2021-01-09
Spiked have published an article with this title in defence of the sceptic who challenges the official narrative.
"That free speech, which is the very precondition for democracy, can now be portrayed as a threat to it, shows the increasing extent to which those in control of cultural and political institutions are reluctant to tolerate dissenting opinions"
"They have been personally and professionally maligned, and, more troubling still, their critics want them removed from the public sphere. This has all the characteristics of a modern high-tech witch-hunt"
"Historically, calls for censorship were justified on the grounds that a text was either politically subversive or morally corrupting. This justification is now a key part of anti-scepticism dogma"
"The sceptic is therefore not questioning or interrogating an establishment position; rather, he or she is denying the truth of the establishment position"
"Deployed as a quasi-diagnostic category, denial transforms scepticism into a psychological problem"
"At a time when scepticism is routinely traduced and condemned by upholders of the status quo, it is important to clarify what it really means, and why we should defend it"
Quite so.
In truth this article rehearses many arguments with which we may already be familiar, but it is good, if rather scary, to see them put together into a coherent whole, and useful to remind ourselves that many of these anti-sceptical positions are characterised by misrepresentation of the position of the sceptic.
Slightly less cerebral and more direct:
The Totalitarian Hell of Lockdown.
Read it while you can . . .
And finally, the last words, courtesy of Independence Daily, on Truth and Fiction.
There is nothing new beneath the sun,
so we must fight again those battles we thought won.
