This is correct. Substack was one of the first "mainstreamish" platforms to go "against the grain" and try to be neutral with respect to the topics and ideas it platformed. Notably, it allowed deviations from the "party line" on the issues of the pandemic. As became evident with the SPLC story, there are powerful organizations whose goal is not to forget such things and organize persistent media punishment campaigns against the dissenters. This can well be a manifestation of that.
The same Lancet that published the infamous Peter Daszak letter, that unequivocally relegated lab leak hypothesis to a conspiracy theory -- without disclosing his ties with Wuhan Institute of virology.
I am sorry, no person with common sense will trust this journal again. Not to mention the adjacent institutions and media.
A position as flagrantly immodest & totally polarizing as this has imo no legs to stand on.
A famous medical journal from 1823 that made some people really mad once is probably, even if those completely over the top wildly over emotional ridiculous complaints are true, is probably not irredeemably lost forever.
This sort of immature ultra polarizing view, that instigates and spreads distrust: I'm tired of angry voices trying to break reality. No one should ever fall for a movie so shrill and so polarized, so wildly agitated, making such ridiculous grandiose claims as these!
It is a deep deep deep misdeed to work so hard to fray the social bonds, to fray reality like you are doing. "No person with common sense" should be mislead by such easily cast broadly overarching incredibly narrowly focused destructive energy. If this distrust and frustration were expressed with some nuance and reasonability, I could at least tolerate the dissent. But I object strongly to anyone working so hard to sunder reality as this, to soe such deep deep dissent: a journal will not nor ought not be ruined forever for such an event as this. This is grossly irresponsibly polarizing & destructive, and we owe it to each other to show some ability to keep calm and be real.
True. But this problem is fixable individually with a smog mask outdoors and air purifier indooes. Systemic issues in other countries are rarely so easy to work around.
I never particularly revered Dawkins, but he always ranked reasonably high in educated circles, and his books were very popular.
But my goodness, the buckets of crap that get poured on him nowadays, in stark contrast with even 10 years ago. Parent comment is an exhibit.
I am 99% convinced that it's because Dawkins ended up on some "anti hate" group target list, after he said things in 2021 that the trans movement found offensive.
> he always ranked reasonably high in educated circles
Unless someone was educated in philosophy of religion, for example.
> and his books were very popular.
Hard to deny. I have a beef with pop-science in general, but nothing particularly bad about his books on evolution.
> But my goodness, the buckets of crap that get poured on him nowadays, in stark contrast with even 10 years ago. Parent comment is an exhibit.
My comment is not exhibit - I poured crap on him more than even 10 years ago, when he was one of the Four Horsemen (and I poured crap on other three as well), and generally celebrated.
I was there before it was fashionable.
> I am 99% convinced that it's because Dawkins ended up on some "anti hate" group target list, after he said things in 2021 that the trans movement found offensive.
Couldn't care less about trans movement or Dawkins opinion on gender issues.
You don't have to be expert in all subjects to be respected for one you do know, evolution in Dawkins case. The fact he considers religion to be nonsense and hence has limited knowledge of it doesn't change that.
You can argue that but still doesn't change that UK news end up as being "only covered by the left" since this site can't differentiate between them being local/regional news vs. US centric vs. global.
The efforts to divide and weaken the western world have been so massively effective that I sincerely wonder if there is not a state-sized adversary orchestrating all of it for years or even decades. The myopic glee with which people deconstruct their civilizational home from within is astounding, and it is hard to believe that is organic.
It's an informal coalition between the alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries. Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Oh also our lazy, clout-chasing fourth estate bears a significant portion of the blame, though I'm convinced their initial contributions were accidental.
No grand conspiracy, just a lot of assholes and idiots and people who should have known better found out that it doesn't take all that much power to damage institutional trust, and got addicted to the sensation of destruction.
> It's an informal coalition between the alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
> Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries.
Yeah, I kinda agree with this. You definitely have people who hate their domestic political enemies so much that they'll throw themselves in with foreign powers who oppose them.
> Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Perpetrators? No, come on. People seem to love to hate on the common man for some reason (maybe beating down on other common men makes some common men falsely feel bigger). But they're just easy targets, because they can't fight back.
The real "perpetrators" if you can call them that, are the elite people in places of power, who are trusted with responsibility but too-often prioritize their own parochial interests.
Case in point: the Democratic party. They've been screaming from the mountaintops since 2016 about the dangers of authoritarianism, many of which have come to pass. But what do they do? Compromise to form a broader coalition to meet the existential threat? No, of course not. Instead they cater to divisive special interests; wag their fingers at everyone they turn off who doesn't vote for them; and look no father than hoping they can eek out narrow, unstable partisan victories by turning out their base.
> alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
This is absurd.
The alt-right doesn't do anything. They have no power or funding and are suffering actual casualties through repeated assassinations. Pim Fortuyn was murdered, Trump's survived a few attempts, Charlie Kirk was murdered, 7 German AfD candidates mysteriously dropped dead before the election, and something like 30 politicians were outright murdered in Mexico ahead of the last election. To say nothing of the bodies of dead whistleblowers that have been piling up.
You say the alt-right are the bad guys, yet they're the only ones getting killed in broad daylight over demands to...enforce immigration law? Investigate NGO fraud? And all of these deaths just so happen to align to keep neo-Marxist agents in power across the west. Nothing to see here, I guess.
You cite an "informal coalition" between a bunch of unrelated groups while simultaneously blaming everything on the stupidity and greed of the electorate. You're not making a coherent argument, just throwing a bunch of lies at the OP and seeing what sticks.
> You say the alt-right are the bad guys, yet they're the only ones getting killed in broad daylight over demands to...enforce immigration law? Investigate NGO fraud?
Speaking of lies, this is a big one.
1) Heather Heyer, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, just to name three that were killed in broad daylight. Two of them were killed by fascist paramilitary agents of the government in broad daylight. So the first part of this statement is blatantly untrue.
2) I’m not sure if you differentiate the “alt-right” from the current fascists who are in power, but the president has publicly called for the extermination of an entire civilization. So that’s something they want to do, not just the things you list. So again, another lie, or at least a deliberate omission if I’m trying to be charitable.
It's not organic. A country's occupants are only taught that they are evil and should be ashamed of themselves as a means of subjugation after they've been conquered.
Self-destruction is the point of critical theory, and the explicit goal of its architects. For some reason this curriculum is only pushed on western countries.
I have tons of apps I installed (mostly from Play Store) since like 2012, and that were grandfathered in through Samsung Switch from phone to phone as I replaced them with one another. A lot of data in them, too. Will they, and the data, just ... disappear?! When exactly do I have to do the 24 hour song and dance to prevent that? All of this sounds too bad to be true, honestly.
There's no such thing as a single universal morality. TFA was quite political, therefore it's only natural for disagreements to happen. That's kinda the whole point of political debate.
Probably. I hate the AI boom too and see no need to get all political, or even outrught blame the politicians. What'd you expect, politicians with a master degree in every field there is? Not gonna happen.
If we're putting the blame on anything, it's on us hacker types for going where the money flows and not fighting the corporate overlords nail and tooth.
reply