ALB
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I know that the anti-vaxxer militants are either nutty or nasty or both but is their misinformation having any effect? The case for allowing them to express their views is that they can be refuted and people judge for themselves. Hence no need to ban or censor them.
It seems that they are having little or no effect. This from a couple of days ago:
“Uptake has surpassed expectations, officials said. Infectious-disease analysts anticipated 75 percent participation, said Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England. But uptake among those 70 and older has been almost 90 percent, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Monday. Among people ages 75 to 79, he told the BBC, “over 97 percent have taken up the offer.”
The anti-vaxxers are not being listened to. They are not influencing people. Of course it could be that people aged 75 to 79 are particularly perspicacious compared with younger age groups. We’ll see.
Wez, I didn’t think my hostility to Feyerabend could be based just on your description of his view, so I checked with my collection of Skeptical Inquirers and found that in 1997 I would have read and absorbed the criticism of him in an article in the March/April issue entitled “The End of Science?“, by Theodore schick Jr in which he wrote:
“There is a view abroad in the land that science is more of an ideology than a methodology, and thus that it cannot legitimately claim to have a corner on reality. No one expresses this view more pugnaciously than the late philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (…) In Feyerabend’s view, science is a religion, for it rests on certain dogmas that cannot be rationally justified. Thus, accepting it requires a leap of faith. But just as government has no business teaching religion in the public schools, it has no business teaching science either. In a truly democratic society, people would be as free to choose their epistemology as their political party. (…) Scientists are a philosophically naive lot. But this naiveté does not come without a price. Because most scientists can’t justify their methodology, Feyerabend’s claims have gone largely unanswered. As a result, Feyerabend’s position has become prominent in both academia and the public at large. This has arguably led not only to the rise of pseudoscience and religious fundamentalism, but also to a shrinking pool of scientific jobs and research funds.”
Obviously we can have nothing to do with a view which provides an intellectual justification for pseudoscience by putting it on a par with science. However, during the next lockdown, I might add him to my reading list alongside Piers Corbyn and David Icke.
I don’t think common sense is about holding ideas. It’s about practice, what you do or don’t do to deal with some situation, based on past practical experience. It could almost be said to the opposite of ideology and book-learning.
Socialism can be described as common sense as it’s the obvious practical solution to the problem of how to ensure that everybody’s material needs are met. The resources are there, the knowledge is there, and the people to apply it are there, so why not bring them all together with the people applying their knowledge to use the resources to produce directly to meet their needs?
There is no way, by contrast, that capitalism can be said to be common sense. Who would have thought up a system under which resources are privately owned and most people’s needs only met indirectly via money obtained from working for those who own the resources? It works after a fashion but can hardly be called common sense.
I am not saying we shouldn’t be sceptical of all claims before making up our minds on the basis of the evidence. But you expressed sympathy for a notorious critic of science and its methods. Maybe he didn’t mean it and was only publicity seeking as a controversialist. I don’t know.
Actually, anthropology in particular has come up with evidence that strongly confirms the socialist case. So have various sociological studies and neurological ones (rather than psychological which I agree is a field for all sorts of non-evidence based beliefs).
But, to return to the subject of the thread, what is the evidence that current medical practice is not appropriate to deal with the pandemic? It’s not the bogey of “capitalist medicine” which once got a mention here before being slapped down, is it?
If some speculative philosopher says that science is an ideology on a par with voodoo and religion with its own rituals and establishment then they are lending credibility to the views expressed by the presidents of Tanzania and Madagascar, the Chief Justice of South African and the Sri Lankan minister of health that there are other ways of dealing effectively with the current covid-19 pandemic than relying on the proved theories and practices of modern medicine.
Someone here expressed sympathy for this sophism and had to be called out.
I don’t think scientists are involved or even interested in seeking an answer to Pilate’s question. That’s a pursuit of theologians and philosophers.
In any event, philosophers have nothing useful to say about the coronavirus vaccines and their efficacy. Whatever they say, they will all have the jab in the end. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Or rather the refutation of the pudding is.
I don’t think scientists are involved or even interested in seeking an answer to Pilate’s question. That’s a pursuit of theologians and philosophers.
In any event, philosophers have nothing useful to say about the coronavirus vaccines and their efficacy. Whatever they say, they will all have the jab in the end. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Or rather the refutation of the pudding is.
He may have attacked “science” but the following suggests that this was a bit of an intellectual pose. When it came down to it, he accepted its application:
“Less than two years after my meeting with Feyerabend, The New York Times reported that a brain tumor had killed the “anti-science philosopher.” I called Borrini in Zurich to offer my condolences. She was distraught. Paul had complained of headaches, and a few months later he was dead.
