Science, Certainty and History

Yes we SHOULD question science:

One of the more bizarre things we have been force-fed over the past two years is the mantra that we must not question the science. Whether it is unelected health bureaucrats here in Australia, or folks like Anthony Fauci in the US, or bodies such as the CDC, the WHO and others, we have been told over and over again that what they tell us is gospel, and we must not question any of their pronouncements.

But of course science is all about asking questions, and asking more questions. As Albert Einstein put it: “The important thing is not to stop questioning.” When folks glibly tell you ‘the science is settled’ and we should not question the ‘scientific consensus’ they are pushing propaganda, not science.

This is true in so many areas, be it ‘climate science’ or ‘Covid science’. As Thomas Kuhn put it in his ground-breaking 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, new paradigms emerge which lead to asking new questions of old data. And new data can arise, challenging old conclusions. Thus science is an ongoing process, including – hopefully – self-correction.

But so often we are bullied into silence when it comes to whatever someone says from the scientific community, as if their pronouncements are infallible and we are ignoramuses for daring to ask hard questions. Not only does science get it wrong, but scientists can as well – sometimes even quite willingly. Just because folks wear white lab coats does not mean they are free from bias, from agendas, from prejudice, and from being bought by the highest bidder.

We have seen this too often in the past. Let me look at all this further by drawing upon two recent articles, both looking at the ‘science’ behind Covid and government reactions to it, including health coercion such as mask and vaccine mandates as well as egregious lockdowns and the like. Of interest, both end up citing the same biblical passage from the book of Revelation.

First, Douglas Wilson recently wrote about “The Mandatorians”. In it he takes apart a trendy Christian magazine in the US which basically said that a good Christian will get the vaxx, no questions asked. He first takes to task the magazine itself:

The principle really should be a plain one. The only relevant Christians are the ones who do not give a rat’s patootie—one way or another—about relevance. Those Christians who are most earnest about relevance are the ones who have youth ministries full of ripped jeans, seminarians with heads full of pink cotton candy, and pulpits full of process theology—all things that have the same “sell by” date as last year’s sour cream, recently discovered in the back row of your fridge. “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date” (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves).

He then goes on to look at the ‘science,’ arguing that “Censorship is No Argument.” He writes:

Someone will say that I am no medical researcher, and so I should just let the experts decide. And I would be quite willing to do that if the powers that be would allow all the experts to talk.

 

It is quite true that I am no medical researcher, but I am a student of human nature. And I know that in a debate, the side with a weak hand doesn’t really like it when the other side gets to talk. They don’t have answers to hard questions, and so they resort to the expedient of banning the hard questions. They don’t have answers to hard questions, so they like to arrange it so that they don’t have to answer any hard questions. Win win.

 

With the apostle Paul, I am out of my mind to talk this way (2 Cor. 11:21), but also like the apostle Paul, you have forced me to it. I am the co-author of two logic textbooks, one of which has sold northwards of 100K copies…. I know what a fallacy is. I know what you all are doing. I know that circles aren’t squares, I know that wet streets don’t cause rain, and I know that you only discredit the integrity of your own position through prohibiting an actual debate. In a situation like this one, to refuse to debate is to forfeit the debate.

 

And in the debate over COVID, the establishment view has forfeited the debate.

 

You tell me that because I am no scientist, I don’t know which side has the information and which has the misinformation. No, but I know which side won’t let the other side talk. I know which side is appealing to arguments and which side is appealing to the form of reasoning known as “shut up, they explained.” I do know that.

 

We can see what you are doing, you know. It is kind of noticeable. You have a governmental/media propaganda machine that is working on all cylinders, and you shut down any effective dissenters, and then, having done so, you claim that no one dissents from the scientific consensus. But anyone who uses the phrase scientific consensus in that way doesn’t have a clue when it comes to what science actually is. Science is not the holy mother church, with an index of prohibited books.

 

Another bad thing that censorship does is feed and reinforce wild conspiracy theories. The Relevant article had a little video clip that explained to us all why the vaccine wasn’t the mark of the beast. Now, on eschatological grounds, I quite agree that the vaccine is not the mark of the beast. Yes, and amen to all that. But then all the responsible voices get together in puzzlement in order to wonder aloud together where those premill rubes could have possibly gotten the idea that the vaccine was the mark of the beast.

