New Year, New Push For Censorship

NPR has a serious-sounding expert telling us that we need alternative health websites shut down, because they are giving information that is unscientific and might cause people harm. For instance, telling people that echinacea can cure chlamydia.

Like when the World Health Organization convinced African men that if they submitted to circumcision of their penises, they would be immune from AIDS? Like that? And now the countries in which most men were convinced to go through with that particular mutilation are also the countries with the highest rate of AIDS? Like that?

You could make a case that the WHO waffled about their recommendations and didn't actually say that the men would be immune, rather like alternative medical sites usually waffle and say that people should consult their doctors for serious illnesses.

But I'm betting that millions of men who made the choice to have the tip of their penis removed, made it because they thought that it would make them immune, not "slightly less likely to become infected".

So who is the irresponsible vendor of Fake News?

The last 2 years of internet and social media censorship, onerous though it may seem to those targeted, were only the beginning of a mass shutdown of what may be put into one broad category "Information and Ideas Your Rulers Do Not Want You To Entertain".