Zinger

I haven’t been reading MindMatters for a long time. Busy with work, health troubles, didn’t see a lot of interesting stuff there. Checked again today. Denyse O’Leary has written a world-class zinger.

She knocks out Ethan Siegel, a world-class contemptuous asshole, and by extension all the academicians, politicians and journalists who play the same obnoxious game. Denyse is focusing on the “virus” and Fauci. I can’t add anything more in that direction!

Denyse’s main point: Science soils its own nest by letting assholes like Siegel (and Fauci and dozens of others) act as the public voice of science. If we want people to trust the guild of science, we should be publicly PUNISHING monsters, not publicly REWARDING monsters.

I’ll take a separate kick at some of Siegel’s psychopathic drivel.

Siegel wants to debunk the “conspiracy theory” that science is biased by who funds it. “Research only gets to be conducted when there’s funding of some type for that research, and the types of research that receive funding frequently depend on whether someone is motivated enough to be willing to pay for it. However, this doesn’t mean there’s built-in bias toward obtaining a particular result. In fact, it’s clearly in everyone’s interests if the research is conducted ethically and scrupulously.”

Anyone who has actually worked in academia knows that this is bizarre delusion. Research follows the money STRICTLY AND PERFECTLY. Profs and grad students know what the funders want, and give them what they want. Been there, done that, not proud of doing it. This has been going on for at least 500 years. The patrons have changed from aristocrats to government agencies, but the response of science is always the same.

Is science just the facts, maam? Here’s where Siegel shows the distinct nature of POLITICIZED science. He says: “Scientists don’t make recommendations because they have a power-hungry desire to tell us what to do. They make recommendations because they are the ones who both know what needs to be done and also know what interventions will accomplish those ends.”

In this case Siegel doesn’t represent most real scientists. He’s accustomed to living in the Faucian political realm, accustomed to declaring I AM THE SCIENCE while bombing the world. Most academic work, though biased by the paycheck, stops short of recommending action FOR ANY REASON. The scientist is the witness, not the judge or executioner. Only psychopaths like Robespierre, Fauci and Siegel feel a burning need to commit torture and mass murder IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE.