Somewhere recently
For various values of ‘recently’
I said something like:

Whenever you prate ironically about Horse Paste, you’re not being too funny and you’re not displaying your intellect in a good light. Mainly you’re just sounding brainwashed by someone else’s power and agenda.

I want to amplify on that a bit.

I think the same thing can be said about repeating the talking point that goes: “Follow the Science”.

What if I said to you: “Follow God’s Will” (‘seek his protection’, ‘leave it in her hands’, or whatever).

You’d be right to react ironically, of course. To begin with, you’d have to ask: Oh yeah? Whose God?

If you counsel me earnestly to just follow the science, I am similarly compelled to ask …

Whose science?

How about Bill Gates’ science? He’s rich so he’s smart, ennit?

I don’t think I have to detail the … economically entangled problems with that.

But what if you said, look, asshole. Science’s science. You know, the thing that’s saved us so far, in the gospel according to Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Let’s just go with a nice safe mainstream choice and say, Saint Anthony Fauci’s science, as told to CNN or some other temple of Rational Reason.

Then I might say back:

Fauci Contradicts Himself Non-Stop Over Covid Advice

On one level the video is pure comedy. It’s really funny.

But the serious part is that there’s no such thing anymore as pure objective disinterested bloodless godless Science. If there ever was such a thing ever.

We live in an Empire that is thoroughly altered by money and who has it and who doesn’t; by Das Kapital. This applies to you and me, and equally to all the well-fed scientists, to the administrative spokespersons, the millionaire cable anchors, and all the way up into the priestly domains of Saint Fauci.

If someone is implausibly but actually not motivated directly by money itself, they’re still going to be diverted from some purely abstract ideal of the scientific by associated factors, like fame or reputation or an inherent need to support the Machine that’s been so good to them. The hand that feeds.

The hand of the pharma lobby or the hand of the Democratic Party or the hand of Apple or Google or Facebook or Lockheed Martin.

The hand of the evil duopoly in the political sense, and the hand of the corporate master in the economic one.

If untainted pure Science exists, I’m still waiting for it to show its face, and I expect to be waiting a long damn time.

I’m not an anti-vaxxer, baby.

I got my twin jab the minute they put it out there.

I wear my mask in public religiously, even now.

I’d consider a booster, or two, if I can come to believe that it would do anything for me, or mine.

A good, team-playing boy, who even voted for Team Joe over that bad creepy disbeliever, that heretic against the System and all that is civilized, and rolled up my good boy sleeve when I was bid.

But I choose to question whatever I hear, even if it falls from the lips of a high priest.

And my advice is Follow Your Own Truth and not one handed to you by Zeus or Jake Tapper or four out of five doctors, even if they call you a barbarian or a potato-head or a trumper red-state dipshit, yea, even if you are one truly.