The analytic mindset is geared towards monocausal explanations. Duo-causal and multi-causal explanations offend against the rule of thumb known as Occam’s razor. Even theories that technically incorporate many causes are usually framed as mono-causal. Example? The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle.
And it is fun to watch the schoolmen fight it out, so to speak, to see who can toe their chosen line with the most singular ferocity.
This is a huge problem for the UFO issue. Of the persistently unexplained aerial phenomena, I suspect that Deep State players are trying like heck to keep people thinking of One Explanation, and away from Many.
Some UFOs are no doubt poorly understood plasma phenomena; others are man-made craft of an “experimental” nature; still others are perhaps developed from wrecks from extraterrestrial civilizations’ excursions; others could be incursions from extraterrestrial elsewheres; there could be time-travelers and other interdimensionals (I place my bets heavily on this latter, alas); and crypto-terrestrial breakaway and remnant civilizations are I suppose possible.
The common lurch towards ET hypothesis is interesting. We should wonder to what extent our opinions on such matters have been sculpted not merely by science fiction, but by psy-ops behind sf, especially sf TV and movies.
Meanwhile, the debunkers’ “UFOs Are All Illusions” Theory seems untenable. I wish it were true, though. All of the possible explanations (listed causes), above, are uber-creepy.
As would be the religious folks’ go-to theory: “Angels and Demons.”
The reason the analytic mindset exhibits a prejudice for mono-causal explanations should be obvious, but will nevertheless be explained at greater length in a future entry here, no doubt.
Once again, many of my opinions barely climb to the level of “belief”: they are suspicions.
For example: I suspect that had Americans been polled prior to 2020 about a new strain of virus that would pass over kids and productive adults pretty much with mere flu-level symptoms at worst, but would indeed kill some immune-compromised older people at about the levels it is now being said to have done, and then asked them whether they would advise nearly the whole world population to take a new, understudied, unapproved-by-the-FDA genetic treatment that works in some significant ways quite different from vaccines in the past, almost no one would be in favor of the “vaccine.”
I cannot prove that. It is my hunch. Outside the context of the events as they unfolded, I suspect nearly everyone on the left would have objected to the proposed vaxx — and rightly so.
But wait. Do I believe that?
Maybe. Depending on the definition of “belief.” But I don’t know it.
And my suspicion affects other beliefs and arguments I make. I think veil-of-ignorance rationality works against the current craze of worldwide vaccination with mRNA spiked protein treatments. I hazard that people are so overwhelmed by events and panicky contexts that their rationality has been undermined, and they support policies (masking; lockdowns; vaccination) they would not have, otherwise.
I could be wrong. It is, alas, hard to prove — nay, impossible to prove — that I am wrong.
And vice versa. The mass of credulous and panicked vaxxed maskers could be wrong, too. But can I prove it? No. But how would their beliefs fare were they to take my challenge?
Probably not well, once they realize how easy it is to be duped.
But most people believe only other people can be duped. And I do very much believe that this specific belief is without any foundation in psychology or common sense.
Belgian economist whom I often mention on social media.
I prefer Gab and even Flote Beta to other social media apps:
And Paul Jacob discusses a relevant subject on Common Sense today:
In all the talk of “social media” — their psychological effects on us; their political power; their abusive treatment of our privacy and our loyalty — one thing does not get talked about enough: that social media’s chief utility for many of us is not social at all.
Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter, Gab, Instagram, Quora — these are personal databases.
Databases on the Cloud, sure; databases open to the public and open to paying advertisers, surely (that’s how the media giants make money while providing us with a free service).
But they remain databases. And, as such, they allow us to log our interactions with both online and physical worlds, storing our photos, videos, audios, links, thoughts, questions & answers, and more, so we may retrieve them later for whatever projects we may be engaged in.
This is no small thing if you are in a “business” like ThisIsCommonSense.org, where mining what I read two weeks ago can turn into something I need tomorrow.
Trouble is, the search features of most social media services . . . well . . . don’t find much. It is often devilishly hard to find that article one linked to last April, or November, or . . . was it December? The search features to one’s own entries (as well as others’) should be much more robust. Inventive. Useful.
It would be nice if the social media companies that mine our data for their pecuniary advantage would also allow us to mine our data . . . for our more humble purposes.
