Posted on 04/27/2020 3:33:59 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
A case in point involves the response to John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, who was thrust into the spotlight after writing a provocative article in STAT on Covid-19. He argued in mid-March that we didn’t have enough information on the prevalence of Covid-19 and the consequences of the infection on a population basis to justify the most extreme lockdown measures which, he hypothesized, could have dangerous consequences of their own.
...Now is the time to foster —not stifle — open dialogue among academic physicians and scientists about the current pandemic and the best tactical responses to it, each of which involve enormous trade-offs and unanticipated consequences.
When the dust settles, few if any scientists — no matter where they work and whatever their academic titles — will have been 100% correct about the effects of Covid-19 and our responses to it.
...More lives may be lost by suppressing or ignoring alternate perspectives, some of which may at least in part ultimately prove correct. That’s why we believe that the bar to stifling or ignoring academics who are willing to debate their alternative positions in public and in good faith must be very high.
Scientific consensus is important, but it isn’t uncommon when some of the most important voices turn out to be those of independent thinkers, like John Ioannidis, whose views were initially doubted. That’s not an argument for prematurely accepting his contestable views, but it is a sound argument for keeping him, and others like him, at the table.
(Excerpt) Read more at statnews.com ...
And we are at or near that point.
Nope, this will be politicized for eternity just like Global Warming that never happened, or the Ice Age in the 70’s
Society faces a risk even more toxic and deadly than Covid-19: that the conduct of science becomes indistinguishable from politics.
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And we are at or near that point.
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If you change the three words “indistinguishable from politics” to “indistinguishable from LEFTIST, GLOBALIST politics” then we absolutely are VERY close to that point.
Nope, this will be politicized for eternity just like Global Warming that never happened, or the Ice Age in the 70’s
Yes!
You have an eye for the future.
That should happen with every topic, HIV, etc.
The Left loves science as long as it’s politically correct science.
“You have an eye for the future.”
Here’s an eye for the future from the past that is very on point.
Having read all I had set aside, I pulled an old Horizon hard cover magazine from my stash of same randomly and found an article by Bryan Magee. Although written in the Summer of 1975, it is a good analysis of our current situation.
Title: “Getting Along Without Doomsday”
Quotes:
“Many of our leading pundits these days are determined to persuade us that we must give up our liberties and submit to some central authority if we hope tp save civilization from the catastrophes they say are at hand.”
“The simple truth that we are all trying to evade is that we don’t know what is going to happen. I apologize for stating an obvious piece of the obvious, but there are few of us who will accept it and face its consequences.”
And one that applies to all the issues, “The lip-smacking RELISH with which our 20th century ( and 21st ) prophets proclaim the imminent destruction of our society is unmistakable. They are THRILLED by it. They want it.”
All this from a Labour MP in the UK 45 years ago.
“Many of our leading pundits these days are determined to persuade us that we must give up our liberties and submit...”
Now that you pointed me in that direction...
An old favorite H.L. Mencken:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
“If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”
In today’s America, questions are the new insults.
Ah the days of Will Rogers and H.L Mencken. Our Journalists and pundits are worse than the politicians. They goad them into unwise action with their own agenda. Skepticism is not allowed hence the new pejorative, “denier”.
Already reached that point.
THAT is profound...
Good post!
Ah the days of Will Rogers and H.L Mencken
After reading the Mencken presidental bathtub tale, I prefer H L over W R.
http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_history_of_the_bathtub
And so Mencken’s story started to spread, accepted as if it were true. First it appeared in other newspapers, then by medical journals; eventually the “facts” that he invented were cited on the floor of Congress.
Eight years after the initial article was published, Mencken confessed. He’d made the whole thing up. “All I care to do today is to reiterate, in the most solemn and awful terms, that my history of the bathtub, printed on Dec. 28, 1917, was pure buncombe,” he wrote. “If there were any facts in it they got there accidentally and against my design. But today the tale is in the encyclopedias. History, said a great American soothsayer, is bunk.”
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