The other day, we were looking at John Horgan’s thoughts on Jeffrey Epstein and the decadence of science.
Well, here’s another symptom:
For decades, The Lancet was seen as one of the world’s preeminent biomedical journals, along with publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). But something has changed, and the journal now regularly publishes bad research and bizarre opinions…
The Lancet thinks that it’s reasonable to ponder one’s pollution sins before having children. This is insane and misanthropic, and it’s precisely why so many people don’t take environmentalists seriously. Followed to its logical conclusion, nobody should ever have any children, which means we’ll leave a clean and healthy planet for precisely no one.
Unsurprisingly, the article also gives a nod to Extinction Rebellion, a group of activists that tries to convince people to act boldly on climate change by, as I described previously, “preventing people from going to work, spraying graffiti, smashing glass doors, protesting naked, and gluing themselves to street furniture.”
Alex Berezow, “The ‘Woke’ Lancet Asks If It’s Acceptable To Have Children” at American Council on Science and Health
Here’s Lancet on the zero kids policy.
Okay. When institutions get this crazy (and Berezow provides a number of further examples of Lancet gone crazy) , it’s usually because their reason for existence has been undermined.
For example, chances are, your local paramedics are not dancing around dressed as pineapples or radishes to make some point. At any moment the signal will sound and who knows what they’ll have to respond to?—in a professional way. They don’t need crazy; it’s laid on for them with the job they do and they can go on being useful until they retire.
So: Is it Lancet that we don’t need any more or medical journals generally? We’ll be able to find out by seeing whether a number of other journals follow suit and ramp up the crazy.
Why don’t we need Lancet/journals any more?
See also: John Horgan on Jeffrey Epstein and the decadence of science. Horgan: As genuine progress has stalled, hype has surged. A 2015 study of biomedical papers found that between 1974 and 2014 the frequency of terms such as “novel,” “innovative” and “unprecedented” increased 15-fold.