Ever since Elon Musk publicized Twitter’s “crown jewels”––the evidence for its various forms of censorship of conservatives, and its collusion with the FBI, Homeland Security, and the White House to damage Donald Trump and promote Joe Biden before the 2020 presidential election––he has been hysterically vilified by social and legacy media, and threatened by the White House for taking the First Amendment seriously and exposing the moral and professional bankruptcy of storied news outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and CNN.
And now, in a poll of Twitter users Musk held Sunday in response to pushback on his ban on Twitter users promoting other social media sites, 55% voted that Musk should step down as CEO. Musk has pledged to abide by the results, tweeting, “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive.” Fortunately, Musk still own the company and can maintain Twitter’s role as the virtual town square that respects free speech.
Such flak is what one gets for defending the foundational rights of any government that empowers the masses to participate in politics and hold accountable their political rulers, and that protects the people from the tyranny of elites whether plutocratic or technocratic. But free speech is also critical to the proper practice of science, which relies on public debates over challenges to scientific claims.
Musk has gone beyond just standing up for our unalienable right to speak our minds, and for exposing the government’s unconstitutional assaults on the First Amendment. His brash and insulting defense has come at the expense of the cognitive elite who fancies themselves “brights” because they have college degrees and professional credentials––a class that needs to be humiliated for their overweening arrogance and toxic credentialism.
Moreover, Musk is one of the tech oligarchs who turned their highly technical and hard-science computer engineering skills into extraordinary wealth and influence. Then he took over their Twitter sandbox and fired 5,000 employees––a grievous affront that made him Woke Enemy No. 1. He punctures the pretensions of the credentialed class who believe they are entitled to tell everybody else what to do and how to live, even though pretty much every policy or idea they promote has little to do with critical thinking, rational argument, or established fact, and everything to do with aggrandizing their tyrannical political power.
The question that lies behind our cognitive elite’s assumption of superior intelligence is where it came from. The possession of college degrees, as they claim? Yet education from kindergarten to graduate school for decades has been failing to teach foundational knowledge and skills, and relentlessly lowering standards of performance for earning a degree. Most university degrees outside the STEM disciplines are various types of scientism or dubious “studies” that rely on postmodern epistemic and linguistic nihilism, and serve not truth or learning, but illiberal ideologies like identity politics or left-over leftism. Earning such degrees means only that a student has managed to show up and parrot dubious disciplinary and ideological shibboleths.
But failing schools raise a further, broader question of why they fail. The answer lies in the epochal changes in the West’s defining narrative since the late 18th century. In the following years the success of natural science and new technologies fostered the hope that the same methods could allow us to understand human nature and behavior as precisely, and develop new knowledge and technologies for endlessly improving human beings and societies.
Corollary to this belief was the gradual replacement of faith and tradition with science. Religion was banished to the realm of the private and the subjective. Tradition was dismissed as comprising stubborn ignorance and superstition. And most important, philosophical materialism was elevated to the only reality. As cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett asserts, “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter––the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology––and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” Soul, spirit, transcendent reality are merely irrational myths.
Once these impediments to understanding and improving human nature and motivation were swept away, and, as historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin writes, “Once appropriate social laws were discovered, rational organization would take the place of blind improvisation, and men’s wishes, within the limits of the uniformities of nature, could in principle all be made to come true.”
But humans are radically different from the rest of nature. Only humans have rational minds, consciousness, self-awareness, imagination, concepts like beauty and evil, and free will, the power to act spontaneously and unpredictably––a whole reality beyond the material world. In short, they are, as Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin put it, “unfinalizable,” able “to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them. As long as a person is alive, he lives by the fact that he is not yet finalized, that he has not yet uttered his ultimate word.”
As such, we cannot be known and explained with the certitude and predictability required of science: “For,” as Berlin writes, “the particles are too minute, too heterogeneous, succeed each other too rapidly, occur in combinations of too great a complexity, are too much part and parcel of what we are and do, to be capable of submitting to the required degree of abstraction, that minimum of generalization and formalization––idealization––which any science must exact.”
