Back in December of 2018, the Wikipedia page about Fat Head was targeted for deletion. It only survived after I started poking the founder of Wikipedia on Twitter and he finally looked into the matter and intervened. This was after Wikipedia articles about Jimmy Moore, Uffe Ravnskov, Malcolm Kendrick, etc., etc., were targeted for deletion.
In May of 2019, Facebook banned a group called Banting 7-Day Meal Plans, which had 1.5 million members. After an uproar, the group was eventually reinstated.
In August, Jimmy Moore’s Jimmy Rants videos disappeared from YouTube, supposedly for violating community standards. It took some doing, but Jimmy finally got the suspension removed.
Also in August, we learned that Google (which owns YouTube), has altered its search algorithms to make it difficult to find diet and health sites deemed unorthodox. At one time, Google’s search rankings were a direct reflection of popularity. If your page and my page were both relevant to the search term and your site had more visitors, your page appeared above mine in the search results. Not anymore. Now Google employees monkey with the algorithm to steer people to the “correct” information – or more accurately, to steer them away from the BAD, BAD IDEAS.
Here are some quotes from an article on that development:
Mercola.com, operated by Dr. Joseph Mercola, is one of the most trafficked websites providing alternative views to medical orthodoxy. If I were researching statins, I would certainly read several of the numerous essays questioning statin use and the cholesterol theory of heart disease. Essays at Mercola.com usually provide references to medical studies. Personally, since Dr. Mercola sells supplements and I am a supplement skeptic, I read his essays—like I read all medical essays—with a grain of salt.
Dr. Kelly Brogan is a psychiatrist who has helped thousands of women find alternatives to psychotropic drugs prescribed to treat depression and anxiety. In her book, A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives, Brogan reports that one of every seven women and 25 percent of women in their 40s and 50s are on such drugs.
For their unorthodox views, Dr. Brogan, Dr. Mercola, and others like them are treated as medical heretics. Dr. Brogan and Dr. Mercola have documented how a change in Google’s search engine algorithm has essentially ended traffic to their websites.
Welcome to the brave new world of “de-platforming” ideas The Anointed don’t like. And it’s not just happening to people who disagree with The Anointed on diet and health — not by a long shot. If you write or say something that offends the sensibilities of The Anointed, there’s a good chance your Facebook group, or YouTube Account, or Twitter account or whatever will be suspended or banned.
If you have a large following and you really piss off The Anointed, they’ll try to destroy your career. They’ll demand bookstores stop carrying your books. They’ll go after advertisers who buy ad time on any TV shows where you appear. If you’re scheduled to give a speech, they’ll try to get it canceled – through threats of violence, if necessary. The message – often stated explicitly – is this: you should not be allowed to spread your harmful ideas to others, so we’re justified in silencing you.
I’ve written about why The Anointed are hostile to free speech several times before (this post includes links to a series), but let’s back up and ask some deep, philosophical questions, such as WHY DON’T THEY JUST MAKE THEIR OWN COUNTER-ARGUMENTS?! WHAT THE @#$% IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!
There’s plenty wrong with these people, and it begins with their core philosophy, which, unfortunately, many of them acquired in universities — you know, those supposed centers of open inquiry and freewheeling debate and discussion.
To explain how The Anointed operate, I’ve quoted from The Vision of The Anointed by Thomas Sowell, Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. They’re all great books. I hope you read them.
But to understand the core philosophy of people who feel justified de-platforming those whose “bad” opinions they don’t like, let’s turn to a philosophy book that I’ve only mentioned briefly: Explaining Postmodernism, by a philosophy professor named Stephen Hicks.
I’ve previously summarized the book like this:
- Objectivist: if it’s true, I’ll believe it.
- Subjectivist: If I believe it, it’s true.
Well, the book goes into a little more detail than that. If you want to know why so many university professors and other members of The Anointed have become big fans of censorship and de-platforming, Hicks explains their mindset pretty nicely.
