One problem with blogging for years is that important links you used way back when can become defunct. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if you don't blog that much, but the blogging I put in over at The Hesperado spanned some 11 years, with 1,427 postings in all, each posting often riddled with links; so there's no way I'm going to go combing through my archives to check every link. At best, I have repaired any links I happen to come across whenever I re-read an old posting.
As I just did tonight, in fact. A conversation came up in my Paltalk chat room (The Sane Asylum) when I mentioned how Bill Clinton raped Juanita Brodderick. A chatter indicated he'd like to see evidence of that, and I recalled I had penned a posting years ago on that very subject -- it turns out back in 2012. So I hunted that posting down (Recipe for a National Rape Cover-Up, reprinted on my auxiliary blog) and refreshed my memory that the evidence is more complicated than a mere slam-dunk, and depends on an article by Jeffrey Lord published at The American Spectator also back in 2012. My posting linked to that article, but when I clicked it tonight, it only took me to an error page. So then I spent about 15 minutes delving into archives at the The American Spectator site and finally found it, titled Bill Clinton and Legitimate Rape.
That's not really why I called, however. What I really wanted to say here today was that on re-reading my posting of yore, I was struck at the concept I articulated in the first three, brief paragraphs:
"Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator has marshaled an impressive array of facts and analysis about the outrageous hypocrisy of the Democrats during this campaign (of 2012).
"Unfortunately, there are so many intertwining facts to present, with so much explanatory weaving together required, that I worry it tends to lose its punch.
"Lord knows Jeffrey Lord does his best, and it’s not really his fault, but just the nature of the complexity of the issue."
What I articulated in passing is a concept that applies to many issues -- for example, the problem of Islam, the problem of Climate Change, and the problem of Covid. While the issue Jeffrey Lord was grappling with was somewhat complicated, it doesn't come close to holding a candle to the monstrous complexities Islam, Climate Change, and Covid present, each in their own way. So my analysis of the problem is that much more searingly apt with regard to those.
This came to mind again recently in a mildly dismaying exchange I had on Twitter with Christine Massey, a diligent activist in the radical wing of the Covid Dissident movement (such as it is) -- radical measured by the fact that they pull the virology rug out from under the whole debate, based on their proposition that there is no virus in the first place (nor any viruses at all). I simply pointed out to her that the issue is too technically complex for most laypersons who only (at best) know the bare rudiments of biology to understand adequately. She shot back effectively saying, "Nah it's not complex at all -- it's simple!" It may be simple to her, but that doesn't mean it's simple to the layperson.
With her attitude on this important facet in the War of Ideas, she will end up only preaching to the choir -- which includes a very few adequately science-educated folks who actually can grasp what she and David Crow, Andrew Kaufman and Tom Cowan are explaining; and a larger number of laypersons who don't really understand why they are assenting to the claims of the aforementioned. My position on this is that when an issue is so complex, as with Climate Change and Covid, the layperson has to defer to experts; so the epistemological burden of assent becomes relocated from understanding the actual issue, to determining which experts you want to place your trust in. Ideally (and I don't think it's too ambitious an ideal) this would entail exchanges and/or debates between those Covid Dissenters who do accept orthodox virology vs. those who don't -- exchanges and/or debates for the benefit of the vast majority who are laypersons. In the minds of the laypersons in the audience, these exchanges and/or debates wouldn't necessarily create actual understanding of the scientific technicalities -- but they could help the layperson come to a clearer decision of which camp is the more honest and cogent. It's not a perfect process, and more often than not will be liable to shadows of doubt. But hey, that's life, usually.
The complexity of the Islam issue is somewhat different, because there it doesn't really depend on technical concepts that involve scientific training, but rather just a sheer quantity of data and dots to connect, with gigantic subsets of frameworks of data (example, the Serbian-Bosnian conflict, as a subset of the problem of Islam, by itself would probably take 100 hours of laborious study to begin to get a toehold into -- ditto for the Israeli-"Palestinian" issue). There are facets of the Islam issue that do unavoidably lead to a reliance on experts -- e.g., a knowledge of Arabic in examining foundational texts such as the hadiths and the Koran -- but the intelligent layperson can demarcate those facets and distinguish them from others that do not require such technical expertise.
