55 Comments
Apr 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Background: Tremendous coercion is happening to keep knowledgable physicians silent and to keep the rest ignorant. About 30% are knowledgable and potential allies. About 40% are ignorant, but persuadable by other physicians if the knowledgable physicians were speaking out. About 30% work for pharma or its lackeys in hospital administration or the American Hospital Association or various pharma-controlled coercive parts of the medical establishment (AMA and various professional societies).

There's one obvious way to put an end to this entire charade. Make sure doctors aren't coerced into silence. That has to be done at the state level--in red states. About 30% of doctors are clued in to vaccine damage and early treatment with effective antivirals, but they have been silenced. If those doctors were protected from coercion, then they would speak out over time.

Medical freedom of speech is the linchpin. Physicians are coerced by employers (primarily hospitals) and by the threat of license removal by professional licensing boards. If physicians were protected from those threats, the dam would break and we'd see a lot of physicians start to speak out.

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Such a great article with so many clever lines. 😂 🤣 😇

Whatever Musk's motives, I'm mostly concerned about the threat of centralization. Bastyon and Odysee are allegedly decentralized. How long you do you think it would be before that becomes common enough that the threat centralized forums pose is eliminated, and what stands in the way?

Asking as a non-tech expert.

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Apr 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Thank you, Mathew, for pointing out the fact that Elon is now sitting at the confluence of a surprisingly large number of power centers and its not at all clear what, if anything, he might do. Those powers are like bombs not yet armed for detonation (i.e. the possible medical criminality and election manipulation mentioned, and you didn't mention the possible existence of illegal direct Twitter/government censorship links) that even Elon likely already knows he cannot control the trajectory of their fallout should he allow them to be revealed. That guess--that Elon knows he cannot control the result--makes me lean toward a pessimistic prediction that he'll just work toward keeping it all secret, and instead focus on making all the money that GETTR, etc. thought they were going to make as Twitter shed users. Oh well, it MIGHT be an entertaining year, but I doubt it.

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Apr 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Wow! Everything and the kitchen sink, right? What a great show of how a human mind unwinds and plays association-hopscotch. Lovely stuff, really.

As for the Tesla, as in the car - when it performs better than diesel, petrol, or woodgas (heck, or horses!) in the conditions I live in half the year, I might consider it worthy of being called a car. I need a machine that starts in -30C snowstorms with wind blowing 25m/s on top, and doesn't lose power and isn't impossible to refuel on a forest or mountain dirt road. Or catches on fire because the battery casing got a little nick.

We'll get there eventually, just in time for every vehicle to have aminiature nuclear battery, I think (whatever happened to that line of research, minituraisation of nuclear reactors and batteries?).

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Don't be so naïve to think that COVID propagandists are going to take the fall here. Billionaires profited handsomely in the last two years and COVID was a great opportunity for certain public figures to build their brands.

I DO hope all the dissenting voices get to come back and change the narrative themselves.

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Apr 26, 2022·edited Apr 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Elon's recent tweet doesn't sound that good.

I think he'll still be censoring stuff, especially when he deems it anti science, like many ignore that COVID was never isolated (but pretend it was 🤣 )

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy

2:25 PM · Apr 19, 2022·Twitter for iPhone

https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1516483038242385928

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Apr 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

please bring back @covid19crusher

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Apr 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

Names of a few people who have just got back on - Simone Gold, Peter McCullough, Zev Zelenko. The latter picked up 39,000 followers just in his first day, with tribute after tribute offered to him.

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Apr 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

I understand that it will be unpopular to rain on everyone's cautious optimism about Musk, especially because we need someone like who he pretends to be right now. So, I'll say something positive: there are very few perfectly linear relationships in the real world, and Musk provides us with a pristine one: The more you look into him, the more you realize he's not to be trusted. That he is, indeed, one of the colluders should be unsurprising given what we've all seen over the last couple of years; it's clear that you couldn't amass the kind of wealth he has without being compromised by the kunlangeta.

