|
|
By Jo Nova The only people worth silencing are those who are right
— Hacktivist Parody Google
Google is waging a war against skeptics because skeptics have the truth on their side and they win debates too easily. How do we know? There are plenty of wrong people on the internet, and acres of misinformation, but Google is happy to feed those creators. The Flat Earthers are not spreading fast on Youtube, they’re not attracting millions of views. But no one needs to cut off their money supply because their arguments aren’t persuasive. To stop those ideas from running amok, the world only needs free speech.
Google announces: …a new monetization policy for Google advertisers, publishers and YouTube creators that will prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change. This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.
Google demonetizes content creators who […]
Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for ten years and he has just quit in protest.
Peter Boghossian
He fought against Woke ideology. He helped write hoax papers to expose how meaningless peer review is and exposed students to politically incorrect speakers to hone their powers of reasoning. For that he has been subject to extraordinary vilification, inquisitions, and a campaign of disruption. His students were interviewed to find instances of “discrimination” and the investigators even asked them if they knew anything about him “beating his wife and children”, fueling rumors that he was a violent misogynist. He was given no right of reply. It’s character assassination by any means possible. The University did nothing to stop it.
Even petty methods were used to silence and intimidate him. Fire alarms interrupted an interview, bags of faeces were delivered, and speaker wires were pulled out during a live panel discussion. This reminds me of stories of how the Chinese Communist Party targets dissidents overseas with petty disruptions like having minions bang pots and pans in alleys to wake them in the dead of night.
It’s almost like the CCP runs the universities of the West.
My […]
What is informed consent if your doctor is not allowed to inform you?
Even if Dr Oosterhuis is allowed to keep his license after being grilled today, the NSW Medical Board will have succeeded in scaring many doctors into silence. If our medical agencies were corrupt, the first people to point that out would be doctors who could speak freely. The gross overreaction of the NSW Medical Board tells us all that they don’t have solid evidence, and they might be covering up either their incompetence or something worse.
What are they hiding?
NSW Medical Board to grill anti-vax doctor
The Australian
A Sydney doctor has been hauled before the NSW Medical Board after he questioned evidence behind Covid-19 vaccines and promoted unapproved treatments, including Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, in a case that will test the limits of what medical professionals can say publicly.
Anaesthetist Paul Oosterhuis, who has practised in NSW’s public hospital system for more than 30 years, will front the board at a hearing on Friday, where he could be stripped of his licence after he made Facebook posts more than two weeks ago.
“AHPRA has said you can only […]
Thousands were asleep at the wheel, occupied with busywork, and an endless trail of minor crises. Each little step was worse than the one before, inexorably, but only a little worse. Like a field of corn that we never see growing — but one day it is over our head.
There is no time when everyone realizes together and lifts in mass protest. Instead, little moments tip the balance, one person at a time. And once awake, good people don’t want to be troublemakers. They are afraid to stand out.
Its all so human while it becomes something so horribly inhumane.
The form of the nation stays the same but the spirit changes to become something people would never have accepted even five years earlier. Like perhaps the idea that people who committed, at most, a minor misdemeanor, a trespass, could be kept without charges in solitary confinement for months on end.
We are a gregarious species. It is hardwired. Our great strength is also our greatest vulnerability…
So many wait for someone else to speak up.
Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. They interviewed 10 Germans who talked […]
Would you like bunions with that? | Photo: Mshirk
Believe it or not, Medieval shoes tell us something important about modern civilization. The hyper-gregarious Homo Sapiens might be able to walk on the moon, but ultimately a large proportion of the species just want to climb the social ladder. And the smarter, higher order sapiens might paradoxically be willing to pay the most stupid price.
In this case, being “progressive” in the 14th Century meant wearing pointy shoes that left 4 out of 10 people buried at the friary with bent and sometimes broken bones. Bunions make it harder to balance so they increase the risk of falls. The undeniable benefits of scoring social fashion points were apparently worth spending decades distorting foot bones. Before you dismiss this as a teenage girly thing, ponder that two thirds of the victims were men.
The social competition to have the pointiest shoes became so dangerous that in 1463 King Edward IV passed a law declaring toe-points had to be 2 inches or less within London.
Pointy shoes in a statue from 3,000 BC. | Camocon
The pointy shoe fashion bubble has struck all over the world: Japan, China, […]
Make this man President. Ron DeSantis has signed into law something that will allow Floridians to sue Big Tech if they have been banned by one sided “selectively enforced” rules. Finally, Big Tech, at least in Florida, will have to set some rules and apply them to both sides of any debate or the aggrieved party can sue Big Tech.
It’s aimed at Silicon Valley:
“I, along with the legislators and this great governor, do not think that a handful of kids behind some desks in Silicon Valley get to be the arbiter of what free speech is,” House bill sponsor Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill said.
