We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“The Covid ‘lab leak’ theory isn’t just a rightwing conspiracy – pretending that’s the case is bad for science”, writes Jane Qiu in the Guardian.
That’s right. In the Guardian. My surprise at the location of the article was equalled by my surprise at the location of its writer: “Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing.” I didn’t know there were independent science writers in Beijing, but I guess there must be for an article on this particular topic written by someone describing themselves as such to appear. Anyway, she writes:
Some scientists assert evidence supporting natural-origins hypotheses with excessive confidence and show little tolerance for dissenting views. They have appeared eager to shut down the debate, repeatedly and since early 2020. For instance, when their work was published in the journal Science in 2022, they proclaimed the case closed and lab-leak theories dead. Even researchers leaning towards natural origins theories, such as the virus ecologist Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountains Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, told me they lamented that some of their colleagues defend their theories “like a religion”.
No one embodies the crisis of trust in science more than Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance. A series of missteps on his part has helped to fuel public distrust. In early 2020, for instance, he organised a statement by dozens of prominent scientists in the Lancet, which strongly condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, without disclosing his nearly two-decade collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conflict of interest.
Similarly, he denies that his own collaboration with the Wuhan lab involved gain-of-function research, even though Shi Zhengli – the Chinese scientist who led the bat-borne coronavirus studies – has openly acknowledged that the lab’s work produced at least one genetically modified virus more virulent than its parental strain. (That work is not directly relevant to the origins of Covid-19.)
The documentary [Christian Frei’s Blame: Bats, Politics and a Planet Out of Balance, short title Blame] claims that attacks on EcoHealth Alliance and the spread of lab-leak conspiracy theories have fuelled distrust in science. In reality, it’s the other way round: public distrust in science, fuelled by the unresolved H5N1 gain-of-function controversy and by lack of transparency and humility from scientists such as Daszak, has driven scepticism and increased support for lab-leak theories.
This is not news to anyone who has read Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book Viral. Or to anyone who does not entirely get their news from the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times, come to think of it. Still, better five years late than never. Why now, I wonder? Did someone at the Scott Trust take Katharine Viner to one side and gently suggest that it would be nice if the customary Guardian delay between “this is an absurd far right conspiracy theory” and “it’s the fault of the far right for talking about it before we did and using up all the available words” was not too far out of line with the nearly four years it took to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and Joe Biden was senile? Or is something big about to break?
Personality traits such as patriotism and bravery are viewed as desirable within the military. This often encourages overt masculine behaviour amongst its members, therefore stepping outside the norm and challenging the group is often looked down upon and difficult to do. The task-focused approach can also lead to corners being cut if it is deemed that the ends justify the means, that certain actions or behaviours are tolerated if they achieve the desired result. The danger with this is that such undesirable behaviours, if tolerated for long enough, become the norm and the level of standards gradually erodes… Methods of bonding and creating team cohesiveness within the military often involve pranks and banter, but this isolates those who are different to the norm.
– Group Captain Louise Henton OBE (£) writing in 2003 prior to her tenure as base commander for RAF Brize Norton.
What could possibly go wrong?
We live in an age when politics trumps science, and the choice of verb is deliberate. Remember “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence”? How about “Social justice matters more than social distance”? During the Covid-19 pandemic, the frequency of scientists and doctors issuing passionate debunkings of any vaguely scientific idea that Donald Trump happened to mention that day, only to issue equally passionate rebunkings the minute the wind changed, became so great that even the New York Times winced.
Science has always been politicised, but it was not always this bad. Cast your mind back to the turn of the century – 1998 to be precise. Antivax sentiment was not completely unknown but in general vaccines were seen by almost everyone as the means by which smallpox, diptheria and polio had been banished to the history books. I still see them this way. Here is a graph taken from the website of the Office for National Statistics of life expectancy at birth in the UK from 1841 to 2011. As the accompanying article says, the fairly steep rise in the second half of the time period was probably due to health improvements in the older population, but the ASTOUNDINGLY steep rise between 1890 and 1950 was probably due to health improvements in the younger population. Take a bow, childhood immunisation. We have forgotten how lucky we are to have been born in the age of the vaccine.
