Category: social media

Ingested Invective Rejected

Post author By Redactor
Post date September 6, 2021
4 Comments on Ingested Invective Rejected

“There is a bizarre propaganda underway in the United States of America to brand Ivermectin a ‘horse dewormer,’” mused OpIndia, in its coverage of Joe Rogan’s recent brief bout of COVID and Alex Jones’s on-air Ivermectin ingestion stunt, “despite the fact that a version of the drug is known to be used for human treatment.”

The origin story is instructive. “The propaganda appears to have been triggered by an ambiguously worded tweet by the US Food and Drugs Administration.”

Well, ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” This FDA tweet led to virality of invectives against Ivermectin users.

Then Katelyn Ogle, of KFOR in Oklahoma, upped the hysteria ante, claiming that a “rural Oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the horse de-wormer medication, ivermectin, to fight COVID-19 are causing emergency room and ambulance back ups.”

This then went stampede, with Rolling Stone taking it up.

Apparently without a fact check.

In hardly any time at all, the hospital in question issued a statement repudiating the whole brouhaha.

It was Fake News — capital F and capital N — and Rolling Stone had to issue a … well, it wasn’t a retraction.

Journalist Glen Greewald offered his take: “The only reason Rolling Stone is calling this an ‘UPDATE’ as opposed to what it so plainly is — a RETRACTION — is because liberal outlets know that their readers don’t care at all if they publish fake news as long as it’s done with the right political motives and goals.”

Dismissing Ivermectin as any kind of “de-wormer” is fraudulent. That this strain of invective against its COVID-suffering users was started by the government is especially galling.

Lots of people swallowed the meme.

Will they develop immunity to future, similar spin?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people social media

Hidden Dissuader

“It’s one thing to let people post UFO content about crop circles in Arkansas,” Ciaran O’Connor was quoted in a recent Washington Post article, talking about YouTube competitor Rumble. “It’s another to allow your platform to be used by someone claiming vaccines are actively harmful and that people should not take them based on conspiracies and misinformation.”

As a cited expert for the Post’s hit piece, O’Connor is the big gun, whom reporter Drew Harwell uses to conclude his vivisection of the upstart video platform: “There’s a duty of care and responsibility as your platform grows and scales up.”

After a year and a half of government lies and flip flops about the novel coronavirus and its treatments, coupled with Big Tech censorship, we must not allow O’Connor’s bald “vaccine” assertions to go unnoticed, but we have other fish to fry.

Sizzling on the platter? Ciaran The Expert.

Who is he?

Well, writes Harwell, O’Connor’s “an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank in London that has worked with Google on a European fund targeting online hate speech.”

Rumble, claims O’Connor, has “become one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world.”

But let us consult one of those right-wingers, Rumble investor and online commentator Dan Bongino, to learn something more about this “Institute for Strategic Dialogue.”

Bongino points out that the institute gets its funding from various governments, including our own, as well as from Rumble’s competitors Facebook and YouTube.

And several more subdivisions of YouTube’s parent company also support this critic of Rumble.

The Post, of course, disclosed none of that.

You know, cuz Journalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, covid, extremism, Rumble, social media

general freedom media and media people social media too much government

Ceding “Science” to Totalitarians?

Post author By Editor
Post date August 19, 2021
2 Comments on Ceding “Science” to Totalitarians?

A recent Reason article on New York’s new vaccination passport informs that “there’s a case to be made …” yet neglects to mention that the opposite case can also be made.

What case is it?

Well, the Mayor Bill de Blasio-sanctified case is that “these [totalitarian] measures are important for getting as much of the population vaccinated as possible in order to reduce virus mutation and prevent more harmful variants from taking root.”

Yet the inverse is perhaps more persuasive. Several important figures in the medical and scientific community have been crying Cassandra* for some time, arguing that an ineffective vaccine, like the mRNA treatments sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna, may, according to epidemiological principles long understood, pressure the spreading viruses into the thing we don’t want: more deadly variants.

The normal course for a new contagion is for it to mutate into easier-to-spread but less deadly variants. Killing a host isn’t good for the virus, so it changes over time. Oddly, I rarely hear this mentioned.

Herd immunity, which is the prevalence in a community of enough people who can fend off the virus preventing transmission to weaker people, can only be helped by vaccination when the vaccines increase hosts’ immunity to obtaining it and spreading it — neither of which clearly applies to the current vaccines.

“From their very first conceptualization,” claims Geert Vanden Bossche, one of the biggest names in the industry to object to the vaccination campaign, “it should have been very clear that these ‘S‑based’ Covid-19 vaccines are completely inadequate for generating herd immunity in a population, regardless of … the rate of vaccine coverage.”

Sans herd immunity but with universal vaccination, he says, deadlier variants could arise.

Is he right? I don’t know.