The book begins by describing what postmodernism seeks to replace: the objectivist philosophy of The Enlightenment, which traces its roots (most of them, anyway) to British thinkers and philosophers: Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes (not British), John Locke and Adam Smith. The objectivists believed that:
- Reality exists and is independent of our feelings, wishes, hopes or fears
- Logic and reason are how we discern reality
- The individual is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others
Not surprisingly, The Enlightenment thinkers emphasized rationalism, the scientific method and individual freedom. To quote Hicks:
Modern thinkers start from nature—instead of starting with some form of the supernatural, which had been the characteristic starting point of pre-modern, Medieval philosophy. Modern thinkers stress that perception and reason are the human means of knowing nature—in contrast to the pre-modern reliance upon tradition, faith, and mysticism. Modern thinkers stress human autonomy and the human capacity for forming one’s own character—in contrast to the pre-modern emphasis upon dependence and original sin. Modern thinkers emphasize the individual, seeing the individual as the unit of reality, holding that the individual’s mind is sovereign, and that the individual is the unit of value—in contrast to the pre-modernist, feudal subordination of the individual to higher political, social, or religious realities and authorities.
And later:
If one emphasizes that reason is the faculty of understanding nature, then that epistemology systematically applied yields science. Enlightenment thinkers laid the foundations of all the major branches of science.
Individualism and science are thus consequences of an epistemology of reason. Both applied systematically have enormous consequences. Individualism applied to politics yields liberal democracy … individualism applied to economics yields free markets and capitalism.
If you enjoy living in a prosperous, technically advanced society with a high degree of individual freedom, you have no friggin’ idea (unless you’ve studied a bit of history and philosophy) of the huge debt you owe to The Enlightenment thinkers.
Today, of course, many college professors tell us we can simply dismiss The Enlightenment thinkers as a bunch of dead white males. The irony (which is no doubt lost on the professors) is that postmodernist ideas were also conceived and promoted by dead white males.
The bigger irony is that the subjectivist philosophy that eventually morphed into postmodernism began as a reaction against The Enlightenment to save faith, tradition and mysticism from the onslaught of objective science. If you deeply believe that X is true but logic and reason say X is false, well then, there’s a simple solution: simply declare that reason and logic don’t matter.
One of the most influential subjectivist philosophers was Martin Heidegger. We’ll quote Hicks for a summary:
Heidegger and postmodernism Heidegger’s philosophy is the integration of the two main lines of German philosophy, the speculative metaphysical and the irrationalist epistemological. After Kant, the Continental tradition quickly and gleefully abandoned reason, putting wild speculation, clashing wills, and troubled emotion at the forefront.
In Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition, we can see clearly many of the ingredients of postmodernism. Heidegger offered to his followers the following conclusions, all of which are accepted by the mainstream of postmodernism with slight modifications:
1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of reality;
2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality;
3. Reason’s elements—words and concepts—are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked;
4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all;
5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;
6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy—whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian—based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to be overcome.
Later in the book:
Postmodernism rejects the reason and the individualism that the entire Enlightenment world depends upon.… Postmodernism’s essentials are the opposite of modernism’s. Instead of natural reality—anti-realism. Instead of experience and reason—linguistic social subjectivism
Objectivity is a myth; there is no Truth, no Right Way to read nature or a text. All interpretations are equally valid. Values are socially subjective products.
Declaring reason and logic to be irrelevant of course leads to some interesting contradictions. As Hicks points out, only a subjectivist could believe that:
- All cultures are valid and equally deserving of respect, but Western culture is really, really bad
- All values are subjective, but racism and sexism are really, really bad
- Technology is destructive and bad, but it’s not fair that some people can afford more of it than others
Totally illogical and therefore rather stupid, right? Yes, you’d think so. But ya see, that’s because you — lacking the deep, philosophical insight that logic and reason are irrelevant — don’t understand that by gosh, I can be totally illogical and still be right … while you can be completely logical and still be wrong. That’s what the postmodernists believe.
So what does this have to do with why The Anointed consider it acceptable and perhaps even necessary to de-platform anyone who disagrees with them?
I don’t want this to be a mega-post, so we’ll get to that next time.