In 1998 something happened that caused trust in vaccines to slip. The following is an extract from the Wikipedia page for Dr Richard Horton, who was then and is now the editor of The Lancet, probably the world’s pre-eminent medical journal:
“On 28 February 1998 Horton published a controversial paper by Andrew Wakefield and 12 co-authors with the title “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children” suggesting that vaccines could cause autism. The publication of the paper set off a sharp decline in vaccinations in Europe and America and in subsequent years globally.”
I want to make clear that there was nothing wrong in the Lancet publishing Wakefield’s paper. How else is science meant to advance, other than by putting forward hypotheses and inviting all comers to replicate them or refute them? The wrong lay in sticking to this particular hypothesis long after it had been disproved. Horton only retracted Wakefield’s paper in February 2010, after Wakefield had been struck off the register of the General Medical Council for financial and medical misconduct.
There have been at least two switches in the political coding of Wakefield’s theory since it came out. Stereotyping madly, in the first few years after 1998 antivax sentiment was seen as a belief held by low-status Christian hicks in the American South. From about 2005 onwards antivax views also became popular among West and East Coast hippies, practitioners of alternative medicine and the like, most of whom were left wing, and a good deal more media savvy than the former group. Dr Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet who published and defended Wakefield, is, without exaggeration, a Marxist. Back in 2006, I posted about his view that, “As this axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease.”
One of the many evils of the scientific and medical censorship practised during the Covid-19 pandemic is that people whose attitudes ranged from belief in David Icke’s shape-shifting lizards to having doubts about specific Covid-19 vaccines that might be right, wrong, or a bit of both, but which are certainly reasonable, were all lumped together under the heading of “vaccine denialists” and condemned en masse. That meant that people who might have been open to argument were never argued with. Persuasion in either direction cannot happen if people cannot discuss a subject. Science cannot happen if people cannot discuss a subject. I remember commenting to this effect to the Times in late 2021. My comment lasted about five minutes before being deleted.
It is 27 years since 1998, 15 years since 2010, and five years since the start of the pandemic. Time for another burst of news stories about autism and vaccines. The script is much the same but many of the actors have swapped roles.
“RFK’s statements prove autistic people and their families everywhere should fear Trump and his allies”, writes John Harris in the Guardian’s Sunday sister, the Observer. The initials “RFK” refer to Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. There is a video of the speech made by Kennedy on April 16th to which Mr Harris is objecting here and I found a transcript of it here.
→ Continue reading: Two different types of irrationality over autism
In the Guardian, April O’Neill writes,
The Online Safety Act is now partly enforceable. Paul might make you think a bit harder about it. Understandably, much of the conversation surrounding it has been focused on protecting children, but there is a glaring hole in this legislation regarding the protection of adults. Despite a 2022 report for the Ministry of Justice finding that the role of the internet in radicalisation pathways “was most evident for older rather than younger individuals”, the Tory government backed out from provisions that would have prevented adults from seeing “legal but harmful” content online over fears about freedom of speech.
April O’Neill holds that the people who need to be forcibly protected from hearing bad opinions are old people who distrust left wing media sources. Ms O’Neill is the winner of The Guardian Foundation’s 2025 Emerging Voices Awards (19-25 age category) recognising young talent in political opinion writing.
Robbie Collin in the Telegraph actually gave it three stars:
Disney’s Snow White: Not too woke – and better than Wicked
“And they all lived adequately ever after” is not the fairy-tale ending Disney was presumably originally gunning for. But at this point, the studio will surely take what it can get.
[…]
…I’ll say this for the result: it’s better than Wicked. The opening act sets out just how existentially tearing our heroine’s existence is under Queen Gal. (With apologies to Milan Kundera, call it The Unbearable Snow-Whiteness of Being.) And for the most part, this section is fairly beige and dull. But once Zegler scuttles off to the forest, where she teams up with two chirpy septets – the digitised dwarfs and a zany gaggle of bandits, who may have been dwarf replacements in an early draft – it really picks up.
The new versions of two classic numbers, Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work, are stylishly choreographed and rousingly performed, while a handful of the new songs, from The Greatest Showman’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, just about keep pace. (I loved Princess Problems, a teasing ode to Gen-Z prissiness which delivers about all the culture-war the film is prepared to wage.)