The new law comes into effect on July 1. It applies to any company with a revenue over $100 million or who have 100 million monthly participants. This is about maintaining a free and open town square. If political candidates are deplatformed it will cost the Tech Giants a quarter of a million dollars a day. (Those fines might have to be raised).
Coming soon: Big Tech to create all kinds of rules that benefit people who like Oligarchs.
Presumably Big Tech have already convened a team to deal with this. Expect […]
All decaying civilizations have a decaying language
Some call the changes an “evolving” thing or a “living language” but when all the changes produce ambiguous misunderstandings or emotional reactions rather than analytical ones, it’s obvious the abuse of words is just degradation for political gain, not progress. Civil behavior is what makes civilizations. Any barbarian can rant with indignation.
When words are exploited we lose meaningful tools.
It’s about free speech
One word has become a favourite weapon to silence people and stop discussions. Hate.
Pat Condell reminds us that “hate” is a powerful word, the darkest emotion, an extreme word — but it’s misused and abused now for any old reason, but only in a selective way.
The word hate is thrown like a verbal frisbee — tossed like verbal acid — every unwelcome remark, and unpleasant truth is “hate”. If you vote for the wrong candidate, you are voting for “hate”. And now this extreme word has been crowbarred into the law.
You can be arrested if you say something that may causing alarm and distress to people who are determined to be alarmed and distressed by your free speech. But if the […]
It’s not the hard and fast rules on censorship that are the worst — it’s the vague ambiguous ones. That way no one really knows what is permitted, and what isn’t. With random punishment and vague rules the underclass have to guess what is OK, and usually err on the side of silence.
Self censorship of a whole nation is so much more efficient. Otherwise the rulers need a lot of police. And if people are only punished randomly, there are no rules to work around — and the fear and guessing sets the boundaries way further out.
Communist Tactics to Force Self-Censorship Sweeping America
by Petr Svab, The Epoch Times
The principle of self-censorship is that people, just to be on the safe side, refrain from saying even things that aren’t outright banned by some applicable rules.
Vague Rules
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the world’s most notorious censor of free speech, has for decades used the method of making its policies intentionally vague. During its past political campaigns, for instance, the central leadership would issue a decree that “rightists” and “counterrevolutionaries” were to be punished. The next lower rung of party officials […]
Former Professor Peter Ridd was sacked for criticizing his university colleagues at James Cook Uni. He won a $1.2m claim for wrongful dismissal, but JCU appealed, and won the appeal. So Ridd is taking his case to the High Court. Today’s small win merely means they will hear his appeal.
Meanwhile academics all over Australia know that right now, if they spotted fraud, poor reasoning, or incompetence they can’t point that out publicly. Our academic system is corrupt to the very core, seeking not the truth, but just more grants and to act as a machine to elect the kind of governments that will give them more money, easier conditions and suits most of their personal political tastes too. James Cook Uni has wasted a million or two of taxpayers funds seeking to protect the Vice Chancellors ability to sack anyone she damn-well likes for spurious reasons like “not being collegial” or daring to write a sarcastic line in an email. A few months ago, JAmes Cook still hadn’t got far investigating the actual alleged fraud, nor in releasing data about the Great Barrier Reef that they profess to care so much about. What matters to JCU? Not science.
Peter […]
Tucker Carlson lays out the radioactive hypocrisy of those who advocated insurrection and riots and now pretend to advocate for rule of law. The word “insurrection” had a whole different meaning in 2016 and for most of history.
Those who control the language…
Really worth watching. …
John Matze ran a company that was worth half a billion dollars on Friday, but Parler went from number one in the Apple Ap store to zero overnight. Matze now says he can’t go home for fear of his safety. It appears that Parler have done a deal with Epik to shift there (which also houses Gab). Judging by this Newsweek article Epik are already so hated and tarred, they have no fear.
Silencing, blacklists, and electronic exile smell just like a Social Credit system. Will Americans let that stand?
If Global Corporations Walk Away from Republicans the GOP Will Have to Listen to New Voters
Stacey Lennox
“A significant majority of Americans, 73%, have a negative view of China. Continued international integration will hurt working and middle-class Americans the most. If Republicans plan on winning elections, these are the voters they will have to both listen to […]
by Jo Nova
Whistleblowers reveal just how well coordinated Big Tech collusion is at the Senate Judiciary Committee
Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley (a new Republican Senator) were on fire today at the Senate Committee hearing titled “Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election,” Insiders had leaked information about two programs of the most insidious kinds.
Facebook has a program called Centra, which tracks the pages people visit, the links, and not just in Facebook, but across the entire internet. (Tucker Carlson wonders, if it’s even legal). Mark Zuckerberg says he’s not familiar with it. Hawley grilled Zuckerberg. When pressed to say whether there is some program that can do that, Zuckerberg evades answering. Apparently, Centra is run in order to spot “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” or astroturfing.
