Bill Gates needs to get what he deserves

Bill Gates seems to have developed an obsession with the conspiracy theories about him, while doing nothing to address them. His own obsession now goes far enough that everyone can be forgiven for taking an interest in those theories, too.

Back at the start of this month, Gates objected to Elon Musk’s desire to ease the moderation policies on Twitter. He seemed to be specifically pleading for his own protection from conspiracy theorists who propagate claims regarding his bizarre continuous attempts to involve himself in health policy, with which this billionaire software designer has no expertise.

Bill Gates' conspiracy theory obsession

Bill Gates asked of Musk, “How does he feel about something that says ‘vaccines kill people’ or that ‘Bill Gates is tracking people?’”, which is telling. This reveals that Gates’ main concern about medical disinformation and malpractice is all about himself. For him, it is not about whether members of the public have access to the accurate and diverse sources of information they deserve or their understanding of science is boosted. He has shown no interest in that issue.

On Saturday, a very unfavourable hashtag was trending on Twitter about Bill Gates.

As an entrepreneur, Bill Gates should take note. Now, as always, he is at the mercy of consumers. Demanding harsh control over what opinions those consumers can express among themselves, when the entire capitalist model depends on them making choices, is folly for one whose career success was based on the consumer's whims.

Bill Gates' scientism

To be on the wrong side of millions of people is dangerous. To cultishly repeat that being on the side of science is best, in the face of millions of worried people, is a disservice to science. It creates the impression that the natural sciences have carved in stone unchanging answers fundamental questions, and have now developed some social role to compel society into obedience, which is hardly a service to scientific inquiry or the public perception of science. Scientists are not parental figures and nannies, and no credible scientist ever assigned himself such a role. They do not compel the public to do anything, as society only ever consented to give them the role of investigators and sources of counsel. Right now, scientists are aware of many things that compromise people's health, and they do nothing about them, because that is not their purpose, which is only to inform.

Bill Gates’ condescending attitude puts him at risk of the millions of unscientific people he feels it is safe to mock, and who may eventually take worse action than yelling at him. Conspiracy theorists may seem like a laughing matter to those who know better than them, but the ones doing the mocking should take a look at what conspiracy theorists have actually done throughout history. It is not a pretty thing, to be in their sights.

Conspiracy theories are no laughing matter

Conspiracy theories are not new, or an internet phenomenon. Before the internet, they were conveyed in pamphlets. Historically, they are linked to eventual justifications for massacres and the rise of extreme ideologies, as most genocides and civil wars feature them as a key part in the formation of the prerequisite extreme views. They are possibly the single most radicalising phenomenon, not just in modern extremism but in history's most extreme revolutionary violence and massacres. As such, the current approach of denigrating conspiracy theorists and dismissing them as incompetent, even as they come to encompass half the population in places like the United States, presents a grave danger. 

Most people would be very worried for their safety if they were accused of the diabolical things that Bill Gates is being accused of. However, this man seems to expect so little initiative from the people who accuse him of murder, that he is completely unconcerned.

Gates' persistent mockery of the fears of a growing number of people across the world, and continued involvement in health policy despite unnerving so many people, actually suggests he has a personality that is bizarre and maybe sociopathic (unable to empathise with or understand the fear he creates). This is a factor that likely only increases many people’s discomfort with him. Many people likely sense stench about him, and it is why they buy into paranoid claims about him.

If conspiracy theorists are mistaken, Bill Gates' best way of correcting the problem is still to withdraw from all his involvement or interest in health policy, as a way to reassure people, and apologise for the fears he created. This would actually do more to encourage vaccines than all his previous involvement in promoting them to date.

How Bill Gates can help

Bill Gates’ story is one of success with consumers. He should take note of his benefactors, and be aware that upsetting them and provoking them can have consequences just as as significant for his life as creating products for them.

Eventually, the crowds must be placated rather than dismissed, even if it means diminishing the authority of capable meritocrats and their role in society. Otherwise, uncontrollable and murderous crowds are inevitable.

Part of the role of leaders is to actually have the trust of society. If half the population really begins to believe Bill Gates is a murderer and a monster, this means that his most stabilising role in society is actually to keep his mouth shut and fade from public view, as would suit public safety and his own safety.

