Sep 10, 2023·edited Sep 10, 2023Liked by Robyn Chuter
Another wokehole stable, ACP Annals, same influences, same claptrap pseudoscience posing as medicine infected by poisoned midwit SJW academicians. Also surrendered professional credibility long ago. And don't look for contradictory comments, counternarratives will be purged.
They published this study very similar to the JAMA study you shared, not finding racial disparity despite their best efforts, disturbed by it.
Social, Behavioral, and Metabolic Risk Factors and Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease Mortality in U.S. Adults
American College of Physicians, Annals of Internal Medicine, August 15, 2023
Jiang He, MD, PhD, Joshua D. Bundy, MPH, PhD, Siyi Geng, MS, Ling Tian, MS, Hua He, PhD, Xingyan Li, MSPH, Keith C. Ferdinand, MD, Amanda H. Anderson, MPH, PhD, Kirsten S. Dorans, ScD, Ramachandran S. Vasan, MD, Katherine T. Mills, MSPH, PhD, and Jing Chen, MD, MSc
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality is persistently higher in the Black population than in other racial and ethnic groups in the United States.
Objective:
To examine the degree to which social, behavioral, and metabolic risk factors are associated with CVD mortality and the extent to which racial differences in CVD mortality persist after these factors are accounted for.After adjustment for these metabolic, behavioral, and social risk factors separately, hazard ratios of CVD mortality for Black compared with White participants were attenuated from 1.54 (95% CI, 1.34 to 1.77) to 1.34 (CI, 1.16 to 1.55), 1.31 (CI, 1.15 to 1.50), and 1.04 (CI, 0.90 to 1.21), respectively.
Limitation:
Causal contributions of social, behavioral, and metabolic risk factors to racial and ethnic disparities in CVD mortality could not be established.
Conclusion:
The Black–White difference in CVD mortality diminished after adjustment for behavioral and metabolic risk factors and completely dissipated with adjustment for social determinants of health in the U.S. population.
Primary Funding Source:
National Institutes of Health.
BUT....here's a twist! The same study, authors published in the American Heart Association Journal earlier this year:
Abstract MP15: Mediation Effects of Social, Behavioral, and Metabolic Risk Factors on Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease Mortality in US Adults
Jiang He, Joshua D Bundy, Siyi Geng, Ling Tian, Hua He, Katherine T Mills and Jing Chen
It's the same study. But with a different conclusion:
Conclusion: Social determinants of health play an important role in racial disparities in CVD mortality. These findings call for public health interventions beyond lifestyle changes and medical treatment.
Academia in the New Dark Age has a funny science. It's almost like it's just a narrative in search of data. Adaptable for any audience and agenda. They really want the narrative to be true. But that insufferable data. Hey - between the JAMA published research and these two 'different' research studies we have to be getting close to having enough studies to publish a "metadata analysis" that racism doesn't cause heart disease, right?
Orwellian, indeed.
Comment below will have excerpts from George Orwell's "The Prevention of Literature" written in 1946 that applies. It even contemplates machine writing programmed to match state objectives, like, say, AI writing used in many publications today.
"From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.
...
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops.
Would you believe, my daughter studied 1984 in her English class in 2020. Not one mention was made in class of the obvious instantiation of the dystopian world of 1984, in the covidian cult.
Thanks for the Nineteen Eighty-Four vs 1984 piece also. I went with Nineteen Eighty-Four because it seemed to be the version used on the earliest editions that I could find. It's good to have confirmation!
It's tragic what they've done and are doing to young minds. Where's the critical thinking and observational awareness skills? Students and teachers alike. What a classically educated mind easily sees is invisible to the progressive educated one.
And that's the whole point of the factory model of education, as explicitly stated by the robber barons who transplanted the Prussian education system into the US, from whence it metastasised to other English-speaking nations including Australia.
Sep 10, 2023·edited Sep 10, 2023Liked by Robyn Chuter
(2/2)
"Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.
-
But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
...
When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons.
...
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
...
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes ossified. At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction."
Sep 16, 2023·edited Sep 16, 2023Liked by Robyn Chuter
Anna Funder's new book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life brings to light the not inconsequential contribution that Eileen Blair made to Orwell's work.
I really do know how you feel. The scamdemic has upended our lives in so many ways.
And what about the struggle to reread a book? When you did that post about Sokal et al, I got out Sokal's book Intellectual Impostures, now twenty-five years old, just to flick through and do a refresh. It's still sitting there unopened.
Sep 11, 2023·edited Sep 13, 2023Liked by Robyn Chuter
Through this and his other writings I never bothered to read before I have a different appreciation for 1984 and Animal Farm. Orwell was using futurism and zoomorphism to convey what he saw as current events in a way to get the concepts out under censorship that was already in place. If portrayed as current events it couldn't have been published. Prevention of Literature speaks to that.
For the censors to allow the introduction of the concepts to the public mind they believed they could control, corral the independent thinkers who begin to awaken. As long as it's a dystopia set way off in the future or as animal characters the reality of it remains only a fear of some far off day, "we're not there yet, but one day it might come here." Like for when a truthteller gains power and tries to inform, correct the record they can be portrayed as the Orwellian figure he warned against.
These are very clever deceivers we're dealing with. But we're more so. We see now, more than ever.
Very astute observation. The best sci-fi is along these same lines: really good sci-fi writers depict terrible events that have parallels in present-day life, but because these events are set in some dystopian future, we let our guards down just enough to be able to view these events in a different light. Then the gears turn in our heads, and we suddenly become aware of the parallels. My favourite example of this is the moment in They Live when the lead character puts on the 'magic' sunglasses and sees the hidden messages behind the advertising billboards.
Sep 13, 2023·edited Sep 13, 2023Liked by Robyn Chuter
Interesting that you mention that. Yes. They do that. Explicitly. Purposefully. Exactly what you describe. In their own words. Hollywood Sci-Fi is how they start the discussion about the ethics of new technology. I found the following in a panel discussion about bioweapons, bioethics:
Dr. George Church, Dr. Giuliana Testa, Dr. Pardis Sabeti (Ariana Huffington moderator)
Creating Medical Miracles, Ethically, April 23, 2019
AH: You all have been to the idea of the third rail in each of your fields, like where would you not go? And I would love to hear a story or an example of a time when you said “I’m not going to go there. I’m not going to play God.” Have any one of you had a moment like that?
GC: Well, I don’t think we’re in any danger of playing a major deity, but we’re, we could certainly do, there’s a line which we don’t cross. There’s some things which I don’t even discuss, until many years later when someone else thinks of the same idea.
An example of that was, personalized weapons, biological weapons, when you make a weapon that is specific for a particular person. And I kept that a secret, I didn’t tell anybody for about a decade. And then somebody else who I happen to know thought about it independently and was planning on publishing it in The Atlantic, and I said to him, “do you really want to do this, I mean this is enabling, for no particular purpose?” And it was framed in terms of Barack Obama being the target. And I just thought it was a, that’s an example of a line that I didn’t cross and I wouldn’t. But it did, and it was published, so.
AH: Should the decision not to publish something that in the hands of the wrong people could wreak devastation be a matter for government regulation?
GC: Both ideas I did share because I do think that other people are thinking about. Just they’re a rare one every now and again that it seems like there could buy us an extra ten years if I shut up. But I think because we talk about these ideas so far in advance, the ones we think that we can protect, that we do, that the ethics can stay ahead of technology. Not just catch up, but stay ahead, so we, the, the world of science fiction writers, the Hollywood, can come up with scenarios that are well outside our technical capabilities, but are inside our abilities to have a discussion among the entire population by introducing it to millions of television or movie watchers for example, or book readers, magazine readers. That is how we start the discussion before it is technically possible. And then many of these, we’ve been worrying about designer babies since before the first IVF in 1978. That’s an example of something that the ethics especially got ahead of the technology."
FF - These aren't just academic cranks kicking around theoretical concepts. These are people with a great deal of influence and at the center of much that our world is being steered into becoming. Eugenicists. Transhumanists. Virologists engineering viruses for effect, establishing systems of human control. You'll find some interesting names in it if you wish to climb aboard my recent Magic Carpet Ride Stack:
And forget what you think you know ethics are and how these panelists talk about ethics. For most of us and general public audiences that ethicists go in front of like in the panel video the concept of ethics is imagined or portrayed as either virtue ethics or deontological ethics, Kantian. But as most ethicists and public policymakers apply ethics their concept is utilitarian ethics. Deceit and harm inflicted for a 'greater good' is deemed ethical. Ethics. A very subjective word.
