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Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘politicization’

The Covid era’s politicization of expertise means we now have medics lecturing us on climate change — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on September 20, 2021

And herein lies the real danger. By exploiting the politicization of expertise, the medical profession is now in danger of undermining the authority of science and knowledge. You do not need a doctorate in sociology to understand why conspiracy theories that are rooted in the mistrust of the so-called experts are growing as they are. 

By going beyond their expertise to add political support to a one-sided and misanthropic debate about climate change, the medical profession is in danger of itself becoming a threat to public health.

Did Eisenhower foresee the Medical-Congressional-Complex?

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/535115-covid-medics-lecturing-climate-change/

Norman Lewis is a writer, speaker and consultant on innovation and technology, was most recently a Director at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, where he set up and led their crowdsourced innovation service. Follow him on Twitter @Norm_Lewis

Would you go to a geologist for a cancer diagnosis? Of course not. So why should we listen to 200 medical journal editors pontificating about the climate emergency? Their intervention in the debate is unwelcome and unnecessary.

When 200 medical journal editors publish an apocalyptic and misleading joint editorial about the dangers of temperature rises, which the Wall Street Journal’s editorial team correctly noted “could have been ghost written by Greta Thunberg,” it reveals that the politicization of expertise we have seen during the Covid pandemic is now limitless.

The intervention by the medical journal editors in the climate debate and its impact on public health ought to be welcomed. We certainly need a broader discussion. But when such an intervention is more about politics than medical science, in the words of the stricken Apollo 13 crew, “Houston, we have a problem.”

The main problem with these journals joining the climate lobby is that they are not doing so to provoke or advance the science of climate change. They have shown themselves to be far from open to debate during the Covid crisis in their field. Many are guilty of having suppressed critical discussions in their pages during the pandemic, from the origins of the original virus, through the effectiveness or not of masks and of social distancing, to the cost of lockdowns. 

They have been the gatekeepers, the medical experts who have maintained a monopoly on what they have chosen to be the truth – truths that we were simply expected to defer to.

Now, encouraged by their new elevated status – a status which is very much the outcome of the failure of politicians to exercise judgement over experts during the pandemic – they feel it their duty to go beyond their expertise to stoke fear ahead of the UN climate change conference COP26 in November. 

As the WSJ points out, there are many dubious claims in the joint editorial, including the suggestion that no temperature rises are “safe” and that higher temperatures are linked to dire health outcomes. To back this up, the joint editorial cites a recent British Medical Journal meta-analysis of studies that examine links between extreme weather and health. They fail to discuss that most of these findings haven’t been replicated, and many conflict. At best, it provides correlations which, as even schoolchildren know, does not prove causation. As the WSJ wryly comments, “obesity has increased at the same time temperatures have. That doesn’t mean heat is making people fatter.”

In reality, extreme cold kills more people each year (1.3million) than extreme heat (356 000), according to a study published in The Lancet last month. Deaths from cold weather have decreased as population rates have increased, mainly because more of the world’s population has had more access to heating. 

They need more, which means what they need is more development and access to cheaper energy. 

As the WSJ points out, “about 10% of the world’s population currently doesn’t even have electricity, and a third still cook with stoves that use wood, coal, crop waste or dung, which “kill millions each year.” If the medical journal editors were genuinely concerned about health outcomes, they would be demanding the greater use of nuclear energy, which would give poorer countries access to the cheap and clean energy they need to combat poverty, which kills more people than anything else.

But there is no mention of nuclear energy. Why not? Because this would be a powerful counterpoint to climate alarmism which sees the limitation of consumption and the lowering of development aspirations as the only solution to what they all agree is a man-made climate catastrophe.

This simply highlights that this medical profession intervention has little to do with fighting for better public health. One can only assume that their motivation has more to do with virtue signalling and opportunism. By joining the climate lobby, they are attempting to insert themselves into a debate in which they have no right to claim any authority in.

And herein lies the real danger. By exploiting the politicization of expertise, the medical profession is now in danger of undermining the authority of science and knowledge. You do not need a doctorate in sociology to understand why conspiracy theories that are rooted in the mistrust of the so-called experts are growing as they are. 

By going beyond their expertise to add political support to a one-sided and misanthropic debate about climate change, the medical profession is in danger of itself becoming a threat to public health.

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Libertarianism’s Place In Society – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on July 20, 2019

When Buck Johnson recently asked Paul Gottfried whether the Left or the State was the chief enemy in our time, Gottfried quickly responded: “what’s the difference?”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/07/no_author/libertarianisms-place-in-society/

By CJay Engel
Austro Libertarian

The thesis here is that libertarianism as a political theory only carries the veneer of importance and centrality due to the strength and power of the democratic, administrative, state in our time. Everywhere we look, we see the influence and effect of the state as an apparatus that guides and oversees the machinations of modern civilization. We speak not merely of the obvious libertarian issues like taxes and regulation but we see in the modern western state a cultural force. We so often push the idea that politics is downstream from culture, that we have lost the culture and therefore the state has followed the path of destruction.

But as was hinted on the AL editor’s blog, it is far more likely that Paul Gottfried has it right: the state has morphed into something much more sinister and it now leads the culture toward its own ends. The modern administrative state is the creator of culture and culture is now downstream from the state. Gottfried is especially succinct as to his meaning in his short excerpt:

Contrary to an older understanding of culture, what we are referring to is a process of moral and social radicalization. It is a process that didn’t come about unbidden but which powerful, pervasive administrative rule promoted. And the social engineering function of public administration here and elsewhere in the West has been particularly evident since the 1960s, with governmentally encouraged immigration and an accelerating war against discrimination. Presumably, when Hillary Clinton assured a gay rights group that she was addressing last year (October 5, 2015) that she would use the IRS to force recalcitrant religious institutions into endorsing gay marriage, she was not simply responding to a cultural condition. She was working to create one.

We have entered into a full politicization of society; there is nothing that the state-cultural complex does not touch. It guides the way we interact with others, the way we process and interpret events, and the way we think about social norms and basic social units and institutions.

Now then, to bring this back to the thesis: “libertarianism as a political theory only carries the veneer of importance and centrality due to the strength and power of the democratic, administrative, state in our time.” Since the state is everywhere we look, and libertarianism has a set of particular ethical critiques against the state, it seems to follow that libertarianism plays such an important place in our lives…

This creates the illusion that libertarianism plays a fundamental role in society. That political theory itself is of primary importance for a people who wish for a better world, a world that is both more ethical and more free. And from this, we work to create a libertarian political strategy and a libertarian movement as well. And thus, the disease of modern administrative statism, which takes over our minds as the lens through which we find meaning, produces the impulse that one ought to dedicate himself to libertarianism as a path toward social preservation.

But it should be made clear that the only reason libertarianism as such seems to play such a fundamental role in the self-identity and life-meaning of so many in libertarian circles is due to the politicalization of society. We live in the administrative state’s world and thus we even put our path toward social improvement strictly in terms of the political. It is not just that the state formally speaking is everywhere we look, it is that there is hardly any longer a culture that is distinct from the state. When Buck Johnson recently asked Paul Gottfried whether the Left or the State was the chief enemy in our time, Gottfried quickly responded: “what’s the difference?”…

Men form society not on the basis of a unifying legal theory, but the legal theory is adopted post-society. Libertarianism is a helpful tool in the development of peaceful civilization; it is neither the spring nor the engine from which society flows. Libertarianism as a unifying spirit is only conceivable because we operate in a world that has experienced the imposition of a political society. But perhaps, to presuppose this statist-world moving forward, and to subsequently work toward a bigger libertarian political movement, is to have already made the very mistake that continues to undermine our efforts toward a free society.

Reprinted from Austro Libertarian.

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