Why is the CEO of the NHS blatantly lying to us?

Postby bluesince62 » Thu Nov 11, 2021 1:26 pm


Fair enough, I'm in the same camp, I've had it up to the gills with it, no mainstream tv or news for me, and havent bought a newspaper in years!! To the extent I just had to look up GBNEWS, as that's new to me!! But one thing I cannot fail to notice is the divide between those vaccinated, and those who are not, whether through personal choice, or not.and that saddens me to be honest.

I haven't bought a newspaper either and only discovered GBNEWS via the link supplied by TheHangedMan, and it really has become a divisive issue. I have no real problem if somebody decides to not have the jabs as it's their choice, but I do get frustrated with those people that don't wear masks in a supermarket for instance as they are putting everyone else at risk whether they've had the jabs or not. But then again I worry about my grandson and the impact of global warming.

I didn't have any of these concerns when I started watching in 1966. The world is now a totally different place!

The reason this highly paid CEO lied.....sorry, made a mistake!......was to induce yet more fear into the population. Clip below if you wish to know why this "mistake" was actually a contrived statement.

https://academyofideas.com/2015/11/fear ... al-control

The transpict is below if you do not want to watch the video.

The following is a transcript of this video.

Fear is one of the most powerful human emotions. While highly useful in situations where threat of immediate harm exists, it is the most debilitating and dangerous of emotions when present unnecessarily. In this video we will examine how fear can be used as a tool to manipulate others, and how those in positions of power, past and present, have effectively used fear to control certain aspects of society.

Humans, especially since the Industrial Revolution, have become increasingly protected from the dangers that our ancestors faced in relation to the natural world. But as mankind’s fear of nature and the elements has fallen, in its place many other fears have come to fill the void. Some of these fears have arisen in response to real threats, but many have been in response to things imagined.

As the Stoic philosopher Seneca pointed out:

“There are more things…likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” (Letters from a Stoic, Seneca)

While some of these imagined fears are of one’s own making, many are the consequence of narratives created by those in positions of power. Individuals looking to take advantage of, and manipulate others, have long realized the power of fear. When one is gripped by fear of a threat, real or imagined, their rational and higher cognitive capacities shut down, making them easily manipulable by anyone that promises safety from the threat.

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear”, wrote the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke.

Ruling classes for thousands of years have understood the power of intentionally invoking fear in their subjects as a means of social control. Henri Frankfort, in his book the Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, noted that between 1800 and 1600 BC a fear psychosis spread through Ancient Egypt, precipitated by the invasion of foreign rebels hungry for power and conquest. Initially this fear psychosis was justified by a real threat, yet even when these foreigners were successfully driven far away from Egypt, the ruling powers sought to artificially maintain fear among the population – realizing that a fearful population is easier to control than a fearless one.

As Frankfort explained:

“The common desire for security need not have survived after the Egyptian Empire extended the military frontier of Egypt well into Asia and thus removed the peril from the immediate frontier…However, it was a restless age, and there were perils on the distant horizon which could be invoked to hold the community together, since unity was to the advantage of certain central powers…A fear psychosis, once engendered, remained present. And there were forces in Egypt which kept alive this fear psychosis in order to maintain the unified purpose of Egypt.” (The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, Henri Frankfort)

The artificial construction and maintenance of fear in a population by a ruling class has remained pervasive from the time of Ancient Egypt up until the modern day. Oppressive governments often maintain their grip on a nation by continually invoking fear, and then proceeding to claim that only they, the ruling powers, have the means and ability to protect the population from such a threat:

“The whole aim of practical politics”, wrote HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

John Adams, one of the founding fathers of America, echoed this sentiment writing “Fear is the foundation of most governments”.

While there are numerous tactics and strategies that have developed over the centuries to effectively exploit the public through fear, two of the more powerful and efficient are the use of false flags, and the implementation of propaganda via repetition.

A false flag can be defined as a “covert operation . . . designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by entities, groups, or nations other than those who actually planned and executed them”. In his book Feardom, Conor Boyack provides a nice explanation on the effectiveness of false flag attacks for those looking to institute social control:

“…physical attacks lead to a corresponding increase of trust in political leaders and submission to them. This effect is likely the same whether the attack be a surprise, known to political leaders yet allowed to happen, or directly orchestrated by these same leaders who stand to benefit from the increased trust and submission…False flag operations are used because people generally do not have access to the details, so they are prone to rely upon what they’re told, and thus are easily deceived. People will, for the most part, believe what they are told in times of crisis, and so government officials, whether their motives are good or evil, capitalize on or completely fabricate the crises.” (Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them, Conor Boyack)

Repetition is also a well-known and prevalent propaganda technique used to solidify falsehoods and perpetuate fear in the public consciousness. By repeating specific phrases and warnings, and displaying particular symbols and images over and over through various mediums, those in power are able to paralyze entire populations with a fear psychosis.

The Nazi Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was well aware of the power of repetition in cloaking falsehoods in a garb of truth, stating:

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.” (Joseph Goebbels)

George Orwell, in a related manner, viewed political language as largely a form of propaganda designed to deceive people, as he wrote:

“Political language. . .is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (George Orwell)

The technological advances of the last century have given those in power the ability to propagate their narratives and engage in fear mongering to an extent never before seen in history. However, despite the unnerving situation we find ourselves in, there is an antidote to the power of propaganda and fear mongering: that being, knowledge.

Plato rightly stated that “ignorance is the root of misfortune”, and as long as we remain ignorant of the fact that all too often those who claim to protect us from fear are actually manipulating our fears for their own benefit, then we will be contributing to the misfortune of the world through our ignorant compliance.

The philosopher Voltaire stated that “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” To avoid being an individual who can be convinced of absurdities, one must become an active truth seeker, instead of an all too common passive propaganda receiver. An important step in becoming an active truth seeker is the realization that when evaluating the claims of those in power, skepticism is warranted and even necessary. Very often those who rule do not have the best interests of the public at heart; for as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it “political genius lies in extracting success even from the people’s ruin.”

The reality is that most of us are not in a position to single-handedly change the world, but we can at least try to rid ourselves of the unnecessary fears which are the fuel for so much hate and destruction in the world. In fact, taking responsibility for one’s own actions and the beliefs that motivate such actions, may be the most important thing one can do when faced with the prospect of an oppressive government. For as Stanley Milgram noted: “The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.” And furthermore, might there be truth to the comment by F.A. Harper’s that “the man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free.”

At this point some may be thinking that while the use of fear by those in power certainly contributed to horrible situations in the past, most notably in the totalitarian states of Russia, Germany and China in the 20th century, Western nations of the present are far from approaching a situation so dire. Hopefully that is true, but it is important to realize that those who have lived through the rise of oppressive governments have seldom realized the perilous situation they were in until it was too late. We will conclude this lecture with a fascinating but ominous passage from the book They Thought They Were Free, which is based on interviews with normal Germans who lived during the Nazi regime. The following quote comes from one of the German’s interviewed, where he discusses why he thought that more ordinary Germans didn’t take a stand against the rise of the Nazi government.

“One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse… You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow…

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked … But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between comes all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next…

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident. . . collapses it all at once, and you see that everything – everything – has changed…Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed…” (They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer)

by TheHangedMan » Fri Nov 12, 2021 12:32 am

The reason this highly paid CEO lied.....sorry, made a mistake!......was to induce yet more fear into the population. Clip below if you wish to know why this "mistake" was actually a contrived statement.

https://academyofideas.com/2015/11/fear ... al-control

The transpict is below if you do not want to watch the video.

The following is a transcript of this video.

Fear is one of the most powerful human emotions. While highly useful in situations where threat of immediate harm exists, it is the most debilitating and dangerous of emotions when present unnecessarily. In this video we will examine how fear can be used as a tool to manipulate others, and how those in positions of power, past and present, have effectively used fear to control certain aspects of society.

Humans, especially since the Industrial Revolution, have become increasingly protected from the dangers that our ancestors faced in relation to the natural world. But as mankind’s fear of nature and the elements has fallen, in its place many other fears have come to fill the void. Some of these fears have arisen in response to real threats, but many have been in response to things imagined.

As the Stoic philosopher Seneca pointed out:

“There are more things…likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” (Letters from a Stoic, Seneca)

While some of these imagined fears are of one’s own making, many are the consequence of narratives created by those in positions of power. Individuals looking to take advantage of, and manipulate others, have long realized the power of fear. When one is gripped by fear of a threat, real or imagined, their rational and higher cognitive capacities shut down, making them easily manipulable by anyone that promises safety from the threat.

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear”, wrote the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke.

Ruling classes for thousands of years have understood the power of intentionally invoking fear in their subjects as a means of social control. Henri Frankfort, in his book the Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, noted that between 1800 and 1600 BC a fear psychosis spread through Ancient Egypt, precipitated by the invasion of foreign rebels hungry for power and conquest. Initially this fear psychosis was justified by a real threat, yet even when these foreigners were successfully driven far away from Egypt, the ruling powers sought to artificially maintain fear among the population – realizing that a fearful population is easier to control than a fearless one.