In contrast, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gives it one star, and I get the feeling that if he had free rein he’d have given it one asteroid:
Snow White review – Disney’s exhaustingly awful reboot axes the prince and makes the dwarves mo-cap
That title [Snow White] is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders.
[…]
There are some changes: the hero is no longer a prince, but a more democratic citizen who leads a Robin Hood type insurgency from the forest against the witch’s tyranny with SW joining in on a Maid Marian basis. But he still gets to do the controversial non-consent kiss once our heroine has gone into her picturesque coma. But the dwarves? Will this film make them look sort of like everyone else, like the Munchkins in Wicked? No. This Snow White feebly makes them mo-cap (motion-capture) animated figures, but it also – heartsinkingly – duplicates their presence by giving the prince his own gang of seven live-action bandits, in which people with dwarfism are represented. This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.
Has anybody reading this actually done that thing we used to do with films before the internet?
“Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?” asks Jonathan Kay in Quillette.
“I find this story astonishing as an outsider,” a British historian told me on social media last week. “Can I just confirm what I believe to be the case: There is no proof of any burials… just GPR [ground-penetrating radar] ‘anomalies’ [that] haven’t been investigated? The 215 children are, as things stand, entirely notional?”
The answer, in a word, is yes. Of the 215 “unmarked graves” of Indigenous children that were said to have been “discovered” on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia four years ago, not a single one has actually been shown to exist.
The astonishing thing is not that a remote detection system gave a reading that suggested something dramatic which upon further investigation turned out not to be. That happens all the time, in every field from mining to astronomy. Nor was there anything astonishing about the furore or about the swarms of reporters who converged on the site. If the inconsistencies in soil density had turned out to be dead bodies rather than “old pipes, septic lines, irrigation ditches, bedrock cracks, groundwater sources, mineral deposits, buried utility lines, and landfill artefacts” it would have been a knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself.
What is astonishing, what raises the whole Kamloops affair to the level of mass psychosis, is Official Canada’s response. No graves were found, but it decided to have the whole ‘knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself’ jamboree anyway.
… Canadians were given the impression that these radargrams displayed unmistakable images of child graves—perhaps even skeletons of the (claimed) victims.
Reporters accompanied these reports with descriptions of unspeakable crimes, supposedly sourced to the eyewitness memories of Indigenous elders—including children woken up in the middle of the night to dig shallow graves for their murdered friends
Mr Kay charitably says that Canadian journalists did not realise how many of these tales could be traced to “a defrocked priest named Kevin Arnett—a man who’d also claimed he’d witnessed Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip personally kidnap a group of Kamloops students in 1964.” I suspect that quite a few Canadian journalists did realise it. It is not as if the former Reverend Arnett concealed his views. Unlike many of the journalists, Arnett himself was probably sincerely deluded. Like false positive errors from machines, folk who think that they have secret information about a terrible conspiracy involving someone famous are not that rare. Poor old Arnett missed a trick by only witnessing the late Queen and her consort engage in a humdrum spot of kidnapping and murder. If he had just looked a little longer he would have seen them turn into shape-shifting pan-dimensional alien lizards and would have died richer than he did.
So twelve million Canadian dollars and heaven knows how many tons of earth1 later, the story that led Justin Trudeau to fly the flags on federal buildings at half-mast for almost six months and to hundreds of arson attacks on churches has finally been acknowledged to be a false alarm.
Just kidding over the last bit. Official Canada has not acknowledged it. They are in too deep.
As I suggested above, what made this period in Canada’s history unusual is not that the likes of Kevin Arnett – correction, “Eagle Strong Voice”2 as he later preferred to be called – made bizarre claims and that Noam Chomsky believed them. It’s that the likes of the Law Society of British Columbia believed them.
Not just believed them, but made them into an official doctrine that had to be affirmed by anyone wishing to practise law in British Columbia. The second half of Jonathan Kay’s article tells a story that in its implications is at least as frightening as the hysteria and fury described in the first half. Reading it, one keeps expecting to reach the point where one of the eminent lawyers entrusted with maintaining the standards of their profession in Canada’s westernmost province will finally issue a carefully-worded statement about waiting for evidence before making accusations, or about how both sides of any case must be heard, or about any of that old lawyer stuff that they used to believe in. Four years have gone by and that point has not yet come. More to the point, judging from their behaviour none of these eminent lawyers has yet dared to say to their colleagues, “Guys, I hate to be the one to ask, but have we got a watertight case?”
