{"id":53090,"date":"2020-05-09T08:51:06","date_gmt":"2020-05-09T13:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53090"},"modified":"2020-05-09T08:51:08","modified_gmt":"2020-05-09T13:51:08","slug":"authoritarianism-in-the-age-of-pseudoscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53090","title":{"rendered":"Authoritarianism in the Age of Pseudoscience"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/off-guardian.org\/2020\/05\/06\/authoritarianism-in-the-age-of-pseudoscience\/\">Authoritarianism in the Age of Pseudoscience<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/off-guardian.org\/wp-content\/medialibrary\/38802915__original-scaled.jpg?x86312\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/off-guardian.org\/wp-content\/medialibrary\/38802915__original-2000x900.jpg?x86312\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-66273\"\/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Following the court decision in the US to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.baumhedlundlaw.com\/toxic-tort-law\/monsanto-roundup-lawsuit\/dewayne-johnson-v-monsanto-company\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">award in favour of Dewayne Johnson<\/a>&nbsp;(exposure to Monsanto\u2019s Roundup weed killer and its active ingredient, glyphosate, caused Johnson to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma), attorney Robert Kennedy Jr said at the post-trial press conference:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>The corruption of science, the falsification of science, and we saw all those things happen here. This is a company (Monsanto) that used all of the plays in the playbook developed over 60 years by the tobacco industry to escape the consequences of killing one of every five of its customers\u2026 Monsanto\u2026 has used those strategies\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Johnson\u2019s lawyers argued over the course of the month-long trial in 2018 that Monsanto had \u201cfought science\u201d for years and targeted academics who spoke up about possible health risks of the herbicide product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Long before the Johnson case, critics of Monsanto were already aware of the practices the company had engaged in for decades to undermine science. At the same time, Monsanto and its lobbyists had called anyone who questioned the company\u2019s \u2018science\u2019 as engaging in pseudoscience and labelled them \u2018anti-science\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We need look no further than the current coronavirus issue to understand how vested interests are set to profit by spinning the crisis a certain way and how questionable science is again being used to pursue policies that are essentially \u2018unscientific\u2019 \u2013 governments, the police and the corporate media have become the arbiters of \u2018truth\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We also see anyone challenging the policies and the \u2018science\u2019 being censored on social media or not being given a platform on TV and accused of engaging in \u2018misinformation\u2019. It\u2019s the same old playbook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The case-fatality ratio for COVID-19 is so low as to make the lockdown response wholly disproportionate. Yet we are asked to blindly accept government narratives and the policies based on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Authoritarianism in the Age of Pseudoscience Following the court decision in the US to&nbsp;award in favour of Dewayne Johnson&nbsp;(exposure to Monsanto\u2019s Roundup weed killer and its active ingredient, glyphosate, caused Johnson to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma), attorney Robert Kennedy Jr said at the post-trial press conference: The corruption of science, the falsification of science, and we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[43,13900,22993,24368,14810,705],"class_list":["post-53090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-liberty","tag-authoritarianism","tag-colin-todhunter","tag-industrial-food-production","tag-off-guardian-2","tag-pseudoscience","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53091,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53090\/revisions\/53091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}