This huge category error of treating human beings as susceptible through science to improvement beyond the tragic constants of human experience has informed the technocracy, the rule by credentialed experts, that defines leftism and its cousin progressivism. But as history catalogues, this technocratic progress has failed over and over during the last two blood-soaked centuries of industrialized warfare and genocide.
A less spectacular sign of the failure of the “human sciences” to improve humanity have been the violations, on the part of “brights” and “followers of science,” of the protocols of the scientific method. Appealing to authority, and silencing dissenters are two typical sins that have been particularly prevalent the last several decades. But as physicist Richard Feynman said, “It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.”
For example, proponents of anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming have for decades been guilty of both these unscientific modes of argument. There are the rigged surveys and statistics like “80% of climate scientists” accept the human-created global warming hypothesis, an old trick of advertisers who claim “Three out of four dentists recommend Crest.” And warmists have smeared informed critics who follow the scientific method and challenge the hypothesis, by labelling them “deniers,” an obvious and despicable way to tar critics with the Holocaust brush, while social and other media censor and “cancel” them, and universities ban them from speaking engagements.
Ad hominem attacks and specious appeals to authority have long been the recourse of those who don’t have real science to back up their claims.
Even worse, sometimes, predictions of global warming’s apocalyptic effects violate the basic protocols and procedures of science. Recently the Wall Street Journal reported on a claim in the esteemed journal Lancet that ignored a fundamental protocol of comparative statistics:
The study offers a frightening statistic: Rapidly rising temperatures have increased annual global heat deaths among older people by 68% in less than two decades. That stark figure has been cited all over, from the BBC and Time to the Washington Post and the Times of India, the world’s largest-selling English-language daily. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres publicized the report, tweeting a link with a grave statement of his own, “The climate crisis is killing us. #COP27 must deliver a down-payment on climate solutions that match the scale of the problem.”
But as Bjorn Lomborg explains, the shocking claim that “Annual heat deaths have increased significantly among people 65 and older world-wide” by 68% between 2000 and 2010 ignores that the number of people in that age-group grew by 60%: “When the increase in heat mortality is adjusted for this population growth, the actual rise that can be attributed to rising temperatures is only 5%.”
As Lomborg observes, “It is hard not to see the Lancet study’s failure to adjust this figure as a deliberate act of deception”––especially since Lomborg a year earlier had informed Lancet of the same error in another article.
Numerous examples of similar ad hominem attacks, attempts to silence, and fundamental errors can be multiplied. Obviously, the last two years of disinformation about Covid’s origins, lethality, transmissibility, possible treatments, and mitigation policies like masks, social-distancing, and shutting down schools have all been exposed. Yet the critics who foresaw these failures were smeared and silenced.
For example, the Great Barrington Declaration, which in 2020 correctly argued against the CDC’s lock-down pronunciamentos, was met by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins’s email to Anthony Fauci advising that it should suffer “a quick and devastating published take down.” And of course the media both traditional and social eagerly publicized and enforced the threat. Meanwhile, evidence of lethal side-effects continues to grow, with little attention from government agencies and their media flacks.
From transgenderism to “systemic racism,” patently unscientific theories and practices have exposed the technocratic “brights’” serial failures that frequently worsen the problem. Elon Musk’s exposure of Twitter, one of the most enthusiastic enablers of the “bright” pretensions to be “followers of science,” is welcome pushback on behalf of the First Amendment and the legitimate practice of real science.
Mr. Thornton always seems to hit the nail on the head.
Those were political hacks not journalists. These hacks should be prosecuted.
Yes, they were political hacks, not journalists, but should be exposed, not prosecuted.
Why not both, expose them first, and then prosecute those where it’s warranted?
These days, a college degree tends to only tell me the person was stupid enough to go six figures into debt (or pawn the debt off on their parents) so they could take bullshit “studies” classes.
The campuses indoctrinate a salivating mob mentality only capable of hyper-emotional responses – not rational thought.
Every once in a while, I come across a student who navigated past the woke chaff, and attended STEM type classes & also managed not to become ensnared in the cultist mob mentality.
(It’s not uncommon for college graduates to be clueless on what century the Civil War was fought in.)
