5G Opposition — Critical Thought or Conspiracy?
According to a VICE interview expert, “….if you are really, really concerned about 5G, you should be terrified of light bulbs.”
Stop 5G International’s updated YouTube page features a mini-documentary video about the Berkeley September 2020 protest. Berkeley, CA joined protesters worldwide on September 26, 2020 to protest the rollout of the untested 5G technology. Film produced by Amber Yang:
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In contrast, in response to growing international opposition to 5G, VICE published an 11-minute video questioning “why 5G conspiracies are spreading so quickly.”
Getting to the Bottom of What the 5G Fuss is All About
The claims and conspiracy theories surrounding the launch of 5G networks have been shocking. In the most extreme cases, people linking the technology with the coronavirus pandemic have torched mobile phone masts and assaulted engineers. In an attempt to get to the bottom of it, VICE speaks to Dr David Robert Grimes, a cancer researcher and physicist at the University of Oxford, to find out if there are any grounds for these claims and to hear his explanation of the symptoms some people are attributing to the rollout of 5G. We also meet people protesting against the implementation of the new generation of cellular networks to hear the ways that they claim it is negatively impacting their lives.
David Robert Grimes states,
Fears surrounding 5G are echoes of previous fears. What is interesting is that the fears are getting more traction.
Why are these fears getting more traction?
Moving further up the spectrum sounds like a huge increase, but it’s nothing. The most powerful photon or particle of light that could be a 5G particle would still be about 17,000 times less energetic than the weakest possible visible light. So if you are really really concerned about 5G you should be terrified of lightbulbs.
The other thing is people need to build more transmitters, they’re lower power but you have to build a lot more of them, people see them and get panicky.
But the biggest factor is the rise of disinformation online.
Dr. David Robert Grimes states that:
Many activists have the lowest level of knowledge about the thing on which they opine. You can convince yourself you believe something if it makes you feel good about yourself. One of the motivators of people spreading these conspiracy theories is the idea of them having special knowledge. This is illusionary superiority or illusionary knowledge, and it’s very alluring to certain people. Narcissism is a factor behind this. When people spread conspiracy theories they get a sense of satisfaction out of it. They feel that they are special. So sometimes the people perpetuating this are doing it for their own gratification, but at a long term cost to public understanding of science and medicine, and ultimately sometimes to public health.
Who is David Grimes? Calling the Kettle Black
In a blog post, “The Ugly Face of Science – David Robert Grimes, Steven Novella, David Gorski”, author Yoda Knight explains.
Grimes, Gorski, and Novella are what The Ethical Skeptic would call fake skeptics and authority credulists. They represent an Orwellian inversion of true science and real skepticism – part of what Nassim Taleb terms the ‘intellectual yet idiot’ (IYI) class of the establishment elite. They are endorsed by – and beholden to – corporate and industry interests (whilst proclaiming and virtue signalling the exact opposite), lodged within – and incentivized by – what Eric Weinstein calls the Gated Institutional Narrative.
They enact a weaponised type of skepticism that – whether or not they are cognizant of it – has been exploited by the propaganda arm of corporations, industry lobby groups, and astroturfing think tanks.
They pollute the Information Ecosystem by parroting the flagrant representation bias of the biomedical / corporate model of medicine (i.e. perpetrating the distortion that absence of evidence is evidence of absence: e.g. patentable drugs and interventions are far more likely to receive the funding necessary to achieve the threshold for clinical evidence) – and by failing to balance their skepticism by seriously addressing the glaring flaws and systemic corruption / collusion in mainstream medicine. This creates what Daniel Schmachtenberger calls distortion bubbles that, over time, corrode public trust in science whilst having made people increasingly dependent on biomedical solutions to chronic health issues rather than being encouraged to take responsibility – and to feel empowered – to optimise their own health.
Together with representation bias, they misappropriate both the origin and meaning of the dictum “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – first derived from Pierre-Simon de Laplace – and then adopted by Marcello Truzzi – before Carl Sagan popularised it. This dictum was supposed to be used to guard against the fantastical and unfalsifiable, as analogised by Bertrand Russell’s teapot. There’s nothing extraordinary about the idea that diet and lifestyle changes could prevent, manage, or even reverse disease. In fact, what is extraordinary is the suggestion that they couldn’t.
They are masters in sophistry – pumping out clever arguments yet which, ultimately, turn out to be epistemologically false, misleading, or dumb rhetoric. This includes their fixed-false belief that “burden of proof always lies with the person making a claim”. This is erroneous because burden of proof depends on the scientific plausibility of a claim – not on who makes it. So, for example, the onus is on the Agrochemical Industry to prove that the long-term, systemic and synergistic effects of chemicals used are safe. The onus is not on those who doubt the safety of such products. And, of course, in law, industries and corporations must be at least implicitly stating products as safe when brought to market – so these skeptics wrongly place the onus even according to their very own conception of burden of proof.
Sophistry has no place in medicine or public health journalism.
This isn’t just an affront to true science and real skepticism — it is a danger to public health, social harmony, the spirit of free society, and to finding pragmatic and genuinely sustainable solutions to the problems facing people and the Earth.
SOURCE: https://objectiveskeptic.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-ugly-face-of-science-david-robert.html
VICE promotes itself as “The Definitive Guide To An Uncertain World.” For now, it is “cool” for news outlets like VICE to ridicule activism dedicated to protecting human health and the environment, with reporting that is short on science and long on the opinions of experts beholden to mammoth industries.
Assuming that a science-skeptical public can’t distinguish between a light bulb and 5G seems at best…. incredulous.
To learn more about the policies and the science outside the Gated Institutional Narrative see the Children’s Health Defense press conference about the pending lawsuit.
Patricia Burke works with activists across the country and internationally calling for new biologically-based microwave radio frequency exposure limits. .
Top image: Flex.com and Pixabay
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