When Public Intellectuals Discriminate

Do the terms of the new Online Harms Bill apply? - Sharing some X/Twitter responses

I’ve been spending late night hours on Twitter aka X, responding to the uniformed name-calling of certain “science writers” - people who seem to see themselves as pro-bono purveyors of and warriors for conventional “public health wisdom.”

I am trying to teach these people to see the world OUTSIDE of the supposedly fact-checked propaganda-filled corporate media bubble I have been writing about in previous posts. Some readers of this Substack might wish to use the counterarguments I used when they run into similar name-calling based on uninformed remarks, so I will post some of my recent responses below.

To keep the dignity of the name-callers somewhat intact, I will not identify them by name here. But as I was preparing to work on this post, I listened to a critique of Canada’s Bill C-63 known as the Online Harms Bill and I got to wondering if our science writing Covid-vax-harm denying “public intellectuals” could be charged with promoting ONLINE HARM if Bill C-63 were to become law??? It seems VERY CLEAR that their promotion of the unnecessary, unproven, unsafe COVID-19 injections and their loud squawking against protocols that prevent and treat COVID-19 and COVID vax injuries have LED TO COUNTLESS HARMS!

Bill C-63

Instead of adding an existing bill that requires media platforms to report child porn being put onto their platforms by users, and that severely increases penalties for those using online platforms to lure minors for the purposes of sexual offences, our elected officials decided to combine those critical actions with deliberations on what should and should not be called hate speech. That is akin to setting up a climate bill that could simply outlaw the practices of geoengineering but that gets stuck in the weeds about how to define “misinformation” when it comes to human manipulation of the climate! - Delay real action by combining a never-ending debate on tangential terminology into the same bill. :-(

The “Online Harms Bill” seems to be about creating wording for a new category of hate crime….or as someone worded it: to “create a hate crime offence of committing an offence… that is motivated by hate based on certain factors”…. and to “define ‘hatred’ for the purposes of the new offence and the hate propaganda offences”

So I wonder whether henceforth comments such as those made recently by certain “social media influencers” fit the as-yet-to-be-defined understanding of “hatred”.

For context, these comments were in response to a poster advertising speakers at the Fifth International Crisis Summit which I introduced in my previous post.

Comments such as these:

• [here is a] List of speakers at Senator Johnson's anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist love-in. Sigh.

• What's the collective noun for a group of wackadoodles like this? A "bedlam"?

• It's hard to imagine a worse academic hell than having to sit through that conference crying tears of disinformation.

Harm?

Is there any harm in having public intellectuals (i.e. professors, or other academics) spout off insults in a public space? On the surface, we can say that they are entitled to their opinions, just as I can say that I think sour milk tastes bad. You might not agree.

But, when professors/academics aka “public intellectuals” with huge online followings vilify something (maybe even casually) and that vilification then gets picked up by journalists who honour the professors as experts in their field, and when that attitude then gets passed on down to policy makers and elected officials who then kill people via bad policies…does the accountability lie with the policy makers? the media? the academics themselves?

An additional danger of having one’s flippant and uninformed comments appear publicly is that the people who express them reveal their lack of informed knowledge - making it transparent to the taxpayers who essentially pay for the salaries of many “public intellectuals” that their money has been wasted!!

To find out if these examples of disparaging name-calling will be outlawed by our new Online Harms Act (if the current draft passes all the voting stages and is implemented) I need to keep reading:

Ah, comments made against individuals on the basis of “protected grounds of discrimination” would be addressed by this bill. Comments made re: people who fall outside of this list are are not presumed “protected”, I assume, will not.

https://www.chrc-ccdp.gc.ca/en/about-human-rights/what-discrimination

So we are NOT to discriminate against people for things they cannot change (race, skin colour, age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, genetic characteristics) BUT we are also NOT to discriminate people for what they chose to believe or express (religion, gender identity/expression) or for what they have done in the past, those convicted of offences after they have been pardoned.

What about NOT discriminating against someone who has gained knowledge that they are choosing to express for the public good, people who are ahead of the curve on the road to new and updated knowledge — the intrepid pathfinders who just happen to be quicker than the rest of us to get to the conclusions we will all inevitably arrive at? They could keep this knowledge to themselves, but they feel compelled, in the interests of humanity to express this knowledge publicly. We should all be aware of the Scientists Who Were Ahead of Their Time. As Jeff Sommers writes:

The history of scientific research is filled with smart people. Every time a smart person discovers something new or refines our understanding of some aspect of the universe we live in, it adds to our collective understanding of how things work. That allows us to do cool stuff like fly to the moon, or carry a link to all the world's knowledge and a supply of reaction videos in our pocket, or get a new heart after ours wears out.

Usually, that's a pretty smooth process. Scientists notice something, collect data about it, present a finding, and the rest of the scientific community decides if it's legit or not, then adds it to our pile of knowledge. Except sometimes scientists notice things that no one else notices, and the world thinks they're crazy. Or they notice something the Powers That Be don't want to be true, and so they get thrown in jail (or worse). Or they just can't get anyone to listen to them. When that happens, when someone is way ahead of the curve, it can take years or even centuries before their work is accepted and their reputations restored.

In other words, you might not think science has a lot of drama, but you'd be wrong. Here are the scientists who were ahead of their time.

Read more: https://www.grunge.com/408585/scientists-who-were-ahead-of-their-time/

Why not add “intelligence” to the list of “protected grounds for discrimination”?

Or “Conviction to express truths on ‘life & death’ matters for the greater good, despite the punishing censorship put in place by those who stand to gain from their suppression”? I for one would want to see a strong lobby for these types of additions to the Human Rights Code.