So, take this as advice to alternative social media developers, like the Flote app: if you are literally providing a database for clients (and not true P2P functionality), then give search features more serious attention.
So that we can quickly find and re-share our most sublime cat photos.
These apps do have indices and search functions, but not very good ones. And Facebook’s most recent upgrade made it harder for me to find stuff on it. Not easier. I wish Gab and Flote the best, though.
twv
Yesterday was a day of low tide. This is the kind of photo I tend to share on social media.
On Gab, I listed some of my biggest issues that I think about when judging a presidential campaign. But I forgot the one that seems most urgent now:
1. The deficits, debt, and financial system, including 2. The Federal Reserve and the monetization of debt and all that horrid jazz. 3. The wars. Warfare state is obscene, and American wars are not in America’s interests. Our allies are often evil and duplicitous and deeply weird (Saudi Arabia) and way too powerful in OUR government (Israel) or not at all reliable (Germany, France) or too reliable (Britain, but not for long, if at all any more), and the whole mess, much of what we know is b.s. because our leaders feed us b.s. 4. The Deep State — spies on us, tells us untruths, lies to us, perverted our media, and harbors strange secrets, propping up an academy geared to pretending it has solved everything and everything out of the mainstream is “anti-science” and “conspiracy theory.” 5. Taxes. Too big a burden. Inherently unjust (of course) and especially, egregiously unjust now that not everybody pays them: corrupting. 6. Subsidies. Subsidies corrupt people like Biden and Trump, but they corrupt your welfare queen next door, too. And her five on-again, off-again layabout lovers. 7. Regulation. I prefer a rule of law. 8. Federalism: America’s original decentralized order would be a much better deal than our current bloated nationalist quasi-empire.
On most of these, Biden looks worse. But when I was making this list for Gab, I really did forget the issue of our annus terribilis, the lockdowns.
Now, I think Trump botched the coronavirus scare big time, and it is hard to forgive him for that. This much is obvious. But Democrats misunderstand Trump’s failure. They invert expectations, blaming Trump for the COVID deaths rather than for the pandemic panic. There were going to be deaths. What Trump did wrong was not counsel courage, instead giving in to Fauci’s fear agenda. Biden, in prescribing more lockdowns, and in “listening to the science,” is so much worse than Trump in this regard. Like usual, Trump listened to the wrong experts. True. But Biden makes listening to the wrong experts the core of his agenda.
Since I am anti-lockdowns, and see the growth of Therapeutic State tyranny the biggest current threat to freedom, the Black-Masked Duo, Biden-Harris, are for me pure poison in double dose.
But back to my initial list: Trump’s attitude to spending and debt has always ranged from goofy to duplicitous — but, alas, Biden and the Democrats are worse.
Take health care, the issue upon which so much spending rests (what with Medicare, Medicaid, and recent reforms). Trump’s talk on Obamacare and “health care reform” has been incoherent and even fabulist, and on this basis alone he deserves only scorn. Trump knows nothing about this subject. Even after years in office, he still says incredibly stupid things. Really, really stupid. But then, SO DOES NEARLY EVERY AMERICAN. This subject makes fools out of almost everyone. People cannot think their way out of a flimsy white prescription drug bag. It is astounding to witness. Trump has probably harmed the cause of good reform in this policy area.
Were not Biden and Harris relentless pushers of increased government involvement into this market, Trump’s crucial support for impossible things would provide all the reason we would need to never forgive him. But the Democrats are so much worse! The Trumpian inability to counter Democratic fabulist socialism with facts or logic makes him a vexing ally at best, and he arguably does more harm than good, for what it looks like is that Trump simply believes that he can deliver the impossible while the Democrats are simply incompetent at delivering the goodies for all. Trump does not think Democrats are wrong, exactly. He thinks they are impractical. A good businessman’s sense should sort this out!
Well, no. The impossible cannot be delivered. Free goods for all means the servitude of all.
Come to think of it, Trump’s witlessness in handling the coronavirus may be linked deeply to his useless buffoonery regarding Obamacare. This is almost certainly the case. So when (one scenario runs) Democratic/DeepState insiders unleashed the Wuhan virus they had paid for, they were sucking Trump into the maw of his own incompetence.
On health care, Trump’s instincts are just plain wrong. But his instincts about ending the lockdowns are of course right. But because he is wrong about the former he is ineffectual — useless, almost — about the latter.