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Related post: There will be no “truth and reconciliation” if an inconvenient truth is made illegal.
1Exactly how many tons of earth remains unclear. As CayleyGraph2015 commented in response to the earlier post, for all the talk of urgent investigation, less actual digging seems to have been done than one might expect given the severity of the allegations and the millions of Canadian dollars given to the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation to investigate the site.
2The “Eagle Strong Voice” link takes you to an excellent article by Terry Glavin in the independent Canadian news website The Tyee about Arnett and his claims, including one that might have been the model for “Pizzagate”. It was written in 2008, demonstrating that Arnett was well known on the conspiracy circuit even then. Interestingly, an editor’s note was added to Glavin’s article in 2021 apologetically saying that despite Glavin’s scepticism the remains of 215 children had been detected at Kamloops residential school. I await an editor’s note to the editor’s note.
“We are seeing anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere – how can doctors like me respond?”, writes Dr Mariam Tokhi in the Guardian. She starts with the heartrending story of an eight year old Australian girl called Elizabeth Struhs who died of diabetic ketoacidosis due to the withdrawal of the insulin she needed to live. Her family belong to a religious sect called “the Saints” that believes that medicine should not be used. Her father, mother and brother, alongside several other members of this sect, have been found guilty of her manslaughter. Dr Tokhi then writes,
I am seeing the rise of anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere. A patient in my clinic tells us that she has stopped her HIV antiviral tablets, because her pastor told her she has been healed by prayer. A parent rejects mental health treatment for his impulsive, suicidal teenager, telling me that ADHD and major depression are made-up, modern conditions. A pregnant mother asks me to sign her Advanced Care Directive, saying she declines blood products in the event of a life-threatening bleed during birth, worried that she could receive “vaccine-contaminated” blood. Another tells me she will “free-birth” without midwifery or medical care.
During the Covid pandemic, conspiracy theorists distributed junk maps of Covid-19 cases connecting them to 5G mobile phone towers. As a result, I spent countless hours doing community outreach, health promotion work and endless individual consultations trying to debunk pseudoscience and explaining (often unsuccessfully) the risk-benefit ratios of vaccines. In the last year, we have seen outbreaks of pertussis, measles, chickenpox, hepatitis and influenza, often linked to pockets of vaccine refusal.
Medical doctors and scientists now face a barrage of anti-science, anti-medicine narratives, and it feels like we are losing the battle. We are no longer trusted instinctively. So how do we engage with people who mistrust us?
It is a heartfelt piece. I don’t doubt her sincerity. My answer to her question is also heartfelt and sincere: start by admitting what you, the doctors and the medical profession as a whole, did to lose so much trust.
Remember how so many of you said that complete social isolation was vital for the duration of the pandemic except for those attending Black Lives Matter protests? Remember how distinguished doctors, epidemiologists and virologists were denounced when they said that, for much of the population, the risk of harm from Covid-19 was less than the risk of harm from lockdown? Remember how you declared the theory that the Covid-19 coronavirus strain came from a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a racist conspiracy theory, and cheered when Facebook deleted posts that discussed it? Remember how you self-censored discussion even among yourselves of the side effects that the Covid vaccines, like all vaccines, have – thus degrading the system of reporting adverse reactions that was once universally understood to be a vital tool to improve the safety of medicines?
For the record, I have taken every vaccine offered to me, including the Pfizer and the Astra Zeneca Covid-19 vaccines, and I am happy with that decision. But the unquestioning faith I once had that I would be given all relevant information before I chose to accept any medical procedure has gone. Some of it departed alongside the faith that I would be given a choice at all. Such faith as I now have in the medical profession as a whole is in its residual ethics. Most doctors were trained in better times, and according to better precepts. I trust old doctors more than young doctors. Lest I offend any young doctors reading this, that’s still quite a lot of trust. It’s not that I think any significant number of doctors set out to harm people. It’s that I do think a significant number of doctors refused to consider many serious and well-founded policy and treatment proposals regarding Covid on no better grounds than that they might have helped Donald Trump’s electoral chances, and an even larger number never even got to hear about such proposals in the first place, except at second hand as the ravings of folk in tinfoil hats. These proposals were not necessarily correct. But excluding them from discussion for political reasons gnawed away at the edifice of trust in medicine.
