Is there a Middle in the Info War?
Everywhere one looks there are divisions. The Canadian Truckers protest against vaccine mandates — State programmes of compulsory vaccination, with attendant consequences, like losing your job if you don’t comply. Justin Trudeau dismissed them first as a non-representative minority, then as terrorists, which apparently gave crowd-funding platform GoFundMe license to seize the millions of dollars the truckers had raised and attempt to distribute it to causes of their choice.
I have yet to read a balanced legacy media account of the truckers. According to The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, CNN, CBC, BBC and so on, they are at best an “anti-vaxx” protest that has gotten out of control, harbour fascist elements, deny science, steal food from soup kitchens and hurl abuse at small businesses.
If you are happy to leave it at that, please do.
If you are of a more inquiring mindset, and have perhaps encountered non legacy media coverage of the Freedom Convoy, you will have heard that the movement is peaceful, positive, inclusive, and to a significant degree, vaccinated. Its spokespeople have stated over and again that it is not an “anti-vaxx” movement (yes, I am going to keep putting that term in quotes, more on that later), it is protesting mandatory medical treatment particularly when it is visited on the population amid concerns and without proper discussion.
Without proper discussion? you cry! As well as being a symptom of Covid-19, we can declare fatigue a meta-symptom too. Many people are sick to the back teeth of Covid, and want life to go back to normal. If you tune into it, though, you know that going back to normal is not possible.
Proponents of spillover theory, which holds that Sars-Cov-2 jumped into human populations from Chinese bats, via intermediary animals like the pangolin. What the hell’s a pangolin?
The spillover theory rests on the perfectly plausible if not entirely valid observation that humans have encroached upon former wildernesses — deserts, forests, swamps, oceans, sierras, mountain ranges —to the extent that unprecedented vectors of contagion exist. This is neatly encapsulated in the wet market idea, where all sorts of animals and fish are crammed up against one another, and in close contact with humans.
Proponents of the spillover theory tend to scorn proponents of the lab leak theory, which holds that Sars-CoV-2 originated in a lab, chief suspect being the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from where it was either maliciously released or accidentally escaped. I suspect it is not possible to know which.
Donald Trump was perhaps the first public figure to voice the lab leak theory. His voice — source of many other mysteries — of course lent the theory a unique sort of spin. It became a curve ball, a new viral vector touching QAnon, Russian interference, Hunter Biden, Capitol Hill, the CIA, the FBI, EcoHealth Alliance and more. It was thrown out — according to Trumpists simply because Trump said it —following a WHO visit to Wuhan, and brought back in when doubt was cast upon the visit —one of the visitors was Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance, whom documents revealed were the people seeking funding for viral gain-of-function research at Wuhan.
This is all murky stuff. If you’ve been reading my stuff, you’ll be familiar enough with the post-truth era not to expect that an answer will emerge, and that even if one did, you would not necessarily trust it. We may surmise that there can be no answer, which if you think about it, is the ultimate call for the Middle Ground. We’re all really in the same boat.
One figure I believe is instrumental to the Middle Ground is Joe Rogan. As you know, he is currently under heavy fire for podcasting discussions with Peter McCullogh and Robert Malone, two of the numerous dissident voices of Covid science.
By the way, the last part of that last sentence is itself contentious. Two of the numerous dissident voices of Covid science. I could have said, more conventionally, two of the numerous voices of dissident Covid science. I’m going a tiny extra step here to include, in my thoughts at least, Malone and other dissidents in the body of science, not throwing them out as quacks or crazies, as the legacy media have, just as they have the Canadian truckers, and Whoopi Goldberg.
We can blame cancel culture, an aspect of the quasi-religious info wars raging over everything from whether Covid is real, whether it is caused by a virus, whether viruses exist at all, whether Joe Rogan should be the next sacrificial king because he used the N-word ten years ago in a discussion about the N-word, and whether mentioning decades of Israeli apartheid and human rights abuses is antisemitic because we didn’t also mention human rights abuses in China, Saudi and Iran, especially Iran.