That's an amazing find. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. The brazenness of these so-called scientists is quite stunning. If the data don't support your hypothesis, just Make Shit Up.
I see, too, that there are some Head Girls infesting our federal parliament now. In reference to Australia's looming Covid-inspired Ministry of Truth at ACMA, progressive' Teals like Zali Steggall (some sort of skier, apparently) have come out with the old clunker that 'free speech does not mean the right to spread misinformation and disinformation'.
Well, yes, it does mean that, actually. The government has every right to spread as much of its pseudoscience cow manure as it likes providing its critics get the same right to free speech, leaving responsible adults the freedom to evaluate the contested ideas. One person's 'misinformation' is another person's propaganda - and without free speech, there is no way of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Another Head Girl/Prefect Teal (Monique Ryan, I think it was) also a mask fanatic forever pulling the maskless students into line.
As a psychological type, the Head Girl is a fascinating, and dangerous, subject.
Yes, you're spot on. Government, the public service, and increasingly, even corporations are just riddled with these Head Girl types (and their male counterparts). They are an amazingly dangerous breed. I'm pondering whether there's a crossover with Carlo Cipolla's laws of stupidity, which I just stumbled across. Cipolla's definition of a stupid person is one who repeatedly does things which harm others, but without any benefit to themselves. Can you think of anything more stupid (harmful to others and self) than insisting that other people wear masks, and also wearing one yourself? Same for the clot shots, of course.
Another wokehole stable, ACP Annals, same influences, same claptrap pseudoscience posing as medicine infected by poisoned midwit SJW academicians. Also surrendered professional credibility long ago. And don't look for contradictory comments, counternarratives will be purged.
They published this study very similar to the JAMA study you shared, not finding racial disparity despite their best efforts, disturbed by it.
Social, Behavioral, and Metabolic Risk Factors and Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease Mortality in U.S. Adults
American College of Physicians, Annals of Internal Medicine, August 15, 2023
Jiang He, MD, PhD, Joshua D. Bundy, MPH, PhD, Siyi Geng, MS, Ling Tian, MS, Hua He, PhD, Xingyan Li, MSPH, Keith C. Ferdinand, MD, Amanda H. Anderson, MPH, PhD, Kirsten S. Dorans, ScD, Ramachandran S. Vasan, MD, Katherine T. Mills, MSPH, PhD, and Jing Chen, MD, MSc
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M23-0507
Abstract
Background:
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality is persistently higher in the Black population than in other racial and ethnic groups in the United States.
Objective:
To examine the degree to which social, behavioral, and metabolic risk factors are associated with CVD mortality and the extent to which racial differences in CVD mortality persist after these factors are accounted for.After adjustment for these metabolic, behavioral, and social risk factors separately, hazard ratios of CVD mortality for Black compared with White participants were attenuated from 1.54 (95% CI, 1.34 to 1.77) to 1.34 (CI, 1.16 to 1.55), 1.31 (CI, 1.15 to 1.50), and 1.04 (CI, 0.90 to 1.21), respectively.
Limitation:
Causal contributions of social, behavioral, and metabolic risk factors to racial and ethnic disparities in CVD mortality could not be established.
Conclusion:
The Black–White difference in CVD mortality diminished after adjustment for behavioral and metabolic risk factors and completely dissipated with adjustment for social determinants of health in the U.S. population.
Primary Funding Source:
National Institutes of Health.
BUT....here's a twist! The same study, authors published in the American Heart Association Journal earlier this year:
Abstract MP15: Mediation Effects of Social, Behavioral, and Metabolic Risk Factors on Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease Mortality in US Adults
Jiang He, Joshua D Bundy, Siyi Geng, Ling Tian, Hua He, Katherine T Mills and Jing Chen
AHA Journals, March 14, 2023
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.147.suppl_1.MP15
It's the same study. But with a different conclusion:
Conclusion: Social determinants of health play an important role in racial disparities in CVD mortality. These findings call for public health interventions beyond lifestyle changes and medical treatment.