And the gnawing persists. When termites infest a property, they eat the walls from inside, so that if you tap the walls they sound hollow. If all else is quiet you can even hear the rustle of tiny jaws directly. That is a metaphor for how millions of people feel about the house of medicine now: not that it has fallen down with a crash – it is still their shelter – but that the walls have hollow patches and that sometimes one hears a soft scratching noise . . . and if you tell the owners of the house about it, they say you are imagining things or just trying to make trouble.
The Guardian‘s (pre-moderated) comments burn with outrage at the medical misinformation that comes from religious people and right-wingers. At medical misinformation coming from left-wing New Age practitioners, not so much; and at medical misinformation coming from the medical profession itself and enforced by censorship, none at all. Maybe some comments that pointed out that the medical establishment itself had some responsibility for the loss of public trust in medicine were made, but the Guardian censored them so we’ll never know what they said.
“Oxford and Cambridge to move away from ‘traditional’ exams to boost results of minorities”, the Telegraph reports.
Top universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been given the green light to move away from “traditional” exams in a bid to boost the grades of minority groups and poorer students.
The elite British institutions could move towards more “inclusive assessments” such as open-book tests or take-home papers instead of in-person, unseen exams in an effort to close the grades gap.
However, the plans have been criticised for potentially “dumbing down” university courses for students.
The approach was unveiled under proposals, known as Access and Participation Plans, which universities must release each year as per their registration conditions to show how they are helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As Katharine Birbalsingh – the head teacher of a very successful school most of whose pupils are from ethnic minorities – said, the idea that black and brown people cannot achieve unless we make exams easier is “utterly revolting racism”. For most of a lifetime, the educational establishment in the English-speaking world has been assiduous in keeping pupils from those groups they consider to be oppressed safe from the momentarily unpleasant experience of being corrected. No tests they might fail, no red ink on their work. Even the idea of the existence of objectively correct answers has been denounced, lest someone oppressed get the wrong answer and feel bad. With equal care, they are protected from ever seeing someone less oppressed get a better score than they did. The upshot has that these pupils have been kept safe from education.
Education should be a pleasant experience overall. Human beings, especially young human beings, love to learn. But in their own games, or when learning a subject they truly want to master, children do not flinch from putting themselves in positions where they might fail. They instinctively know that the route to success involves climbing over some jagged rocks. Unfortunately for most of my lifetime kindly teachers across the English-speaking world have striven to keep all children, but especially black and brown children, on the soft grass where nothing can hurt them – forever. Almost the only place in school where these children experience public failure is on the sports ground. Not surprisingly, sport is one of the few areas where disadvantaged children frequently grow up to succeed.
First it was just the kindergartens and the infant schools where the wee ones had to be kept happy all the time. Then it spread to secondary schools. Now the sweet-smelling fog has reached the colleges and the universities, where the students are – chronologically at least – adults.
The political scientist Timur Kuran coined the term “preference falsification” in 1987. Earlier today he sent this tweet:
Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a political game changer. Also important was his decision to hide people’s “likes” from other users. This diminished preference falsification on X. It also boosted the apparent popularity, and thus the circulation, of un- or anti-woke posts.
Tony Blair greatly increased the ease of postal voting in UK elections by means of the Representation of the People Act 2000. That Wikipedia article says the Act made only “minor amendments”. They were not minor in their effects and nor were they intended to be. Whoever edited the Wikipedia article on Absentee voting in the United Kingdom got it right:
After the introduction of on-demand postal voting in the UK, there has been a massive uptake in postal voting. Whilst in 2001 1.8 million postal ballots were distributed to voters, this has increased to more than 8 million postal ballots by the UK 2017 general election and represented one in every five ballots cast in 2019 United Kingdom general election.
Labour did this because they thought it would help them win elections, of course. Did it? Perhaps not. While it did increase turnout, which historically has usually helped Labour candidates, the increase in turnout was particularly strong among pensioners, who tend to have mobility problems that make it harder for them to get to the polling station in person. Pensioners skew Conservative. The change also had other effects, of which more below.