You might wave a hand tiredly and go back to whatever you are doing, in the assumption that all this fuss will blow over soon enough. But I wonder whether it will. What is happening here is the erosion of discourse, the negation of any middle ground or vesica pisces, leaving unconnected circles.
Inside those circles, tribal affiliations, a religions adherence to a people like me dynamic — identification in a word — abounds. Every circle becomes a church. The church of science. The church of the vaccinated. The church of the unvaccinated.The church of viruses exist. The church of viruses do not exist.
But why has separation, rather then integration become the order of the day?
Zooming way-out, it may be that this social flocculation, if it has an evolutionary purpose, serves to bring the polarisation of opinion into stark relief, that our own agendas in it are revealed.
Jordan Peterson, for instance, today called on the Canadian opposition to seize the moment for Conservatives and decry the absence of the Leftist Trudeau.
A FOX News panel of talking heads discussing Joe Rogan joked about the Left and their cancel culture, subtext being their cancellation of The Donald.
Rogan, the Canadian truckers and the “antivaxx” movement in general are dismissed as the fringe right. Protesting a vaccine mandate, demanding the right to choose whether you have this stuff injected into you or not, is seen as anachronistic, gun-toting libertarianism.
Possibly the great religious divide lurking in amongst all this is alluded by the slogan Trust the Science. Increasingly though, being for or against this slogan is anything but scientific. It is increasingly difficult to be scientific.
Take the viruses do not exist camp, which more or less equates to the heretical Germ Theory Denial view (I do not mean heretical is eo ipso bad, just that it is contra the mainstream thesis).
Having mentioned Pasteur in passing in my Hard Covid Piece, synchronicity delivered a link to the work of Andrew Kaufman MD, who today premiered the GTD movie Terrain. Terrain theory is so called as it prefers a holistic view of the corporeal terrain, the cells of the body in other words, and intrinsic dysfunction thereof — toxins, malnutrition etc — as the cause of disease. Pasteurian pathogens are in fact not pathogens — they do not cause disease — they simply show up, like ants to spilled sugar or maggots to a decomposing body, in order to clean up. Kaufman goes further to claim that viruses — including HIV and Sars-CoV-2 — do not exist.
Like other Covid dissidents, Kaufman is heavily criticised online. I refrain from using info war terms like debunked or destroyed. As you can imagine, to get to the bottom of the business of whether viruses exist or not, whether that business turns out to be a matter of science, philosophy of science or even linguistics or philosophy of language (different degrees of meta, perhaps), would take hours.
If you’re interested and have hours, if not days, then go for it. Review Pasteur versus Bechamp in the 17th Century, Koch’s postulates for identifying a bacteria as a suspect pathogen, the various attempts to revise these postulates for the curious case of the virus in the nighttime, being as they are, only quasi-alive. You might touch on Lynn Margulis, Carl Sagan…
One of Kaufman’s arguments for the non-existence of Sars-CoV-2, backed by German virologist Stefan Lanka, is that the sequencing of the viral genome is a piece of pseudo-scientific make believe.
The lay person tends to take ideas such as the sequencing of a genome, any genome, let alone that of a specific coronavirus, as religious axiom. For most people, We have sequenced the genome of Sars-Cov-2 is the same sort of statement as We have set angels to your left and right. In today’s smartphoned-up crazy world we just haven’t got time to think about it.
Kaufman and Lanka claim that viral sequencing is performed by almost brute force match and replace edit of genome snippets, to piece together something that resembles something else — Sars-Cov-1 say — that has itself been sequenced by similar methods. A bunch of genetic stuff thus assembled is said to be this or that if it matches the template thing say 80%. In other words, despite the use of supercomputers, a great deal of guesswork goes into sequencing viral genomes. They are assembled from matching other bits and pieces. Scientific progress? Or a house of cards?