Academia in the New Dark Age has a funny science. It's almost like it's just a narrative in search of data. Adaptable for any audience and agenda. They really want the narrative to be true. But that insufferable data. Hey - between the JAMA published research and these two 'different' research studies we have to be getting close to having enough studies to publish a "metadata analysis" that racism doesn't cause heart disease, right?
Orwellian, indeed.
Comment below will have excerpts from George Orwell's "The Prevention of Literature" written in 1946 that applies. It even contemplates machine writing programmed to match state objectives, like, say, AI writing used in many publications today.
The Prevention of Literature
Polemic, January, 1946
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-prevention-of-literature/
(selected excerpts)
"From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.
...
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops.
...
(1/2)
This is absolutely chilling.
Would you believe, my daughter studied 1984 in her English class in 2020. Not one mention was made in class of the obvious instantiation of the dystopian world of 1984, in the covidian cult.
In this quality animated feature, there's a nice little moment where Nineteen Eighty-Four gets the Nineteen Eighty-Four treatment.
https://youtu.be/vWkepoLUZfs?si=7hUeqzhQBUrZUQ32
And where did '1984' come from?
https://www.darcymoore.net/2022/12/30/nineteen-eighty-four-or-1984/#:~:text=The%20correct%20title%20for%20George%20Orwell's%20novel%20is%20%E2%80%9CNineteen%20Eighty,%E2%80%9CNineteen%20Eighty%2DFour.%E2%80%9D
The animation is brilliant, and sooooo creepy.
Thanks for the Nineteen Eighty-Four vs 1984 piece also. I went with Nineteen Eighty-Four because it seemed to be the version used on the earliest editions that I could find. It's good to have confirmation!
It's tragic what they've done and are doing to young minds. Where's the critical thinking and observational awareness skills? Students and teachers alike. What a classically educated mind easily sees is invisible to the progressive educated one.
And that's the whole point of the factory model of education, as explicitly stated by the robber barons who transplanted the Prussian education system into the US, from whence it metastasised to other English-speaking nations including Australia.
(2/2)
"Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.
-
But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
...
When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons.
...
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
...
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes ossified. At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction."
"The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves." Orwell was an extraordinarily perceptive man.
Anna Funder's new book Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life brings to light the not inconsequential contribution that Eileen Blair made to Orwell's work.
Excellent, another bloody book to add to the ceiling-high stack of unread books on my bedside table 🤣.
I really do know how you feel. The scamdemic has upended our lives in so many ways.
And what about the struggle to reread a book? When you did that post about Sokal et al, I got out Sokal's book Intellectual Impostures, now twenty-five years old, just to flick through and do a refresh. It's still sitting there unopened.
Vocabulary Building for the Bibliophile:
Librocubicularist—a person who reads in bed.
Abibliophobia—the fear of running out of reading material.
Readultery—the act of being unfaithful to one book by reading another at the same time.
Bibliosmia—the aroma of a good book.
Shelf-righteous—the feeling of superiority about one's bookshelf.
Through this and his other writings I never bothered to read before I have a different appreciation for 1984 and Animal Farm. Orwell was using futurism and zoomorphism to convey what he saw as current events in a way to get the concepts out under censorship that was already in place. If portrayed as current events it couldn't have been published. Prevention of Literature speaks to that.
For the censors to allow the introduction of the concepts to the public mind they believed they could control, corral the independent thinkers who begin to awaken. As long as it's a dystopia set way off in the future or as animal characters the reality of it remains only a fear of some far off day, "we're not there yet, but one day it might come here." Like for when a truthteller gains power and tries to inform, correct the record they can be portrayed as the Orwellian figure he warned against.
These are very clever deceivers we're dealing with. But we're more so. We see now, more than ever.
Very astute observation. The best sci-fi is along these same lines: really good sci-fi writers depict terrible events that have parallels in present-day life, but because these events are set in some dystopian future, we let our guards down just enough to be able to view these events in a different light. Then the gears turn in our heads, and we suddenly become aware of the parallels. My favourite example of this is the moment in They Live when the lead character puts on the 'magic' sunglasses and sees the hidden messages behind the advertising billboards.
