Will you fight or will you walk away?
How long will you let it burn?
Let it burn?
Let it burn?
The State has no 1st Amendment right to free speech; in fact, even a moderate reading of the 1st Amendment would require the State to avoid any expressive speech at all. And the same can be said for any fictitious legal entity chartered by the State; publicly-traded corporations, for example.
The State does not, can not, have “beliefs”.
The State has an obligation to limit itself to facts.
Beliefs are things that conscious entities can have; they’re kind of a side-effect of consciousness.
They are not things that legal fictions like States or corporations can have, and pretending that they do just lets the State or corporation become an amplifier for the beliefs of its controllers.
So, what to do with this nonsense that showed up on the CDC web site yesterday?
It is, obviously, just an expression of Kennedy’s ongoing struggle against vaccines and the facts that support them.
It is not the belief of the CDC or the Department of Health and Human Services; those are State organizations, and cannot have beliefs. It is obviously the belief of Robert Kennedy, who is abusing the power he’s acquired as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to amplify and enforce compliance with his personal beliefs.
The fact that he’s clearly wrong about this one is actually not that relevant.
Even if his belief were correct it would be an abuse of State power to use the machinery of the State to promulgate that belief; the State should deal only with facts and evidence.
But, and this is where it gets tricky, the State cannot be trusted to judge facts and evidence for itself.
Because that’s what we have now, and that leads to stupid claims like this being published on government web sites, with a powerful person’s belief being passed off as fact.
Ironically, medicine is one of the few areas where we already have a solution to this problem.
Medicine, in the U.S., is organized in non-State professional societies. These societies decide collectively on what treatments have sufficient evidence to support their use and decide on what the “standard of care” is that all professionals are expected to follow.
Membership in these societies is limited to professionals educated in accredited schools and following standards for maintaining their information and expertise.
Needless to say, the relevant medical societies all agree that “vaccines do not cause autism” is a well-evidenced fact.
What we need is some formal relationship between these professional societies and the State that would enable them to require that government statements and decisions be based on actual facts and evidence as decided by the relevant group.
A simple process, where any government statement could be referred for evaluation by the appropriate professional group who could require that it be changed if they found its evidence base didn’t justify it.
Because the State should not be amplifying the personal beliefs of its controllers.
The State should not in any way be trying to influencing public opinion.
We, the citizens, tell the State what to think not the other way around.
But we need a quicker and more granular way to do that than elections.
