This statement expresses our opposition to any exclusionary and effectively non-inclusive & speech-suppressing chokehold over academic publishing, by any single ideology that purports to seekknee-jerk obedience, unquestioning conformism, totalitarian thought control, mass indoctrination, engineered mass 'consensus', and forced modification of behaviour, whether implemented by corporations or The State (and perhaps enforced by subservient State 'psychiatrists' [USSR-style]). E.g. Mercury Project and its 'behavioural "science" '. This of course includes all ideologies that use stated 'inclusion' for the sole purpose of de facto and ultra-politicized 'exclusion'. We object to academic publishing being diverted either (a) for purposes of state-sponsored, Police-enforced (SWAT "teams" / corrupt 'Federales'), special-interest, or professional lobbyist propaganda, or (b) to sustain extreme and factionalized dogmatic strife. We oppose all administrative and judicial imposition of compelled speech and compelled terminology -- from whichever ostensible "side" of the spectrum. We oppose all factions that aspire to 'complete / total narrative control' -- The Great Narrative. Let us be entirely blunt: withholding evidence, 'scrubbing' awkward data from records, 'adjusting' data and documents, knowingly omitting pertinent research, suppressing rival working hypotheses, etc. -- in the name of something like Political Communication and the Greater Good -- all of that is NOT scholarship. It is just plain old FRAUD. Even if done out of purported Effective Altruism 'concern' that actual data might be 'misunderstood' or 'misinterpreted'. Pure kabuki theatre -- there is no sashaying away from that. Why is it necessary to be so panically afraid of actual recorded data?

Up-front, we wish to state that our “undertaking(s) for the transmission or retransmission of programs over the internet” on this site simply will continue to be governed solely by OUR views and by OUR approach to scholarship and research, and NOT by the CRTC. The Portuguese Studies Review , as an instrument of free research, has zero intention to comply with the provisions of Bill C-11 / C-18. WE are invested in a genuine, productive, very courteous, and truly inclusive multi-lateral plurality of viewpoints. WE are uninterested in any boilerplate 'agitprop', statist 'social engineering', and designer Behaviourist 'social control'. Simple. So "done". Your are entirely free to disagree, and we shall always unfailingly publish you as long as the product meets high standards. WE are likewise free to disagree, and to publish whatever WE deem to meet same high standards. We have 0% intention to compromise quality, inventiveness, curiosity, and cutting-edge revisionism -- the very wellspring of Human future -- for the sake of any utterly stale templates vetted by some sort of surveillance-obsessed fanatical 'Ministry of Truth'. In other words, we are committed to the "dangerous fantasy" of Free Speech. Yes, yes, we know -- "only controlled speech is free speech" [satire signal ] (it has become tiresome by now to evoke George Orwell in these contexts). So, let's move on. We emphatically do not believe in any unfailingly beneficent attributes of an implemented "technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent," and we reserve the Right to Question the intent of any 'thing' that self-purports to be "all-knowing [abysmal hubris], ever-present [egomania], all-powerful [megalomania]". We do not, and never will, bend the knee to a Techno-Deity. You may very well think of this as a commitment to seek all unknown things, in determined opposition to the X-Club (1864-1865) and any subsequent inheritors of X-memes and brands. Oh, well, that line "... and nobody, and I do mean nobody, will be able to oppose it." We, and a legion of diffuse others, are the Nobody -- nullus, nihil, Nemo, Νέμο / Ουτις, το ουτι -- who will not only oppose it, but help to stop it. Stick the Bronze Age stake straight into the Single Surveillance Eye of Polyphemus and twist it around. No, we are not "truly afraid" and never will be. Not part of the "the sheep-like process." Go somewhere else to find your "sheep." In an answer to an old question formerly posed by Maurice Lamontagne (President of Canada’s Privy Council, 1964 to 1965): "How can we stop Man’s creativeness?" (Senate Committee Reports, 1968-1972), we shall simply retort: "You cannot, and you absolutely WILL not, no matter what you attempt to do." And a further comment, with reference to San Francisco -- we deem, on fundamental Humanistic and philosophical grounds, that a "Dalek"-style Police robot cannot be authorized to kill a Human. That is a core violation of even the SciFi "First Law of Robotics" (Isaac Asimov). Humans ARE, still, vastly superior to mere robots. Therefore, "Daleks" cannot be permitted to roam freely. The "Daleks" are NOT Human (just like a synthetic 'Receptionist' is absolutely and annoyingly not Human). Eliminating roaming "Daleks" with extreme prejudice is NO crime. It is mere 'sanitary disposal' of dumb and hazardous res inanimata Scrap Metal, Plastic, Sensors, Wires, Lithium Batteries. Simply, urban sanitation. Human-rights-based preventive control of robotic curbside infestation. A contrary version of Information Resilience of course already exists -- shall we say Scholarship Resilience? No comment. 'Mary Poppins'? We laugh. The rest is just PR BS, we would call it 'cheap', but of course it costs the deployers and the taxpayer billions of dollars. Apparently, rather recently (November 2022) there were 'some people who said something' about "can't imagine ... an official ... would be wrong ...". Real and properly expert historians of course can plethorously imagine -- and not only imagine but document -- a gazillion reasons why Officials, Officers, Judges, Attorneys General, Kings, Prime Ministers, Public Servants, Ministers, etc., can be utterly and disastrously, even criminally, WRONG. Awareness of all this, in point of fact, is the 'bread and butter' of Real History, ever since Humanity's most ancient records, East and West, back to 3,800 BCE and even earlier. The only possible conclusion is that the 'some people' who just "can't imagine [an official / political huckster / media talking-head / 'celebrity'] could be wrong" are either weak on critical analysis or 'purchased' beyond any conceivable imagination -- or both.

