PSA: Be Careful on Telegram
eugyppius | December 15, 2021
Assume that most large chat groups are infiltrated by security services and that everything you say there is being surveilled by the police.
For a few weeks, regime-friendly press outlets in Germany, like the Süddeutsche Zeitung, have been ringing the alarm about Telegram as a “lawless space” that poses a “danger to society.” Apparently it is a den of hate speech and incitement. This coordinated hyperventilation comes with demands that the new German government regulate Telegram as a social media application, which would require its administrators to report illegal content to authorities. Right now German law regards Telegram as a messenger app and thus exempts it from some of these rules.
In perfect tandem with this false press hysteria, police have raided the apartments of a Telegram chat group in Dresden. Allegedly, members of the chat, in the context of discussions about vaccine mandates, contemplated assassinating Michael Kretschmer, the CDU minister president of Saxony. Whenever police actions and press messaging campaigns align this perfectly, you should presume it is the work of agents provocateurs. In all likelihood, German security services are infiltrating Telegram chat groups, and putting about violent rhetoric in the interests of creating arrests and headlines to reinforce the press narrative.
I understand most of my readers aren’t in Germany, but as a back-up to Twitter I have my own Telegram channel, so I just want to advise everyone that caution is extremely important here. If you’re in a chat and anyone proposes violence, the chances that this is a bad actor are high, and you should distance yourself from these statements immediately. “I disavow all political violence and you should too” is the line I always use. Protect yourself.
Mainstream media moves against “misinformation” in email
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 14, 2021
The boundary corporate media want to establish for what they think should be policed and censored as political “misinformation” keeps expanding.
The new “frontier” that seems to be shaping up, if narratives pushed by the likes of the New York Times are to be taken into account, are people’s email communications.
Unlike the politicians’ speech on public platforms like social media and TV broadcasters, that is tightly controlled and often censored by various fact-checkers hired by Big Tech, the medium of email remains elusive, the newspaper laments, even though it is a powerful way to reach constituents.
Mentioning several examples of fund-raising emails that the NYT said contained false information regarding benefits enjoyed by illegal migrants, and Medicare, abortion, etc., the article’s author goes on to qualify email as a tool “teeming” with misinformation.
The newspaper is trying to highlight email communication as a problem ahead of the 2022 mid-term election, and the “methodology” used was to sign up for mailing lists from 390 members of Congress seeking reelection, and then decide which ones were sending out “unfounded claims.”
After reviewing the emails sent from 390 campaign lists since August, the NYT said it discovered that 15% percent of messages coming from Republicans and only 2% of those authored by Democrats contained misinformation.
And more sinister undertones have also allegedly been detected, since “multiple” Republicans are accused of doing this in an organized manner, by repeating the same claims, while Democrats “rarely” do that.
Democrats are also painted as far more cooperative, with a spokesperson for one campaign saying they had made “honest mistakes” and would be more careful in the future – while several Republican candidates cited in the article ignored NYT’s requests for comment.
Unavoidably, President Trump is blamed for the “ubiquity” of misinformation among Republicans. The fact that political messages can freely and in a cost-effective way reach an audience despite the massive censorship efforts and deplatforming on big social media platforms is seen as particularly concerning.
However, no suggestion is made on what to do about this “problem” and how to make sure fact-checkers can gain access to emails as well.
Facebook tech guru questions fight against ‘misinformation’
RT | December 13, 2021
Attempts to turn social media into an exclusive club where only elites have a right to speak in the name of rooting out dangerous misinformation are fundamentally wrong, a senior Meta official said.
Andrew Bosworth, who leads technological research at Meta and is set to become the tech giant’s CTO next year, pushed back against critics who accuse social media like Facebook of harming society by failing to police speech on their platforms.
“If your democracy can’t tolerate the speech of people, I’m not sure what kind of democracy it is,” he said in an interview with ‘Axios on HBO’, which was previewed on Sunday. He was responding to a statement by host Ina Fried that some people think tools like Facebook should not exist at all because they are “fundamentally unsafe”.