My own lay, thoroughly unqualified sense is that, while there remains a brute force pattern matching element to sequencing genomes, there are nonetheless patterns to be matched, and in due course better and better understanding of what those genetic patterns actually mean will follow. Silicon computers are being used, indeed must be used, to decipher a computer of vastly greater complexity, the genetic biocomputer.
It may very well be that truly understanding the biocomputer will require an entire scientific paradigm shift, perhaps one that encompasses more holistic or spiritual concepts such as the frequency of DNA and its relationship to frequencies of light and sound. The computability of silicon and bio computers relative to each other is probably the domain of far out mathematics and computer science.
While this intersection of genetics and biological and silicon computing is super interesting, I am more concerned here in the combined dynamics of info war, religious tribalism and the influx of science into the public sphere thanks to Covid.
In the general absence of cross-polarity or multilateral debate, where opposing positions are dialogued, our metascientific inquiry has to ping from thesis to antithesis and take a good look at the comments under each piece. One notes the prevalence of psychologists and psychiatrists, like Kaufman, among the alt-med people.
Dutch psychologist Frank Visser provides a worthwhile critique of Kaufman, Lanka et al on his Integral World website. David Icke, a Kaufman fan, is as usual quickly dismissed with reference to his reptilian mythology, while Kaufman himself requires several thousand words, spanning his misappropriation of something the John Hopkins HIV-ologist James Hildreth wrote about the viruses sometimes resembling exosomes.
An exosome is a breakaway sub-cellular entity that functions to transport waste materials away from cells, and also to transmit genetic material. Viruses like HIV are thought to hijack this communication route to transmit viral material between cells. At the subcellular level, the distinction between virus and exosome can be a close call.
Visser accuses Kaufman of running with this idea and getting carried away with the conclusion that viruses do not exist.
According to Kaufman, what scientists claim are viruses, including HIV, influenza and coronavirus, are actually exosomes, if they are not crud on the microscope slide or some other artefact of slide staining. Electron microscopy has a host of intrinsic issues. Cells viewed in vitro under pathogenic attack are in fact decaying as they are in a non-nutritional if not toxic environment, which is treated with antibiotics to remove bacterial noise as standard.
The bulk of scientists research and report on viruses per se in good faith. Only those at the arch level of the evil Dr Fauci who do so cynically. They have combined this grey area around viruses, with a neat sleight of hand using the PCR test (actually a general method for highlighting template bits of genome sequence) to create a viral pandemic from thin air, as the classic Ickeian problem-solution set up for the vaccines, an immediate global smash and grab to the tune of trillions of dollars, and a first footstep into a new paradigm of medical totalitarian tyranny.
Visser tweeted James Hildreth, who came back with a black n white response. “The virus and the pandemic are real. Period.”
But is it?
Wouldn’t it be more period if Hildreth and Kaufman got into a room and hammered the damn stuff out? Why does this not happen? Is it because this does not happen that the info war erupts like an outbreak of measles in the comments to the Visser article?
Covid exists, period. Covid is a hoax, period. Is there any middle ground?
It may be that Fauci and other demonically clever and cynical people have cooked up one hellufa fraud. It may be that they were thinking about it, or were thinking about something beyond that, viral vector gene therapy using graphene inserts or whatever the hell. It may be that it got away from them. Maybe an experimental bat flew the coop. Maybe they cynically put something in the water. Maybe we have crashed through too many wildernesses, fucked about with the balance of wild and domesticated animals and shoved them all together in wet markets and shipping containers and whatever the hell and nuked our own immune systems with smartphones and TikTok and something has stepped into the breach. Maybe it’s a grab bag of all of the above. Maybe it’s a message from God.
Until we get these people — the Faucis and Kaufmans and others— in a room together, we shall never know. While there are trillions of dollars to be made, and while the Middle Ground is abolished, we shall never know.