And with Trump, it is instinct and hunch and prejudice that we must focus on. For he knows almost nothing. Thankfully, Trump’s basic instinct against war is refreshing. Whew!
And it is almost certainly the main reason the Deep State and the elitist classes loathe him so much; this is why they fought so hard (and so crazily) to oust him.
That being said, what pertains to other governmental matters pertains here: Trump doesn’t know anything really about foreign policy. Indeed, he’s a sucker for a general in uniform, for every crackpot Pentagon warmonger who wanders into his ambit. And because the Republican intelligentsia has been infested with neocon goons and rah-rah-men since the days of Reagan, Trump has witlessly surrounded himself with war hawks who have led him to a generally incoherent foreign policy.
Regardless, he can still boast of more foreign policy successes than Barack Obama can, and though his stance against China is riddled with problems, Trump at least recognizes China for the minatory power it is. All in all, he may be the best foreign policy president of my lifetime, yet this half century has been so bad that he can nevertheless be quite terrible. Biden and Harris, stooges to the Deep State, would tow the Deep State line. Of course. And Biden may even be a paid agent of Beijing (the fact that Democrats dismiss such talk only speaks to their lack of integrity on this issue: the evidence is mounting.) So they are beyond the pale. But as a hero in the fight against empire, Trump is mostly a stumble-bum, no feats of glory, only feet of clay.
I know, I know: Trump has his genius, I grant you, but it is a mercurial one. He has no real principles to speak of, and we are left with his instincts and his strange place in history.
Probably the worst thing about him is his incurious nature. He has prejudices. Some of them align against the thrust towards the Total State, and for that he tempts me to give him a break. But I cannot see him as an exemplary figure. Had he someone wiser than Steve Bannon to advise him in the fight against tyranny, he could have long ago seized popularity and assured a second term. There are dozens of things he could have done to win over, say, half of the Resistors. But his vices outweigh his virtues.
He has his supporters, still. And in a land of witless sheep, they are often refreshing. But Trump appears to be losing an important set: old women. He needs the crone vote, no? Or can he make up for losing their support by the rise of a promising new cohort: working men of all colors appear to lean towards Trump. Non-working people appear to lean against.
As for me, I don’t know if or how I will vote on Tuesday.
But if I do end up voting, it will not be for Biden. The Democrats have become unhinged, and their leaders are corrupt and dangerous — more, even, than the Republicans.
I know worrying about “foreign interference in our elections” is so Last Year, but as I was reading a missive from Gab.com entitled “Who Is Gab For?,” I realized something: Big Tech de-platforming and censorship is foreign interference in “our” elections:
American values are foreign to Silicon Valley because three-quarters of Silicon Valley workers are from foreign countries with foreign values. Would American workers unilaterally censor fellow Americans at the behest of a corporation? Perhaps, but there would undoubtably be a few more dissenters and whistleblowers.
I know that when I get crunched for a post on Quora or Facebook, it does not feel like Americans doing the crunching.
⭐
Rating: 1 out of 5.
The letter from Torba:
Gab is an anti-establishment company.
The establishment is our enemy because the establishment is the enemy of Truth.
This includes establishment “conservatives.”
Gab is not being built for the establishment.
It’s being built to dismantle it.
Our terms of service have always been unapologetically American and place the First Amendment above all else as a guiding principle when it comes to content moderation. This is something most “woke” American companies won’t do. This is something the vast majority of politicians would never endorse. This is something Silicon Valley will never do.
Gab is the only technology company in the world brave enough to authentically stand against Big Tech tyranny and offer people a real choice.
Gab gave birth to the free speech software movement in 2016 and is the de facto market leader when it comes to alternative technology. Not only did we build an open source social network, but also a web browser, a news aggregator, hosting infrastructure, email infrastructure, our own ecommerce platform, and much more.
While our terms of service are crucial and the technology we’ve built is impressive, Gab is nothing without our community of people. Gabbers are not just “users.” They are our shareholders, customers, donors, volunteers, and warriors.
Many Gabbers have been with us since August of 2016 when we launched. They’ve seen our story unfold and have stood by us through attacks from every mainstream media outlet in the world, every far-left activist organization in the world, every major tech company, foreign governments, and worse.
Gab stood boldly in front of the entire establishment machine and dared to say: NO.
Gabbers are smart people.
