Al Gore’s Hot World hysteria, the country’s greatest politicization of Western academia, now competes with Kamala Harris’ statement she would not trust a Covid-19 vaccine under a Trump presidency, as proof the Left has undermined honor and integrity in communication. “The medium is the message” said Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media). We’ve gone from the Information Age to the Propaganda Age, a time when social digital media is now utilized to shape public opinion by any and all means possible to undermine concepts of individualism, personal liberty, self-overcoming and rationality of objectivism that underlie Americanism.
Simple proof – type, “evilincandescentbulb” in the digital world’s most popular search engine and you will be pointed to nothing more that light bulbs. Now, type the same using an independent search engine, e.g., DuckDuckGo and the first thing that comes up is a link to hundreds of references in articles related to the ideologically-motivated politics of global warming, climate change, the assault on western science in general and on the scientific method in particular, on this site, as follows:
https://evilincandescentbulb.wordpress.com
The height of the Little Ice Age is generally dated as 1650 to 1850 A.D. The American Revolutionary Army under General George Washington shivered at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78, and New York harbor was frozen in the winter of 1780. Historic snowstorms struck Lisbon, Portugal in 1665, 1744 and 1886. (P…
The medium is the message and the message is clear: the words of Mugwump@Wagathon (https://twitter.com/wagathon) shall not be searched or read. We’ve seen the same type of communication cleansing beginning in the Trump era and continuing through the Biden era and even earlier when the entire public scientific forum at Amazon.com was taken down. Such ‘shadow banning’ is simply a cleaner and obviously more surreptitious way of preventing the public from being informed that is simply a modern method of burning down the offices of newspapers that print uncomfortable, inconvenient and objective news.
Wanna get banned? Simply point out that, those who despise capitalism have no respect for we anthropoi who believe there is a higher authority than ideologically-motivated establishment politics. For us who are skeptical of official government-blessed knowledge, there are higher authorities: integrity, honor and respect for the scientific method.
Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we’ve built around ourselves. ~John Etchemendy (‘The threat from within’)
What passes for science in the halls of academia these days has less to do with skill and ability than who are better at marketing fearsome scenarios of certain doom, who are big promoters of big government planning and who are the most enthusiastically eager to allow science to be used as a propaganda tool to usurp the fruits of others’ labor, energy, will and commitment to truth and honesty.
So… what do we do about it? Obviously, classical education is dead. We’ve got to learn to think for ourselves and sometimes, it doesn’t come naturally. We’ve got to be more proactive about being aware of hidden motives, secret agendas and unstated biases of others, more skeptical about anything that defies common sense and learn to do our own research. “Classic psychological research,” says David Robson (Why smart people believe coronavirus myths), “shows that some people are naturally better at overriding their reflexive responses than others. This finding may help us understand why some people are more susceptible to fake news than others.”
In this era of fake news, a healthy degree of thoughtful skepticism and fact-checking is a healthy, rational and wise approach to take about everything we are asked to believe without question. No less an authority than Albert Einstein on the subject of ‘thinking’ also advises us to question it when he says, “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
(Updated, October 16, 2021)
Wagathon
evilincandescentbulb 