An editorial in my local paper laments, as an “assault on truth”, the cancellation of federal funding for research into “disinformation”. We read:
The National Science Foundation last week canceled hundreds of grants to researchers studying the spread of disinformation online. This was the explanation: “NSF will not support research with the goal of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation’ that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.” The cancelations are not subject to appeal.
This latest assault on science has nothing to do with protecting the right to free speech and everything to do with making it even easier to spread the falsehoods that are helping the administration undermine the rule of law and establish a police state in America.
It’s easy to understand why those in power, such as the Progressive elites who have been in charge of the commanding heights of Western institutions for many decades now, would care about what people can say or think. (It’s especially important in ostensibly “democratic” societies, for the obvious reason that in a system where political power is subject to public opinion, those who would hold on to power must learn to control public opinion. Duh.)
So: this kind of “research” — agents of the powerful inquiring into the content and propagation of “disinformation” — is nothing new. It’s been going on since antiquity, and little has changed, except the word we use to describe the thing being scrutinized. We used to just call it “heresy”.
3 Comments
I’m enjoying the dialogue Malcolm you’re having with Dr. Vallicella regarding presentiism and eternalism, although I confess much of it is just beyond my ken. I appreciated the example The Maverick Philosopher gave of gladiator contests, although I’m not sure it follows that such gruesome bloodletting is somehow tenseless, at least objectively. To put it this way: While we may ourselves subjectively and personally perceive such events perpetually and repeatedly ( historians revise and debate and argue again and again and again about what happened in the Roman Colosseum), it seems to me there is also a specific and permanent salami slice that simply exists immutably in the past, independent of our consciousness of it.
Actually Malcolm, I wonder if while our own perception of time is a case of salami slices, as you say – past-past-past-present-future-future-future – is not time itself just one long continuum, from Big Bang to Apocalypse?
Jason,
Then you’re an eternalist. But the idea of what defines a specific “slice” is made much more complicated by the theory of relativity.
That’s what “B-Theory” says it is. (Whether it is truly continuous, rather than discrete, is another tricky question.)