They aren’t easily led astray by talking heads or “influencers.” They aren’t fooled or persuaded by gimmicky marketing slogans or smooth-talking politicians. Gabbers are thinkers and Truth seekers. Above all else: they are good, honest, hard working people who love their freedom, country, and God.
Gab has earned their trust through trial by fire.
Not one person in the political establishment–including the Conservative Inc crowd that loves talking about free speech and Big Tech bias–embraced Gab. Not one of them defended Gab. Many of them even attacked Gab and cheered as we were attacked by the media and Big Tech. These people are hypocrites, liars, frauds, and enemies of truth.
The mainstream media has never covered Gab in any objective way or with any form of journalistic integrity (with the one exception being Tucker Carlson.) From the moment Gab launched we were smeared, defamed, and attacked by the marxist propagandists who call themselves as “journalists.”
None of this mattered to our community.
What mattered is that we stood our ground and most importantly: we refused to ever give up and kept fighting back.
So who is Gab for?
Gab is not designed to prop up narcissistic “influencers” who already have a big microphone courtesy of their oligarch masters.
Gab is not being built for politicians to whisper sweet nothings full of lies and deception to the masses.
Gab is for everyday people who feel that they no longer have a voice—both online and off.
So basically Facebook blocks all Brighteon videos. I had merely been trying to share a Styx vid on John Bolton.
How should I express my contempt for the people who run Facebook? They block a whole video source. Because it contains work by people excluded from other sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo. Apparently. (I have not read any of the stories about this.)
I have an account there, on Brighteon. I am trying to upload a video right now. I have not had much success on Bitchute — I upload a video and then it never shows up. But Brighteon hasn’t published my video yet. Says it is “under review.” What? We’ll see how this develops. Finding alternatives to Institutional Evil is a problem. (I have written about it before.)
So, I am abandoning Facebook again for the weekend. I’m on Gab: @wirkman.
And here is me, years ago, irked not about Facebook but by John Bolton:
As anyone may have noticed, I’m not very big into “protests.” I turned on the idea of mass protest pretty thoroughly when I stumbled into Seattle’s 1999 WTO protests by accident, and then watched (from a safe distance) as the protests spiraled into mass violence.
Since I also opposed the WTO, you might think I would have been simpatico with the protesters. But no: they were mainly left-anarchist poseur hippie boys and their earnest, professional girlfriends, spouting contradictory and incoherent gibberish, unlearned and anti-factual and rather stupid.
The biggest difference never receives official attention: “right-wing” protests almost never lead to violence, “left-wing” protests almost always do.
This wasn’t always the case, and much depends upon how you define left and right, which I blogged about once again today. But in recent memory, left-wing protest tends to lead to rioting.
Remember just a few months and then weeks ago normal Americans — mostly but not all white — were promoting the Second Amendment in Virginia and then protesting the lockdowns in Michigan? In both cases the major media freaked over the weaponry on display. But there was zero to scant violence, during and after.
The main complaints were “I saw a Confederate Flag!” and “They aren’t social distancing!”
But media folks — they don’t mind seeing commie and anarchist flags, pointing their cameras elsewhere, and I haven’t heard any umbrage taken about the protesters in Minneapolis not wearing medical masks.
There were mask-wearers, of course, but those appeared to be rioters — and the Men in Black who were instigating mayhem.
So, one reason there may be violence associated with left-wing protests is that right-wingers sabotage them. But that isn’t the full story, for the anarchists at the WTO riots, and antifa and BAMN at more recent protests, are very, very left-wing, and very, very violent.
And do a lot of instigating.
While being institutionally supported by George Soros.
Further, masses of leftists seem more violent than masses of rightists.
The lack of objective reporting by the press is interesting.
It could be ideological: we rah-rah our side, we boo their side!
But it may be more craven: the media likes to cover violence, so encourages the protests that give corporate heads the stories that help with the bottom line.
I have never denied that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely dangerous. Why, it makes even the uninfected go mad.
Does it need to be said? No matter who instigates a destructive riot, riots are bad. No matter who casts the first stone, so to speak, does not let off the hook the second thrower, or the third, or the fourth. We can make judgments about people who attack innocent people and their property. Condemnation is the standard, traditional, and quite justified judgment.