Bosworth rejected the notion that the democratization of public speech brought by the advance of social media should be reversed due to the threat of misinformation.
I do believe in giving people more access to information and more access to connect with one another, and not reserving those tools to some small number of elite people.
US-based social media, Facebook in particular, have been put under increased pressure to increasingly police their platforms so that they are not used by ‘malicious’ actors. The initial push came after the 2016 election based on the claim that Russia used memes to interfere with the political process. More recently, the justification for censorship was that misinformation about Covid-19 and health was running rampant online.
Bosworth reiterated his discomfort over attempts to turn Facebook into an arbiter of what speech should be considered malicious and banned. Even using third-party checkers to do the job is far from a perfect solution, he said.
Our ability to know what is misinformation is itself in question, and I think reasonably so.
“I am very uncomfortable with the idea that we possess fundamental rightness even in our most scientific centers of study to exercise that kind of power on a citizen, another human, and what they want to say, and who they want to listen to,” he said.
Journalist Andy Ngô is sued for sharing riot videos on Twitter
The photographers claim it caused them “harassment.”Ngô’s lawyer says the lawsuit is “frivolous.”
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 11, 2021
Two photographers from Portland Oregon have filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against journalist and author Andy Ngô. The photographers claim that Ngô shared their videos of protests in Portland on his Twitter account.
Andy Ngô has amassed a following in conservative circles for documenting riots and other events from BLM supporters, Antifa, and other groups.
The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court of Portland. It cites two videos taken by the plaintiffs, Melissa Lewis and Grace Morgan, during protests in Portland. The plaintiffs want the court to order Ngô to stop sharing their videos and for financial compensation.
The suit claims that Ngô “has made a practice of illegally copying and uploading plaintiffs’ videos onto his own Twitter account.”
The suit also notes that Ngô is popular in “right-wing” circles, and the photographers are “left-wing.” As a result, they allege they are “are deluged with harassing comments” when their videos are shared.
“This has resulted in instances where (Morgan and Lewis) were physically attacked by (Ngô’s) followers,” the suit adds.
The lawyer representing Ngô, Harmeet K Dhillon, claimed that Ngô did not violate Twitter’s rules and described the lawsuit as “frivolous.”
“The plaintiffs shared their videos publicly on Twitter, a platform designed for exactly their purpose, and Mr. Ngô commented on this publicly posted content using Twitter platform tools, not somehow surreptitiously downloading and uploading the clips as the plaintiffs falsely claim,” Dhillon said in a statement.
The complaint appears to be somewhat contradictory, in that it expresses that using a standard Twitter feature to share videos in a way that credits the original tweeter is causing them harassment but also that sharing their videos themselves is copyright infringement.
“Being an effective journalist means people will try to silence you. I was beaten several times by antifa. Now two antifa videographers in Portland filed a lawsuit against me. Why? Because I retweeted them on Twitter,” Ngô commented, showing screenshots of times he used Twitter’s sharing features to share the videos.
Twitter bans popular account highlighting Nancy Pelosi stock trades, @NancyTracker
Twitter purges another account that scrutinizes powerful figures
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2021
Twitter has booted @NancyTracker, a popular account that documented Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades and drew attention to the millions of dollars she and her husband have generated through trading.
The account had over 200,000 followers when it was banned. Some of its most popular tweets highlighted that Pelosi’s role as a government official gives her access to “insider information” and noted that Pelosi’s returns have significantly outpaced both the market and some of the world’s best investors.
@NancyTracker was created by The Free Press Report which also created the largest Ghislaine Maxwell trial tracker account, @TrackerTrial.
Twitter suspended both accounts earlier today and claimed that The Free Press Foundation had broken its rules against “platform manipulation and spam.” It also referenced rules that prohibit artificially amplifying or suppressing information.
However, The Free Press Foundation pushed back against Twitter by saying that all of the @TrackerTrial’s engagement was “organic” and that “there was not outside amplification.”
In October, less than two months before the accounts were suspended, @NancyTracker said it had received “a cease and desist order from a lawyer representing someone high up in the [Political] office.”
