Emaskulating the population
Most of you will probably already be aware of the following pre-print that’s doing the rounds amongst the maskerbators.
I’m not going to go over this paper in any detail; others have already done so. I will, however, just say that this paper is SO appallingly bad and flawed that it can, surely, only be a kind of sarcastic ‘hoax’ to demonstrate that it’s easy to get insanely awful “science” out there provided it fits The Narrative™.
Indeed, as the fabulous Eugyppius notes here
loony Lauterbach himself seems rather taken with it. It’s another brick in the wall of the Palace of Prattishness western societies seem to be building these days. Except that the wall looks like this
Climate, health, racism, gender are all forming an intersectionality of insanity and excess that seems not to be ending any time soon.
Academic publishing is a lucrative business. Before open-access publication became a thing, as an academic you would submit your paper to a journal and, if it passed the review and editorial process, it would get published free of charge. The publishing houses made money by charging university libraries a small fortune for stocking the journal.
The open-access model is a bit different. In this model the costs of publication would be paid by the authors, and the journal made available to everyone, free of charge. Not a bad idea when you consider that a lot of university academic work is funded by the taxpayer, so why shouldn’t the public be able to see what they’re getting for their money?
The danger here is in the obvious possibility of scams and lower quality output. Any fool can set up a ‘publishing’ house and publish stuff after ‘review’ and rake in some not at all well-earned cash.
My favourite is the guys who got their paper accepted for publication in an open-access journal. They had become fed up with receiving emails from open-access ‘journals’ inviting submission and so they wrote the paper with the all-time classic title of Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List. Here’s a couple of pages of the paper with a figure
The paper passed ‘peer review’ for the journal.
A lot of these somewhat dubious journals have titles that begin with “International Journal of . . .” and this example was accepted for publication in The International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in 2014.
If you’re not in the academic publishing game it’s easy to think peer review and publication is some Great Certification of Rectitude™, but it’s not.
Most people will hear the words “study” or “expert” or “peer reviewed” and automatically, and unconsciously, pop the resultant claims on some kind of pedestal in their minds. It’s why the media and politicians love these kinds of words - they give an often wholly-unwarranted air of authenticity and correctness.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the promotion of masks over the last couple of years. People will see the link to the paper above and think “ooh, look it’s on the medical archive - must be a proper good piece of work” when in reality the paper above is shite beyond all measure. It is the very essence of shite. Shite so pure it could fertilize an entire planet. It is so very, very bad that I can only imagine it has to be a kind of hoax/protest paper like the mailing list paper.
And in the general public the mask ‘debate’ rages on - when the actual science (the stuff we used to do) has been pretty much settled on masks. It was pretty much settled before the ‘pandemic’ and the data since then has only strengthened that ‘settled’ status.
The following post, and subsequent comments, are depressing and gives us some idea of what we’re up against.
You’ll notice that whilst the Twittee correctly concludes that masking kids is anti-science and anti-kids, he also implicitly thinks vaccines are somehow beneficial with regards to the spread of infection. One can only presume he would like mask up any kid who is unvaccinated?
However, the replies to this tweet are astonishing - and here’s just a selection. You can read the whole shebang yourselves if you like getting your blood pressure up to the ‘head explode’ level. Here’s just a selection (with my own highlights)
The level to which so much junk science has penetrated people’s psyche is depressing - although not wholly unexpected given the propagandist war on science that has been waged by governments and their media buddies.
These people really believe that masks work, that science has shown this, that they will kill granny if they don’t mask, and so on. One even states that the original Twittee has “misunderstood how vaccines work”, that they “provide support in an immune response” but “cannot stop spread”. Wow. Although the one who claims that masks “promote inclusion” must be a decent runner-up.
Honestly, I don’t think there’s any way to reverse this kind of damage without another media onslaught every bit as widespread as the anti-scientific shite they liberally pebble-dashed us all with in the first place.
The good news is that a lot of people have realised the mask hoax. The bad news is that there are still far too many people who have been emaskulated.
Yep, reading that yellow highlighted montage there got my blood boiling.
I can just imagine what it's like to talk to these people. Notice how many of those are basically positive or negative appeals to authority and NOTHING else? "You're not a doctor / Let the doctors decide this."
These are the people who would gladly abrogate moral responsibility for murdering me if someone was willing to sign the waiver for them.
It is depressing that even this basic understanding- masks don't work - isn't ubiquitous. They won't stop trying to confuse those easily confused.