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More influential even than a culturally conditioned bizarro worldview are the economic incentives.
Google etc stand to profit handsomely by propping up massive corporate interests that lazily peddle outdated information. The folks that own all the dinosaur companies do not want to watch their market share disappear to brash upstarts or anyone else for that matter. These dinosaurs used to lobby government for regulation against their competitors, but it is much more efficient to put economic pressure on a snooty Google, Facebook, and Twitter to do this censoring for them. Much more efficient than government rules.
So Big Tech is now the enemy, and it is way more powerful than government, since billions of brainless NPCs depend on it heavily. The next 20 years will be very interesting to observe, and I fear it will not be a good interesting.
Old curse: may you live in interesting times.
Of course, the deep philosophical answer to “why don’t they make counterarguments” is that they don’t have any. Well, they do, but they don’t make any sense. If they really believed that making sense didn’t matter, they’d go ahead and make their arguments.
At some point, we’ll have our own bots that can search the web for us and Google will be as relevant as Gateway. Until then, Jordan Peterson has created a platform and Dave Rubin is creating his own, too.
As for Facebook, I abandoned it after briefly joining it several years ago. It looked like an exercise in narcissism, something for people apt to follow postmodern dada dimwittery.
I’ve noticed the subjectivists are happy to make logical arguments when they believe logic is on their side. But as soon as you make a logical argument they can’t answer, BOOM, it blows up into a sequence of ad hominem attacks and nonsequiturs. Since they don’t actually believe in reason and logic, they treat it like they treat language in general: as a weapon (the subject of the next post). If the weapon isn’t useful at the moment, they drop it.
If only it WAS ‘they don’t have any’! It’s far worse than that! The daddy of Postmodernism, Jaques Derrida, came up with the concept of Phallogocentrism, the ‘he privileging of masculinity in the use of speech, writing or modes of thought’. In short; White Men Are Priviliged, White Men Use Logic And Argument, White Men Are Evil Therefore Using Logic And Argument Is Also Evil, Therefore I Can Dismiss Your Arguments As Harrassment And Male Powerplay To Oppress Non-White Males And The Non-Priviledged. This is why speech is rebranded as ‘violence’ or ‘hatespeech’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallogocentrism
Yup.
That’s why I say that they have arguments, but they don’t make any sense.
I read about the changes to Googles search a couple of weeks ago. First I thought that this can’t be and then I did some searches. So I now know not to use Google when searching for health terms.
I skipped the philosophy stuff. These guys were mostly narcissists anyway. I doubt that the Google has any philosophy. They only have 2 gods: Mammon and Cthulu (I never get the spelling of that one right, he will smite me for that I know).
Excellent rant, Tom! (Genuine applause!). I run afoul of the “algorithm” on numerous topics, when articles I previously reviewed, and wanted to check again, can no longer be found, mysteriously swallowed up in the ether. (Nevertheless, I persist, LOL!) I have never joined Facebook, Twitter, or any other platform that wants to think for me.
Related, I think postmodernism is a stain on so many aspects of our lives, and appreciate your illumination of its toxicity. Jordan B. Peterson gave a scathing lecture on postmodernism that is well-worth an hour of your time.
I may have seen that lecture, but I’ll check again. I don’t think most people who cherish freedom of speech realize just how hostile the postmodernists are to the idea and how anxious to rid of it. We’ve always taken it for granted that freedom of speech is a core American value that couldn’t be threatened.
That’s why I worry about what Silicon Valley is doing. They think of us as a bunch of stupid, inbred morons that need their expert advise.
Considering the “experts” diet advice has led to obesity and diabetes skyrocketing, you’d think they would learn, but no. It’s why I think of government as having a reverse Midas touch: everything they go near turns to shit.
How long is it going to be before we have China’s social credit system? Working on a book that had something similar, but at first, I thought it was too outlandish.
Dennis Prager (whose PragerU videos have been laughably restricted by YouTube as “hate speech”) believes the reverse Midas touch is that the Left ruins everything it touches. (Before any of my liberal friends have a conniption over that statement, please keep in mind Prager is careful to distinguish between liberals and the Left. True liberals don’t try to shut down speeches with threats of violence, or punish scientists who produce data gender-studies theorists finds troubling, etc.)