“I will not name names. And I will also not cease or desist,” @NancyTracker added at the time.
The Free Press Report is urging fans of the @NancyTracker account to follow it on free speech social network Gab and has already built an audience of tens of thousands of followers on the platform.
Filmmaker Daniel Bostic described the censorship of the @NancyTracker account as a “full on authoritarian crackdown just days after Dorsey leaves.”
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down on November 29 and was replaced by Parag Agrawal. Since being appointed CEO, Agrawal has faced scrutiny for his past comments that Twitter’s role is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and that he wished Twitter had censored some content sooner.
Investor and Bitcoin commentator Anthony Pompliano also suggested that the censorship was linked to Agrawal by highlighting that the accounts had been suspended and tweeting: “New Twitter CEO seems to be having a busy week.”
The censorship of these popular accounts is the latest in a wave of Twitter censorship that has occurred since Agrawal took the reigns. A link to the American Heart Association website was recently flagged as “unsafe” and numerous accounts have been suspended after Twitter announced new rules that ban the sharing of photos or videos of people without their permission.
Covid has been horrible for me. Do I regret being unjabbed? Not for a second!
By Julia | TCW Defending Freedom | December 9, 2021
COMPARED with Australia’s other police-run fiefdoms, South Australia has generally stayed under the Covid madness radar. No public police thuggery and rubber bullets in the back, no beating up grandmothers and pregnant women, no Daniel Andrews, no dictatorial legislation, no forced Covid camps, no rounding up of Aboriginal community members (so far). There has been Covid farce, however – a mind-boggling absence of perspective and proportionality reflective of the manic, embedded zero-Covid ideology experienced in other Australasian jurisdictions.
First, there was the pizza outbreak in November 2020. After a man with Covid-19 lied about his link to an Adelaide pizza parlour, the whole State entered a lockdown slated for six days which ended abruptly after three, due to lack of interest from the virus.
Then there was the ‘don’t touch the football’ affair, when Australian Rules fans were warned to duck if the ball came towards the crowd.
The latest is the case of a South Australian Senator, Alex Antic, a vigorous opponent of vaccine mandates and lockdowns, who was carted off to quarantine in a ‘medi-hotel’ after returning from Parliament in Canberra. (Antic is a conservative Liberal in a State run by so-called ‘moderates’ aka Leftists who should be in another party.)
This is in the State that has experienced four Covid deaths. Four. And 952 ‘cases’. South Australia has no crisis whatsoever, certainly none that can justify the establishment of a mini-police state. But the State is run not by a Premier but by an unelected police commissioner and an unelected chief health officer.
Which brings us to the persecution of Dr Bruce Paix, a doctor of 32 years in South Australia who is now unemployed due to ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Dr Paix has been issuing exemptions for mask/vaccines and is a staunch critic of the Covid vaccine and lockdowns. He contacted a member of Parliament, who happens to be South Australia’s acting attorney general, about matters Covid. This politician, one Josh Teague, or someone in his office, it would seem, notified the police. As a result Dr Paix was visited by officers and told that he should stop contacting the MP to voice concerns about Covid management policies.
He was advised to ‘tone down his emails’ and ‘be careful what he writes’, as his communications were ‘drawing attention to him’. Soft, friendly police power. In reality, an iron fist in a velvet glove.
Dr Paix is responsible for a string of Covid crimes – he is unvaxxed, he strays off message, he speaks out, and, worst of all, he is willing to grant exemptions from the jab. His offence in this case seems to have been his act of approaching his elected representative to seek a meeting to protest against a government policy, and his act of letter writing.
Seven officials raided the surgery of another such dissenting doctor, Mark Hobart, in Melbourne last month and seized confidential patient files, an appointment book, and other documents after he refused to hand them over. Inevitably, Hobart is described as ‘controversial’, such is the embedded state of Covid ideology across the legacy media.
Such doctors are quickly swooped on and threatened with being de-registered. The Victorian state government even changed the rules about exemptions to close off what it sees as ‘loopholes’. Patients were apparently ‘doctor shopping’ to find a practitioner who would give them a medical exemption from the vaccine.