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
“Corollary to this belief was the gradual replacement of faith and tradition with science. Religion was banished to the realm of the private and the subjective.”
What was the history of the West like when religion had not been banished to the private and the subjective? Before the reason-based separation of Church and State? What was the Roman Inquisition, Spanish Inquisition, the 300 years of the bloody wars and persecution of the Reformation and Counter Reformation like?
What was the legal and lawful persecution of the Jews by Christians like before religion had been banished to the private and the subjective?
Let’s talk about TRADITION. Slavery is an ancient tradition, does tradition make slavery good and moral? Theocracy, monarchy, tribalism, racism, collectivism, tyranny, are all ancient traditions, does that make these things good and moral?
Part 1
Once again, THX underlines they don’t understand religion or history, and don’t even make an attempt to understand.
“What was the history of the West like when religion had not been banished to the private and the subjective? Before the reason-based separation of Church and State? ”
The first concrete separation of Church and State in Western history was in the First Amendment of the US Constitution in the 1780s. Catholic Emancipation in Britain did not even happen until 1829, But by that time the West had most of its history and had already become the most powerful, prestigious, and advanced civilization in the world.
That does not mean that it would be a good idea to go back to Renaissance European religious laws, but it does underline how stupid, ignorant, and superstitious you are in assuming devout (even despotically devout) societies cannot reason, cannot innovate, and cannot develop.
I’m not going to engage in any discussion with you. You hurl personal insults and and use obscenities, but more importantly you’ve been dishonest in the past. You’ll be dishonest again. A man doesn’t change his character. You’re more interested in a contest of egos and your ego satisfaction than arriving at facts and truth.
Part 1 “I’m not going to engage in any discussion with you. ”
Which is ideal for me.
I don’t think you have ever engaged in HONEST discussion during your misbegotten time on this website, and you certainly have been happy to peddle smears, profanities, and personal attacks. All without being able to refute my points.
This just means you are surrendering the field of discussion to me immediately, which gives me the chance to dismember your claims piece by piece.
“You hurl personal insults and and use obscenities, ”
As have you.
The difference is, my “personal insults” and “obscenities” are based on accurate and candid assessments of you and your behavior.
I call you a liar because that is what you are.
I call you a hateful bigot because that is what you are.
I call you historically illiterate because you blather greatly about a “thousand year Christian dark age” but never try to bracket said years, while insisting that Aristotle was the root of all good things in modern civilization.
“but more importantly you’ve been dishonest in the past. ”
Accusations are cheap.
If you want to accuse me of being dishonest, PROVE IT. Because the rational mind demands proof. Objective, empirical proof. Especially for a matter of concrete dispute.
In contrast, I’ve been able to prove how dishonest you are.
“You’ll be dishonest again.”
Says the remorseless, nearly-psychopathic liar who cannot substantiate their claims. And who when confronted by a far more competent and learned debater disengages behind a smoke screen of libel and character assassination. Because you can’t ACTUALLY discuss things like the growth of a separation between Church and State, or the relegation of faith to private conscience, or matters of history competently. I doubt you would even recognize if I lied about the date in which Catholic Emancipation was passed in Britain.
Which is why you will always be unable to substantiate your claims with particulars and are dependent on broad, sloppy, general statements. Really, myths.
Part 3
” A man doesn’t change his character. ”
And here we get into the sophist, mystical, supernatural streak of THX’s supposed “rationalism” and “objectivism” Which sounds pithy and true, but is ultimately false.
The truth is, people can and do change their character. Not all or even most, but many. Whether it is subjects of religious scripture such as the metaphorical story of the Road to Damascus, or the historical religious record of the author of Amazing Grace (a former slaver turned abolitionist) or the very secular transformation of Sakharov.
So the supposed “objectivist” ignores objective, well documented historical facts about human nature and experience. Why am I not surprised?
But while men can unquestionably change their nature, you most likely will not. You willfully ignore attempts to educate you better, to correct your falsehoods, or to engage with you. You lie remorselessly and engage in bad faith. You are ultimately a shallow, psycopathic wretch of a human being who is incapable of evaluating the likes of Rand or Peikoff critically, as I have shown many times before.