Recalling Feyerabend’s excoriation of the medical profession, I could not resist asking: Did he seek medical treatment for his tumor? Of course, she replied. He had had “total confidence” in his doctors’ diagnosis and was willing to accept any treatment they recommended; the tumor had simply been detected too late for anything to be done.”
(https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/was-philosopher-paul-feyerabend-really-science-s-worst-enemy/)“Anyway we now know that some of it is useless for combating the new variants and for the over 65s”
I think that the words you are looking for rather than “useless” are something like “not effective enough” or “not (yet) proved”.
I agree, though, that competition and profit has to have been a factor with the various pharma companies competing to get their vaccine out first and to rake in profits whether short-term or long-term.
I meant extended the recommended three weeks not three months of course as hopefully the context made clear. My three weeks are now up so I am now a guinea pig.
Having defended the right of anti-vaxxers to be allowed to put their view on the grounds that the way to deal with them is to let them put it and then shoot it down, I can’t criticise Dissident Voice for publishing this. However, I think they can be criticised for allowing “Makia Freeman” (presumably his adopted name) to describe himself,without challenge, as:
“Makia Freeman is the editor of The Freedom Articles, a long-time truth researcher and a promoter of freedom. He provides insightful, non-partisan, unique and cutting-edge analysis on who’s running the world, how they’re doing it and what the deeper agenda is – as well as solutions for restoring peace and freedom to the world.”
His articles are not “non-partisan”but present a decidedly partisan view — about the world being run by a cabal who want to impose a “New World Order” restricting the freedom of individuals (and nation-states). In fact the very first paragraph of his article talks of “the covid cult” and references another articles of his which calls the current pandemic a “scamdemic”.
The basic arguments in his article in Dissident Voice is that mandatory mask-wearing and mass vaccination infringe the Nuremberg Code in that “masks” are “medical devices” and the vaccination programmes are medical experiments. I doubt that a court interpreting the code would decide that masks were “medical devices” unless they were also prepared to rule that crash helmets and safety belts were.
The Vaccination programmes could only be called an “experiment” if you regard the pandemic as a “scamdemic”. Having said this, there is an element of experiment in the UK programme — not giving the second jab within the recommended three-months. They have extended the time limit to 12 weeks without knowing what effect this will have. It probably won’t have any adverse effect but they don’t know and are in effect carrying out an experiment to see if this is the case. Whether those responsible should be face a Nuremberg-style trial for this is another matter.
So, if someone wants to do a detailed refutation of the views of this anti-vaxxer, the elements of this this would be (1) that the virus is real (2) that it has caused a pandemic and (3) that the world is not run by a cabal who have a hidden agenda (it is not run by anybody but is subject to the vagaries of the impersonal capitalist economic system).
I don’t think that there can be any doubt that (for most of his life at least) Churchill was a “white supemacist”. It went with the terrority if you thought that a European state should have a colonal empire. Of course he was not alone. All supporters of the British Empire were white supremacists as were those of the French, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese empires and those in Germany and Italy who thought their state should have one too.
It is also true that the Second World War was one between the British Empire and expansionist Germany, and at the start was presented as such by both sides, though later the rulers of the British state decided that this wasn’t a good way to retain popular support for the war. The rulers of Germany, on the other hand, played to the end that card for all that it was worth. As for the American state, when it joined in it fielded a segregated army.
In one of his podcasts Peter Joseph has analysed well the so-called Great Reset, so well in fact that we are thinking of using in it in next month’s Socialist Standard under the title “Capitalism cannot be reset” (to work other than as a system that runs in profit).
Here is what he said (scroll down to last post on 24 January):
M, I think the lack of response to this could be due to people here not seeing the essay as directed at them because of its opening paragraph:
“There is a propensity amongst those on the left to discuss revolution in the context of physical violence. I do not know of any communist who has not, at one time or another, spoken feverishly of toppling the old order with brutal excess.“
We don’t talk of the revolution in terms of physical violence and hanging capitalists from lampposts. Certainly there are plenty of reasons to be angry about what capitalism does to us and others and some may hate the capitalists (our early members certainly did) even though they know that it’s the system not individual capitalists that’s to blame. It seems to be by a Leninist directed at other Leninists.
On the other hand, this question of yours is perhaps more relevant:
“Is being a modern revolutionary simply a futile, theatrical exercise?”
The answer to which is obviously No! And even if it was theatrical that would not necessarily mean that it was futile.
As it happens, we had a discussion on this sort of thing a couple of months ago that can be listened to here:
In the days when gold and silver coins circulated as the currency this was an obvious ways of resources. The anti-state libertarians who created Bitcoin as an electronic equivalent of anonymous cash have found a way of recreating this waste. Lots of electricity is required to “mine” ( their term) Bitcoin and it has now been calculated that so much is wasted for this purpose that it amounts to as much as is consumed in Argentina:
