The author Naomi Wolf has been suspended from Twitter after using it to spread myths about the pandemic, vaccines and lockdown.
Wolf, who wrote the influential feminist work The Beauty Myth, holds staunch anti-vaccine views. Last month she told a US congressional committee that vaccine passports would “re-create a situation that is very familiar to me as a student of history. This has been the start of many, many genocides.”
As the pandemic continued, the author variously claimed that vaccines were a “software platform that can receive uploads” and that “the best way to show respect for healthcare workers if you are healthy and under 65 is to socialise sensibly and expose yourself to a low viral load”.
The significantly deluded also have that free speech stuff. If this were not so then no Marxist would be allowed online, would they?
She is a most curious case. Nearly everything she writes is batshit crazy but as it was the right kind of crazy, she was tolerated even celebrated on the Left and BBC. As soon as she strays from the path she is cancelled. Her last book that was based on a misinterpretation of source material was being defended by other crazies, but now that is being trumpeted as proof of her wrongthink. She also made the mistake of saying that she now found conservatives actually quite polite and happy to debate the facts when challenged. It was even discovered that one of the institutes for whom she works take their funding from the Koch Brothers ! Fie ! La !
You know the saying about the Left’s standards.
Moderna officially describe their vaccine as an operating system so she’s not misquoting there. The protection of intellectual property coupled with lack of full registration at the FDA and elsewhere means that no one outside the companies producing them know whats in them. One company, I forget which but in the big four argued against revealing them to enable wider production argued it used over two hundred and eighty constituents and that revealing them would disrupt supply chains. She’s no scientist but her sense of smell in this case is acute.
Twitter have deprived us of a cheap source of entertainment. Who knew that nano-particle vaccines let you time travel before Wolf told us so?
@ljh: “no one outside the companies producing them know whats in them”
Equally said about KFC’s nugget coating, Worcestershire sauce, Coca Cola and lots more products touted by marketroids. Generally it’s regarded as a selling point.
Arthur: not for EUA’s drugs with no longterm safety record. My highly allergic daughter whose NHS doctor is keen to get her kickback from the state informed that anaphylaxis wasn’t a problem because they’re equipped to resuscitate her. An approach that seems a tad casual verging on criminal. Btw her miscellaneous allergies were triggered by the last highly promoted drug Tamiflu for which the NHS was suckered for £2bn during the H1N1 panic in 2009.
Come on Tim, Twitter is private property and can suspend whoever they want for any, or no, reason. That’s the libertarian view right?
There always was a difference between speech and publication.
Speech restraints meant someone stopping you speaking or stopping your publisher from distributing it.
Publishers could always decline to publish and then you had to find another publisher. And being unable to find a publisher wasn’t a speech restraint.
The problem is that we have social media now, which is legally a publisher,but functionally a public forum.
The best analogy for me is the shopping mall. If you have a shop in a normal high street, a protestor can stand outside that shop to protest. If you have a shop in a mall, then the space immediately outside the shop is private and you can’t protest there.
Legally there’s a huge difference. But functionally, they’re the same.
True … but TwatBooketc also claim to be mere humble pass-through publishing portals with no interference on their end to avoid a host of other courtly problems…
serious cake-ism there.. Especially when the interference they do employ suspiciously looks like favouring certain points of view rather exclusively..
I’d have some sympathy with the ‘their gaff, their rules’ argument. Except they’re preaching at the Nigerian government, telling them that free access to t’Internet is a human right for all Nigerians. So that rather precludes *them* from banning people, doesn’t it?
. . . vaccine passports would “re-create a situation that is very familiar to me as a student of history. This has been the start of many, many genocides.”
A bit hyperbolic, but surely people around here might have some suspicions that statist politicians and bureaucrats would take advantage:
Ex-PM wants shops and pubs to have right to ban un-jabbed customers
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9656161/Time-distinguish-vaccinated-unvaccinated-says-Tony-Blair.html
“A senior Government source said: ‘Once again Mr Blair appears to have learned of things already in the pipeline with the NHS app and decided to publicly call for them. Nonetheless we thank him for his continued support.'”
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. . . vaccines were a “software platform that can receive uploads” . . .
Sounds completely mad. Don’t know where she got that from:
Our mRNA Medicines – The ‘Software of Life’
https://www.modernatx.com/mrna-technology/mrna-platform-enabling-drug-discovery-development
” . . . we set out to create an mRNA technology platform that functions very much like an operating system on a computer. It is designed so that it can plug and play interchangeably with different programs.”
Yes, okay, she’s an artiste and doesn’t understand what she’s almost directly quoting.
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. . . “the best way to show respect for healthcare workers if you are healthy and under 65 is to socialise sensibly and expose yourself to a low viral load”.
Probably not as showy as cowering indoors apart from permitted/required Thursday evening clapping displays, but as Sweden shows not a bad way of carrying on. For everyone not vulnerable to Covid-19, a mild dose of Sars-Cov-2 seems to be the best protection.
We’ve reached some bizarre hell state in which “significantly deluded” leftie writers are the voice of reason.
Stopped clock etc. And again with nano bullshit. It was Gates who advocated this as a high tech vax passport substitute.
– Except they’re preaching at the Nigerian government, telling them that free access to t’Internet is a human right for all Nigerians. So that rather precludes *them* from banning people, doesn’t it?
As someone commented at SDA, “If Twitter doesn’t like it they can build their own Nigeria.”