Much of this goes way back -- e.g. to Von Hayek (1899 – 1992) and his Counter-Revolution of Science. To Hayek's trenchant critique of Saint-Simon and of the 'technocratic elite' (an 'elite' that was exhorted by the aristocratic Claude Henri de Rouvroy the Count of Saint-Simon [1760-1825] to "consider yourselves [presumably 'a select group of human beings'] as the governors of the operation [2023 wording: the central operating system or CPU] of the human mind" (aka "engineers of the human soul" ["инженеры человеческих душ" ~ as per Stalin, 26 October 1932; see also Josef Škvorecký (1924-2012), The Engineer of Human Souls (1977), a novel that won a Canadian Governor General's Award]). 'Personalities'-context? Political, cultural, economic, social, philosophical? Easy -- here goes: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire ... " ["... das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce", with"a grotesque and mediocre personality (playing) a hero's part'] (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon] [December 1851 - March 1852]).

Engineering "human souls" through constant frame-ups ("nudging"), 'legal' fraud / 'lawfare', 'mandated' conformity, extorted 'confessions', rigged accusations, and ritual deplatforming is not going to solve anything -- it will, however, very beneficially, make die Farce more stunningly glaring, utterly dysfunctional, authoritarian, and embarrassingly obvious. Simply, grotesque. All this does relate, upon sober reflection, to our opinion that LLM-s, for instance -- unless critically contained -- may eventually nullify the crucial intellectual 'chain of transmission / versioning' in Humanoid scholarship (thus making ALL knowledge worthless). And billionaires posing as 'awakened' philanthropists only make things worse. (A) LLM-s do not generate 'new knowledge' ~ they are currently incapable of that; (B) LLMs fail the Turing Test, and do NOT even remotely satisfy Isaac Asimov's sci-fi 'First Law of Robotics', expecially in terms of quality and strict impartiality. Manufactured constructs (as in 'Manufacturing Consent') are chimeras of Politics, Power, and Policing (the trillions-dependent-3P engine). Within a framework of 'editing' and 'suppressing' of even what people know has documentably occurred -- thus, a purging of Reality: by “automated fact-checking tools” (United Nations International Computing Centre [UNICC], or the Facebook & Google-funded fact checker Meedan [sound much like 'Maidan'?], or the Meta-owned CrowdTangle, or the International Fact-Checking Network [IFCN]). Most of the experts in our circles are real experts (not programmed 'bots') in their own fields. And you want us to yield to a 'scripted' AFCT ('automated fact-checking tool')? Now THAT there is really FUNNY ...! Maybe even Larry Fink would find it funny, if he were able to.