A spokesman for the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and the Medical Board of Australia has made their message clear: that vaccination is a non-negotiable part of the public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic and that advising against it ‘undermines the national immunisation campaign’.
They said the consequences for doctors of not complying would include having their registrations suspended.
The Australian Covid State has relied massively on third party collaboration for maintaining fear and hysteria and for enforcing Covid mandates. The corporate media and the churches are but two of the most egregious examples. Arguably the role of the medical establishment and behaviour of supine, self-regarding doctors is way more appalling than that of all the other ‘just-following-orders’ functionaries of Covid totalitarianism. They are guilty of
· Bullying patients to get the jab, whatever their medical circumstances;
· Collaborating with government in refusing exemptions to patients who palpably deserve them;
· Propagating lies about Covid and about those who question the official Covid narrative;
· Not speaking up and out against ‘medical tyranny’ in Australia;
· Getting into bed with Big Pharma;
· Making a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath, ‘first, do no harm’ by cheering on the vaccination of healthy youth, some of whom they know will die from the vaccines.
Dr Bruce Paix and Dr Mark Hobart have found themselves at the sharp end of the medical wars over Covid. They are enemies of the Covid State, hunted down like the Aborigines of the past – and under Covid Law are once again.
YouTube reveals mass problem of false copyright claims
Millions of videos falsely flagged
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 7, 2021
YouTube has published its latest transparency report – this being the first detailing the way the giant deals with copyright claims.
The big takeaway is that the copyright claims system is abused on a mass scale, as many observers believe it to be – 2.2 million videos have been targeted with fraudulent, or “incorrect” as YouTube put it, claims in the first half of this year alone, the report reveals.
Still, this is only a small fraction – under 1 percent – of overall copyright claims filed from January to June 2021, which amounted to a whopping 729 million. And 99 percent of those came from the automated and controversial Content ID system.
When creators decided to contest these bogus claims, their appeals were accepted in 60 percent of cases, YouTube claims, interpreting this number to mean that its copyright enforcement and appeals system represents “real recourse” and brushing off the long-standing, serious shortcomings as “no system being perfect.”
But creators who lose income thanks to false copyright strikes – when their content is blocked, muted, or stripped of ad revenue – are unlikely to be appeased by YouTube admitting to its faults and providing a glimpse into the numbers with the first of its kind copyright transparency report.
Despite being a massive platform and a financial juggernaut, YouTube is still failing to meet the goal set by CEO Susan Wojcicki all the way back in 2019, when she said the Google company was “exploring” how it might find “the right balance” between creators and copyright holders.
In the report, YouTube says that they have worked hard to assist the latter with even better tools to protect what they claimed as copyrighted content, while creators are being given tools and resources to help them “manage” their content.
YouTube also explains that there are three avenues they provide to copyright owners: the webform, which can be used by anyone and rarely results in takedown requests; the Copyright Match Tool available to more than 2 million channels hunting down reposted content; and finally, what YouTube calls its “award-winning” Content ID, which is responsible for 99% of all takedown requests – 722 million in the first six months of this year.
Content ID is geared towards serving “the most complicated rights management environments, like movie studios and music labels,” said YouTube.
Twitter bans largest Ghislaine Maxwell trial tracker account, @TrackerTrial
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2021
@TrackerTrial, an account with over 525,000 followers that provided regular updates on the Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking trial, has been banned from Twitter, just 10 days after the trial began.
The high-profile trial of Maxwell, who is accused of facilitating the sexual exploitation of girls for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, isn’t being broadcast so people have turned to social media to get updates on the trial. Twitter’s focus on real-time updates and breaking news has resulted in it being the preferred platform for many independent accounts that are covering the trial.
Twitter claimed that the @TrackerTrial account had violated its rules against “platform manipulation and spam” and cited its rules around artificially amplifying or suppressing information when banning the account.
“This is the first censorship that the account has experienced,” The Free Press Report told Reclaim The Net. “No warnings or anything. I woke up this morning and my account was gone.”
