Just a little media moment from a couple of weeks ago I just came across.
There’s a video clip on this page in which the presenter talks down to the elected MP very brusquely.
The issue of contention is hydroxychloroquine. He cites the hydroxychloroquine studies.
It’s not shown on the clip but the presenter issues a put-down about them not being peer reviewed:
"Mr Kelly also recently clashed with Today show host Allison Langdon in a live television interview.
Langdon told him to stop promoting studies that have not been peer-reviewed on his Facebook page, which has 90,000 followers, and urged him to stop questioning the vaccines.
‘Craig, we have seen deaths from Covid, we’ve seen sickness. We’ve seen mass job losses, hundreds of billions of dollars spent in government stimulus, all our hopes are riding on a vaccine. You need to be quiet,’ she said.
The host also told Mr Kelly he was in a position of authority and was ‘failing in that duty’.
The MP stuck by his comments, claiming he was being misrepresented."
The website c19study keeps a count and list and according to them, 188 of the HCQ studies WERE peer-reviewed.
Ironically the Pfizer vaccine trial was only peer reviewed in December, after the rollout had started and without the data from Pfizer (who in 2009 earned the largest corporate corruption fine in history) being made available to scientists.
So I wondered about this put-down and whether it was fed to the presenter; the MP protests but she talks over him.
“…stop promoting studies that have not been peer-reviewed”
I wonder what @dimac makes of it, or @JMC.
I guess this squashing of dissident views could easily happen in the UK even to an MP, if it was a left wing politician being hit with a piece of spin or false claim as a tactic…but I kind of doubt a presenter would pull this out of thin air themselves. STOP…emphatic accusation that is technical, but also false.
Looked to me it was a prearranged ambush, or it came down the wire. A small but possibly quite telling moment?
That’s plausible. The overall framing is that off-message folks “promote” certain arguments, while the flock “evidence” their arguments using citation. The easiest arguments to cite, and certainly the least risky, are the ones near the top of Altmetric or Google Scholar rankings (for example).
As a mature student I was challenged for “citing lots of books”, relative to papers, presumably because (a) why make your ‘research’ more of a hassle with all this pesky reading and/or (b) because the eminent professor wants to assess the credibility of the arguments being ‘promoted’ via the aforesaid Altmetric (or similar) rather than drawing upon their own, often surprisingly sparse, knowledge.
In academia the capacity to bullshit fluently and with confidence builds careers (as does being born to the right parents, etc). One’s peers can make or break a researcher and this is how “disciplined minds” survive the crushing years of apprenticeship.
Sorry I didn’t get to respond till now. As a supporter of Craig Kelly’s views on HCQ treatment, which are all absolutely sound and in line with the best science (!) I am now excised from consideration along with the “discredited and unproven” HCQ, and anyone who dares suggest it could cure people, or even help them. In Australia we no longer have anyone who needs treatment or vaccination, so it’s easy to claim HCQ doesn’t work and that vaccines do. Who would know? !! The odd thing is, that the effects of HCQ are much the same as those allegedly from the vaccine - of reducing the likelihood of hospitalisation or death. HCQ is actually better, as the vaccine isn’t guaranteed either to cure people or stop them being infectious.
Craig Kelly also observed that masking children was child abuse, of which I have no doubt whatsoever. Edinburgh psychoanalyst Bruce Scott has had a bit to say on this but he just gets ignored because he doesn’t think climate change is a fraud. Kelly is detested and denied by the Left and Greens for his climate scepticism, and everything else follows.
AND - he was banned from Twitter for putting out misleading and false information, like Trump and well, Putin I guess, if he were on Twitter.
But…what we ARE really concerned about is the possibility that the Attorney General got the leg over a 16 year old girl when he was 17 in 1988, and that despite her committing suicide last year for reasons unclear, and him denying any such rape took place, most of the media and parliament want an enquiry. the AG is a criminal who interferes with the secret trial of whistleblowers, but the Women’s Lawyers group who set this up doesn’t care about that. They want “Consent” to be taught in schools, and legislated in parliament, and there to be no more groping or singing or dancing nor getting pissed, and no victim blaming, unless the victim is male. Jesus are we fucked up! And trapped here for 3 more months after “the (previously unknown) Russian variant” turned up in a quarantine hotel, along with a load of unwanted Sputnik V vaccine ( only joking) Sorry about the rant!
Yesterday I had a long talk with John Shipton, JA’s father, who is doing a tour of regional towns to “bring Julian home” and had an appearance in the local town. About ten people turned up, three of whom were invited by me. I think they’ve forgotten what real meetings are like, and prefer Zoom. I tried to distribute some flyers before hand, but COVID regulations forbad me from leaving any in cafes, which anyway I can’t go in without registering on the surveillance QR code system. They don’t have papers to read either any longer, except in some dissenting establishments.
