click whirrrrrrrr BAD BAD BAD whirrrrrrr click

and now a word from the machine people

The Los Angeles Times says that scientists like Peter Hotez shouldn’t debate with anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The Houston Chronicle says that scientists like Peter Hotez shouldn’t debate with anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Vox says that scientists like Peter Hotez shouldn’t debate with anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The Washington Post says that scientists like Peter Hotez shouldn’t debate with anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The New Republic says that scientists like Peter Hotez shouldn’t debate with anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

And so on.

To be a professional journalist in 2023 is to know instinctively how to say Current Thing in Approved Language, on first pass. Heterodoxy is the third rail: if you touch it, you’re dead. There is a thing to say. You say it. I assume, at this late point, that “mainstream” journalists immediately shrivel up and die screaming if they accidentally have an original thought. But maybe they have a self-shaming ritual that allows them to purge for survival, like an idea-bulimic. Something with, what, a leather strap? Five minutes reading their own work? Something really degrading and empty, in any case.

A hundred separate journalists, assigned to write about the same subject, produce the same story a hundred times, with similar sentences using comparable phrases in similar paragraphs that arrive at the same conclusion. The job is uniformity of thought and expression.

And so here’s a news media favorite, the Canadian law professor and disinformation expert Timothy Caulfield, with a flawless expression of the underlying principle that organizes this discourse:

He has found a culture that attains excellence in critical thinking; for example, they have 0% disagreement. They have climbed to the very pinnacle of intellectual sophistication, and have therefore achieved near-perfect uniformity of thought.

I’m torn between laughing at these people and fleeing for the wilderness.