Read More »

Suspicions about ‘Billionaire elites’ don't make sense

One must always be cautious of simplistic claims and laymen’s theories about the source of destructive governance and the loss of collective prosperity. Such are the most common claims of agitators, but they often have no validity when assessed rationally.

The notion of an exclusive club of rich people, the billionaires, deciding our fate, is one such kind of mistaken simplistic theory. It proposes a link between people’s net worth and their attraction to Malthusian or dystopian visions of the world, which are then pursued to the detriment of the masses.

Great Reset as the work of the rich?

Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom (of fame for Megaupload and later the cloud service Mega) was recently tweeting about the ‘Great Reset’, positing that the ‘elite’ want to shield themselves from the shocks of a plan they have to preserve their own wealth at our expense.

The only problem with this idea is that Kim Dotcom’s own 10-million-dollar net worth is higher than Great Reset mastermind Klaus Schwab’s rumoured 1-million-dollar net worth. Such a discrepancy would appear  to throw any kind of analysis suggesting a Malthusian billionaire elite, planning mass serfdom of the people through the Great Reset, into doubt.

In addition, other perceived heroes of the masses against a Great Reset-pushing elite include Donald Trump and Elon Musk, net worth 2 billion dollars and 290 billion dollars respectively.

Such numbers are arrived at simply by searching on the internet. They are not hidden.

Billionaire power

It is striking that the people positing the sinister plans of the billionaires often rally behind individual millionaires and billionaires as their heroes, while many of their adversaries pushing such things as the Great Reset possess poultry sums of money that are expected simply of random politicians and economists.

What is happening is that many people are convinced that power is just a direct extension of money. They succumb to the simplistic assumption that whoever has the gold makes the rules. However, it is better to say that whoever has the power makes the rules, and power derives often from knowledge rather than wealth. Furthermore, those who have power gain wealth, whereas those with pre-existing wealth often just lose it.

There is indeed an elite responsible for policy in Western countries, which looks upon the masses with scorn and condescension, but any assertion that they are a group of super-rich property owners or royals misses the real point.

Whatever the threat to the welfare of the public from the halls of power may be, it is not necessarily the work of the rich, and not even the malign doings of the royal family of Saudi Arabia or the United Kingdom. Many agitators simply point to those with more wealth or property than us as a way of getting an emotional response from their audience, based on envy.

In reality, a rich person or celebrity is just as likely to sense something wrong with the world as a poor person, and be just as powerless to act. On the other hand, a poor person may indeed have the knowledge from which to derive power, and so be able to act.

Then who are the 'elite'?

Meritocrats.

Our politics and our perceptions are shaped not by a moneyed elite, but rather by a self-appointed ‘power elite’ that consists of people who merely curried favour enough to pass through the revolving doors of think tanks, mainstream media and the government, allowing them to create ideas (think tanks), manufacture consent for them (media), and implement them (government). At no point in this process does this powered elite have any empathy with the public, merely viewing them as a hurdle to the implementation of their own vision. Such individuals will repeatedly hold offices to which they are appointed and that do not require a democratic election (National Security Adviser in the United States, for example). While no single such post is necessarily powerful, together these unelected posts allow a narrow group of people cut from the same statist ideological cloth to continuously guide the nation state on a course opposite to the wishes of the people, regardless of electoral outcomes. It is this meritocratic group spanning think tanks, government agencies, and media conglomerates, that all think alike in their will to subvert democracy, to compel the regime against the wishes of the people.

One thing to bear in mind is that what is being described here is not a flaw of any kind of system that can ever be corrected by the law, nor is the diminishing of democracy by the hands of meritocrats necessarily a bad thing. It may well be that this professional governing corps really does produce the best outcomes for a nation, whereas the people are foolish. The meritocrats are simply an element that can be either ripe or rotten within any organisation, and there is a good case that this element has become fully rotten in Western democracies, having become obsessed only with its own security, fearing the nation as a hostile mob to be monitored and suppressed.

The elite are not especially rich, but merely favoured. Many of them could be nice people, in the manner of a prince, but amenable only to those they know or meet, and that is an exceedingly narrow group. This persistence of the same narrow group of meritocrats for too long can become inimical to any authentic idea of democracy or republic, which are reduced to lies.

