Propadogma
Tabloid science in the new age of dogmas
A friend, someone I did not make part of the six I mentioned in Virtuous ignorance, sent me a link to this article, with a comment that I can for sure find the scientific study it is based on in English.
My reaction reading it was a cringe. You can probably relate to the feeling you have when someone you know says or does something so stupid, that you feel embarrassed for them, because they cannot even understand the scope of how embarrassing their act is. He sent it to me as some sort of proof of validity of his position on the Covid vaccines. I don’t know whether it was a trump-card or a serious attempt to change my mind.
The article was posted on a Hungarian portal for the woke left.
With less than 350 words, it is a typical tabloid article. Here are some bits from it:
“Fresh Dutch mortality figures illustrate how well the coronavirus vaccine worked
Fewer people died.
Not only compared to the unvaccinated, but also compared to statistics from previous years before the epidemic.
Those who were not vaccinated had twice the chance of dying.
Those who were in poor health in the first place had one fifth of the mortality rate when vaccinated compared to similar unvaccinated people.
Vaccines against the coronavirus prevented a significant number of deaths among the elderly and people with serious health problems, such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease, according to a report published on Monday by the Dutch health research institute Nivel. The researchers compared health and mortality statistics in the Netherlands.
…..While measures such as lockdowns, a one-and-a-half metre clearance rule and the wearing of masks covering the face and mouth affected both vaccinated and unvaccinated people, the survey results show that unvaccinated people were almost twice as likely to die from coronavirus infection as those who chose to be vaccinated.
….The Dutch government launched a coronavirus vaccination campaign for people aged 60 and over and younger people in poor health at the end of August, following the summer reports of a new variant of the coronavirus known as FLiRT in the Netherlands.”
(emphasis mine)
A quick word-count will show that I quoted 2/3 of the article. That’s it. That was the argument, with a note that I can look up the original. So, I did. It is only available in Dutch, but that’s what we have Deeple for.
Before anything else, we should take a quick look at the institutions involved: !!444!!! and NIVEL (Netherlands Institute for Health Care Research).
444.hu is not serious journalism; it is a globalist tabloid propaganda forum. 75% of its income is from “international sources”, mostly various EU agencies. Their latest venture is a cooperation with the French news agency AFP to create a Hungarian fact-checking platform in harmony with their European counterparts. What they are doing is not journalism, but EU/Globalist/Western hegemonic propaganda.
NIVEL, is NOT a scientific institute. I could not find a single one actual hard-scientist amongst its people. It is a government financed policy research institute. They are bureaucrats, not scientists. They are massaging data to create narratives. The point of the report was to fight ‘vaccine-hesitancy’.
“Robert Verheij, a program leader at Nivel and professor at Tilburg University, told Trouw he hoped that the research will end the social media suspicions about a link between the vaccines and excess death rates.” (source)
The 53 page report that is the foundation of the media campaign is unreadably boring and pedantic, but the errors in it do not even matter, as its only function is to support the propaganda campaign reminding people that the new shot for the coming season is available and everybody should get it the moment they are ‘eligible’.
How should such “argument” be handled? Ignoring it? Trying to talk sense to counter propaganda? Flood them with real information? Expose them to the dozens of books and hundreds of actual scientific studies? It would be an absolutely pointless effort, as holders of dogmatic beliefs consider any challenge of those beliefs an affront, an attack on the very essence of their being. They would never give them any consideration.
The road to dogmatic authoritarianism is paved by the uncritical acceptance of official dogma by people who are using propaganda as the foundation of their perception of reality. The constant restating of the dogma is the confirmation of the faith in it.
Unfortunately, the world is full of people who are, drawing their strength from their number and the conviction that the consensus view is the only valid expression of what truth, facts and reality are.
For most of humanity’s existence, we lived in societies where knowledge was codified into some sort of dogma, some sort of authoritative knowledge. The encyclopedia was the bible of the enlightenment; extending the concept of dogma from faith to science.
All the way to the universal availability of the Internet, the Encyclopedia Britannica was a most authoritative source of knowledge.
Then all hell broke loose. Critical theory made everything relative, postmodernism turned everything into a narrative, sexual liberation and its permissiveness turned basic social organizations and institutions meaningless, biology and science in general subservient to political ideologies and intellectual midgets like Yuval Noah Harari who is trying to sell the story, that everything is just a story.
Political correctness and woke ideology rendered even language meaningless through subjecting all of it to political decisions. Everything is potential subject to redefinition and everything is about power.
Facts do not matter, logic doesn’t matter, science, biology, the economy, the law and morality are all subjected to political whim. At this point we are in a cosmic fight for our sanity, while our opposition is fighting for control.
A dinky little tabloid in a dinky little country can take the highly questionable ‘scientific’ report from a corrupt government agency of another dinky little country and present it as universal truth. All in the financial interest of a not so dinky company in a not so dinky country and while already seeking the power to censor any views contrary to the newly declared or redefined dogma.
On the top of this:
“Australia threatens fines for social media giants enabling misinformation
Breaches face fines up to 5% of global revenue
Bill seeks to prevent election, public health disinformation” (source)
Brazil and the EU are doing the same. The key point to understand are the words “misinformation and disinformation” These words are NEVER defined. They always mean “anything we may not like or disagree with.”
The internet made knowledge distributed, subverting its authoritative nature of printed material and broadcast media, while at the same time, being digital makes it easily changeable and manipulatable beyond the wildest dreams of Big Brother.
This creates an interesting dichotomy, where on the one hand, there is an increased amount of knowledge around, while on the other hand, there is an increased demand for its control.
All debates, all controversies are out in the open, making paradigm shifts and dissent more accessible.
The authority part of authoritative becomes more questionable. As a response to that, authoritative opinions are replaced with official ones, at which point they become unquestionable and therefore dogmatic. The implied power in ‘authoritative’ is getting replaced by the explicit power in ‘authority’.
Truth is changed from an emerging property of scientific debates into a property of consensus as declared by authority – i.e.: dogma.
In an ever-changing world memes and tweets can live forever, while vital information, facts, arguments, truths, evidence and even people can disappear in memory holes.
In an ever-changing world, the safety or permanence, the faith in established knowledge is becoming ever-scarcer.
In an ever-changing world of uncertainty, just about everybody is trying to hang onto what they have:
The ruling classes to their power and money, everybody below them to the illusion of safety and the delusion of never-ending good times. Deep down, everybody knows that what we have is unsustainable, but we all want the racket to keep going.
The ruling classes want to control everything, especially the narrative. A big chunk of the ruled is looking for safety in the mediocrity of the consensus view. They want the reliability and safety of trustworthy information. They want propadogma.
I don’t really know how big that chunk is, but I’m afraid that the likes of me are being squeezed out.
The person who sent me that garbage article had good intentions. He wanted to open my eyes with information that he considers irrefutable evidence.
This is the example I started with: Big Pharma needs to sell vaccines, so it will create a ‘new’ narrative to reinforce the fading dogma, that the vaccines are safe and effective and everybody should get them. It is propaganda to reinforce the dogma.
Let me close this with this graph:
Do you think that it will convince the person who sent me the article of ANYTHING?
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I don’t think it makes sense to take apart the article and asking questions like:
What makes the re-massaging of 2-3 years old data ’fresh’?; or the excessively filtered and manipulated data more reliable than the unfiltered one, but if you think you can get something out of it, knock yourself silly! The links are below.
The Germans have a word for that kind of cringe: Fremdschämen.