July 7, 2021 - Epoch Times
12:18
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The lab leak behaved differently than a normal story. | |
| In general, there are people who see what is taking place and they try to call public attention to the evidence, whistleblowers of a kind. | |
| And in general, they are not successful. | |
| Sometimes we find out about them in retrospect when a story breaks because some catastrophe has happened and suddenly we discover that somebody was warning that it would. | |
| In this case, the whistleblowers were largely a number of people who go by the acronym DRASTIC on Twitter. | |
| These are people with scientific skills and insight who did the analysis in public, unearthed evidence that was not known, and put the story together. | |
| And that provides a template for how you can deal with such stories when the evidence is available. | |
| The problem is the other legs of the stool involved in the COVID story are of a different type. | |
| And the apparatus that wishes to maintain control and hold us to the official narrative has ratcheted up its censorship game. | |
| So... | |
| I was able to talk about the lab leak hypothesis, and I did run into trouble periodically, but my channel was not jeopardized on YouTube as far as I know. | |
| This time around, we are facing substantial pressure to stand down and not talk about the evidence that of the repurposed drugs that appear to be effective at preventing and treating COVID-19 and to not talk about the adverse event signal in the VAERS data regarding the vaccines. | |
| That is going to make it harder for this story to emerge. | |
| Now, I'm hopeful that it will, but people have to understand This set of stories where there is a narrative supported by the evidence and then there's an official narrative that pretends to be supported by the evidence but has the weight of the tech sector, governmental officials, that is a symptom of a deeper problem. | |
| It is a symptom of something that goes by the name of capture. | |
| Unfortunately, capture is too closely associated with the idea of regulatory capture, which is where that term shows up. | |
| What we are facing is something that is much broader than that term usually connotes. | |
| Maybe just tell us, what is regulatory capture, and then let's expand from that. | |
| Regulatory capture is when a company or an industry captures the apparatus that is supposed to regulate it in the public's interest and begins turning that agency or whatever its structure might be so that it actually does the bidding of the company or the industry. | |
| And that is a fairly common phenomenon, and people are aware of it. | |
| It does not usually involve things like the tech sector doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical industry. | |
| It is not clear why that connection exists, but we can see that that connection exists because, well, consider the question... | |
| Of what would be ideal from the point of view of the vaccine manufacturers. | |
| It would be ideal if it were recommended that all people get the vaccine irrespective of their age, irrespective of whether or not they were pregnant, irrespective of whether they had had COVID-19. | |
| Assuming ethics don't play into this at all. | |
| I mean, that's what you're saying here, right? | |
| Well, I guess what I'm really saying is I don't know how ethics interface with something like the fiduciary responsibility inside these corporations, and I'm not going to pretend to, but they do have a perverse incentive to deliver as many vaccine doses as possible. | |
| That perverse incentive lines up with a medical conclusion that everybody should be vaccinated. | |
| And that medical conclusion is now the CDC recommendation mirrors exactly what would be in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. | |
| And the tech sector, the social media platforms, have now taken the CDC recommendations and encoded them as the basis for their censorship policy. | |
| So that suggests that Capture has now worked its way down to the level of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. | |
| And the danger that that poses is that we can't have a conversation about the capture of the public health agencies, even when it is urgent that we do so. | |
| Because our platforms of conversation won't allow it, essentially. | |
| Yes. | |
| If you do it as a hypothetical, imagine that you don't believe that capture has taken over the CDC, but that it could have. | |
| In the case that we take CDC beliefs and recommendations and we encode them as the basis for a censorship policy, then what we would see is the evidence does not match the recommendations of the CDC. We would have to have a conversation that says, has the CDC been compromised? | |
| Is there evidence that it's been compromised? | |
| Are there mechanisms we can see that would allow it to be compromised? | |
| We would have to have that discussion. | |
| But if that very discussion is shut down because it is deemed to be medical misinformation, then there is effective silence. | |
| And it appears to those who are only casually paying attention that there isn't the suggestion that the CDC has been captured because nobody's talking about it. | |
| Well, but in this situation, you also would have a whole lot of people who I guess, are rapidly losing faith in the system if the system can't be somehow tested or held to account or even assessed, I guess. | |