The second program is called Tasks, and Twitter, Google and Facebook use it which helps them coordinate their censorship. That way they can exile people together. Handy, eh?
Zuckerberg said they are just checking in with their peers. Josh Hawley got Zuckerberg to admit under oath that Facebook does have tools to track users, across platforms and accounts, all without their knowledge. Hawley pushed Zuckerberg to say how many times this […]
by Jo Nova
Censorship trumps everything else. Without free speech, there are no free elections, and no progress in politicized science. The base temptations of the human condition thrive in the dark.
Ten years too late, the House Judiciary Hearing on antitrust laws is on:
Republicans tear into big tech CEOs
Katelyn Caralle, Nikki Schwabm, The Daily Mail
For more than five hours the world’s richest man, Bezos; fourth-richest, Zuckerberg; CEO of the world’s most valued corporation, Cook; and its key search engine, Pichai; were repeatedly ripped as copycats, liars, bullies, drug dealers and traitors.
…big tech’s out to get conservatives. That’s not a suspicion, that’s not a hunch. That’s a fact,’ Representative Jim Jordan asserted at the top of his opening remarks.
‘We’re 97 days before an election, and the power – as the previous chairman and ranking member have said – the power these companies have to impact what happens during an election, what American citizens get to see before their voting, is pretty darn important,’ he said.
Trump issued an Executive Order to prevent social media giants from altering or editorializing free speech. He declared that if […]
The evidence is overwhelming but the names of 85 unconvinced experts threatens the Earth. Shield your eyes, sinner, lest ye faith be tested!
…
The Religion of Carbonoid-Weather-Control is so fragile, and Wikipedia so captured by philosophical fruit flies, that 35 editors voted down 19 other editors and now The List does not exist. Thus do 35 editors keep safe the minds of Wikipedia babes who might get confused when they see Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencers names and mistake them for actual climate scientists… oh.
Thanks to Dr Roger Higgs:
Electroverse: Wikipedia deletes scientists who disagree…
Here’s the reasoning for the censorship given by one of the Wiki editors:
“The result was delete. This is because I see a consensus here that there is no value in having a list that combines the qualities of a) being a scientist, in the general sense of that word, and b) disagreeing with the scientific consensus on global warming.”
Wikipedia
I’d like to thank those 35 Wiki editors for telling the world how weak the consensus is and giving skeptics another excuse to highlight this dangerous list. Go Streisand Effect.
Cap Allon […]
We need more free speech, not less
Is National Australia Bank scared of this? @ExtinctionR
The witchdoctor activists have been demanding bankers and insurance firms boycott new coal mines. One by one these corporate giants have jumped to obey, like towers of saluting jelly. Australia’s PM, Scott Morrison, has “threatened a radical crackdown” as if there is some way, and some worth, in forcing free people to choose a sensible option. But this is not the way. What the nation needs is not more laws to stifle speech but someone with the balls to speak freely. Persuade the nation instead! Half the country quivers in fear of being called a climate denier by a teenage girl. Tell them to grow up and get over it.
The activists are just namecalling bullies — too chicken to engage in polite conversation because their case falls apart like a crystal mousetrap — looks good, but destroys itself on deployment. If they had overwhelming evidence they just need to explain it — not beat people over the head with it. Australians are good people, right?
They’re only a threat if we take them seriously
Whatever we do, don’t take them seriously. Instead […]
Today, for your amusement, Misha Ketchell, ex-ABC journalist, editor and ED of The Conversation scrambles to justify why banning half the population from speaking is not censorship. It’s almost a form of satire, but it’s not that clever.
He pulls out the old Argument from Authority and Ad Hom fallacies, known since Aristotle. He’s only 2,300 years behind the leading edge of rhetoric. Worse, the journalist doesn’t even understand the basics of journalism — as in, to research, present the best of both sides, and let the readers decide. Instead Ketchell, whose top scientific qualification is watching the ABC for twenty years, has decided that climate sensitivity of CO2 on planet Earth is 3.3C give or take nothing.
The biggest scandal of university research and science is there waiting to be told, but Ketchell-the-journo is 100% obedient to a collection of unaccountable foreign committee members who do unaudited work with unvalidated models.
Here come the excuses:
There’s a good reason we’re moderating climate change deniers: uninformed comments undermine expertise’
Real experts just answer the questions, they aren’t scared of the uninformed. Why is it only climate science where we need to protect the public from know-nothing comments? Either the […]
The battle continues for Peter Ridd.
James Cook Uni lost every single point against Peter Ridd. Today at the penalty hearing we find out they plan to appeal.