Interesting that you mention that. Yes. They do that. Explicitly. Purposefully. Exactly what you describe. In their own words. Hollywood Sci-Fi is how they start the discussion about the ethics of new technology. I found the following in a panel discussion about bioweapons, bioethics:
Dr. George Church, Dr. Giuliana Testa, Dr. Pardis Sabeti (Ariana Huffington moderator)
Creating Medical Miracles, Ethically, April 23, 2019
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/dr-george-church-dr-giuliana-214036340.html
Transcript (02:49)
AH: You all have been to the idea of the third rail in each of your fields, like where would you not go? And I would love to hear a story or an example of a time when you said “I’m not going to go there. I’m not going to play God.” Have any one of you had a moment like that?
GC: Well, I don’t think we’re in any danger of playing a major deity, but we’re, we could certainly do, there’s a line which we don’t cross. There’s some things which I don’t even discuss, until many years later when someone else thinks of the same idea.
An example of that was, personalized weapons, biological weapons, when you make a weapon that is specific for a particular person. And I kept that a secret, I didn’t tell anybody for about a decade. And then somebody else who I happen to know thought about it independently and was planning on publishing it in The Atlantic, and I said to him, “do you really want to do this, I mean this is enabling, for no particular purpose?” And it was framed in terms of Barack Obama being the target. And I just thought it was a, that’s an example of a line that I didn’t cross and I wouldn’t. But it did, and it was published, so.
AH: Should the decision not to publish something that in the hands of the wrong people could wreak devastation be a matter for government regulation?
GC: Both ideas I did share because I do think that other people are thinking about. Just they’re a rare one every now and again that it seems like there could buy us an extra ten years if I shut up. But I think because we talk about these ideas so far in advance, the ones we think that we can protect, that we do, that the ethics can stay ahead of technology. Not just catch up, but stay ahead, so we, the, the world of science fiction writers, the Hollywood, can come up with scenarios that are well outside our technical capabilities, but are inside our abilities to have a discussion among the entire population by introducing it to millions of television or movie watchers for example, or book readers, magazine readers. That is how we start the discussion before it is technically possible. And then many of these, we’ve been worrying about designer babies since before the first IVF in 1978. That’s an example of something that the ethics especially got ahead of the technology."
FF - These aren't just academic cranks kicking around theoretical concepts. These are people with a great deal of influence and at the center of much that our world is being steered into becoming. Eugenicists. Transhumanists. Virologists engineering viruses for effect, establishing systems of human control. You'll find some interesting names in it if you wish to climb aboard my recent Magic Carpet Ride Stack:
https://freedomfox.substack.com/p/step-in-foxs-magic-carpet-ride
And forget what you think you know ethics are and how these panelists talk about ethics. For most of us and general public audiences that ethicists go in front of like in the panel video the concept of ethics is imagined or portrayed as either virtue ethics or deontological ethics, Kantian. But as most ethicists and public policymakers apply ethics their concept is utilitarian ethics. Deceit and harm inflicted for a 'greater good' is deemed ethical. Ethics. A very subjective word.
That's an amazing find. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. The brazenness of these so-called scientists is quite stunning. If the data don't support your hypothesis, just Make Shit Up.
I see, too, that there are some Head Girls infesting our federal parliament now. In reference to Australia's looming Covid-inspired Ministry of Truth at ACMA, progressive' Teals like Zali Steggall (some sort of skier, apparently) have come out with the old clunker that 'free speech does not mean the right to spread misinformation and disinformation'.
Well, yes, it does mean that, actually. The government has every right to spread as much of its pseudoscience cow manure as it likes providing its critics get the same right to free speech, leaving responsible adults the freedom to evaluate the contested ideas. One person's 'misinformation' is another person's propaganda - and without free speech, there is no way of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Another Head Girl/Prefect Teal (Monique Ryan, I think it was) also a mask fanatic forever pulling the maskless students into line.
As a psychological type, the Head Girl is a fascinating, and dangerous, subject.
Yes, you're spot on. Government, the public service, and increasingly, even corporations are just riddled with these Head Girl types (and their male counterparts). They are an amazingly dangerous breed. I'm pondering whether there's a crossover with Carlo Cipolla's laws of stupidity, which I just stumbled across. Cipolla's definition of a stupid person is one who repeatedly does things which harm others, but without any benefit to themselves. Can you think of anything more stupid (harmful to others and self) than insisting that other people wear masks, and also wearing one yourself? Same for the clot shots, of course.