Checking my copy of 1984 for hints on what may happen next. Oh and btw, after finding some waste water CV fragments and doing another 19,000 tests without a positive, the Vic government chose to extend the state of emergency till the end of the year, just in case. They made some concessions to three independents to get it over the line, including that children not wearing masks should be fined only half as much as adults. I have no expletives left.
If I recollect accurately the UK Column news of yesterday, Wednesday 3 March, suggested that compelling primary school children to wear masks may be to provide leverage against BaD PaRenTs who are shamed into compliance by their little darlings.
There was another item reporting on one or more schools who plan to issue a badge of some kind for kids with an exemption to wear, instead of their muzzle. (the kids to shun as health hazards but maybe not as much as the kids with neither masks nor badges)
It all sounds rather like that grand jape of yesteryear where class scapegoat has “Kick Me!” note surreptitiously slapped on their back.
Note for GCHQ/Echelon/Twitter cops: these are definitely not malicious/conspiratorial measures, just people in authority being big silly Billies.
Good point Karen about the verbiage which matters if it’s always adhered to. Academia’s usefulness to the public drops rapidly when its integrity drops. Probably goes negative quite quickly!
Yeah D, Attorney Generals have the dubious role of bridging the gap between law and the politicians. As they seem to perpetuate and cover up political or state abuses, their role should be changed or disappeared, forcing politicians to deal with a legal system that was genuinely neutral.
Sounds grim down under - the sudden control that has been seized even in the UK is alarming, as the restrictions together with censorship impact on all political activity.
I wouldn’t dismiss women’s rights as being ‘the big distraction’ though - plenty of trivial life is continuing. How these rape and sexual assault cases are handled is important to women - in India a Supreme Court judge has tried to marry a rape victim and her rapist. Actually it was a lot worse than that as the case only came to legal light when the victim attempted suicide, because the girl’s family only went to the police because the rapist, who had agreed to marry the girl, married someone else. The feelings of the girl didn’t matter even to the family. We can discuss our worst case dystopian political scenarios, but for many women the dystopia may already be here.
But it sounds like the political situation you refer to Dimac is much worse in Oz, and for less justification viz a viz the virus - so I do understand your alarm about the coinciding of the creeping public controls, the apathy about whether their justifications have any merit and the censorship.
Also the seeming AWOL of the left (that’s my alarm I mean, you’re not having that )
Cheers
Thanks Evry - and your very reasonable observations on rape in India only go to illustrate the power of this subject to distract from other things, which on a global scale are many times more important (though I know I can’t say that!)
The point being that anyone who has an interest and an agenda to divert attention from problematic subjects or covert actions can always find a case like this to effect it, particularly with the Left and Greens. And my feeling is that this whole collection of stories and accusations was manufactured and manipulated by the Coalition government and the “Suprastructure” of power to sidetrack parliamentary business from a number of fundamentally challenging problems. First we are about to come off the year long “job Keeper” allowances, paid to millions of workers to keep them in jobs that have become redundant, and many of which will probably fold once they have to pay wages AND pay back rents and charges postponed, meaning that these workers will then go on the dole, which has now been reduced back to just $50 a fortnight more than it was, and has been for 25 years! ($540 a fortnight)
Our scheming treasurer has bailed out the banks to $180 Billion, printed more hundred billions, and mortgaged the whole economy for years, for NOTHING - because we had 28,000 cases and 850 deaths, not in one day but in a whole year! ( Oh yes but look what could have happened!!)
In addition we just bought another batch of F35s, despite them being useless, and want to spend $90 billion on some new submarines, while doing everything we can to sabotage our relationship with China permanently, antagonising Russia, sucking up to Israel, horrible thought, and NOT pulling out of Iraq. And pushing the vaccines ahead with a complete ban on any negative or alternative viewpoints.
But the Left and the Greens don’t know anything about all this, worry about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen that we helped to cause, and worry about sexual philandery in Parliament.
I also just found out today that the woman who made the 33 year old charges against the AG only “remembered” them two years ago in therapy for “repressed memory” - where her “somatic memory” enabled her to do so. Much as I distrust the AG, I would challenge any fair minded person to watch his presser and not believe he was genuine. He nearly had an emotional meltdown, saying not that he couldn’t remember the event, but that he remembered it perfectly well and nothing of the kind every took place. Because the woman is now departed there is no possibility of “proving” anything.
In a word, well three - “short and curlies” - always works - and there is no-one I can think of here who would even consider my argument above. cheers David.
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