As Frankfort explained:

“The common desire for security need not have survived after the Egyptian Empire extended the military frontier of Egypt well into Asia and thus removed the peril from the immediate frontier…However, it was a restless age, and there were perils on the distant horizon which could be invoked to hold the community together, since unity was to the advantage of certain central powers…A fear psychosis, once engendered, remained present. And there were forces in Egypt which kept alive this fear psychosis in order to maintain the unified purpose of Egypt.” (The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, Henri Frankfort)

The artificial construction and maintenance of fear in a population by a ruling class has remained pervasive from the time of Ancient Egypt up until the modern day. Oppressive governments often maintain their grip on a nation by continually invoking fear, and then proceeding to claim that only they, the ruling powers, have the means and ability to protect the population from such a threat:

“The whole aim of practical politics”, wrote HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

John Adams, one of the founding fathers of America, echoed this sentiment writing “Fear is the foundation of most governments”.

While there are numerous tactics and strategies that have developed over the centuries to effectively exploit the public through fear, two of the more powerful and efficient are the use of false flags, and the implementation of propaganda via repetition.

A false flag can be defined as a “covert operation . . . designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by entities, groups, or nations other than those who actually planned and executed them”. In his book Feardom, Conor Boyack provides a nice explanation on the effectiveness of false flag attacks for those looking to institute social control:

“…physical attacks lead to a corresponding increase of trust in political leaders and submission to them. This effect is likely the same whether the attack be a surprise, known to political leaders yet allowed to happen, or directly orchestrated by these same leaders who stand to benefit from the increased trust and submission…False flag operations are used because people generally do not have access to the details, so they are prone to rely upon what they’re told, and thus are easily deceived. People will, for the most part, believe what they are told in times of crisis, and so government officials, whether their motives are good or evil, capitalize on or completely fabricate the crises.” (Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions and What You Can Do to Stop Them, Conor Boyack)

Repetition is also a well-known and prevalent propaganda technique used to solidify falsehoods and perpetuate fear in the public consciousness. By repeating specific phrases and warnings, and displaying particular symbols and images over and over through various mediums, those in power are able to paralyze entire populations with a fear psychosis.

The Nazi Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was well aware of the power of repetition in cloaking falsehoods in a garb of truth, stating:

“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise.” (Joseph Goebbels)

George Orwell, in a related manner, viewed political language as largely a form of propaganda designed to deceive people, as he wrote:

“Political language. . .is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (George Orwell)

The technological advances of the last century have given those in power the ability to propagate their narratives and engage in fear mongering to an extent never before seen in history. However, despite the unnerving situation we find ourselves in, there is an antidote to the power of propaganda and fear mongering: that being, knowledge.

Plato rightly stated that “ignorance is the root of misfortune”, and as long as we remain ignorant of the fact that all too often those who claim to protect us from fear are actually manipulating our fears for their own benefit, then we will be contributing to the misfortune of the world through our ignorant compliance.

The philosopher Voltaire stated that “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” To avoid being an individual who can be convinced of absurdities, one must become an active truth seeker, instead of an all too common passive propaganda receiver. An important step in becoming an active truth seeker is the realization that when evaluating the claims of those in power, skepticism is warranted and even necessary. Very often those who rule do not have the best interests of the public at heart; for as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it “political genius lies in extracting success even from the people’s ruin.”

The reality is that most of us are not in a position to single-handedly change the world, but we can at least try to rid ourselves of the unnecessary fears which are the fuel for so much hate and destruction in the world. In fact, taking responsibility for one’s own actions and the beliefs that motivate such actions, may be the most important thing one can do when faced with the prospect of an oppressive government. For as Stanley Milgram noted: “The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.” And furthermore, might there be truth to the comment by F.A. Harper’s that “the man who knows what freedom means will find a way to be free.”

At this point some may be thinking that while the use of fear by those in power certainly contributed to horrible situations in the past, most notably in the totalitarian states of Russia, Germany and China in the 20th century, Western nations of the present are far from approaching a situation so dire. Hopefully that is true, but it is important to realize that those who have lived through the rise of oppressive governments have seldom realized the perilous situation they were in until it was too late. We will conclude this lecture with a fascinating but ominous passage from the book They Thought They Were Free, which is based on interviews with normal Germans who lived during the Nazi regime. The following quote comes from one of the German’s interviewed, where he discusses why he thought that more ordinary Germans didn’t take a stand against the rise of the Nazi government.

“One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse… You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow…

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked … But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between comes all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next…

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident. . . collapses it all at once, and you see that everything – everything – has changed…Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed…” (They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer)

I'm afraid that I couldn't find anything above to the simple question of

Why would she possibly say something so stupid on purpose when she would be well aware that all the media would hear and millions of people who see the figures published on tv and in the press every day and would realise that it was nonsense?

As I had never heard of "The Academy of Ideas" I did a little research to find out something about it:

Stuart Jeffries of the Guardian provided one of several reports:

[color=#FF0000]Five years ago the Guardian investigated Claire Fox and her Institute of Ideas. It found that she was linked to pro-gun American libertarian groups, was funded by unpleasant pharmaceutical corporations and had a shady past in the nastiest Trotskyist bunch who ever picketed a nurses’ pay dispute[/color]. Then, two years ago, George Monbiot castigated Fox in this paper for being a member of a “bizarre and cultish network” that was poisoning scientific debate in Britain. He charged that she was in cahoots with her sister, Fiona, who ran a dubious PR firm that was in hock to GM companies and proselytised for pharmaceutical corporations. If his page had come in scratch ‘n’ sniff, it would have emitted a whiff of sulphur.

Claire Fox is, if not the devil, then someone who holds devilishly unsettling views. In her time, she has stood up for Gary Glitter’s right to download child porn, libelled ITN journalists, backed GM technology and attacked multiculturalism. And she refuses to disparage the benighted views of Michael Buerk - who chairs Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, on which she is a panellist - about uppity women. It seems a good idea to ask her to account for herself.

Fox lights a cigarette. We’re having coffee in one of the few cafes near her London offices that has a libertarian philosophy like hers. It permits customers to choose the path of carcinogenic oblivion. “I have a reputation for infamy,” she concedes. Why do they think you’re infamous? “Because the point of the Institute of Ideas is to challenge established orthodoxies. And they don’t like that.” They? “The liberal left.” Why wouldn’t they like orthodoxies being challenged? “There was such a sense of relief on the left when New Labour came to power that certain orthodoxies could not be challenged. People became desperate to hang on to the ascendancy of left ideas without really questioning what they were about.”

Fox offers multiculturalism as an example. “If you challenge multiculturalism you are seen to be a racist. But it’s a political philosophy that needs to be looked at. If you don’t, you’re taking it on trust, which is intellectually dishonest.”

The Institute of Ideas was born from adversity, namely from the collapse of the Revolutionary Communist party (RCP) magazine she used to co-publish, Living Marxism. It closed in 2000 after being sued for libel by ITN for falsely claiming its journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian muslims.

Two things emerged from these ashes - Spiked, a web magazine, and the institute, which Fox directs. Both teem with former members of the RCP, an iconoclastic Trotskyist splinter group that regularly engaged in non-metaphorical fisticuffs. Often with other Trotskyist splinter groups, but still. “If there was still an RCP I would be a member,” she says. “There are revolutionary principles I adhere to. I’m interested in improving the world.”

This unfashionable faith in progress leads her into controversial areas. “It’s part of being a progressive person that I consider agriculture should be as efficient as possible. I support modern farming methods because I’m a modernist, not a sentimentalist. My parents were from a farming family and I know there’s there’s nothing to be sentimental about. GM offers great potential. It’s not a panacea for the third world and companies will make lots of money out of it - but it’s ever thus.”

Fox’s belief in human ingenuity’s capacity to make lives better is untimely and, to some, exasperating. “We’ve stopped believing in progress. When New Orleans flooded no one thought, how marvellous that humans managed to build a city on a swamp. Nobody thought about Holland, which hasn’t drowned, but through human ingenuity produced a solution to its problem. Our pessimism about the future and our view that everything is a threat is” - she pauses and silently smokes most of a cigarette. What, decadent? Weak-willed? “Both of those things.”

You’d find it hard to accuse Claire Fox of being either. She was born in north Wales to “archetypal Irish Catholic parents” in 1960, educated at “a bog-standard comp in a pretty rough area”. “One thing I got from my parents was that they talked about politics all the time. They weren’t educated or academic but they were interesting about and interested in the world. They made us watch Panorama,” she says grimly. The brutes!

Fox arrived at Warwick University a Tory-supporting member of the Society for the Unborn Child and a sentimental devotee of Catholic liberation theology in South America. She left three years later a libertarian Marxist with a 2:2 in literature and a summa cum laude in selling lefty papers and going on demos.

It was abortion debates that awoke her from dogmatic slumbers. “Some on the left called me names, which had no impact on me, but others opposed to my anti-abortion stance would talk to me and suggest things I could read and argue with me. My position changed as a result of that. It gave me a revelation that politics really mattered, as did ideas.” She dallied with the SWP but it was the Revolutionary Communist Tendency’s Next Step magazine that turned the historical materialist’s head. She stayed with them as they mutated into the Revolutionary Communist party. She trained as a teacher and worked in mental health, but the RCP remained her spiritual home.

“If there’s a consistency between my views then and now, it is in the libertarian views on free speech I hold. That was always unpopular on the British left, though the American Civil Liberties Union tapped me into another left tradition. The ‘no platform’ view is what I oppose. It’s very important to hear the arguments. We’re not idiots - we can make our own minds up.”

This position has led her to defend Beenie Man’s sung invocation to murder gay men. She argued thus once against Michael Mansfield QC when she was a witness on The Moral Maze. She was so successfully combative that she was invited to become a panellist. A similar distinction led her to defend Gary Glitter’s right to download child porn on a Radio 5 Live phone-in. The switchboard was jammed with people who, to put it mildly, disagreed.

Monbiot cast Fox and her RCP intimates as people who had moved from “the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate, libertarian right”. The only constant was their entryist tactics. Her sister, Fiona, had colonised a crucial part of the scientific establishment while Claire was keen to take money from dodgy companies.

Do you recognise yourself in these descriptions? “Entryism is clandestine, and that’s something you can’t accuse us of being.” She argues that the Institute of Ideas’ funding is an open book. “We have received money from Pfizer, and they have never interfered. We have received money from Syngenta, which is involved in GM technology.”

But surely they back you because you support their aims? “I think they back us because we have really interesting debates that they want to be associated with. But you’re right. I’m not opposed to developing drugs. I would rather medicine was being state-funded to the absolute hilt.”

Shouldn’t you be ideologically opposed to taking money from big corporations? Fox gives me the “ever thus” defence again. “There is no such thing as clean money. So we’re not selling out ... My peers who do take money from the government tell me there are always conditions. Whereas with Pfizer, say, they have never tried to influence what we do.”

She finishes another cigarette and makes to leave. She has to bone up for this week’s Moral Maze. Was Michael Buerk right to say that women are taking over in a frightening way? “Michael can speak for himself,” she says. “What I will say, though, is when I got involved in politics one of things that was important for me was that a lot of the values associated with masculinity were ideas I would embrace - rationality, leadership, bravery. Why would I want to be a soft carer? What’s interesting now is that society gives more value to feminine characteristics I have little regard for. Emotion more important than reason? Come off it.”

Later our photographer takes her picture. He’s found some posters printed with suggestive words that he wants to use as a backdrop. She readily agrees to be snapped in front of Rigour, Accessibility, Originality, Experience, but declines Pragmatism. Given her remarks on dirty money and using human ingenuity to improve our sorry lot, this seems an odd stance, morally speaking.



Having read this and other reports I'm afraid that I certainly won't be listening to anything from her academy.

The report above relates to Claire Fox, the chief executive of both the Institute and the Academy.

Why would she possibly say something so stupid on purpose when she would be well aware that all the media would hear and millions of people who see the figures published on tv and in the press every day and would realise that it was nonsense?

It's an important question, although not sure if we can ever answer it definitively. However, I'm stuck in end of quarter VAT bill hell and desperately looking for a bit of procrastination so here goes...

(apologies for the long post blame HMRC or my hatred of numbers )

One suggestion might be a fairly simple one. She did it knowing full well if/when she got caught out the repercussions would be minimal and the objective would already be achieved.

Just theoretical, but she could have held the belief that the vast majority of the population will blindly accept what is put in front of them and by the time the lie is called out, it has hit the masses, while the retraction or refutation of the lie is merely an echo that falls away far quicker.

Additionally, she may be aware that these are more polarised times than ever, and the majority will quite happily overlook obvious cognitive dissonance to adopt a position that is in line with the pervasive thinking in their tribe.

For example, pre-pandemic, the pro-life vs pro-choice debate fell clearly along 'left' and 'right' lines, with the pro-choice 'left' citing bodily autonomy as a fundamental right. "My body, my choice" being the dominant rallying cry. Today, the debate has shifted to pro-vax vs. pro-choice. Again we are seeing a clear split in ideologies between 'left' and 'right' with the pro-vax 'left' having abandoned without a second thought their core mantra from just a few years ago as it is no longer of use.

(as an aside, I personally think the labels of left and right have largely become meaningless and the societal divide is more collectivist/authoritarian vs. libertarian but I just use the terms as they are more commonly seen/understood)

The fact is that independent critical thought is largely being replaced by a far more alluring tribal group-think.

It is so much more reassuring to accept the prevailing narrative if it fits within our predefined ideas of what we want to believe. If it comes from someone on our side we will accept it largely without question. If it is demonstrably wrong, we will make allowances we would never afford someone from the opposing tribe. The standards we hold our people accountable to are for more benevolent than those we oppose, who we scrutinise and castigate at every turn.

The prevailing wind in the vaccination debate currently lies very clearly in the pro-vaccination camp, which is gently being evolved into a pro-mandate position (boiling frog/death by thousand cuts methodology). Those on the other side of the debate are denounced as crackpots, conspiracy theorists and selfish loons. There is almost zero representation of their side of the debate from the legacy media while the new media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) equally suppress what should be a healthy debate, in the name of protecting us from medical misinformation.

So back to the question why would she lie?

Perhaps very simply because she could do so knowing full well that the lie would reach more people than the correction ever would and that there would be little repercussion when she got caught out. In essence, she weighed the cost/benefit equation and found it in her favour so just went ahead.

As I say this is all hypothetical, but certainly not unfeasible and not without precedent in the last two years.

In the US for example Fauci openly admitted to lying about mask requirements in order to manufacture a desired outcome from the public as he wanted to ensure there was PPE available for frontline staff. Perfectly, valid reason but it was nonetheless, an overt and deliberate lie, from the US Government's most senior medical advisor, designed to create a specific response in the people he is supposed to serve. It is also something he has not only admitted but justified.

source: https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-d ... ?r=US&IR=T

A UK Government paper from the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 explicitly stated:

"The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat."

source: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... 032020.pdf

Just a couple of quick examples and would be easy enough to surface more, but the point was just to illustrate that senior government and medical officials telling a lie to engender the desired response in a population is not unheard of, likely not uncommon and was even proposed as policy/guideline in this country as recently as last year.

Ultimately, we cannot know why she might be prepared to make such an open lie, or indeed if she did or if it was just (a significant given her position) error in the numbers. I very much agree with your earlier point in this thread that such a mistake from someone in such a position is gross incompetence and perhaps just as worrying as if she was deliberately misleading the public.

However, truth is that this is largely impossible to define, however, the premise that those who see her as batting for their team would overlook the lie, and take her on her authority rather than her argument is absolutely legitimate.

In fact, politely you've fallen into a similar logical fallacy that is akin to arguments to authority yourself in your dismissal of the article from the Academy of Ideas.

I say this as respectfully as I can as you come across as a decent guy both in this thread and others...

However, dismissing the article the Hanged Man posted based solely on an opinion on Clare Fox is either intellectually lazy or intellectually dishonest.

Rather than tackle the arguments presented in the video, you've fallen straight into a tribal argument. You've tackled the player, not the ball and having identified Clare Fox as someone not in your team, you've then subsequently been able to dismiss the arguments put forward in the article without having to confront them or challenge them at all. It is an easy out that allows you to dismiss any of those arguments not on their merit or with counterarguments (which is the only mechanism for productive debate n my opinion) but instead because of who is putting them forward.

In fact, you've taken this stance even though (from what I can see) the video was not produced by her - or at least aren't attributed to her. So you're not just dismissing the arguments made based on who has made them but dismissing the arguments made based on the person making them having an association with someone else.

I say this genuinely - this isn't a pop at you either. We all fall into these default positions (including myself) as doing so absolves us of the responsibility for critical thought and this is what is at the very heart of the echo-chamber thinking that permeates society and is in my mind a highly dangerous path we've been heading down for longer than any of us care to admit. It's hard though to stop doing it as it becomes a pretty much automatic response. It is much easier for any of us to see the world in black or white rather than the murky grey in between.

As I say, if any of the above sounds antagonistic, it is honestly not intended in that way and 'you' could be anyone making a similar argument, from either side (again myself included). Just pointing out the trap we can all fall into so easily these days and why we have to try and avoid it.

From reading your comments both in this thread and others you come across as a decent chap and intelligent poster so just wanted to clarify that last point

Anyways back to spreadsheet hell

EA