I met a woman once at UPS who transformed from vicious bitch to compensate & caring.
She started reading the Bible profusely.
I’m not sure what gendered her epiphany, but the change was noted by everyone.
Part 4
“You’re more interested in a contest of egos and your ego satisfaction than arriving at facts and truth.”
This is rich coming from someone who has never cited a single historical source in all the posts I have seen of yours. Who rarely makes reference to timelines or primary or secondary documents and instead repeats the mantras of Rand and Peikoff with more blind faith than most priests do.
But more importantly and objectively, this doesn’t matter. The reasons why I choose to reply to your nonsense have nothing to do with the empirical strength of my arguments and their merits (or lack thereof).
By declaring you will not respond to me, you declare you will not respond to my arguments or evidence. And by doing so you are confessing that you are the one with no interest in learning about truth, about the historical and philosophical record, or rebutting counterclaims.
A shame, but also utterly unsurprising for someone who – when they had their arguments and claims dismantled – resorted to incoherent cursing and insults devoid of actual evidentiary value, and then later claimed to have “won” the argument.
You wouldn’t know much about arriving at facts or truth.
Part 2
“What was the Roman Inquisition, Spanish Inquisition, the 300 years of the bloody wars and persecution of the Reformation and Counter Reformation like?” Quite nasty. But they were also the years when the West advanced from being a second rate power on the Eurasian stage to becoming mistress of the world. When many of the most revolutionary developments in maritime travel, fluid dynamics, engineering, and math occurred, such as the first stages of the commercial, agricultural, and industrial revolutions.
But because you are an ignorant fool who makes no attempt to understand religious faith and has no interest in honestly learning history, you dismiss all of that. As if the Renaissance era caricatures of the years after Rome were reality.
“What was the legal and lawful persecution of the Jews by Christians like before religion had been banished to the private and the subjective?”
Quite awful, obviously. And I’ll note that in many cases lawful persecution of religion never stopped.
Part 3
“Let’s talk about TRADITION.”
Certainly.
” Slavery is an ancient tradition, does tradition make slavery good and moral? ”
Obviously not.
But then neither is being an idolatrous, Rome-worshipping, dogmatic bigot. Which you are in spades and is at least 800 years old. A paltry amount compared to slavery’s long history, but still notable.
“Theocracy, monarchy, tribalism, racism, collectivism, tyranny, are all ancient traditions, does that make these things good and moral?”
No, but neither is what is new inherently good. Which is why it is important to manage one’s traditions carefully and try to preserve what is good. Something that you and your idols have no interest for, but are also utterly parasitic upon.
It’s easy to blather what is frankly historically illiterate, mid brow rigamarole about the wonders of the philosophical ubermensch, how tradition and faith are merely fools, and how the wonder worker is not dependent on anything when one is the beneficiary of hundreds of years of accumulated progress and advancement. Largely built up I might add by pious traditionalists who – for whatever their often staggering follies and crimes – did not break faith with those that came after them.
“Tradition was dismissed as comprising stubborn ignorance and superstition.”
There are good traditions and there are evil traditions.
“The “neo-conservatives” are now trying to tell us that America was the product of “faith in revealed truths” and of uncritical respect for the traditions of the past (!).
It is certainly irrational to use the “new” as a standard of value, to believe that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is new. But it is much more preposterously irrational to use the “old” as a standard of value, to claim that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is ancient.” – Ayn Rand
“There are good traditions and there are evil traditions.”
Indeed. So the question is how we evaluate them.
“It is certainly irrational to use the “new” as a standard of value, to believe that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is new. But it is much more preposterously irrational to use the “old” as a standard of value, to claim that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is ancient.” – Ayn Rand”
Which is why it is important to assess arguments and sources by the merits of their cases. Something that you consistently fail to do. And in fact use a myriad of excuses to avoid doing, as seen by your “I am not engaging with you” ad hominem.
“And most important, philosophical materialism was elevated to the only reality. As cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett asserts, “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter––the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology––and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” Soul, spirit, transcendent reality are merely irrational myths.”