However, the account’s creator, pushed back against Twitter’s claims and said: “The account got insane engagement, which by the way, was all organic. There was not outside amplification.”
“The people wanted to hear the truth about the Ghislaine Maxwell, and Jeffrey Epstein trial and the engagement numbers showed that,” The Free Press Report added. “There were hundreds of millions in impressions and an account that went from zero to over 525,000 followers in a couple of weeks. All we did was report information from the trial that the mainstream media was failing to do.”
The Free Press Report has appealed the suspension and has vowed to continue reporting on the trial via its Substack. It has also encouraged people to follow its Gab account for “a more informal route of communication.”
Additionally, The Free Press Report warned about the power of Big Tech and how it can use its stranglehold over news distribution to determine which news stories are promoted and which news stories are suppressed.
“Big tech has gotten too powerful, and they can silence us anytime they want,” The Free Press Report wrote. “Local blogs and websites are suppressed by big tech algorithms. If you write one thing out of line Google can institute a site-wide ban, making sure you never show up in search algorithms again. Facebook restricts what is posted on their website. Twitter suppresses any outside links, to keep users on their own site. The year is 2021 and big brother is watching.”
This isn’t the first time Big Tech has censored content related to Maxwell and Epstein with Facebook and YouTube censoring and “fact-checking” commentary and memes on Epstein’s 2019 suicide. A roast of Epstein and Maxwell was also removed from Facebook for violating the platform’s rules around “harassment and bullying.”
Twitter has been approached for comment.
Media are gagging challenges to the Government’s Covid narrative
By Mark Sharman | TCW Defending Freedom | December 8, 2021
In his skyscraper office high above New York’s Sixth Avenue, Roger Ailes, then boss of the Right-leaning Fox News, was justifying his channel’s slogan, ‘Fair and Balanced.’
It was a well-rehearsed line. The rest of the US media, he said, were the liberal Left. ‘So we balance it – and that’s fair.’
Later, an underling added that in America you chose the channel that best fuelled your own views. ‘It just depends on how you take your political medicine.’
On the flight home, I thought how fortunate we were in the UK, with a remit of impartiality in broadcasting; a duty to report fairly and evenly. Less than two decades later, I wonder what’s happened to those intrinsic values.
In all my years around newsrooms, decent journalists have seen it as their right and obligation to seek out the truth, to scrutinise and determine the facts. But on Covid-19, mainstream news outlets have seemingly kow-towed to the Government line, following the ‘official’ science.
Worse, opposing views have been ignored, blocked or summarily dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’ or ‘misinformation.’ This is not honest journalism as I know it, especially at a time when the Government has extra powers of control over the population. I was taught early that the more someone pushed for or against a story, the more it needed investigating. So what changed?
It’s bad enough that Big Tech acts as the world’s censor, suspending or cancelling any accounts that carry unpalatable comments about the virus or the vaccines. But the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom has also muscled in.
The authority instructed broadcasters to be alert to ‘health claims related to the virus which may be harmful; medical advice which may be harmful; accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy relating to it’.
When did it become the regulator’s job to determine debate on Government policy? In effect it discourages investigation of alternative views. And who decides what is accurate or misinformation anyway?
Some media outlets have their own ‘fact checkers,’ but I’m not overly encouraged that BBC News has a Specialist Disinformation Reporter (the title hardly suggests impartiality) or that Sky’s Digital and Forensics team compiled an article that begins: ‘Covid-19 conspiracy groups who have attempted to undermine efforts to bring the pandemic under control are increasingly sharing climate change misinformation.’
The terms prosecutor, judge and jury spring to mind – and try as I might, I couldn’t find any hard evidence that so-called ‘theories’ were bunkum. They weren’t proven either, but that’s not the point.
Maybe the root can be found in Event 201, a simulated global coronavirus pandemic exercise organised by the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security, in October 2019.
Advice to world governments included ‘flood the media with fast, accurate and consistent information’ (some would say propaganda), while media companies, for their part, ‘should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritised and that false messages are suppressed, including through the use of technology’.
We’ve certainly witnessed less-than-overt Government behaviour.
