In the previous three posts, we looked at why The Anointed aren\u2019t big fans of free speech or the wide-open discussion and debate free speech enables:<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0\u00a0 They believe they are very, very smart.
\n2.\u00a0\u00a0 They believe the rest of us aren\u2019t very, very smart and are therefore easily fooled and led astray.<\/p>\n
In comments, a reader posted a link to an excellent blog<\/a> post by Charles Hugh Smith that makes the same point:<\/p>\n Perhaps what has failed here is the narrative that everything fails and falls apart if it isn’t centrally managed and curated, a narrative that inevitably leads to censorship under the guise of “protecting you, the easily confused sheep, from these nasty wolves.”<\/p>\n Censorship then enables another, much more well-organized and centralized pack of wolves (the ruling elites) to prey on the obedient sheep at their leisure, without fear of any disruptive dissenting narratives.<\/p>\n What the ruling political elites and their mainstream media shills fear is a wide-open, chaotic and very Darwinian competition of concepts and ideas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019ve got to start reading his blog.\u00a0 Sounds like my kinda guy.<\/p>\n Whether The Anointed like it or not, that chaotic and very Darwinian competition of concepts and ideas is happening.\u00a0 Thanks to the internet and social media, the information gatekeepers have lost control of the gates.\u00a0 The rest of us are now communicating directly with each other.\u00a0 The results haven\u2019t been good for The Anointed, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb pointed out in his essay The Intellectual Yet Idiot<\/a> (his term for The Anointed):<\/p>\n What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking \u201cclerks\u201d and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think\u2026 and 5) who to vote for.<\/p>\n \u2026 With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1\/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n My, my, my \u2026 with the great unwashed masses rebelling and trusting their own instincts, or their grandmothers, or each other, or bloggers and podcasters whose ideas and advice they\u2019ve found useful, how are The Anointed supposed to protect people against their own stupidity?\u00a0 (As you may recall, The Anointed believe anyone who defies them must be stupid, or evil, or perhaps both.)<\/p>\n One way or another, The Anointed believe they must coerce people who disagree with them into shutting the hell up.\u00a0 As we saw in our last post<\/a>, demanding retractions of critiques and opinions they don\u2019t like is one favorite tactic.<\/p>\n Another favorite tactic is to personally attack the messenger, as opposed to arguing against what the messenger has to say.\u00a0 That\u2019s where the \u201canyone who disagrees with us must be evil\u201d attitude shows itself.\u00a0 Yelling \u201cracist!\u201d over disagreements that have nothing to do with race is certainly near the top of The Official Anointed Playbook.\u00a0 So are comments like this, uttered by our ol\u2019 buddy Dr. David Katz while responding to the Nina Teicholz critique<\/a> of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines:<\/p>\n The report does take into account sustainability, something that the committee noted was not traditionally in their purview. “Ms. Teicholz seems inclined to ignore that altogether; perhaps she does not care whether there is anything for the next generation to eat or drink, but I suspect most of us do,” Katz noted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Got that?\u00a0 If Teicholz argues that the guidelines aren\u2019t based on good science, well then by gosh, it means she doesn\u2019t care if our kids and grandkids end up starving and dying of thirst \u2013 a looming disaster the U.S. Dietary Guidelines would of course prevent.\u00a0 Gee, she must be a terrible, terrible person.\u00a0 Best not listen to anything she has to say.<\/p>\n When demands for retractions and personal attacks fail, there\u2019s always the final option: bring the rebellious naysayer up on charges.\u00a0 Initiate some kind of prosecution, preferably one with the threat of real punishment attached.<\/p>\n As you probably recall, a state board threatened to prosecute blogger Steve Cooksey for promoting a low-carb, paleo diet for diabetics on his Diabetes Warrior blog<\/a>.\u00a0 Here are some quotes from a Carolina Journal article<\/a> about that incident:<\/p>\n The North Carolina Board of Dietetics\/Nutrition is threatening to send a blogger to jail for recounting publicly his battle against diabetes and encouraging others to follow his lifestyle.<\/p>\n Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to \u201cpractice dietetics or nutrition\u201d without a license. According to the law, \u201cpracticing\u201d nutrition includes \u201cassessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups\u201d and \u201cproviding nutrition counseling.