Special Report - Online activists are silencing us, scientists say Reuters March 2019

Sean said:
Shh. The first rule of the Secret Causality Breaking Club, is not to talk about the Secret Causality Breaking Club.
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Why?

The whole point in being a member is so that causality can be broken, that there are no consequences to any actions.

This would logically include talking about the Secret Causality Breaking Club, that there would be no consequences as a result of doing so.
 
adambeyoncelowe said:
FOIs are not doxxing. As far as I know, no one has published Sharpe's personal address online.
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I would assume doxxing is about making someones private identity public most scientists have public identities with names, institutions and email addresses listed on publications.

The FoI is read along side GDPR in the UK so that personal information will not be released although the names of government officials making decisions can be as part of the process of accountability (in that they are doing work in a professional role).

Email correspondence of those working for the state (including academics) is part of an official record and is subject to the FoI. There will of course be exceptions of personal information within these emails. But if someone who is paid by the government is emailing or sent emails then this is the same as any other documentation and since emails are searchable they can be released in an FoI. They should also be part of any organizations record management policy (i.e. delete and keep records in record management systems).

But the article is confused and not really about FoIs but after the first half muddying the waters around FoI requests seems to say a journalist got stolen information about an individual and released personal information about them. I would still not really see this as doxxing in that he was already well identified but its more about releasing personal information (which is wrong). It even looks like the address released was not his address but his secretaries.
 
adambeyoncelowe said:
FOIs are not doxxing. As far as I know, no one has published Sharpe's personal address online.
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Wow, yeah, this literally has nothing to do with it. It's just a cheap shot from an unrelated airing of fake grievances. And "ruthlessly" just makes them look stupid. We can barely take care of ourselves. The FOI requests have taken years and severely impacted Alem's health.

What a ghoul. Sharpe has no conscience.
 
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Arnie Pye said:
@Sly Saint

Sharpe was mentioned on the website of the American Council on Science and Health. I'd never heard of them so I looked them up.

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_on_Science_and_Health

They don't seem to be a very savoury group.
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Oh, it's an astroturf organisation. Neat.

Sharpe and his colleagues have some very interesting defenders: Rod Liddle, Spiked, NaturalNews, Quillette, now an astroturf lobby for chemical and tobacco companies. Look around at the people defending you and it tells you everything you need to know about which side of history you will end up.
 
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We need to get the NIH to publish a position paper that debunks this ridiculous narrative that PACE is being unfairly criticized, or that patients are hostile to researchers in general or criticize because they "don't like" the findings as opposed to the methodology being terrible and misleading.

This fully aligns with the effort to bring in more researchers and increase the quality of the science in this area. The Science Media Center propaganda is discouraging researchers from entering the field. I suspect that is exactly the point too. They don't want competition for CBT/GET or more people signing open letters.
 
strategist said:
We need to get the NIH to publish a position paper that debunks this ridiculous narrative that PACE is being unfairly criticized, or that patients are hostile to researchers in general or criticize because they "don't like" the findings as opposed to the methodology being terrible and misleading.

This fully aligns with the effort to bring in more researchers and increase the quality of the science in this area. The Science Media Center propaganda is discouraging researchers from entering the field. I suspect that is exactly the point too. They don't want competition for CBT/GET or more people signing open letters.
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I think you mean the Science Media Centre, in the UK?
 
strategist said:
We need to get the NIH to publish a position paper that debunks this ridiculous narrative that PACE is being unfairly criticized, or that patients are hostile to researchers in general or criticize because they "don't like" the findings as opposed to the methodology being terrible and misleading.

This fully aligns with the effort to bring in more researchers and increase the quality of the science in this area. The Science Media Center propaganda is discouraging researchers from entering the field. I suspect that is exactly the point too. They don't want competition for CBT/GET or more people signing open letters.
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That should have been the first step after the IOM report. I mentioned it clearly in my comments to NIH. Most of what is needed for effective change is completely free. Leadership is what's missing, there simply isn't any.

When Collins gave his speech earlier this month he basically made it clear we were on our own, that he won't help us any further. The CDC was just as cowardly about it, publishing their change of position as a mere information package, not a formal advisory. Cowardice top to bottom.

That it hasn't happened yet is a choice. My impression is that there is too much opposition within NIH and the broader medical community to do so, aggressive deniers who feel outrage at the mere idea that we should be given even a second's thoughts push back forcefully.

But this is what needs to happen. We can't do it on our own, we simply don't have the allies for it and those we do have face career ruin if they speak out too much. We can't counter those lies by ourselves, even when they come from people who have been revealed to be full of shit they have the upper ground of eminence and political pressure.
 
rvallee said:
What a ghoul. Sharpe has no conscience.
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One might almost say he is ruthless in his defence of his precious ideas.

rvallee said:
Sharpe and his colleagues have some very interesting defenders: Rod Little, Spiked, NaturalNews, Quillette, now an astroturf lobby for chemical and tobacco companies. Look around at the people defending you and it tells you everything you need to know about which side of history you will end up.
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Yeah, I noticed that too. By the company they keep shall ye know them.

strategist said:
The Science Media Center propaganda is discouraging researchers from entering the field. I suspect that is exactly the point too. They don't want competition for CBT/GET or more people signing open letters.
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The last thing they want is competent honest researchers looking too closely at what they are doing.
 
On a tangent - I'd certainly never heard of the other people mentioned in the doxxing article. The academic agricultural scientist, Kevin Folta, appeared on a pretty engaging (quite long) podcast here.

After digging around a bit further I do sympathise with his experience. He seems like a guy who wants study ag biotech and communicate its potential benefits, and thus has come under scrutiny from anti-GMO fundamentalists.

Unlike BPS researchers, he promptly released all information requested. People fished in it to find that he, an industrial researcher, does have some connection to industry in his area of study, and used that to vilify him.

Food production brings in to play such a vast set of global political, economic, and ecological issues that merit careful consideration. It is quite counterproductive to fixate obsessively on one issue (safety of GMOs), be wrong about it, and then make a huge effort just to try to bring down one state school researcher.

Anyway, there's no comparison to the situation with BPS researchers. It's too bad that people fall for this. Reverse the situation and it starts to look similar. Unfortunately people seem get so high from signaling their anti-anti-science stance that they lose all critical thinking and simply defer to anything that can claim institutional authority.


Now back to scheduled programming.
 
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