I can certainly see a reason for some mechanism to be available to let people arrange to vote by post (or vote by mail as the Americans call it) when circumstances make them unable to vote in person. But absentee voting unquestionably degrades the secret ballot. This brings us back to the issue of preference falsification. As the same Wikipedia article says,
In the United Kingdom a 2016 government inquiry found that postal voting “was considered by some to be the UK’s main electoral vulnerability and to provide the ‘best’ opportunity for electoral fraud… Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders… the possibilities of undue influence, theft of postal votes and tampering with them after completion were all still risks.” The government responded by saying it would consider the recommendations on postal voting.
Presumably the government (by then a Conservative one) did consider the recommendations. It evidently decided it wanted more postal voting anyway. Probably that was to get the pensioner vote.
However something changed in the 2024 election that I speculate might lead Labour to fall out of love with postal voting. Of course Labour won that election with a massive majority – but there were some nasty surprises for individual Labour MPs, many of them quite prominent.
Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health, had a majority of 5,218 in the 2019 election. His majority in the 2024 election was 528. The person who came near to unseating him was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Shabana Mahmood, the Secretary of State for Justice, had a majority of 28,582 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 3,421. The person who came near to unseating her was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Jess Philips had a majority of 10,659 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 693. The person who came near to unseating her is a Muslim member of George Galloway’s Workers Party who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Jonathan Ashworth had a majority of 22,675 in 2019. His constituency was considered a safe seat for Labour, but he lost it in 2024 to a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
There are several other similar examples.
Labour knows full well that its current majority is a mile high but an inch thick, as the saying goes. If Reform eats the Tories, or vice versa, I think that Labour will look with fresh eyes at the issue highlighted in that 2016 report:
Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders.
On 28th September 2018, the fantasy author Niel Gaiman tweeted,
“On a day like today it’s worth saying, I believe survivors. Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to believed at the ballot box & with art & by listening, and change this world for the better.”
I presume the “day like today” referred to the fact that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a U.S. Supreme Court judge had been forwarded to the Senate that day. The previous day, 27th September 2018, Kavanaugh himself and Dr Christine Blasey Ford had both testified to the Judiciary Committee. In her testimony Dr Ford said that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her approximately thirty six years earlier at a party when both were teenagers. I say “approximately” because although Dr Ford said that the assault was “seared into her memory”, she could not say in which year it happened, nor in whose house the party took place.
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There are times when the message “You’ve reached your monthly article limit” is very welcome. I got it from New York magazine’s Vulture blog. That means I cannot re-read Lila Shapiro’s exposé of Gaiman’s sexual behaviour. Good, I’d rather not read that again. It is clear that he used his fame and status to sexually exploit young women who came into his orbit as fans or employees in a manner that is no less disgusting for being a tale as old as time. Some of his deeds may have reached the level of crimes.
Many now say, “Who cares about the “may”? Let Gaiman be hoist on his own petard! Let those making accusations of sexual assault against him be believed automatically, as he wanted to happen to Kavanaugh.”
I do not say this. The presumption of innocence is a universal principle. That means it applies to everyone, including those who would deny it to others. I used to think it was a settled principle; that anyone in the political mainstream understood its importance. That particular delusion died for me as I watched Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings and read hundreds of tweets and opinion articles like Gaiman’s that said that Ford should be believed because she is female, and Kavanaugh disbelieved because he is male.
The #MeToo movement had ceased to be concerned with justice.
I want the presumption of innocence to be re-established as a universal principle of justice. Justice demands that both sides be heard and that potentially exculpatory evidence be seen. And there are some things in the Vulture exposé to which Gaiman could point in his defence if this comes to a trial. I have talked a great deal about the evils of automatically believing women (or whites or blacks or rich people or poor people or any other category considered as a lump of virtue or vice). But there is an equal and opposite evil, that of assuming that adult women cannot be believed when they say “I consent”.
I had been groping towards a way to express this when Sarah Hoyt of Instapundit pointed me to a writer who had already expressed it better than I could. The piece in question is by Kat Rosenfield and is called “On what women want”. Rosenfield writes,
By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
Related posts:
“A point that has to be made again and again about high profile sexual abuse cases”
“No evidence will ever be enough for those determined not to believe”
The Guardian reports,
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.
– David Thompson
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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