Read More »

Why refuse nuclear energy in a climate emergency?

Despite a recent U-turn, Germany's Green Party long opposed nuclear energy, holding this view even though nuclear power plants do not contribute to climate change. In the UK, the Scottish National Party (SNP) continues to reject nuclear energy.

There is a climate emergency, we are told. That means that we must radically change course immediately, or it will be too late.

Competing with other nations is hard to balance with saving the climate

The creation of an absolutely eco-friendly future, living fully in adherence to the philosophy of the environmentalists, is not something we actually have time for if we are in an emergency due to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming specifically. The idea of a grand new war of waste and economic competition by Western regimes and their ideological structures, against Russia and China, is not compatible with addressing a climate emergency.

In 2018, the United Nations was saying we have only until 2030 to avert an actual climate disaster (an event that will put serious strain on our countries, such as unprecedented refugees and threatening food shortages). The idea that the West can focus on eliminating energy dependence on Russia and economic reliance on China (that means accommodating an explosion of dirty industry and energy to accomplish such goals and waging conflicts throughout the world), and at the same time avert a climate disaster, is folly. Food shortages alone will be completely unmanageable, when added to the potential loss of a third of the world's wheat supply due to conflict in Ukraine.

If the West is going green, it is not going to defeat Russia or China in time to make the switch. At this point, hegemony really is incompatible with survival. Once a climate disaster really starts to have serious consequences, it is clear where all the world's refugees will be heading (the European Union and the United States). It would be game over for the Western side in this "Cold War" at that moment, as the West will be swamped by these refugees and unable to even feed them, perhaps being forced to beg for food aid from those we labelled as enemies.

Is it a lie?

Many reading the above would probably like to interject by saying that the barrage of contradicting statements (there is this climate emergency, yet we must wage this war of waste, and yet also we can scrap nuclear power stations even though they are not adding to that emergency and in fact mitigate it), means a major lie is being told somewhere. Many conspiracy theorists will probably reject the idea that there is a climate emergency at all, because of so many contradictions.

The consensus of the world's governments and the international panels of experts compels us to accept the reality of a climate emergency, whereas only a few would have us adopt declarations that conflict with this reality. Clearly, political partisans are interfering with a united response to the emergency, dependent as they are on having something to debate about.

The position of the German Greens up until their U-turn was absurd. They agreed with the idea of a climate emergency, yet they wanted to sabotage the response to it by trying to hobble our efforts to stop it, by condemning nuclear energy. They likely agree that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is a dirty and polluting process, yet they want to buy the resulting American LNG so that they can avoid gas supplies from Russia. So, what looks like a commitment to save the Earth quickly crumbles in the halls of power, replaced with familiar and ugly realpolitik.

Is the SNP's continued rejection of nuclear energy in the UK more acceptable than some, because the SNP desires independence for Scotland and Scotland likely has enough energy sources to support its small population without any nuclear plants? Yes, but someone who is truly concerned about a global warming emergency, believing we only have eight years left to solve it, would likely still want to generate nuclear energy and sell it to their neighbours, to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

Read More »

Medical disinformation can be akin to murder

With all kinds of disinformation circulating on social media since the start of the pandemic, it is important that people do not believe reposting it is devoid of consequences. In fact, it is very much like killing people.

I will start by saying that I do not oppose alternative medicine or even faith-healing, provided that the patient also has access to every form of conventional and science-based medicine too. I also believe in freedom to choose to refuse a medical treatment, but I do not necessarily believe in freedom to misinform, and that is the subject here.

Delay and doubt can be fatal

Distrust in the medical authorities leads to delays, and can be fatal. Without going into specifics, I will say that this has affected my own life. In that case, there was hesitancy by certain parents at letting doctors operate on a child, due to the parents succumbing to some disinformation and paranoia about medical safety. It almost caused a child to die, and the delay might have led to permanent damage.

The opponents of medical authority are absurd because we literally have no alternative other than the medical services to turn to for help in case of illness or injury. Even these idiots will in fact limp to the same hospitals they would have condemned, if they are injured.