Trevor, have you ever read 1984? They didn’t have a sophisticated, established credit system, but they certainly brought you down for doing or saying the wrong stuff. I am so mad that I didn’t read it sooner and that it isn’t read more. You should totally continue that book.
Dealing with postmodernists is similar to dealing with cults in that they believe that they hold the “truth” and that others must believe as they do and are angry when the general populace rejects them. For them to accept actual truth based in reality, data, and facts would crumble and shatter the world they established in their minds. It is a painful experience with them either continuing to be in denial, accepting the truth and being bitter, or accepting the truth and truly turn into a new person.
Was Heidegger a Sith Lord? His ideas/views sound very Sithish.
They certainly share some aspects of the True Believer personality described by Eric Hoffer.
At a recent gathering of like-minded folks (not health or nutrition related), the term thought police came up. And here it is again. Scary stuff.
A very real problem is that no one at these platforms is checking to see if the complaints are true. They simply figure if X number of people are making the same complaint then the complaint must be valid. This has also become a new form of cyber-bullying and it is quickly being exploited.
I also believe that you are not warned that your site being deleted or given a chance to refute the complaints made against you. Tom, did Wiki give you any kind of notice that your site was under review?
No, I didn’t get any warning from Wikipedia. The cancel-culture crowd of course simply labels anything they don’t like as racist, sexist, speciesist or whatever and expect the platforms to cave.
Thank you, Tom, for bravely spreading truth!!!
Thank you for reading, but I don’t consider it brave to point out how these people think.
Great wisdom Tom! (No surprise.)
I cannot recommend highly enough the book(s) by Vox Day: “SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police” — which is mostly a self-defense manual for “when ‘they come for you” (At your job, at your church, in your gym, on the web, heck even in your family!) Realize, they WILL always come for you, even for some sort of “new offense” you didn’t know you’d committed… I get a huge laugh out of the left now turning on and attacking some their OWN, who — as a part of a school of fish swimming and turning in unison — MISSED the latest/newest signal and didn’t turn with the school.
His second book: “SJWs Always Double Down: Anticipating the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice)” is more about protecting not just yourself, but your organizations… (The third book, we’re waiting not-quite-patiently for, will be “SJWs Always Project.” That his third rule of SJWs…
DON’T quail in horror at the mere mention of Vox Day’s name! Don’t let the liars and scammers (and SJWs!) who are backlisting and de-platforming and censoring and otherwise trying to force you to only see, only read, only FIND the stuff they want you to find!
I’d also recommend to you reading Vox Day’s book (or at least his blog entries) called “Jordanetics: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker” — which, if you like Jorden will hurt but the book makes absolutely clear that it’s “bafflegarble” Jordan “sells,” not “just” wisdom. (I fought long-and-hard against Vox’s disassembly of my belief in Jordan’s crap; but it turns out Jordan lays out a ‘treat’ on a string and we/you/folks fill in the “apparent wisdom” out of our OWN knowledge base. Jordan may be a finer pointing AT the moon, bu he sure as hell is NOT the moon — nor any way to GET to the moon.)
And, if you did recoil in shock and horror at my suggestion, maybe just read the synopsis/excerpt of the first book offered free on the blog as an immediate resource when you’ve suddenly been attacked http://www.milobookclub.com/mart/SJW_Attack_Survival_Guide.pdf — and/or — watch the Google Whistleblower Zach Vorhees discuss how the first book kept him from getting destroyed by the Google behemoth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ghU24MvdFc&t=596s Yes, Alex Jones is annoying — but this is an excellent interview! Specific review starts at minute 2:30 — great review!
I read “SJWs Always Lie” and “SJWs Always Double Down.” Yup, he explains the pattern quite nicely.