“Outside instigators of violence” should worry those who think their protests are legitimate. If they go ahead and protest, and do not patrol their ranks, and their peaceful protest breaks out into looting and arson and street violence, then that’s a tragedy. If, however, every time a protest of your cause ends up that way, and yet you organize protests, you become complicit (to some extent) in the horrors of the crime wave.
I have seen credible (but not certain) accusations of instigation to violence in Minneapolis and elsewhere of undercover/off-duty police and of antifa and other anarchist groups, and much speculation about criminals, political groups, etc. What if it were a perfect storm of influences, from left, right and center?
Would it matter to protesters? If what they do is set off violence, then what they do is at best counter-productive.
Something other than protests need to be thought. I have suggestions.
But because they are rational suggestions, irrational people will not engage in them, now, will they?
Defending “peaceful protest” is fine, but if it always ends up violent, the defenses are inapposite.
Remember Martin Luther King, Jr.? Somehow, he took a lot of care to make his marches peaceful.
Today’s protests generally repudiate the principles of MLK. Yet everyone claims to admire him.
Par for the current course, though: seemingly earnest pieties are regularly repudiated in action.
Were you aware that notorious pick-up artist Roosh V. has repudiated his past and now preaches traditional Christian ethics?
I first became aware of him as he began undergoing his transition. It has been interesting to watch. I was of course aware of “the game” for many years, but had never really followed it. Roosh, however, is an interesting case.
So, the challenge is here: the famous anti-HCQ study is probably a fraud.
I had seen someone else make the case yesterday. On Twitter or Gab. Somebody else other than this linked author who deals with data on a regular basis was utterly incredulous about the data set described:
If you’re following at all the search for COVID-19 treatments, and possibly even if not, you will have seen the flurry of media coverage for the observational study in The Lancet ‘Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis. It made the news not least because hydroxychloroquine is the drug President Trump says he is taking in the belief that it will reduce his chance of catching COVID-19. This view is not backed up evidence until some randomised trials come in. Getting in before the trials, the Lancet study used propensity score matching to try to control for the non-random treatment. It found that taking hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were associated with an increased risk of heart problems. I am highly skeptical of the powers of hydroxychloroquine with relation to COVID-19 (‘skeptical’ in the sense that I have suspended judgement for now – there simply isn’t evidence either way). But I want the test of its properties to be done properly, with random controlled trials. And if we are to use observational studies (which I do not object to, they just aren’t as useful as an experiment where you can manipulate the treatment), they have to use real data. The data in that study, and in at least one preprint on a second treatment, were provided by an Illinois firm called Surgisphere. Allegedly the data represents the treatment and health outcomes of 96,032 patients from 671 hospitals in six continents. However, there is simply no plausible way I can think of that the data are real. I’ll say that again – I believe with very high probability the data behind that high profile, high consequence Lancet study are completely fabricated.
Peter Ellis, “A health data firm making extraordinary claims about its data,” free range statistics, May 30, 2020.
So, a major journal accepts a study on a highly politicized subject and — if this charge holds — scandal ensues.
This is par for the postmodern course, from what I can tell. We do not have as much actual science going on as we are led to believe. Much of it is scientism — pseudoscience. I assume you are aware of the replicability problem that has been dogging the heels of institutional science for the last decade. Many journals have also become corrupt or, at best, inefficient. (I just read the abstract of a paper co-authored by Dan Klein about “the paucity of theory in the Journal of Economic Theory.” Hilarious.) Much of the academic world has lost its way. The “scientific method” is not in practice when the “public testing” element is institutionally scuttled.
The problem, I believe, is government funding. For that puts science into the whorl of special interest incentives, and makes the subject area liable to something very much like “regulatory capture.”
Whole domains of science seem untrustworthy to me:
climatology paleontology ancient history economics
. . . I could go on and on.
Only when academics are held accountable on objective grounds can they be saved from corruption by politics and funding. And since the academy is by definition an exclusionary institution, accountability has to be imposed. It is imperative that non-academics speak up.
And let us be frank: this case is in part about TDS.
To what extent is COVID-19 panic driven by class insecurities? Most illnesses the well-off can avoid or pay for. The panic began when being rich did not seem to help, while lockdown mania grew as it became clear that the well-off were less negatively affected than the proletarian middle and lower income groups.
twv
The startling horror of wearing stripes with plaid made me go crazy with the filter. Still: stripe v. plaid!
Wirkman Comment 