Even if medical science is absolutely ineffective, it is probably still your only hope. To try to threaten medical workers and researchers and accuse them of malicious intent literally is the same as inciting people to leave others to die and delay or prevent treatment that is urgently needed.

We know, on the authority of everyone, the vaccines are safe

In the case of vaccines, I cannot analyse them from a medical standpoint as I know nothing of medicine. However, I do know International Relations (IR) quite well and can confirm the vaccines are safe from my own disciplinary background.

We have almost every responsible international actor on the face of the Earth - even the Taliban - accepting that the coronavirus is dangerous and pleading for vaccines to help combat it. Donald Trump is another example, much to the dismay of some of his fringe anti-vaccine supporters who can't accept facts.

If people so diverse all agree that vaccines are necessary, and the only thing they have in common is that they were or are in positions of power and responsibility and had access to the best information, a rational person will concede that taking the vaccines is the best-informed choice. Similarly, all the world's scientific bodies devoted to studying viruses attest to the existence of the virus and the effectiveness of vaccines in combating it. The only people asserting the contrary (anti-vaxxers) are fringe individuals and groups that are tasked with giving no essential aid or counsel to anyone, and are accountable to no-one for whether their information is right or wrong. The latter point is best illustrated by the fact anti-vaxxers can't even agree with each other on what the problem is (e.g. whether the germ theory of disease is even valid, or if viruses exist), other than that they all hate the vaccines and those administering them. In contrast, the world's governments all agree about vaccines, even if they have severe disagreements on almost every other issue.

Governments could lose patience with disinformation

The more medical disinformation complicates the work of healthcare authorities, the more likely it will eventually be eliminated by government intervention (currently only very mild), possibly with consequences for all online publishing freedom. People spreading false medical advice or paranoia are therefore hindering, not improving, the work of any political opposition and dissidents.

Because harmful people exploited the ease of achieving online influence, we are likely to see a significant decrease in the ease of any and all dissidents achieving such influence in future, if the decrease has not happened already. The well may have been irreversibly poisoned by medical pseudoscience and we may be faced with the ever-declining reach of alternative media, as the state acts legitimately against it to protect public health.

Health services such as the UK's National Health Service (NHS) should not be fair game for criticism by those whose interests are solely political and not medical, especially if these medically unqualified dissidents are going to try to provide uncertified and illegal medical advice. In fact, there should be dire consequences for such interlopers who try to complicate the ability of medical workers to provide accurate information to potential patients.

It is the job of the state to safeguard the population's health, even if it means overriding the freedom of individuals the state deems to be a significant threat to the health of the population. The state has significant power over life and death, and it ought only to tolerate freedom insofar as it contributes to the health and wellbeing of the population.

Liberty misunderstood

Freedom for freedom's sake is absolutely unacceptable. If people are making use of their freedoms to harm others and cause injury and death, their freedoms should be curtailed through any means including completely pulling the plug on something like the internet and denying all press freedom. Hopefully, such a step will only be very rarely needed, but it may be necessary to save the lives of the afflicted and the children whose parents succumbed to fatal irrationality.

Rampant anti-authority sentiment of the American variety is based on misreading and misunderstanding the nature of liberty. What is advocated in this post may seem like extreme statism, and be opposed by anti-statists, but they should remember that what the proponents of unlimited liberty advocate is even more extreme punishment for medical quacks. In a stateless society, medical quacks who caused the death of a child or relative would be at risk of not just being silenced by the restrained authorities, but being killed under the slow tortures of an unrestrained angry mob.

That's right. The peddlers of medical disinformation should, rather than accusing any authority of suppressing freedom, thank those same authorities for preventing the mob from seeking justice against them for the harm they do. If you have a hand in killing someone's child because you were blabbering paranoid and ignorant thoughts about doctors in a published form online and it created hesitancy among readers, think not of your curtailed freedom and just thank the state that you don't have some parent's hands around your neck.

Liberty, which is solely an exercise of the state or the incumbent power's restraint and generosity rather than an inalienable right of man, is fatal when misunderstood to mean the right to cause rampant harm without repercussions. Liberty is good only insofar as it forms part of the life and flourishing of the public, and those who jeopardise either of those things deserve none.

Read More »