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hmmm, certainly sounds like a case of The Anointed feeling threatened by a wide-open, chaotic and very Darwinian competition of concepts and ideas.\u00a0 After all, there are plenty of bloggers and health professionals in the world promoting the low-fat diet recommended by the American Diabetes Association.\u00a0 Are they afraid people will try Cooksey\u2019s advice and discover it actually works?\u00a0 Yes, I think that\u2019s part of it.<\/p>\n In South Africa, The Health Professions Council of SA brought Professor Tim Noakes up on charges for a tweet \u2013 that\u2019s right, A TWEET! — in which he advised a young mother (in response to her question) to wean her baby onto high-fat, real foods.\u00a0 The sane response there would have been to send out tweets and press releases explaining why HPCSA disagrees with Noakes.\u00a0 But we can\u2019t expect The Anointed to behave sanely when there\u2019s a risk ordinary people might come to believe their advice is wrong.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in the land down under, The Anointed initiated another prosecution.\u00a0 Here are some quotes from ABC in Australia<\/a>:<\/p>\n Gary Fettke is an orthopaedic surgeon and an advocate of a low carbohydrate diet.<\/p>\n He said he became passionate about nutrition after amputating limbs of diabetic patients whose diets were a big part of the problem.<\/p>\n “What I’ve been advocating for some years is cutting sugar down, particularly all the refined sugars in the diet,” he said.<\/p>\n “Over time that’s evolved, and it’s evolved to what I call low carb, healthy fat.<\/p>\n “It’s just eating lots of vegetables, pasture-fed meat and the right amount of oil in the form of things like nuts, avocado, cheese, olive oil and fish.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Geez, that sounds really, really dangerous.\u00a0 Humans never would have survived and evolved on a wacky diet like that.<\/p>\n According to Dr Fettke, an anonymous complaint from a dietician at the hospital sparked an investigation by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA).<\/p>\n Two and a half years later the watchdog found he was working outside his scope of practise and was not qualified to give specific nutritional advice, and he was ordered to stop speaking about the low carbohydrate, high fat diet.<\/p>\n “The committee does not accept that your medicine studies of themselves provide sufficient education or training to justify you providing specific advice or recommendations to patients or the public about nutrition and diet, such as the LCHF lifestyle concept,” it read.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, stop and wrap your head around that last statement.\u00a0 Dr. Fettke isn\u2019t qualified to give nutrition advice because he\u2019s just a doctor?\u00a0 Have you EVER heard of a doctor who recommends a low-fat diet with lots of healthywholegrains!<\/em> being prosecuted anywhere in the world?\u00a0 Of course not.\u00a0 Dr. Fettke summed it up nicely himself:<\/p>\n \u201cYou go to your cardiologist and he tells you what to eat, you go to a neurosurgeon and he tells you what to eat, gastroenterologist and all of them, by definition, don’t have a major training in nutrition and yet they’re all giving advice.\u00a0 You cannot push a way of eating onto a person. All I’ve ever done is told patients that there is a choice, that there is an option that’s out there.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ahh, but The Anointed don\u2019t want the great unwashed masses to know about options.\u00a0 That could lead to a wide-open, chaotic and very Darwinian competition of concepts and ideas \u2013 which would of course be very, very bad.\u00a0 No, The Anointed much prefer something like this:<\/p>\n AHPRA has released a statement reaffirming that it expects medical practitioners to provide appropriate dietary advice to patients.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And \u201cappropriate\u201d means whatever The Anointed say it is.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why we can never stop fighting these arrogant morons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the previous three posts, we looked at why The Anointed aren\u2019t big fans of free speech or the wide-open discussion and debate free speech enables: 1.\u00a0\u00a0 They believe they… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,45,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-low-fat-nonsense","category-random-musings","category-the-anointed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9130"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9132,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9130\/revisions\/9132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}