Seen this?
https://www.lchf-rd.com/2019/08/20/censorship-of-real-food/
Meanwhile in the UK the Intellectual Yet Idiots at Cambridge University have banned beef and lamb from their canteens. And our Leader Of The Opposition Jeremy Corbyn recently switched from vegetarian to vegan and currently looks like a dead man walking, with a serious case of Vegan Neck.
Frankly I’m looking forward to being dead. But before I go I will eat all the rump steaks and lambs liver I can before it gets banned.
Good lord … a chicken prepared for cooking is “sensitive content” now? If that triggers people, we’ve got maybe a decade before we’re successfully invaded by people who haven’t been thoroughly weenified.
There may be an opportunity to knit little pullovers for chickens. Well they do if for dogs.
I wonder if some algorithm assumed naked flesh was porn not poultry. Might be interesting to post pork chops or steak and see if they also get flagged, Flesh = lust don’t ya know.
If you’re turned on by a de-feathered chicken, I’d say you have issues.
Would love to see the look on AOC’s face when I crank up my Town Car’s V8 engine and drive it around town and enjoy the smooth ride and ample power when I press down with my right foot. And eat a burger made of real beef? We’re talking environmental terrorism here.
We only have 12 years to save the planet. The bartender said so.
Of course, I’ve been hearing “If we don’t do (fill in the blank) within the next 10 years, it will be too late” since the mid-1980s. Whatever filled in the blank didn’t happen, and we’re still here.
It would be worthwhile to have some discussion about what search engines to use instead, and for those with content to serve, what alternative video streaming services need to be considered.
I’m open for suggestions on those.
I’ve gotta recommend both DukDuckGo and Qwant as “non-aligned” (non-censored?) search engines.
You may know that Alphabet loses a gazillion+ dollars on YouTube:
“According to CNBC, Alphabet’s stock was down more than 8% on Tuesday after it was revealed that YouTube was one of the reasons the company’s ad revenue grew at 15% compared to 24% last year. As a result, Alphabet lost $70 billion in market cap.” {https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/youtube-alphabet-stock-market/}
For some GREAT streaming — not everything and anything like YT — but carefully chosen and curated providers, check out the Unauthorized.TV site There are, apparently some 600+ hours of video up there now — and the site was only put up a couple months ago! Some entire “channels” and some “first videos” on other “channels” are available free. I especially recommend Voxiversity very short vids: all free! Most of the videos need a subscription: however the minimum is ~$5 a month — and you can ‘direct’ it to the preferred content provider you want to support: part goes to the creator, part to support UA.TV. Two ‘higher’ subscription points are ~$10 or ~$15 per month; but ALL subscriptions at any level get you access to every subscriber-only video!
I’m not sure of the details, but there was a recent bobble because the demand for streaming bandwidth was so very high the ‘space provider’ nearly went down; they had to do an emergency server switch to support the demand! MOST everything is back in place on new servers, but not quite everything. I’m esp. sad that the “WineStream Barcelona” channel had been re-uploaded yet, but it’ll get there!
Some example:
In the comics world, “The Legend” Chuck Dixon is up to, like, episode 17, on his channel “On Comics.” Piero san Giorgio has several vids (the survivalist one is free) up; he’s working on a book now, as I understand, so no new vids at the moment. Comedian Owen Benjamin’s filmed comedy shows, and his daily (long!) livestreams are there. Of course, many of Vox Day’s DarkStreams; after the server overwhelm, not all of them are back, but a lot of the recent ones are. David the Good does vids on growing plants and food, composting, building a small house…
And, if you’ve ever seen Zammy — the hospital comfort dogs’ channel? Zammy have moved over to Unauthorized.TV!
