hey, let's have health policy made by 24 year old media studies majors!

said no sane society. ever.

yesterday, i opined upon anger and division as emergent properties of internet media and social media. and i believe this to be absolutely true.

however, this does not preclude another trend taking place at the same time: that messages are being deliberately slanted and censored to political/agenda driven ends.

in fact, the two trends have unfortunate synergies and are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive.

the endless food fight of the rage amplification system and its nasty divided society tribalism provides the perfect steganographic background and cover for pavlovian campaigns of “big lie indoctrination” through repetition and mindless parroting. this erects the perfect edifice of gaslighting by making the victim feel isolated and as though all opinion is against them.

it traps the would be skeptic in a hall of mirrors reflecting not “consensus” but rather talking points and contrived falsehoods distorted to LOOK like consensus. it buries truth in repetitive lies and hectors on moral grounds any who would search for it removing the debate from the precincts of logic and science and exiling it to the emotional and faux-ethical (for how can one really defend browbeating to the will of the crybullies as a valid moral precept?) plane.

good gaslighting is about a solidified edifice. you silence dissent and amplify your message until it appears to be the ONLY message.

this is how the bullying bluebird who once claimed to stand for “speaking the truth to power” has mutated into the belligerent browbeater of speech and suppressor of facts through the imposition of grossly biased and unqualified censors applying politics to science and facts around which they have no knowledges and less desire to acquire any. this is “imposing power on truth.”

they don’t need understanding. they have lists of banned words and ideas. they are soviet commissars. whether your science is correct is of little import. (and frankly, the more correct it is, the more they must seek to silence it.) what matters is “does it serve the party?” and that is all.

this is how you get health policy by sociology major.

let’s look:

one would struggle to find a more august, qualified, and outright reasonable expert in epidemiology than gatopal™ @MartinKulldorff with whom i shared a little gulag time over at GAB during his twitter exile.

one would also struggle to find a more obvious and unobjectionable sentiment than “covid vaccines should be a choice based on personal risk profile.”

yet object the bluebird did and such messaging was silenced as disinformation. it was not allowed to spread. this seems to happen all the time, and it’s clearly one sided. a group of liberal arts majors who once saw a bio lab and ran like rabbits to protect their GPA’s now get to decide whether professors of medicine and disease surveillance at harvard get to teach science and if so, just which science.

meanwhile, they have anointed a literal fake infectious disease epidemiologist whose claims to such stature have led his (not really) colleagues to demand that he stop claiming credentials he does not possess, emoji enthusiast eric ding, as a “certified twitter expert” and amplify his astonishing and endless cavalcade of outright lies and misstatements.

(note, ivermectin is an FDA approved drug in humans as an anti-parasitic. this endless “it’s a horse drug” is laughable. so is penicillin. does that mean it’s not a human drug too?)

he’s still at it:

over, and over:

and yet as we saw so poignantly yesterday, this is all literally made up nonsense pushed by a failing media outlet(s) who either failed to check facts and was taken in (again) by the flimsy hoax of one deranged source or who willingly spread sensationalist drama for a quickie ratings bump. (perhaps this sort of scandal is the rock and roll magazine equivalent of an aging starlet leaking a sex tape to get her name back in the news?)

whatever the case, this has all been broadly retracted.

it was a clownish fraud. and yet the disinformation judges of twitter notice nothing. not only have they allowed these claims to stand, but proliferate. the tweets are not even taken down, much less retracted. there is zero integrity here.

this is a massive fake meme and even the useful idiots of MSNBC are out parroting it. there is simply no way twitter has not noticed this. ignoring it and allowing “the correct falsehoods” to spread is obviously bedrock bluebird policy.

there is no excuse for spreading fear based on clearly fake facts. (well, at least no excuse other than “we need to propaganda you for your own good!”)

you can tell any fake tale you like about overwhelmed hospitals and deaths in idaho because the nearest ICU was in connecticut (while boisie ICU is 20% empty) but argue that there may be some drugs that show strong efficacy in covid prophylaxes or that vaccinating healthy young kids or those recovered from covid and possessed of natural immunity that is vastly stronger and longer lasting than that generated by vaccines (and sterilizing to boot) and you’re getting censored, silenced, and perhaps even de-catformed for life.

the liberal arts children in the bluebird nest in san francisco are now the judges of science, medicine, and even base reality about what happened.

yeah, that’s gonna work out well…

but this generates a useful heuristic:

twitter only censors the truth, ergo, that which they censor is most likely true.

this streisand/kenobi effect grows more powerful by the day. remember when you could not suggest that covid-19 was the result of a lab escape on twitter or face reprisals? did that allay suspicion? did it wind up being true?

and best, it has now been undone and the very fact that it was censored makes the return wave all the more powerful.

this list keeps growing and it keeps eroding the credibility of twitter and providing badges of honor and spotlights of attention for those the abusive avian seeks to silence.

any day now “censored by twitter” is going to exceed “passed peer review at a prestigious journal” as a credential.

because the twitter censors are nearly always wrong and choose to pick only the fights they are told to by their political masters. these zealous little commissars are not arbitrary in their application of the censor’s marker. they only attack that which threatens their narrative and thus, that which is true.

refuting that which is false is always the better policy to defend your views.

resorting to censorship is the admission that you cannot refute a claim.

and people are not stupid. it may take some time, but they cotton on. they see the game and credibility once squandered in this manner may not be regained. being caught banning the truth and pushing a false narrative is not a thing you come back from among reasonable people.

and so policies like this ALWAYS boomerang on those imposing them. even soviet commissars with full control of all media, radio, television, publishing, and governmental messaging could not keep this game alive for long.

everyone knew they were lying and everyone learned to read between the lines.

truth was divined not by what they propogandists said, but by what they suppressed.

those they choose to speak for them are disdained and those they silence rise in prominence.

can these deluded would be informational imperialists seriously think that they can manage this feat in our current age of media plurality where smacking the twitterati and faceplanting fakebookers just causes substack and rumble to pop up like wack-a-mole? every abuse of the ownership of walled gardens provides the evolutionary pressure to bring real peer to peer internet into being.

attention and trust flows away from one set of sources and accrues to another. the self-correction is inevitable for however powerful these censors seem, time is not on their side and they have jumped their shark and ceased to wax. it’s all wane from here on out.

media will evolve to render censorship anachronistic. (perhaps, in a functional sense, it already has)

the future is ours, not theirs and while the scuffle for it will take time, that future is bright and well worth fighting for.

information may want to be free, but people need to help it.

stay brave. stay strong.