In her best-selling book A State of Fear, Laura Dodsworth charts how proven psychological techniques influenced the Government in frightening and intimidating the population, ‘nudging’ us to comply over Covid. And how mainstream media acted as cheerleaders in weaponising that fear.
It should make uncomfortable reading for any news executive.
Our Government is supposed to serve us, not use fear tactics to bring us to heel. As an industry, we should challenge the narrative much more rigorously, starting with the numbers. At least the BBC carries the small print, that deaths are from any cause within 28 days of positive test. However, these quickly become Covid deaths on many daily score charts. It’s inaccurate reporting. Or should I call it misinformation? Or again, propaganda?
Now the shame-and-blame game has shifted to the unvaccinated (I prefer vaccine-free), those ‘radical anti-vaxxers … spreading fake news’ according to Austria’s Chancellor as he introduced compulsory vaccination.
When did it become acceptable to persecute people who stand up for that most basic of human rights, that of their own body autonomy?
Why are we not outraged that our neighbours in the Netherlands, ordinary citizens, are shot by their own police? Or that Australians are beaten and shot by rubber bullets, or incarcerated in what has become a police state?
Are we ready to accept such a reaction on the streets of London, Birmingham or Sheffield? What angle would the MSM take, police violence or mob rule? Which way would the scales dip?
A recent protest, not widely reported, saw thousands of people marching through London; students, medics, teachers and ex-servicemen, of all ages and races, people with genuine concerns for their children and their democratic freedoms.
They seek the truth and nothing but the truth about the virus and, particularly, the safety of the vaccines. And they have deep convictions that the truth is not forthcoming from the Government or from broadcasters and newspapers.
And that’s the point. If the media continue to stifle alternative views that flourish on various social sites, and continue to follow the censorial state narrative instead of encouraging healthy open debate, they are fuelling the very ‘conspiracies’ they seek to dismiss.
TV show deletes poll after 89% oppose mandatory vaccination
RT | December 8, 2021
ITV breakfast television show ‘Good Morning Britain’ received backlash on social media after deleting a poll which showed a vast majority of respondents opposed mandatory Covid-19 vaccination.
The poll, which asked viewers whether it was “time to make vaccines mandatory” in response to the spread of the Covid-19 Omicron variant, was posted to Twitter on Tuesday and soon received more than 42,000 votes.
A whopping 89% of those who voted opposed any scheme to make vaccination mandatory, with just 11% in favour.
After the poll went viral, however, social media users noticed that it had been deleted by the Good Morning Britain Twitter account and critics accused the program of trying to cover up the public consensus.
“Why did you delete this poll, is it because you were asked? Or because it shows the people don’t support this sh*t, this tyrannical future your colleagues seem to want. We see you,” reacted one critic, while another suggested, “Guess that wasn’t the answer they were looking for.”
Good Morning Britain – which was hosted by controversial commentator Piers Morgan before his departure in March – did not explain why it removed the poll.
New Zealand Prime Minister: “There’s Not Going to be an End Point to this Vaccination Program”
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | December 7, 2021
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has candidly revealed that “there’s not going to be an end point to this vaccination program.”
Yes, really.
“So long as there’s people who are eligible who haven’t been vaccinated, we’ve got work to do,” said Ardern.
“Do you know, I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied so long as there’s someone who is eligible and hasn’t been (vaccinated),” she added.
“There’s not going to be an end point to this vaccination program,” the Prime Minister revealed, while calling on people who got jabbed six months ago to come back for another shot.
Ardern delivered the message while adopting her familiar passive-aggressive smiley mannerism, as seen many times before when she casually revealed the next step in COVID authoritarianism.
People who fail to continually get vaccinated will face the same fate as those who have continued to resist compulsory shots, they’ll be out of work, face social ostracization and God only knows what else in the future.
Enjoy your lifetime booster shots and enjoy not being able to travel, visit a restaurant or eventually go in a shop if you miss out on just one.
Remember, if you don’t take the Pfizer jab for life, you’ll never be “fully vaccinated”.
It truly never ends.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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