So, yes, we are determined to fight against any 'world' that wishes to emulate that of Ayn Rand's Anthem -- as captured in the words of the novella's narrator [neo-nounself] 'Equality 7-2521': "It is a sin to think words no others think [i.e. 97% 'Consensus', anyone?] and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. . . . And well we know that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.” So, WE are committed to precisely that sin and transgression, always, and we shall gleefully commit that sin and transgression 24/7/365, by any forceful means necessary that involve "thinking alone". Of course, as quite common these days in the so-called 'West', one might become the target of a 'public safety' operation, just like in the former USSR -- political opposition to the Communist Party and statist utopianism triggered fake 'diagnoses' of "disease" (such as "sluggish schizophrenia") or manifest [entirely fabricated] symptoms such as "delusions of reformism." Same totalitarian garbage, always, repeatedly. Giordano Bruno (1549-1600) was just a test run, obviously ... all his known works 'cancelled' & on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. And of course Cardinal Bellarmino, Cardinal Madruzzo, Camillo Borghese (Pope Paul V), Domenico Pinelli, Pompeio Arrigoni, Cardinal Sfondrati, Pedro de Deza Manuel and Cardinal Santorio were all orbital-navigation and GPS 'authorities' [satire] and the Earth does not at all revolve around the Sun but the Sun revolves aorund the Earth [because 97% Institutional Consensus says so] . Sure. One must uphold Respect for Authority, even if that 'authority' is mentally 100% removed from de facto documentable Reality and grounded solely in Narrative and Models. The Calvinists were hardly any better, incidentally, where Bruno was concerned, with respect to puffed-up and dysfunctionally ignorant 'authority', as per the exemplum of Bishop George Abbot (1562-1633), a caustic anti-Brunian and truly a "sincere but narrow-minded Calvinist", for all his varied light & shadow merits, such as they were. Oh, well, we were just wondering here ... can one still have Culture without any actual culture and knowledge (as in -- all dissenting 'discourse' is banned, shadow-banned, denounced, deplatformed, unemployed, and raided by ultra-heroic SWAT Teams [80 Officers and 20 'Specials' against one single and entirely unarmed man], 'throttled', 'cancelled', graffitied, shredded, smashed, mock-labelled, 'eradicated', dismissed, 'fired', 'un-hired', carted away into hidden 'special repositories', or stolen and melted down for the crass value of the 'metal', etc., and replaced by a giant completely 'symbolic' Nothing at All [a sort of properly non-descript 'Equality 7-2521']? Quite frankly, we do not know. Yes, we do live, currently, on a Mad Planet where Fahrenheit 451 or its socio-politico-'cultural' equivalents have basically become a "New Normal". Formerly, during various historically recorded periods, this was known as spastic 'iconoclasm' (a very ancient phenomenon, ancient already when the Amarna period dawned in Ancient Egypt [latter half of the Eighteenth Dynasty] -- way before anyone at all associated any such term as 'icon' with 'image'). It was quite unfortunately prone to causing entire societies to collapse in sterile ruin and be heard of again only as quaint archaeological curiosities, some 600 to 4, 000 years later. Of course, given that the PSR takes huge pride in being non-mainstream and open-minded, it might presumably be alleged that we do not foster scholarship but publish opinion only (in analogy to "They’re not gathering news. They’re publishing opinion only"). Please, allow us to laugh, process a few more utterly scholarly footnotes, and go have a very smooth top-qualilty drink. No matter what WE do when using words, we at least stand behind using those words and do not lie about those words under oath and on live camera. Plus, for us, "schools are [NOT] where policies become people". For us, schools and universities have a fundamental duty to be places where people become fully independent, fully autonomous, fully expert, fully aware, critically thinking, genuinely educated (as opposed to indoctrinated) full Human beings of the future, who can deliberate about policies, frame future policies of their own, and also abolish and reform policies, and invent or devise NEW policies, for entire centuries to come -- and NOT at the embarrasingly passé beck and call of an ideology but in sole accordance with THEIR actual needs. The needs of THEIR future. We simply draw a line. Because it MUST be drawn. Human minds are absolutely NOT a blank slate thought-sausage of passé "policies" pressure-stuffed into flesh by some sort of Government Mandate.

"It is of the utmost and vital and supreme importance to avoid going past 'Day 315' of the Calhoun 'Mouse / Rat Utopia' (Enuma Elish -- 'When On High [Heavens] / When In Elysium) experiment. 'Day 320' is already much too late, devastatingly so. Total system-collapse in 1588 'Mouse Days', no recovery possible at all after 'Day 560'. Experiment after experiment after experiment, without fail. This has to change, now, by any means necessary. The mice demonstrated in the 1960s everything one needs to know about the 2020s+. Lazy, apathetic, self-obsessed, self-important, dysfunctional, entitled, showy, grooming-eating-sleeping, not reproducing, not evolving, etc. ... Not any 'overpopulation' [which in fact never even remotely occurred in 'Mouse Elysium' before The End, an abject and pathetic within-system ideological / behavioural Total Collapse]." (Anonymous)

"A Planet of Muzzled and Fleeced Sheep will only beget a World Government of lazy, ignorant, arrogant, meritless, worthless, self-satisfied, sated, dysfunctional, lying, corrupt, and farcically manipulative 'Wolves' that are not even real wolves any more, just an 'obsolete Monte-Carlo-technique math-model-based' stench of corruption. No, the 'benefits' are not worth the 'risks', and the very thing the Planet does NOT need is a 'Single Global Order'." (Apocryphal)

“Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World [i.e. the novel]. Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” (Aldous Huxley – Letter to George Orwell about 1984 [the novel] , document dated 1949)