| Well, unfortunately, what you get is the worst of both worlds because, on the one hand, you don't get the necessary conversation about whether the apparatus that's supposed to keep us safe is still functioning in our interest and And that leaves those who detect that something is wrong to fantasize about what may be going on. | |
| And so the understanding of how bad things are, what the nature of them is, runs wild because the only conversations in which the fact of a discrepancy between the evidence and the policy can be discussed are also conversations in which people are undisciplined and, you know, are allowing their imaginations to get the better of them. | |
| I keep thinking about this because we're in this time period over, I don't know how many years it's now, where you have lawmakers, you have significant portions of society advocating in general for censorship for the good of society, ostensibly. | |
| I mean, I don't I've certainly heard that cited a lot. | |
| It's not something that I necessarily was expecting, but that's where we are. | |
| And this whole kind of, I guess, reality or ethos intersects with this whole phenomenon somehow, right? | |
| I mean, that's what I'm thinking, but I haven't thought much further than that. | |
| I must say I'm shocked by it, but I also know that I've been warned again and again. | |
| I've been warned about the burning of witches and the burning of books and Big Brother. | |
| And I know that history does not repeat itself, but that it rhymes. | |
| And this rhymes in a way that I think caught us off guard. | |
| But yes, we have people cheering for the very things that our forefathers understood were a threat to... | |
| Our ability to persevere in the world. | |
| And I do feel like I'm not sure what our forefathers needed to say to us in order to alert us that this might happen. | |
| But the number of warnings is great. | |
| And the degree to which we are now seeing people who, until very recently... | |
| We're apparently on board with the idea that free expression was a good idea. | |
| We now see those very people cheering for the censors and aiding them, and it's frightening. | |
| And so here's the question. | |
| There's some portion of the population that seems to believe this is a good idea, and it's not a tiny portion. | |
| How does that intersect with this type of censorship that we're seeing, exactly? | |
| I don't think it works that way exactly. | |
| In fact, I think that our founders understood something quite counterintuitive. | |
| Everybody can imagine that Lots of speech has no value, and some speech is destructive. | |
| And so it is an obvious thought that maybe we could improve the world by just simply eliminating the speech that is obviously beyond the pale. | |
| And the problem is, the speech that is obviously beyond the pale is not an easy category to operationalize. | |
| What you often have are cranks and heterodoxy that travel together. | |
| And the admixture is an unfortunate one. | |
| In general, there are a hundred cranks for every really interesting heterodox idea. | |
| And they very often sound alike for reasons that probably aren't worth going into. | |
| But the point is... | |
| It becomes a good bet for a lazy thinker to bet against all of the things on the fringe, because the things on the fringe so strongly tend to be wrong that if you bet against them, you'll be right 99 times out of 100. | |
| But if you bet against the fringe and you stop thinking about the fact that hanging out on that fringe will be the heterodox ideas that are the root of the next rung of progress, then you will freeze progress and you won't know what happened. | |
| So our founders, recognizing that there was no good way to surgically separate the bad ideas from the good ideas on the fringe, said, well, we have to accept the cost of the bad ideas being protected. | |
| That is the cost of having the good ideas that are in amongst them free to be voiced. | |
| And it's hard to exceed their formulation. | |
| We still don't know how to separate heterodoxy from crank ideas. | |
| And we need the heterodoxy. | |
| The fact is every great idea starts with a minority of one. | |
| And if you're not willing to surrender the advantage that comes from all of those next great ideas, then we're stuck with having to deal with what's on the fringe. | |
| And it's not that the cost of it is zero. | |
| Is this whole scenario that we're discussing here today with respect to health an expression somehow of the fact that we're heading into this kind of stasis because of the way the collective thinking of society is changing or somehow being guided to change? | |
| I don't know why it's happening, but I can say this is happening across every industry that I'm aware of. | |
| It's happening across every institution that I'm aware of. | |
| And frankly, it's happening across every topic that is important for us to discuss. | |
| We are undoing all of the basic principles that allow us To think, that allow us to disagree with each other productively, to discover what is true, and the consequence for us is going to be catastrophic. | |
| I mean, really, we are taking a system that, yes, is deeply flawed, but does improve over time. |
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