Oh! I almost forgot! Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Associate Professor of Medieval History, Fundamentals, and the College. The University of Chicago. PhD 1994 Columbia University, is doing a series of subscriber online classes (first one is free) called “Unauthorized Medieval History.” BRILLIANT classes! Then, there are three AMAZING documentaries: I’ve watched “Reclaiming the Blade: History of the Sword”; it’s wonderful! And a fascinating “The Four Generations of Modern War” — a lecture to Marines by William Lind. I haven’t seen Unforgettable: The Korean War” yet.
p.s., Replace SJW-run/censored Wikipedia with Infogalactic.com the Planetary Knowledge Core. Unlike WikiP — where the person who is the TOPIC of the entry is NOT allowed to edit his or her own page (?!): on Infogalactic the person discussed can have a VERIFIED page; and only that person can make entries! If they prefer or to compare, users can also read, still at Infogalactic, the direct-from-WikiP ‘converged’ version; and, if there is one, the page edited by the Infogalactic editors. STARVE Wikipedia!! (And would someone please let Dr. Malcolm Kendrick know about Infogalactic — since WikiP kicked him OFF!?)
p.p.s. To replace/supplement Drudge — try news.Infogalactic.com
Thank you for the suggestions. Let’s hope the market rewards the providers who support free speech and punishes the ones who don’t.
When the internet was invented they said “information wants to be free” but now we know it wants to be $9.99 a month.
What else is currently bugging me is the increasing number of websites that fail to work unless you accept cookies, or unblock ads. Then there are the advisories before TV programmes. Like a content warning for stuffed animals for a Police drama including a taxidermist. Personally I find “disturbing images” in the adverts, especially what they claim to be food but they never warn us about that. I record all my TV and jump the ads. Imagine that!
“Science” is still going on but increasingly it is being replaced by religion in the public media, cf. Harvard, EAT-Lancet and the rest of the Seventh Day Adventist agenda. Look behind the curtain and spot all the money.
In a way, the Enlightenment thinkers ended up inadvertently sowing the seeds of their current popular disfavor. When they showed the power of rigorous scientific method, others took this to the extreme, that science can explain everything, then used bogus science to explain away such things as classical morality. Science will never explain love or the appreciation of beauty, but when you try to do that you end up chasing your own tail and one of the results is relativism. If everything is relative, you don’t have to explain anything. And thus we get where we are. Unfortunately, nations, like ours, which experience a descent into relativism and concomitant breakdown of classical morality, typically do not last long. When your leaders are running on gut feel and instinct instead of reality, it not very hard to take you down. Alaric didn’t have to do much to walk in and sack Rome. I have a very vested interest in destroying relativism. I want the nation to be around for my children.
And for the record, religion and science should not be at odds. Both are seeking truth, just in different areas. The problems come when one tries to dictate into the other’s area. There are numerous historical examples on both sides of this, many in effect right now. However, very religious people can also be very rigorous scientists – Newton, for example. And one of our greatest, and most proven, modern theories, the Big Bang, was invented by a Catholic priest, over Einstein’s objections. He was a better mathematician than Einstein. And coincidentally, the Big Bang corresponds pretty well to the first allegory of creation in Genesis ;).
I’d say the fault lies more with the others who took their views to the extreme than with the Enlightenment thinkers themselves.
I’m not religious, but I don’t believe religion and science are necessarily in opposition either. Paul Jaminet is quite religious and also a good scientist.
I seem to recall a tenet of Taoism, something along the lines of anything taken to an extreme gives rise to its own opposite.
We have a perfect example of this now in the United Kingdom. One of the anointed agreed to ask the people a simple question – “do you want to stay or leave the EU”.
Much to the shock and horror of the anointed the ‘people’ said “Leave”.
Nothing has happened yet, but the anointed have been fighting back against the decision as it does not accord with their beliefs.
The new leader of the Liberal Democrat Party ( I kid you not – somewhat key words in the label) announced that they will stop Brexit if they come to power despite the glaring fact that the majority of the people voted to leave.
If this is ‘post-modernism’ then I think I will have to emigrate to Canada.
The Anointed are huge fans of listening to the people as long as the people agree with them.
Hi all, I live in central Florida the horse capital and there is a lot of buying and selling of all different types of horses in this area, Face book groups sprang up to serve this purpose as well as selling of farm animals in my area. They almost all got shut down by FB because they decided no animal sales are allowed for whatever their reasons were. Thousands of people belonged to these groups, FFA and 4H kids got their fair animals this way, many trail riders found their perfect mount this way. But no more. It’s disgusting how the ideas of a few affect the many.