px_eliezer_ Damn thing is, Kennedy and his two henchmen kept saying (over and over) that people deserve a choice.
But that choice is being taken away from patients, parents, doctors.
As I demonstrated in my (apparently deleted) post. Almost everything these guys said and did was performative. They were the source of, or a key amplifier of, most of the disinformation during the pandemic. What they were very good at was dressing up their talking points by mixing in somewhat reasonable - but ultimately misleading - arguments, or making sure to code their talking points in ideological language.
They had a lot of big talk about medical freedom but now that they are in charge they are imposing their own will on other people and taking away people’s choice.
They had a lot of big talk about censorship but now that they are in charge they are now using a list of banned words to prevent research funding and now bannning scientists from publishing in leading journal they have now deemed to be “corrupt”.
They had a lot of big talk about randomized control trials and there not being enough evidence, but now that they are in charge they are not running randomized control trials and they are making fact-free assertions to support the decisions they want to make.
They know precisely the type of rhetoric that a certain portion of people will fall for every time.
The major problem with putting contrarians in power is that their platform is entirely based on arguing against the mainstream. Mainstream public health makes mistakes, but on the aggregate it’s pretty solid and evidence-based. If you throw out everything mainstream, you’re left with a lot of nonsense.
And now we’re getting advice such as maybe we should focus more on cooking instead of insulin for diabetics.
The problem isn’t that dissent was being crushed. The real problem is that partisan actors, and bad faith influencers are using anectodes and misrepresentations to create a revisionist history to enrage their audience and misinform their audience. For example, we see again, the “motorcycle crash being counted as a COVID death” anecdote. What that was actually a story about a mistake being corrected. But instead it becomes part of the mythology that everything the public health told us was a lie. And now that these bad faith influencers have failed upwards into positions of power, they are using these same anectodes and misrepresentations to justify getting justice for their long-held grievances.