"fuelled by speeches and public appearances" - Old Business New Business

In old business, I'm going to amend and extend a paragraph from my long Sunday post:

The idiocy that, today, we can draw the line over those who deny the decades ago Holocaust happened while we cannot draw it on those who want to reproduce it is one of the most astonishing and telling defects of modern libertarian-liberal culture.  It is sheer idiocy shown to be such through the subsequent history of mass murder and genocide by anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic governments and movements.   If you can't learn the lesson of your own time, whining about those who refuse to learn from history rings entirely hollow.  Such free speech advocacy is supremely irresponsible and immoral.  Egalitarian democrats owe the opponents of egalitarian the same rights that those opponents would take away from most people, except any that would lead to them taking power and destroying equality and democracy.   Anything that would lead the opponents of egalitarian democracy taking power or even having a malign effect on equality or democracy granted to them is an immoral and profoundly stupid license for them to succeed.   In so far as it may have that effect, and in the United States with hate-talk and other media creating then empowering Trump,  it is clear that in that line we owe them  the absolutely nothing, including allowing them a hearing.  Those hearings they were granted are how they got in a position to murder people to start with.  Dictators, those who enslave, oppress and commit genocide always gain power through words, spoken, written, or in the case of today's modern gangster governments, OFTEN BROUGHT TO POWER THROUGH ELECTIONS, through words amplified through mass electronic media.   If you want to know who and how will make those decisions, the same way all human decisions are made, they are made by people hopefully as honestly as they can be, MISTAKES GUARANTEED TO BE MADE, but in the case of egalitarian democrats, those will be mistakes.   Our occasional mistakes are the intended acts of gangster governments.  Unlike egalitarian democrats, they will not try to find and fix what they do.  Once the gangsters get power, they make their decisions as dishonestly as they figure they need to to get what they want.   Pretending that nature just sorts it all out better than we can is to give the gangsters what they want by irresponsible chosen impotence.   

To allow them the chance to get power and destroy democracy, to destroy the rights of those whose they target as scapegoats for their deluded followers, those they target for the worst treatment in their use of their followers to enforce their will, the chance to do that because people of good will are bound to make occasional mistakes is one of the stupidest thing about that deluded 18th century faith in the "nature" and "nature's god" those deist boobs installed in the Constitution.  We are the agents of moral responsibility or we are the ones who irresponsibly reject that responsibility.   That is the choice between keeping an egalitarian democracy or losing it.    The test of time of those lofty 18th century generalities would seem to be about up, if they gave us a Trump who cannot be removed from power, even after these first years of catastrophe, it has failed.   It allowed him to get and keep power in the sewer that absolute freedom to lie has created.  He gained power through speech, just as Lenin did, just as Hitler did, just as those who mounted the Reign of Terror did by swaying crowds with their words.  With the electronic mass media, Trump didn't even have to work hard at it and he's the stupidest person of those I just mentioned.  We are even stupider for allowing that to happen with the lessons of history we have. 

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In new business,  I should point out that two of the themes I posted on last weekend meet in the anti-vaccine mania that is certain to be in the news, the dangers of a "freedom" of the press to lie and the disaster that lax scientific standards leads to.   I read a typical sci-ranger materialist-atheist claim that it was new-age "woo" that had started the anti-vaccine idiocy.   But it was largely fueled by journalism of the most esteemed and renowned scientific reputability and through the sloppy scientific standards that have become ubiquitious in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  But you don't have to take my word for that. 

Twelve years after publishing a landmark study that turned tens of thousands of parents around the world against the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine because of an implied link between vaccinations and autism, The Lancet has retracted the paper.

In a statement published on Feb. 2, the British medical journal said that it is now clear that “several elements” of a 1998 paper it published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues (Lancet 1998;351[9103]:637–41) “are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation.”

Dr. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, declined through a spokesperson to speak to CMAJ about this issue.

In the original paper, Wakefield and 12 coauthors claimed to have investigated “a consecutive series” of 12 children referred to the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine with chronic enterocolitis and regressive developmental disorder. The authors reported that the parents of eight of the 12 children associated their loss of acquired skills, including language, with the MMR vaccination. The authors concluded that “possible environmental triggers” (i.e. the vaccine) were associated with the onset of both the gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression.

In fact, as Britain’s General Medical Council ruled in January, the children that Wakefield studied were carefully selected and some of Wakefield’s research was funded by lawyers acting for parents who were involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. The council found Wake-field had acted unethically and had shown “callous disregard” for the children in his study, upon whom invasive tests were performed.

When the original article was picked up by the general media, the findings were fuelled by speeches and public appearances in which Wakefield recommended single vaccines rather than the combined MMR. Many parents seeking a cause for their children’s illness seized upon the apparent link between the routine vaccination and autism, say Canadian researchers who laud the retraction.

The media carries lies, people die.  There is no right to lie, there isn't even a right to carry lies due to lax fact checking and just taking it on faith due to someone having a PhD or MD or having the right connections.   It took the goddamned Lancet 12 fucking years to retract it.   How's that for not making an effort to correct a mistake.   I doubt any of the myriads of talk show on TV and radio and podcast who have carried that poison have ever made much of an effort to dis-misinform the public on that count.  They don't have to, they're the free press, don'tcha know. 

Update:  Rereading the passage from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, it occurs to me that there is a third component I've written about contributing to the catestrophic defeat of modern medicine by lies, the media and lax scientific practice, sleazebag lawyers figured heavily in it, as they did in getting the media of the United States the ability to lie with impunity.   When lawyers are allowed to twist things for their paying clients, people die, too.  Their success at getting people killed by getting their clients the ability to lie is a mountain compared to the handfuls they save from the death penalty, brought back from near death in the 1970s by the ability they got their clients to lie with impunity.