The media’s culpability in suppressing the lab leak hypothesis is obvious. But a larger share of the blame falls upon science journal reviewers & publishers - the “scientific establishment.
They shut down discussion & discredited viable alternatives.
These prestigious, influential journals should be providing a forum for pulsating debate as experts explore and test theories, especially on something as contentious and fascinating as the possible origins of a global pandemic.
The opposite, in this case, happened.
It appears that @Nature had made it very clear what the boundary of what Dr. @EricRWeinstein calls the Gated Institutional Narrative is:
Be warned, for Thou shalt not speak of the lab leak hypothesis.
The grant makers, the NIH, the science journals, the scientist experts - all of their incentives to tell the truth are misaligned.
It’s a giant racket, and they, like all bureaucrats have only one goal - to maximize the potency of the bureaucracy.
This I find particularly egregious on @Nature’s part - not disclosing that the genome offered as the closest known one to SARS-CoV2 had a name change.
Why? One could guess. The change obscured an important connection.
Only two possible choices: Negligence or maliciousness?
So there were personal & institutional interests to protect.
But there might be something else. Just like in Hollywood, the need to appease Chinese commercial interests might be at play here.
China is the biggest national sponsor of publishers that produce these journals (!!)
Corporate links to China compromise output and distort agendas, especially when investigating something as sensitive as the origins of covid19.
The epistemic role of science journals and the publishing process today should absolutely be questioned in light of this.
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I wonder how different our world would be like if our leaders and intelligentsia weren't so completely divorced from violence - both simulated or real.
Ancient Greek thinkers such as Plato - meaning "broad shoulders," so named because of a physique honed by wrestling - were not
merely men who lived their lives in their heads, pontificating in abstraction away from any understanding of savagery and the zero sum nature of conflict. Both Hemingway and Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War.
Today, the stereotype that characterizes our erudite class is the
bespectacled tweed-wearing waif who turns down his nose at the idea of physicality. UFC, wrestling, heay weight lifting - these are signifiers of low social status or of a lesser intellect.
We need an elite who is in constant contact with reality, who
Affirmative Action backfires in many ways, failing to help the minority students it purports to help. Blacks feel like they don’t belong; Asians feel resentful.
Singapore rejects AA but has a solution that has seen success
“Like many of the other ideas pushed during the racial reckoning (see: defund the police), affirmative action appears to be yet another manifestation of what @robkhenderson has so astutely called “luxury beliefs.” Does the actual fate of these students not matter as much as their… https://t.co/2UEJXrfuEgtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
“Asians have to score 450 points higher than black students & 150 points higher than whites to have the same chance of admission to Harvard.”
“Majority of Americans oppose affirmative action at public universities by a margin of 74% to 26%, including a solid majority of Dems”
In the early 2000s when I left Singapore for America, most Singaporeans admired the US.
My sense being back here these days is that not only is it no longer true, there's a considerable amount of contempt for America due to its cultural export of woke garbage.
Relatives and
high school friends who I never once ever talked politics with my whole life suddenly are eager to engage me on how American politics and how "crazy America has become."
Sometimes it's about crime, sometimes it's about lawlessness or the homeless/drug epidemic, but increasingly
it's about "the gender stuff."
They ask me why this is going on, and how it came to pass that reality is actively being denied en masse. They name-drop Professor @jordanbpeterson and @benshapiro, and tell me they've all seen my clips on Joe Rogan and other pods.
Of course it took a journalist who reported on China, Russia and Egypt to say this: calling the Lab Leak Theory disinformation, was itself, disinformation.
the formation of the narrative (that lab leak = conspiracy theorist / racist), how it evolved into "consensus," and explains how the folks vested with the authority to create the consensus had huge conflicts of interest.
It's clear to me that the epistemic process is no
longer permitted to run its course. Because as soon as the "wrong people" (in this case Trump and his ilk) took a position, it was practically instinctual for the entire media industrial complex to take the opposite stand. And they did.