But in any event, the thing I wanted to bring up to Mathew is of another topic.

Might want to keep an eye on the following:

https://www.cmaj.ca/content/194/16/E573

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2022/04/25/unvaccinated-people-increase-risk-of-covid-infection-among-vaccinated-study-finds/?sh=15b965d524a3

https://twitter.com/stacey_rudin/status/1518929372811563009

https://twitter.com/DFisman/status/1518473611882999808?s=20&t=9QWa3kSpIqWF3Ez6HPOIjA

Why? Because they may use it to make a last-ditch effort to blame the unvaccinated for their impending health problems.

I don't have time to read the whole paper with reasonable scrutiny today, and I know you don't have any time either, Mathew, but if people start trying to make this argument and it becomes exigent to look into it, you'll remember it was mentioned and have a head start on the general premise.

My very rushed look at the methods section heavily suggests to me we're dealing with more Neil Ferguson-style bullshit; assumptions without any real evidence with some rudimentary calculations set up in what is referred to as a "model" because that scares everyone who thinks it means "fancy calculations which are therefore incontrovertible". However, I'll let you be the judge:

Methods: We constructed a simple susceptible–infectious–recovered compartmental model of a respiratory infectious disease with 2 connected subpopulations: people who were vaccinated and those who were unvaccinated. We simulated a spectrum of patterns of mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups that ranged from random mixing to complete like-with-like mixing (complete assortativity), in which people have contact exclusively with others with the same vaccination status. We evaluated the dynamics of an epidemic within each subgroup and in the population as a whole.

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Apr 26, 2022·edited Apr 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

That's interesting, thanks. In my view, the following is a must read quick exploration to understand who Elon ("we will coup whoever we want") Musk is.

By the author of one of the most important books of all time on tne relation of Big Tech with the military-industrial complex ('surveillance valley').

Short but valuable.

https://yasha.substack.com/p/elon-musk-is-surveillance-valley

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The hundred flowers campaign of the CCP during the 1950s and their rise to power thereafter comes to mind. Be cautious is my only suggestion.

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What does "free speech absolutism" mean? Ain't no such thing as absolutely free speech. The famous example is shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. For various reasons I do not like that example. For me a better one is somebody in the audience loudly reciting Hamlet during the Antigone production. Ergo there will always be some form of speech policing on social platforms.

Some of the major problems of the current approach is that it is arbitrary, capricious, and opaque. It is also clearly geared toward shaping of public opinion. Make new censorship regime equitable, predictable, and open.

I wanted to say "and stay away from trying to shape the public opinion". But that is purely wishful thinking.

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The more interesting parts are yet to come in how he deals with "making the algorithms open source, defeating spam bots, and authenticating all humans." I suspect there's a whole new 'digital id' idea that will carry across multiple social/online platforms (think google authenticator), maybe backed by whatever his favorite cryto is at the time. ala Michael Saylor, and it's a fascinating idea.

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It's going to be interesting to see how things play out in the near future. I hope it's going to go well for everyone, but I'm waiting until he actually does the things he says he wants to before I do anything like celebrate.

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Apr 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford

This will turn out as bad as Omidyar's The Intercept did for Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald and free speech journalism

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That was my first experience with Libs of TikTok. I thought, these are the exact sort of people empowered to purge by Mao. I will be happy to never see another Lib of TikTok compilation again.

I've always been more dubious of Elon Musk than a fan. I long thought of Tesla as a subsidy dumpster, especially after the company didn't turn a profit for such a long time, and didn't actually seem to make the kind or amount of product to justify the stock valuation. I long thought of the stock price as the cult of Elon. But maybe I would have been better served to buy some stock a decade ago?

I will say, I feel a palpable sense of relief, like a stricture has been released, like a weighted blanket has been removed, even though I have never had a Twitter account. It was like, after two years of Covid authoritarianism and then Florida said we are going to let doctors be doctors, except much bigger. Go Elon.

Here's hoping this is an opening to burn away woke authoritarianism from the body politic.

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