 

Oh, I don’t know. It might be the fact that you won’t let them buy or sell without it (Rev. 13:17). You know, just a thought. If you don’t want to be mistaken for a beast, then stop acting like one. https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/the-mandatorians.html

And second, David Solway wrote this important piece: “Has history taught us nothing? Medical apartheid and fascism are here again.” He begins this way:

The COVID controversy, which shows no sign of ending anytime soon, has now condensed around the eruption of viral mutations, and the need for an indefinite number of injections or booster shots, as Dr. Fauci has recently stipulated. Objections are routinely discredited or censored while mandates insensibly ramify. One may know people who collapsed shortly after taking the jab, or whose research suggests that the vaccines may be toxic or merely drive the emergence of workaround variants like the B.1.1.529 recently found in Botswana and South Africa (dubbed Omicron, aka Nu).

 

But such attestations are of no account. “Vaccinology has become a cult religion,” writes Dr. Christopher Shaw in Dispatches from the Vaccine Wars. People must vaccinate. People must submit to an increasingly despotic political system and its avowed program of legislating the health of the nation, otherwise known as COVID-zero. It is a system that had come to be known as medical fascism.

 

As The Lancet has pointed out with respect to the Nuremberg trials, its proceedings suggest “implications relevant for today’s debates on the ethics of research involving human beings.” The COVID vaccines certainly qualify as such; long term trials are far from completed, mRNA injections were never tested on pregnant women nor on children, nor do they confer prolonged immunity and — despite disclaimers to the contrary — may not prevent “shedding.”

 

The Nuremberg Doctors Trial, which began on December 9, 1946, continues to impinge on contemporary medicine. As a result of experimental medical practices during the Nazi era, aside from the indescribable barbarities inflicted on Jews and other Untermenschen, “considerable minorities of the population… lost most or all of their civil rights.” The political system in place subordinated the individual person to “the importance ascribed to the health and wellbeing of society as a whole,” as exemplified by the infamous Gesundheitspass Des Hauptamtes Für Volksgesundheit Der NSDAP, or Health Pass Card, of 1938, with the backing in large measure of the medical profession.

 

The National Library of Medicine informs us that more than half of all German physicians joined the Nazi Party, “surpassing the Party enrollments of all other professions.” Another study observes that research has shifted to elucidating the motivations of the medical community for such a transition from healer to political operative, incentives that include the glorification of the profession, improved incomes, and purging the profession of undesirables. As always, the political juggernaut advances under the mantle of national health, leading to a society that has been effectively vaccinated against democratic governance.

 

Today, in almost all Western democracies, not having a vaccine passport is equivalent to wearing a badge of social pariahhood. Public spaces have become off-limits. Internet mobbing and civil incitement are daily occurrences. Snitching has become a social practice. Travel is forbidden to the unvaccinated. No jab, no job. People are being fired without compensation. People who quit voluntarily rather than accept the vaccine may be deprived of their legal benefits. Many commercial transactions are determined by the existence of QR codes, as if in ironic confirmation of a biblical presage:

 

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Revelation 13:16-17).

 

Public personalities like Noam Chomsky suggest that the unvaccinated lose their access to food stores. Newspaper columnists have proposed that unvaccinated people should be prosecuted. Austria has just locked down one-third of its population, a measure enforced by police carrying out spot-checks on the streets. Certain countries are planning quarantine facilities that eerily resemble internment camps.

 

Australian state governments, as Chris Queen reports in PJ Media, now want to codify the emergency measures they took two years ago during the initial stages of the pandemic and to “haul Covid patients into quarantine camps.” (The Northern Territory website is most explicit). Other countries are contemplating compulsory vaccination of the entire population, curfews and indoor masking. If sources are accurate, Slovenia is now imposing gasoline-passports. The lockdown proceeds in everything but name and is beginning to look permanent. https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/has-history-has-taught-us-nothing-medical-apartheid-and-fascism-are-here-again/

Two things should be clear from all this: we must never forget the lessons of history, and we must never believe that the science is settled and that we must keep our mouths shut and our minds closed. That is a recipe for dictatorship, and every tyrant’s dream.

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