The fake fish uni has learnt nothing:
Charlie Peel, The Australian
James Cook University risks contempt rap for response to verdict
James Cook University is poised to appeal against the Federal Court finding that its sacking of physics professor Peter Ridd was unlawful.
JCU’s response was so far from the mark, apparently Justice Vasta is considering whether to refer it to the Federal Court Marshall. Vasta said the statement attributed to Chris Cocklin of JCU was “almost contemptuous”.
The IPA, bless them, filed an FOI to find out how much money was burnt in the quest, and says it’s high time JCU stops:
Gideon Rozner: The details of a freedom of information request lodged by the Institute of Public Affairs with James Cook University and released today reveal the University has already spent at least $630,000 on legal fees in the Dr Peter Ridd case.
“The very fact that an Australian university is willing to force the weight of an entire […]
In a flash of insight, or possibly rank capitulation, Facebook has announced last week that it will “fight misinformation” with censorship. Seems Facebook thinks Facebook-users are too stupid to figure out the misinformation themselves. Besides, fighting misinformation with the truth is especially hard if the misinformation is true:
Facebook crackdown on groups spreading misinformation
Barbara Ortutay and Rachel Lerman, The Australian
Facebook says it is rolling out a wide range of updates aimed at combating the spread of false and harmful information on the social media site – stepping up the company’s fight against misinformation and hate speech as it faces growing outside pressure.
And it’s not even transparent censorship but the the most weaselly hidden kind:
The updates will limit the visibility of links…
How does Facebook define misinformation? Wait til you hear this: Groupthink = truth?
…limit the visibility of links found to be significantly more prominent on Facebook than across the web as a whole, suggesting they may be clickbait or misleading.
So that pretty much rules out Facebook spreading the word of whistleblowers, rebels, new theories, suppressed ideas, oppressed people and anything controversial, interesting or not completely […]
Professor Peter Ridd
Brilliant. There is still some free speech in Australia, as long as you are willing to risk your career, 12 months out of action and a huge legal case. Peter Ridd wins on all counts.
Presumably James Cook will have to reinstate him, and he is now free to talk about the failure of replication in science and how our institutions may not be trusted. How many taxpayer dollars were fritzed defending the indefensible? Will Ridd get compensation? Will JCU staff get punished or sacked for their war against science?
Thanks to Peter for fighting on when so many would have given up, and thanks to everyone who helped fund the case!
UPDATE: In reply, the Provost of James Cook Uni says Ridd was never gagged or silenced, nor sacked for his scientific views. Which would be great if it were so. But there’s a pattern here — how many skeptical scientists do they employ? Is that zero? We all know they went to great lengths to blackball, evict, and practically erase skeptical Prof Bob Carter too. If there are any skeptical scientists left at JCU, they are probably too afraid to speak out. Which is […]
Peter Ridd in Brisbane getting ready for the trial.
Peter Ridd’s court case is set for 26 to 28th March in Brisbane. He invites you to watch the proceedings (Jennifer Marohasy says she’ll be there, all three days!). Go on…
If James Cook Uni (JCU) wins, they lose. Whatever happens, the taxpayer lost a long time ago.
On a philosophical note, in my opinion JCU will lose the ethical argument even if they manage to win on some narrow legal definition. If they win, it will mean that a judge has decided that a university has set up legally binding contracts that give them the power to effectively take away the right to intellectual freedom of an academic and silence him/her. That would be something of a pyrrhic victory. The university hierarchy may feel vindicated but the general public, especially those in North Queensland who are most affected by the questionable Great Barrier Reef science, will take a different view. But without getting over-confident, I reckon the chances of us winning are considerably above average, so we will see. — Peter Ridd, March 2019
Ridd’s employment contract says he has the right to speak freely, […]
UPDATE: People are still angry over this on Twitter.Sign the petition. Unpermitted words have a Weapons-Grade power over useful words at a rate of a billion to one
Speak a Forbidden Term and your entire career can be neutralized instantly. It doesn’t matter how many other useful ideas or contributions you make. Any breach unleashes a tidal wave of unrighteous indignation. Then the honest players fold like daffodils in a breeze and leap to carry out the judgement of twitter mobs. Why do good people help the Lynch Mob every time?
The permitted word list is defined by the PC mob, it changes at random, and post hoc, and only applies to people who threaten collectivist power. Eminent scientists can be called “deniers” as if they are mental morons, they can be likened to pedophiles, asbestos-pushers and Hitler, and that’s not only OK, those people get lavish taxpayer funded careers and prizes. (Not mentioning any names Stephan Lewandowsky and Robyn Williams.)
Freedom of Speech is under threat — we have to stand up to this
Tuesday, Ross Cameron said the four forbidden words “slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned“. Rude, yes, dynamite, no. They were better left unsaid, and potentially offensive, but not a […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments