To Tell the Truth is a Human Events News’ press analysis series. These stories will focus on “news” being reported by either The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC News, NBC News, or CBS News. Despite 24-hour cable broadcasts, and an untold number of internet sources, these established, mainstream platforms continue to influence the majority of American citizens and their political opinions.
The “news” generated by these press is better regarded as “opinion” crafted in a way designed to discourage skepticism and critical thought on the part of the audience. To Tell the Truth will be Human Events News’ periodic effort to help address this bias, and restore the skepticism necessary on the part of all Americans to maintain a free society.
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The Media: Sins of Omission
On Jan. 15, Newsweek reported on a groundbreaking study published ten days prior in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study, conducted by Stanford researchers, found that mandatory lockdowns in response to COVID-19 “did not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures.”
Five days after Newsweek’s report, news of the study remains absent from the websites of major American news outlets, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, ABC, and CBS.
“The study compared cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.S. – all countries that implemented mandatory lockdown orders and business closures – to South Korea and Sweden, which instituted less severe, voluntary responses. It aimed to analyze the effect that less restrictive or more restrictive measures had on changing individual behavior and curbing the transmission of the virus,” Newsweek reports.
“We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures,” wrote the researchers.
The named outlets have continued to cover coronavirus-related news and even research studies, especially those having to do with the severity of the virus and the importance of a vaccine. The New York Times has covered several studies in the days since the Stanford research was released, including the following:
From Human Events, here.
Communist Party USA Denies Having Spies…
Thanks for your interest in our clandestine ops/espionage program! Here’s how the process works. You apply for membership in our party, then continue your education, look for a job, participate in non-violent political activity in accordance with your beliefs, and live the outwardly normal life of a regular human being trying to get by in a system based on maximizing profits rather than meeting people’s needs. But get this: the whole time, you’ll actually be gathering and analyzing information on capitalism and sharing it with other members and allies of a legal, open political party that makes no secret of its goals or program.
You can report on your experiences under capitalism by submitting them as articles to the People’s World (stories@peoplesworld.org) or the party website (discussion@cpusa.org). You can even develop a secret identity based around a pen name if you’d like. You could be Eugenia Eagleson, a retired teacher from Naperville who’s concerned about the impact of climate change on her grandchildren. Or Larry “Big Jim” Hayes, a laid off mechanic who’s giving cello lessons to make ends meet until he finds another full time gig.
Or you could be yourself. You’re part of a generation that has inherited a world in deep economic, social, environmental, and political crisis, handed the task of solving a bunch of problems you didn’t cause. And that’s basically what all Communists are: not secret agents, not operatives of some foreign power, just average working people trying to save the world.
We’d love to hear your ideas on how to do it, comrade.
‘Knowing HOW’ Versus ‘Knowing THAT’: Wittgenstein Against Brisk
Lost in Transcription
Friday, August 22, 2008
Sheldon Richman
Following rules, such as the rules of language, of the market, or of just conduct, is more about “knowing how” than “knowing that.” This is a lesson taught by many important thinkers, among them, Gilbert Ryle (who used these terms in the title of chapter 2 of The Concept of Mind), F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. On many matters, we know more than we can say. Yet we are tempted to identify knowing with saying. It’s a temptation best resisted. (Wittgenstein distinguished between knowing the height of a structure and knowing how a clarinet sounds. We use the same word know, but we don’t mean the same thing. Do you know the height if you cannot say it?)
Language, economic activity, and law did not begin when someone published a grammar book, an economics text, or a political treatise that people then used to guide their actions. On the contrary, the books were written after the fact to codify what people had long been doing. And, importantly, the books could never fully describe what people had been doing or would do in the future. At best they were imperfect codifications (abstractions) that couldn’t possibly capture all the details involved in applying the rules to the varied circumstances of everyday life. In truth, they weren’t rules — in the formal, self-conscious sense that we usually define that term — until the books were written. Yet they governed behavior.
“For not only do we not think of the rules of usage — of definitions, etc. — while using language, but when we are asked to give such rules, in most cases we aren’t able to do so,” Wittgenstein writes. And elsewhere: “One learns the game by watching how others play. But we say that it is played according to such-and-such rules because an observer can read these rules off from the practice of the game — like a law of nature governing the play.” Think how children learn something as complex as language and social roles.
More Satire for Adar…
(USA) — Government officials in Washington DC and across the country are looking forward to ending the national lockdown soon and returning to normal times, when Americans are allowed to go about their business without government direction or interference.
“This whole Coronavirus thing really forced us into a new role,” said one high official at the Centers for Disease Control. “We’re not used to telling our citizens what to do. It’s just not in our nature as bureaucrats.”
Added one state lieutenant-governor: “The idea of dictating whether people can leave their homes or open their businesses or go to church, even how close they can stand to each other and what they have to wear when outdoors … geesh… it’s not like we politicians were itching for untold decades to get this kind of power.”
“Yeah, it’ll be great to get back to the status quo,” said a relieved police chief, as his officers rounded up a group of old ladies assembling illegally in a church parking lot. “You know, when Americans barely knew government existed.”
From The Imaginative Conservative, here.