. Paradoxically and perhaps unfairly, the more they defend it, the more correct you will have been. Let’s see if they can do so without smearing the author. I don’t believe they will do so but I hope they at least use real facts so that it can be debated. Which I know you would be able to engage in honestly.
thy will try to ignore this - I give them a very high chance for success. No one wants to find out they are wrong or that they were lied to. Its like finding out you have counterfeit money. Better just to pretend its still real pass it on and pretend it nothing happened
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id say they were successful. sadly.
It would be good if many individual journalists came out in the open and publicized how they became complicit with the government, disavowing the meaning of the First Amendment. I suspect they’ve been overcome by the percs and clubbiness that Matt has also described, so it’s not likely to happen, unfortunately.
Journalists craft narratives that help the pols they support, which helps to build a loyal, monetizeable audience of people supporting the same pols and wanting to believe the narratives. The pols have always tried to manage the press, rewarding them with “access”, and feeding editors daily with spin and “suggested stories” from partisan activists and think tanks. And then a few decades ago, the journalists started to manage themselves voluntarily. Remember “Journolist”?
And cancel and woke culture is in some ways an active tool of narrative management and a vehicle for loyalty oaths.
Social media helps monetize these narrative-loving audiences, but is also incredibly inconvenient in potentially exposing audiences to other narratives or…even “facts”.
The US has a long history of scurrilous partisan media and pamphleteering. Somehow we survived, but political machines back in those days always attempted to crush ideological opponents and ensure that none of them got jobs in government or contracts for government. Of course this happens today when it is easy to develop a profile of everyone’s browsing, shopping and donation habits. Wrong-thinking people don’t get jobs in government or academia and don’t get accepted to top universities.
Agree. Tough to admit that about yourself
What beautiful writing. It takes real talent to combine clarity, completeness of thought and discipline of content to create elegance in expression. Some of the Founding Fathers had this ability in spades and I am glad to see it is not entirely lost to societal decay. And by the way, the content does reveal a horrifying and damnable fact pattern.
Thank god we have you Matt. Good luck today.
Matt,
I don't own a gun, live in NYC, so I never felt the need. That said, we really need 2A to defend our free speech. Otherwise you become Canada and Australia.
I have a son with Autism, and I do believe that some of the school shootings were from people on the Spectrum who have been isolated. This stuff is super complicated.
"We the People" need to stop hiring politicians who say nice things to make us feel good, give us free stuff. Enough.
I will remain an independent until one party brings some REAL talent to the table.
the uniparty will never bring significant talent to the table that will serve the people of the land. they are the ultimate club for attracting people with sociopathy and psychopathy. the people that want the power are the last we should ever allow to have it.
I think you are describing a fatal flaw in any government—it attracts sociopaths and psychopaths to lead it. This was the reason for three branches of government and the 1st Amendment. I knew we had a problem in 2016 when we had two extreme sociopaths running for President.
It will be interesting to see how the people Matt describes in his testimony twist and turn to refute his statement afterwards. A well-written statement!
Any institution with power will attract sociopaths and psychopaths, the way catnip attracts cats.
That said, separation of powers only delays the corruption, but it also means that once the sociopaths and psychopaths take over, they are that much harder to root out.
The Iron Law Of Institutions always wins in the end.
Then you'll forever be an independent (haha). I too am an independent, but have been dipping my toe in the Libertarian pool since witnessing the way our government handled covid, which made me realize how much I valued my rights and freedoms. I don't agree with everything the Libertarians stand for, but since freedom has become my top issue, they're looking pretty good.
You live in NYC and don't feel the need to own a gun??? New Yorkers need 2A more than almost anyone. Too bad it's been taken away from them, effectively.
We are a Military family, and we got through 9/11, WTC Bombing, Covid '20 hard lockdown... It's fun!!
Powerful and accurate
Excellent - thanks for fighting.
Thanks Matt...