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I think it has something to do with the election of Trump, and his threat to the idea that only the elite should be allowed to have opinions in public.
slightly baffled but altruistic academian who thought that this Covid controversy could all be cleared up by a bit of rational investigation and enlightened scientific discourse, in which everybody would simply yield to obvious proofs.
By corrupting Fauci, the instigators of this conspiracy managed to quell nearly all dissent from the very people who should have been debating health policy and vaccine safety the MOST strenuously. But the were nearly all AWOL from the discussion, hiding under their well-appointed desks while homespun internet sleuths were left to sort through meager data and examine hypotheses for plausibility.
When we needed the experts the most, they failed us by either becoming shills for big pharma/government or just lacking the moral courage to speak up in the face of the bastardization of Science itself by venal, corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.
There was no scientific consensus about lockdowns, everything was decided by unelected bureaucrats
The thing that stuck out at me from the article the MOST was the assertion that the NIH controls funding for research, without which scientists and professors can’t get paid or get tenure. And Lord Fauci was the king of the NIH, with the ear of two Presidents,
Stanford must expel those law students who shouted down a federal judge because he is white, or admit that Stanford itself is a failure.
Stanford must expel those law students who shouted down a federal judge because he is white, or admit that Stanford itself is a failure.
The apology letter finished by stating: “We are taking steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again. Freedom of speech is a bedrock principle for the law school, the university, and a democratic society, and we can and must do better to ensure that it continues even in polarized times.”
Stanford requires all undergraduate, graduate, and professional students to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19.
Stanford equity dean who sparked fury when she ambushed conservative judge at law school event and stoked woke students' protests BRAGS about her behavior and refuses to apologize
Stanford Law official who admonished judge during speech is on leave, dean says ...
Stanford Law School will not discipline students who disrupted a campus speech by a conservative federal judge earlier this month, but an official who appeared to intervene on the protesters' behalf is now on leave, the law school's dean said Wednesday.
In a 10-page public letter, dean Jenny Martinez detailed the school's response to the March 9 protest of 5th U.S. Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a 2018 appointee of former President Donald Trump. The letter said Stanford Law administrators did not enforce the school’s speech policy, which prohibits shutting down speakers through heckling. ...
Steinbach did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, and a law school spokeswoman did not respond to requests for clarification on whether Steinbach's leave was imposed or voluntary.
Seriously, if no one can speak at Stanford Law and not be shouted down unless they are woke as fuck, that's not a school.
I no longer expect any integrity from the establishment academia. I am married to a Stanford alum (from early 90’s) and have a lot of friends who went to to Stanford. Marc Tessier-Lavigne presided over turning the university previously open to all ideas into a DEI insane asylum. Thought police administrators are assigned to each student, monitoring their social media and other forms of expression. If a slight dissent from the controlling narrative is detected, re-education sessions and signing of pledges ensue. Cultural houses (Italy, Germany, Slavic) are now verboten, as if learning foreign languages and cultures somehow threatens diversity and inclusion. There are “ethnic theme” dorms catering only to Latino, African and Southeast Asian “themes”. There is a “special” Physics PhD program for minority students which does not require much knowledge of physics. I wish I were making this up.
Of course they went covidian-mad, and devised extra special mental and physical torture rituals. Zimbardo would have been proud, I suppose. All of that was before they started requiring mRNA poison to be injected as condition of attending the Stanford prison camp, granting exemptions to faculty but not students.
If Stanford does not expel those students, it should not be considered a serious law school at all, and should lose it accreditation.
Seriously, if no one can speak at Stanford Law and not be shouted down unless they are woke as fuck, that's not a school.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/stanford-failed-academic-freedom-test
We live in an age when a high public health bureaucrat can, without irony, announce to the world that if you criticize him, you are not simply criticizing a man. You are criticizing “the science” itself. The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.
The analogy goes further, unfortunately. The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did.
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On Oct. 4, 2020, along with two other eminent epidemiologists, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, I wrote the GBD. The declaration is a one-page document that proposed a very different way to manage the COVID-19 pandemic than had been used up to that date. The lockdown-focused strategy that much of the world followed mimicked the approach that Chinese authorities adopted in January 2020. The extended lockdowns—by which I mean public policies designed to keep people physically separate from one another to avoid spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus—were a sharp deviation from Western management of previous respiratory virus pandemics. The old pandemic plans prioritized minimizing disruption to normal social functioning, protecting vulnerable groups, and rapidly developing treatments and vaccines.
Even by October 2020, it was clear that the Chinese-inspired lockdowns had done tremendous harm to the physical and psychological well-being of vast populations, especially children, the poor, and the working class. Closed schools consigned a generation of children worldwide to live shorter, less healthy lives. In July 2020, the Centers for Disease Control released an estimate that 1 in 4 young adults in the United States had seriously considered suicide during the previous month. The U.N. estimated that an additional 130 million people would be thrown into dire food insecurity—starvation—by the economic dislocation caused by the lockdowns. The primary beneficiaries of the lockdown—if there were in fact any beneficiaries of these drastic anti-social measures—were among a narrow class of well-off people who could work from home via Zoom without risk of losing their jobs.
It was amply clear by October 2020 that the lockdown policy adopted by many Western governments, with the exception of a few holdouts like Sweden, had failed to stop the spread of COVID. It was in fact too late to adopt a policy goal of eradicating the virus. We did not have the technological means to achieve this goal, then or now. By the fall of 2020, it was abundantly clear that COVID-19 was here to stay and that many future waves would occur.
Governments had imposed lockdowns on the premise that there was nearly unanimous scientific consensus in support of them. Yet an extraordinary policy like a lockdown requires, or should require, an extraordinary scientific justification. Only near unanimity among scientists, backed by solid empirical data, suffices.
Like Gupta and Kulldorf, I knew that such unanimity did not exist. Many scientists worldwide had contacted us to tell us about their qualms with the lockdowns—their destructiveness and the poor evidence of their effectiveness. Many epidemiologists and health policy scholars favored an alternative approach, though many were scared to say so. It seemed clear to the three of us that as the next inevitable wave appeared, there was a risk that the lockdowns might return, and that scientific evidence against such steps would be ignored and smothered, at tremendous social cost.
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