There are lies, damned lies, and SCOTUS
By now I’m sure most of you will have seen the extraordinary statements issuing forth from some Supreme Court Justices in the US during the recent hearing on the legality of the covid mandates.
They are not extraordinary by virtue of being eloquent, insightful or stunning examples of intellectual clarity and precision. They are extraordinary because they are wrong. And not just a little bit wrong. Massively wrong, and incomprehensibly so.
I’m from the UK and so I’m pretty sure I don’t know about all the ins and outs of exactly how one gets to be a member of SCOTUS. I’m pretty sure, however, that the process is accompanied by a reasonable smorgasbord of political machination.
I’m also pretty sure that you can’t be appointed to SCOTUS if you have the IQ of an ironing board.
These Justices have done for the reputation of the highest law court in the land what people like Neil Ferguson and Chris Whitty have done for the reputation of science. It’s like appointing Harvey Weinstein or Ghislaine Maxwell to be the manager of a Women’s Shelter.
It’s a fairly common criticism of judges, at least in the UK, that they are “out of touch”. One rarely hears, however, that they are “out of their minds”. But after reading some of the SCOTUS statements maybe we’ll be hearing this more often. You would like to think, wouldn’t you, that when deliberating on a case (and if it has reached the heights of SCOTUS it is almost by definition an important case) the Justices might do a little bit of homework? You’d think they’d have all the important parameters - those things called facts - right at their grubby little legal fingertips?
But apparently not. Only the so-called conspiracy theorists, the anti-vaxxers, the science-deniers, seem to be interested in facts these days. What a strange world we live in when people are reporting that merely posting the Nuremberg Code on FaceBook, without comment, can get your post labelled as “misinformation”. I don’t do FB, so can’t check the veracity of these claims, but it would seem consistent with the many other examples of perfectly truthful statements being labelled as “misinformation” on all of the major platforms.
Almost right from the start of this pantomime, this propagandemic, I have been asking myself on a daily basis am I insane? My thought process goes something like this :
that’s got to be a load of bollocks, followed by . . .
what am I getting wrong?
what am I not seeing here?
There are furrows in my brow you could plant potatoes in after nearly 2 years of this. I’ve been trying to find the data that would fill in the gaps, show me the pieces I’m “missing”.
It’s a sad, but understandable and forgivable, fact that all of us have feet of clay. Even our heroes. It’s not forgivable when our legal heroes are shown to have minds of clay. But it’s indicative of a much more worrying thing.
There is an absolute chasm that has opened up between those whom we might broadly class as followers of the Rona Religion and the Septic Sceptics (I’m trying to be equally insulting in the interests of fairly representing the views of both sides). The different world views the two sides represent are really quite stark.
I really do try to understand the position of the followers of the Rona Religion - but I can’t. It’s generated by fear, obviously, but it’s not even a consistent fear. There’s a deadly virus about (apparently) and we must all be subject to severe restrictions - but not so severe that we can’t enjoy a meal in a restaurant as long as we wear a mask when standing. So, something to be really fearful of and not so fearful of, all at the same time.
There is an attitude that has developed that we should “trust” the experts. It has always been there, of course, but it’s become a bit more forceful with all of the censorship that’s going on right now. It’s not a bad thing to listen more carefully to what an expert has to say - they are experts for a reason, after all. But even experts should be questioned, and even experts can be very wrong indeed. It has always been important to do your own research - weighing up the opinions of various experts and thinking.
Here’s what the great Ibn al Haytham had to say around a thousand years ago :
The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and . . . attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.
Ibn al Haytham was, in my view, the world’s first proper scientist. As far as I know, he was the first to state the scientific method. Furthermore, he actually came up with theories and tested them experimentally.
What do we have today? We have a growing trend to criticize anyone who undergoes this process. We are told we simply have to trust the experts.
There was a paper published by “experts” at MIT (yes, MIT, one of the world’s premiere institutes of science) in which the phenomenon of “anti-masking” was investigated. There are a lot of WTF moments I had in reading this paper, but the one that stood out for me was the part where they were trying to give reasons for the phenomenon of “anti-masking”.
They said that “anti-maskers” tended to view science as a process, rather than an institution. They meant this to be a criticism. Let that sink in for a moment.
It’s quite bizarre to see that these (allegedly) deluded “anti-maskers” had a better understanding of what science actually IS than the researchers at MIT.
I once had some measure of faith in our great institutions. They always had flaws and failings, of course. But broadly speaking I used to have a much greater trust in doctors, scientists, judges, pharmaceutical companies etc, than I do today. Perhaps I was too naïve, my eyes too clouded by those trust-tinted glasses. I find it very sad that I’ve come to this position, but the events of the last 2 years have only deepened my cynicism.
I don’t know where we go from here. It seems to me that covid has the capability to irreparably damage our lungs, but it, or the response to it, has also irreparably damaged our society and social bonds. I don’t know that we will ever fully recover. I hope to God I am wrong. But take heart, dear reader, I often am wrong!
Speaking as an ex-physicist, I realized in May 2020 that science was dead, that I would never consume any MSM "news" for the rest of my life, and that except for like-minded people on Twitter, Substack, etc, I would never be able to open my mouth to anyone again about this horrific, willful abandonment of the scientific method. Non-scientists cannot fully appreciate how appalling a development this is, although many have been vocal about the humanitarian arguments against lockdowns. You'd need a kind of Maxwell's Demon to put everything back to where it was. What is the point of any research endeavour when everything published is now suspect? I think "mass formation psychosis" is just the phrase du jour. We always knew, at some level, how irrational people are, but to experience the cataclysmic impact of it is another matter entirely.
I also wonder where we go from here. It's not much of an answer perhaps, because you might not see the real fruits of it for two decades yet, but there is a rapidly growing classical education movement in the US that is really bringing back true education, as opposed to the credentialism and therapy often pretending to be education in the US. I serve on the board of directors of one such school so I have some personal interest here, but the growth rate is quite incredible, the quip that "every new classical school that opens immediately has a waitlist" is probably darn close to the truth, people want something the public system isn't giving them. So that is one thing I find encouraging but, unfortunately, "wait 20 years" and we'll see what we've accomplished.