Monism is an ancient philosophical tradition and just as anciently false and mistaken. Human consciousness is real, it does exist, but that does not mean that consciousness is therefore mystical and supernatural. Consciousness is natural.
“The monist insistence that, despite the observed facts, reality (or man) can have only one constituent, is groundless; it is an example of rewriting reality. The materialist equation of physics with science is equally groundless. Science is systematic knowledge gained by the use of reason based on observation. In using reason, however, one must study each specific subject matter by the methods and techniques suited to its nature. One cannot study history by the methods of chemistry, biology by the methods of economics, or psychology by the methods of physics….
At the dawn of philosophy, the ancient Pythagoreans in an excess of enthusiasm attempted, senselessly, to equate mathematics with cognition and to construe the universe as ‘numbers.’ The modern behaviorists, with far less excuse, commit the same error in regard to physics.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff
Good ideas do not require force. Good ideas do not require deception.
Just fyi to all the cool humans out there with their fancy tech devices, swimming in this little fish bowl or that one, occasionally swapping pools…
If you have to log in to have freedom of speech, you have already relinquished your freedom of speech. The relentless pursuit of data harvesting and authoritarian desires to positively identify and track every activity online is the end result of this loss. Social credit scores are here.
I warned people 20 and more years ago the social networking experiment online would fail, that this would be a severe detriment to both ones self and society at large. To this day, I still do not have a cell phone, because I”m not a dog on a leash.
Sorry, I can’t boycott this particular social movement twice. Bug Me Not!
You can still read twitter freely without a login and it’s a really cool experience, to capture all the raw data and not even be tempted to block or promote or even comment. Just read, then click login when the login requirement hits, then click back, and read freely once more. My take on twitter out of all of them is to remember; The medium of communication is the message. If humanity really thinks we can have all this interaction and control through a medium of communication which is basically a never ending series of one liners, humanity is doomed. If you’re reading this comment on a mobile device, you’re doing it wrong.
Good ideas do not require force. Good ideas do not require deception.
Just fyi to all the cool humans out there with their fancy tech devices, swimming in this little fish bowl or that one, occasionally swapping pools…
If you have to log in to have freedom of speech, you have already relinquished your freedom of speech. The relentless pursuit of data harvesting and authoritarian desires to positively identify and track every activity online is the end result of this loss. Social credit scores are here.
I warned people 20 and more years ago the social networking experiment online would fail, that this would be a severe detriment to both ones self and society at large. To this day, I still do not have a cell phone, because I”m not a dog on a leash.
Sorry, I can’t boycott this particular social movement twice. Bug Me Not!
You can still read twitter freely without a login and it’s a really cool experience, to capture all the raw data and not even be tempted to block or promote or even comment. Just read, then click login when the login requirement hits, then click back, and read freely once more. My take on twitter out of all of them is to remember; The medium of communication is the message. If humanity really thinks we can have all this interaction and control through a medium of communication which is basically a never ending series of one liners, humanity is doomed. If you’re reading this comment on a mobile device, you’re doing it wrong…
“He punctures the pretensions of the credentialed class who believe they are entitled to tell everybody else what to do and how to live.”
You do realize that the “religion” and “tradition” you lionized are nothing BUT attempts to “tell everybody else what to do and how to live,” right?
Thats true.
I think the difference is the role of technology. I mean that specifically. It us much more difficult to do your own thing and ignore the rulers when you’re hooked on and hooked up to tech. Like mist of us are today.
If the middle ages church had big tech they’d have tracked your piety, your prayers and pious behavior and have held burnings at the stake online for those who transgressed. You could have bought your sin credits (instead of carbon credits) with a pious paypal system.
But instead we have some silly girlie men in Silicon Valley telling us how to think and live.
Elon Musk has done this country a great public service. It took audacity, respect for civil liberties and, of course, a whole lot of money — $44 billion of it — to make this possible. If thousands of Twitter employees have to find alternative work, here or abroad, good.
Why not both, expose them and then prosecute them?
There is certainly a great deal to find out about this topic. I love all the points you’ve made.