A Thought Experiment…

So we had some Canadian professors tweeting that fellow (former) professors (from other universities) along with various lay people now are not to be believed because of their knowledge status. What if, instead of commenting on the opinions of fellow academics, they had commented on the opinions of a group of people from a certain “protected group”?

Imagine statements like

(Asian/Black/Caucasian/ Indigenous etc. people; or xyz orientation people; or disabled people) are a “bedlam of whackadoodles, who only believe in stupid unproven conspiracy theories and who are a danger to society?” What about statements made by our own Prime Minister fuming against the “Unvaccinated” - Saying hateful things he could never have said against any other “protected group”?

Would X (Twitter) have been charged with any hate crime related offence for letting a comment to that effect stand?

And consider having “medical decision” be added to the list of protected grounds alongside of religious choices or choices re: gender expression! That should do away with every uninformed “anti-vax” name-calling and allow time and space for the actual scientific concerns re: adverse effects of toxic products that is missing but so desperately needed.

Politely Replying to those who are Mired in outdated or ideological Misinformation

regarding the speakers at the 5th International Crisis Summit held recently in Washington DC

• It's hard to imagine a worse academic hell than having to sit through that conference crying tears of disinformation.

I repeatedly link back to the previous post, where I included the list of the speakers at the portion of the ICS5 event involved with Senator Ron Johnson’s Round Table, inviting these people to listen for themselves before commenting.

• Wish an anti-vaxxer would show some humility.

• Worst conference ever.

  

  James Rogulski is following the day by day developments when it comes to an unelected world wide body (WHO) dropping its advisory role and single handedly declaring its jurisdiction over health/medical/emergency related powers WHILE MOST OF US ARE BEING DISTRACTED by other things. ALL OF US need to bookmark and follow the posts here nearly daily.

• If those were my colleagues or peers, I’d find a new profession

• World renowned experts? Really? Expert on what?

• I heard that Big Laundry changed the definition of pants to promote their experimental jean therapies.

https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca/witness/shawn-buckley/

• Funny how much overlap there is on the Venn diagram between anti-Ukraine, anti-vax, and anti-mask. Must be coincidence.

• What's the collective noun for a group of wackadoodles like this? A "bedlam"?

https://totalityofevidence.com/resources/experts/

• The crème de la crème. I also see the Croatian EU parliamentarian Sincic, who spread misinformation about vaccines even before the pandemic, and during the lockdown he called the anti-pandemic measures corona fascism.

(Note - I was citing from this source)

• Pls, read at least blue-highlighted part of this article I wrote a few yrs ago. (linking to https://naukagovori.ba/vaccination-and-freedom-of-choice/)

The author of this tweet was inviting me to look at this article written on February 28, 2022:

And had included this comment in blue:

Obviously a thoughtful person, someone willing to learn more, likely someone more deserving of the term “public intellectual” than some of the others on this thread… My response:

I provided links to this post called The Missing First Rungs of the Ladder in which I link back to basic science on the harms of the vax that many newly looking into the topic might have missed when they were first published.

And to Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs co-authored by Stephanie Seneff, Peter A. McCullough, and others

• Andersen comes from German AfD and I hope that we all know here what AfD is.

https://www.afd.de/themen/

• "Everything I ever needed to know about vaccines I got from a washed up figure skater and a cokehead former NHL player" said nobody. This comment was referring to Jaime Sale and Theo Fleury’s new media platform. Sadly, this comment was “liked” by 33 people… only 14 seem to have seen my reply so far.

Here I was thinking of this interview they did with former foreign correspondent Rodney Palmer and of the “Diversity” section of the Canadian Association of Journalism Ethics Guidelines.

• Anyone that gives RWMaloneMD air time immediately loses credibility. Can’t tell you how many actual doctors have expressed deep concerns over him to me (this came with a link to a hit piece on Dr. Malone published in “The Atlantic” )

https://totalityofevidence.com/pandemic-timeline/

What to do with the ONLINE HARMS BILL

So there you have it - Either, the online harms bill is reduced right back down to its core business (penalizing makers and disseminators and profiteers related to child sexual exploitation) and REMOVING the hair splitting around definitions of HATE,

OR

we expand the Human Rights Law “protected grounds” as I suggested earlier in this post.

It isn’t like we haven’t added additional circles of people to protect before.

AND

in any case, we DEMAND that social media and print, broadcast and online media get back to actually applying the ETHICS GUIDELINES that are supposed to govern journalists in this country. This should be added to the Online Harms Bill asap!

https://caj.ca/wp-content/uploads/Ethics-Guidelines-v2023.pdf

Perhaps the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission already has a cut-off point at which those with social media accounts pass from “communicating for personal use” to “communicating journalistically.” I will arbitrarily say 1000 for illustrative purposes but stand to be corrected. So, once I have reached 1000 follower on X for example, the Social Media platform could be programmed to notify me that moving forward, I would be obligated to abide by the CAJ Ethics Guidelines. OR I would be expected to communicate OUTSIDE of my professional designation. So unless academics, science writers, fact checkers, educators and the like would commit to abiding by ethical journalistic standards, they would be required to post in “Casual conversation mode” along the lines of: “This is me expressing my personal views on topics unrelated to my professional role.”

In the examples shared above, the disparaging comments made to misjudge and slander those who share different professional opinions on matters up for informed debate would be deemed out of order as per the CAJ ethics guideline re: providing the public with a diversity of opinions. Such unprofessional communication, once the “journalistic mode” sets in, would lead to a strike against the perpetuator.

For more thoughts on the Canadian ONLINE HARMAS BILL, please see the post that follows.