Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 193

[ecosophia]

We are now in the fourth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary more than three years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health are anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; public health authorities government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion. 

Comments

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with you that ethics are slipping across the board, but disagree that it's worse in most of science, or intellectual pursuits in general, than anywhere else (say, business). An individual paleontologist could be crooked in the same way that an individual roofer could be crooked, but we don't want to give up roofing. Retraction Watch lists thousands of bad papers; they don't list hundreds of thousands of papers that haven't been accused of anything.

Before I started this line of discussion I had not read your ecosophia.net essay yet (forgot it was Wednesday ... glad you're returning to the topic of decline). Had I done so, I'd have quoted your: "one of the core reasons that modern medicine does such a poor job of dealing with so many health conditions, for example, is that our medical researchers try to find a single cause for conditions that are the product of many intersecting factors..."

That's an inherent flaw, or weakness, of science. What really happens is too complex to be studied in any affordable way or feasible timeframe, so people wind up doing studies of genetically identical caged rodents with only a single factor varying at a time. Of course the results of these various studies don't all jibe with each other, because the setup is totally artificial, and if results reflect a generally applicable real relationship, or the lack of one, it's in large part through luck.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[ecosophia]

I'm starting to wonder if you have an unstated agenda here. Where did I say that scientific ethics are worse than that of the rest of society? Or that I think we ought to do without science altogether? Your rhetoric here seems to be aimed at defining those you disagree with in terms more extreme than their words justify, and that's not helpful, you know.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[(Anonymous)]

I don't have any unstated agenda with regards to YOU, and no offense intended there. I'll state the agenda that I don't want to get persecuted, or hacked to death with cowrie shells, in my old age because my own job falls into the category of science as most broadly defined. (Which, to be clear, is not something you are promoting.)

You didn't say that scientists were more unethical than others, but if they're not, then you've got a bigger target ready to aim at.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[ecosophia]

Um, I think you mean some other kind of shells. You'd have one heck of a hard time using a cowrie shell to hack anything at all:

From my perspective, it's wildly exaggerated to talk about people being hacked to death. What's at issue, rather, is the cultural prestige and government funding that currently go into the sciences. Those are indeed at risk, because rampant scientific fraud isn't just a public relations problem. It cuts to the heart of the scientific endeavor -- and the fact that so many people involved in the sciences focus on insisting that there isn't really a problem at all is not helping the situation any, you know.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[(Anonymous)]

I was thinking of Hypatia. What kind of shells were those again? (DuckDuckGo says oyster or abalone.) Thanks for the mollusc education; I'm a long way from a seashore.

There are people who want pogroms. I hope they don't get their way. Perhaps a better comparison for me to make would be to corruption in religion. Oh, boy, is there a lot of it. But there are also plenty of honest, caring, poorly-paid ministers who don't deserve to be attacked or have their churches shut down. FWIW, I agree that cutting back on federal funding of science is a good call--but it does have negative consequences too.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[ecosophia]

Yes, I thought you meant Hypatia. It still seems to me that you're missing or perhaps evading my point, but I don't allow others to keep flogging the same issue over and over again, and so I try not to do the same thing myself.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[(Anonymous)]

Well, if your point is either that science as a broadly defined profession needs to clean house, or that it doesn't merit the level of financial and social support it's gotten in recent decades, I can completely agree with both of those.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[ecosophia]

Er, that's what I've been saying all along, with one additional point: until science as a profession cleans its house, nobody is going to take anything that scientists say on trust. They had that trust, they abused it, and now it's gone. A lot of hard work and a new openness to public scrutiny from outside the scientific community is going to be needed before anything of the kind can be restored.

If you want to see science survive the twilight of the industrial world, in other words, as a participant in science, you have your work cut out for you. Most of it isn't anything I can do as an outsider -- and a despised outsider, by the way. (You might recall for a moment the kind of rhetoric scientists like to direct toward occultists and practitioners of alternative health care, both of which I am.) It has to be done from within. I'd like to see science passed onto the future, but all I can do is hope that you and people like you will do something about scientific fraud...and not just go around insisting in forums like this one that it really isn't a problem.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[scotlyn]

If I may - when there is an egregore, and the egregore develops a taint, it is not *just* a question any longer of whether *some* of its practitioners are honest, caring, poorly-paid (as it were) ministers, or researchers, or whatever.

Sometimes a practitioner needs to consider their own relationship to the egregore as a whole - whether to keep feeding it, or attempt to reform it from within, or leave and take their energy into a different egregore, or something I have not thought of... but, regardless, an egregore can become a "being" in its own right, and may simply *use* the honest, caring, poorly paid exemplaries as camouflage to hide the dishonest, brutal, profiteering parts from scrutiny.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[ecosophia]

A very solid point. Thank you.

Re: Randomized clinical trial

[scotlyn]

If I may add one more tiny thing - it is that, for me, the "taint" of this "science" egregore comes in with language like "control the variables", and generally with the pre-supposition that nature is inert, and the scientist stands somewhere entirely neutral and unconnected, and therefore Nature can be experimented on by Scientist with no consequence and no karma and no ethical "drag".

In terms of leaving the egregore and bringing the "good" energies of science into an entirely different egregore, it strikes me that reviving the concept of "natural philosophy" - which is more a matter of participatory observation of the concatenation of relationships and processes that fall under the rubric of "nature" - would be one way of conserving important aspects of scientific method and enquiry. Ian McGilchrist, just for example, strikes me as an important modern natural philosopher.