Faith and falsifiability

I don’t think there can be any doubt about my position on, or what I think in general about the insanity of the last two years. The reason we still have to talk about it is the many conversations I had on the subject, all too often with the same disappointing outcome of no common ground. I tried to challenge the beliefs of my opponents by asking them to provide me with some falsifiability criteria so that we can bring the conversation beyond the perpetual restating of our positions. The best of these was a conversation with some relatives. I was desperately trying to find some common ground when the husband of the relative I was talking to started shouting at her saying: “Don’t ANSWER! Do not walk into his trap!” The ‘trap’ was my attempt to define the parameters of our conversation. The woman in the cartoon above does exactly that: refuses to walk into the trap of real conversations. I never succeeded, but in the process, I figured I should offer my own beliefs and falsifiability criteria. Much easier said than done, mostly because the essence of my ‘beliefs’ is exactly the opposite of beliefs, it is having doubts. I do not believe the official narrative, I do not believe that this is a health emergency; I do not believe that the policy response is in the interest of public health; I do not believe the statistics, I do not believe ANY of the claims of pharmaceutical companies or public health officials, etc. We could continue, but the pattern – and the question - should be clear. What are the falsifiability criteria of doubts? What are the falsifiability criteria of proven lies? Broken promises? Failed predictions? Unprovable, vague claims? Inconsistent, daily changing positions and rules? What are the falsifiability criteria of pure bullshit? Which takes me to the territory of my possible expectations. Of course, nobody can provide me with falsifiability criteria, because doing so would lay bare their cognitive dissonance. Asking people to provide me with falsifiability criteria would require them to articulate their angst into verifiable statements. In most discussions I enter I need to deal with propaganda talking points, hit piece quotes or cherry-picked statistics from highly questionable sources which, on the other hand, immediately lead to the question of the reliability of both of our sources. How can I prove to anybody that my sources are more reliable than theirs? “I’ve seen it on television” “There are ‘X’ number of new cases!!” “According to the New York Times, the science says that vaccination works.” “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

Take a good look at this carefully crafted message from the FDA. Just the right amount of insulting condescension for “y’all” with a wink to the rest to let them know how they think of the people they are addressing.

“Covid will kill 2.2 million people in the US.” The person who made this claim did not have to resign for being spectacularly wrong; he had to resign for breaking the lockdown rules that were introduced based on his recommendations. He is still praised as a very dedicated researcher. There is absolutely no information about the virus that can be trusted. The science has been so badly corrupted by the political response that we may never know what the actual numbers were. Countries keep revising their Covid-19 death statistics for the past two years. New York experienced two major ‘spikes’. The cause? Padding the numbers with those of unknown causes. Health officials decided that people who died at home can be assumed to have died of the virus without performing any test to confirm. From the very first day, the media is lying shamelessly, mostly along partisan lines. Distorted reporting, phony statistics, hysterical fear-mongering. The Ecommunist was pumping up the alarm for several weeks. When it became obvious that the numbers are not high enough to justify the harsh lock-down measures, they declared the official numbers as underreporting the real effect of the pandemic. They started using excess deaths (compared to the same period a year prior) as the true measure of the pandemic’s impact. The point was to conflate the damage caused by the pandemic with the damage caused by the response to it. The possibility that the response to the pandemic killed more people than the disease itself, hardly ever enters the conversation. The media, just like politicians are taking advantage of the simple fact that most people cannot interpret statistics, cannot put them into context and cannot relate them to reality. The ‘experts’ and the media made everything look very ‘science-ish’. Scientific looking but without any proper context and grounding. At some point, the lines between facts, opinions, narratives and messaging get completely blurred. What is considered ‘true’ is changing by the day, and just like in Orwell’s dystopia, we have to learn to adjust to it … by the day. We are living in a post-fact world where ANY claim can be made on any subject. Facts don’t matter, only narratives exist. Truth does not matter, only power and politics do. No wonder that we cannot have a conversation. No wonder that we cannot even establish the parameters of the discussion. We cannot establish falsifiability criteria without agreeing on what we need to agree on. Bullshit cannot be falsified. Just take a look at the cartoon on the top. It is not funny, but it is educational. It has a vague semblance of a conversation, of two parties completely talking past each other. All of the statements there could be correct at the same time but a conversation is not possible without an agreement to communicate. The media, the policy makers, the propagandists do exactly what this women in the cartoon is doing: repeating the same, simple but completely irrelevant message AS IF it was an argument. When they are not blatant and outright, the lies in print media are in the headlines, in the choice of words, in the snarky remarks, in the insinuations and other various techniques of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). In broadcast media it’s in the body language. In the scoffs, the sniggers and the rolling eyes. The point of all these is the division, the taking of sides, the removing the discussion from the realm of reason where the concept of falsifiability can make sense. Ever since this fakedemic started I was under the impression that we are being tested. For our credulity, our sheepishness, our willingness to submit and compromise. Our susceptibility for mass formation, and mass psychosis. We are not doing too well. But this unreality didn’t just come out of the blue. It has a long tradition. It started with Rousseau and Marx; with the idea that we should not look at the world the way it is but the way we want it to be. That the only reality that matters is the one we want, not the one that exists. All that matters is our shared will. This nonsense found full support and intellectual validation in postmodernism, critical theory and deconstructionism. The element they all share is the denial of reality and the desire to create a civilizational clean slate. The replacement of reason and the cooperation of free individuals with power and obedient masses. Such attempts always fail, the only question is how much damage will be done before the failure is recognized. Again. The march toward the abyss cannot be stopped without accountability, and accountability in the media and in politics doesn’t seem to exist any more. The people, who were slandering the American President with proven lies, are still in the position of doing the same. The people who said that we have ‘X’ number of months to stave off global climate catastrophe are given forums to promote the same nonsense ‘Y’ number of years later. Riots can be called peaceful demonstrations and vice versa. Accountability, if we can call it that, is purely political. What you say, what you do does not matter. As long as your actions and loyalties are properly aligned with your political affiliations and the expectations of the day. Break the bond and you will be liable for even the misrepresentations of anything you ever said. Today, in Canada, it is a federal felony to state certain biological facts publicly. If I tried to convince an impressionable teenager that he/she cannot change his/her sex because it is hard-coded into every cell of his/her body, I would be facing jail-time. I cannot even make the argument to my own child. Careers are destroyed, accreditations are withdrawn, evidence is buried, voices are silenced for expressing views and stating inconvenient facts that are deemed unacceptable. For the powerful, power is the ultimate arbiter of the truth. As Stalin famously quipped:  “How Many Divisions Does the Pope Have?”