But the case against vaccine passports might reference epidemiology and virology from sources outside establishment-approved “scientific” opinion.

Totalitarians rarely have “the science” on their side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Ineffective because suppressed on major social media, in part. You can find their discussion on Rumble, Brig h teon, Bitchute and other upstart sites.

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Tags covid, fascism, freedom, vaccination

government transparency media and media people social media

Conspirators versus Conspiracists

Post author By Editor
Post date August 17, 2021
5 Comments on Conspirators versus Conspiracists

“Conspiracy theories circulated online over social media contribute to a shift in public discourse away from facts and analysis,” proclaims a new study by the Rand Corporation think tank, “and can contribute to direct public harm.”

Titled “Detecting Conspiracy Theories on Social Media,” the study, paid for by Google’s Jigsaw unit, proposes to “improve machine-learning technology for detecting conspiracy theory language by using linguistic and rhetorical theory to boost performance.”

All very fascinating, but … do conspiracy theories shift public discourse away from “facts and analysis”?

They do challenge accepted facts, and are themselves examples of extended analyses.

Often off track? Sure.

But their problematic nature is not as stated.

The assumption throughout is that conspiracy theories are always in error. But when the report goes on to say that “conspiracists also distrust authority and believe that those who produce the news are lying to them,” there’s no fact check — why do the Rand authors believe we are not being routinely lied to?

This becomes almost funny with the COVID origination debate. The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory is one of four current popular conspiracy notions the report looks at. And when the report was being written, the lab leak theory was marginalized on social media and pooh-poohed amongst most public health experts. Now we know that there was an actual conspiracy to bury evidence for it.

Truth is: conspiracies happen. Most bandied-about theories may be cuckoo, but a few turn out rock solid.

The honest way to deal with suspicions of a conspiratorial nature is pointed inquiry into relevant facts … with careful analysis.

The Rand Corporation and Google are more interested in defending the authorities.

Who often lie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags censorship, conspiracy, social media

national politics & policies social media

Rand on Rumble

Rand Paul, 2016 Presidential Race, Common Sense

“Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, has been suspended from YouTube for seven days,” CNN Business reports, “over a video claiming that masks are ineffective in fighting Covid-19, according to a YouTube spokesperson.”

He is not alone. Videos of other doctors, too, have been taken off YouTube for doing precisely what Dr. Paul has done: quote scientific papers, relate common knowledge, and draw reasonable conclusions … of which, quite apparently, governments, social media companies, and Dr. Fauci don’t approve.

CNN went on to explain: “YouTube indicated that examples of the offending content in the video included the line: ‘Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection.’” And this line too: “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.”

How anyone at YouTube could take issue with these statements, in a free country, sort of boggles the mind. No wonder Rand Paul called his suspension a “badge of honor” and referred to his censors as “Leftwing cretins.”

The senator expanded his thoughts regarding YouTube’s left-induced/state-supported cretinism on an alternative video sharing site, Rumble — which you can easily access from the Summit News report on Paul’s suspension. “Saying cloth masks work, when they don’t, actually risks lives,” the senator pointed out, in what seems to me as common sense a point as possible.

We aren’t saved by wishing upon a star, but by helping ourselves and each other.

Bad means don’t achieve good ends, they hinder.

YouTube increasingly is an enemy of the truth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Sen. Paul told libertytree.com, “As a libertarian-leaning Senator, I think private companies have the right to ban me if they want to, but I think it is really anti-free speech, anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth.”

international affairs social media

Good-bye, Google

Is Google working for the Chinese government?

The group Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights believes that pro-Chinazi partisans have been targeting its YouTube videos, triggering sanctions against Atajurt’s channel. Many of its thousands of videos provide testimony about how family members have been hauled off to internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region.

Alphabet/Google’s YouTube has penalized the Atajurt YouTube channel for alleged “harassment” because some of the videos provide proof of identity. Channel owner Serikzhan Bilash, an Atajurt cofounder, says this is important to establishing the credibility of the testimony.

On June 15, after a dozen of the channel’s videos were flagged for harassment, YouTube terminated the channel. After Reuters asked why, the channel was restored.

On June 22, YouTube locked another dozen videos and accused the channel of praising “criminal groups or terrorist organizations.” YouTube blames automated messages for such accusations. But it hasn’t stopped threatening the channel.

“There is another excuse every day. I never trusted YouTube,” Bilash says. “But we’re not afraid anymore, because we are backing ourselves up with LBRY. The most important thing is our material’s safety.”

LBRY is a blockchain protocol used by YouTube competitor Odysee, to which Atajurt has so far ported almost a thousand of its videos.

The large audiences of Google’s YouTube and other Big Tech social-media forums make them appealing as a means of getting out a message. But as Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights and many others are discovering lately, you better have backup.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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