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” (Aldous Huxley). The Truman Show (1998) anyone? 'Real' fake picket fence', 'real' plastic people, 'danger' of moving around, 'virtue' of staying at home (lockdown), being a 'peculiarity trapped in a cage', with 'questioning the script' of the techno-prison NOT allowed (Google "Info Interventions" and "pre-bunking" and mind-"immunization"). And, of course, to be forced to admit that one has been duped, 'taken', that one fell for an old carnival shell game, that one's heroic Two Minutes of Hate were pure farce, that would be terrible -- a total annihilation of self-esteem and a rock-bottom FTX-style collapse in artificial 'virtue signal' credits or scrip-money 'game tokens'. Oh, well: "... then there will also be offences, which are characteristic of people with abnormal minds. Of those who might start calling for opposition to Communism, on this basis we can say that clearly their mental state is not normal" (classic -- speech by Nikita Khrushchev, 24 May 1959).

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited)

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" (NOT Orwell, merely attributed to him, but 100% on target in every single minute respect)

"What is the very essence of a Totalitarian System? It is government through fear -- a fear manufactured, carefully engineered, 'agitprop'-driven, government-controlled, and endlessly foisted on people by the so-called media, which are utterly bought plus abjectly servile. A fear carefully crafted through calibrated (mis)use of words (a classic 'sustained moral panic' PsyOps inversion of Reality). Casting 'truth' as criminalizeable 'falsehood' and, conversely, agitprop junk as 'Truth™'. Already the Jesuits and the Propaganda Fide were chevroned masters at this very old gambit." (Anonymous)

“If you would know who controls you, see who you may not criticize" (attibuted to Tacitus and many others)

"Truth is the least popular and least profitable thing in the entire Universe" (Anonymous). About everything else (including such things -- past things -- as the exact 'scientifically' established number of angels dancing on the tip a 'pin'), countless entirely rapturous trend-followng billions are "so excited", "so pumped up", "so wahoo", "so improved outlook and mood", "so HOORAY", "so omg I love it, lol", "so blessed at being finally 'chosen' ": etc., etc., etc.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” (Hannah Arendt). Totalitarian Societies are based on lies, so they require people to recite lies, daily. Forcing people to endorse lies breaks them mentally (SYNANON Principle, or Psy-Ops 101).

Surprise, surprise, many of us at the PSR still like very much Georges Brassens (1921-1981), much as the 'Organs of Power and State' did not like him. " Le siècle où nous vivons est un siècle pourri. / Tout n'est que lâcheté, bassesse, / Les plus grands assassins vont aux plus grandes messes / Et sont des plus grands rois les plus grands favoris. / Hommage de l'auteur à ceux qui l'ont compris, / Et merde aux autres." (Georges Brassens, Des coups d’épée dans l’eau [I.G.E. Michel Lafon, sans date (1982)], manuscrit de c. 1942, avec extras, postface d'André Larue). And yes, keep in mind of course, as Brassens said, that "An anarchist is a man who scrupulously crosses at the zebra crossing, because he hates to argue with the Agents". The pen is mightier and much more enduring than the sword. Thus, of course, crude 'fact-checker' Censorship, as prevalent in 2022-2023 -- arrayed on one side, and arrayed on the other side those who detest and oppose Censorship and will always seek to undermine it and render it ridiculous.

Let us state merely two very basic facts here. (A) a culture 'war' or ideological 'war' is still a 'war' (Clausewitz, Suvorov, Sun Tzu, and all else, all the way back to Shalmanesser III and before). If one dreams that one will win 'for Eternity' just by ceaselessly deploying 'authorities' and the so-called Pretorian Legion (whichever ridiculous three- or four-letter agency), one is already in the situation of the long-dead bland staring faces of once live (and presumably 'important') but now long buried 'players' in the decaying Roman Empire (200CE--early 400s CE) (e.g. the deep archaeological basement of the Museum of the City of Barcelona, Spain, etc.) -- this is a simple fact of limited organic life. (B) A 'war', cultural or other, is the most stunningly and overwhelmingly democratic of procedures -- the ultimate Total Democracy -- the 'enemy' you have picked has a full and presumably (until you find otherwise, in confrontation) equal and completely inclusive say, and also full independent 'agency'.

A real 'winner' is in fact utterly calm, focused, practical, balanced, if necessary 'ice cold', meticulous, professional way beyond any 'professional' so-called 'requirements' (please, gauge that against the Idiocracy verbal frenzy described in various contexts earlier). A 'winner' is truly and genuinely and earnestly interested at all times in whatever opponents have to say and why, because (a) it is vital to comprehend an opponent, any opponent, in all minute intricacy, in minute-to-minute real-time, and (b) the decodable 'signal' offers an opportunity to hone and refine data and arguments constantly. If one (i) listens to a single sound-stream only and exclusively, (ii) deliberately ignores what 'deemed' opponents say or are actually doing (in real-time/space, informationally, technologically, R&D, etc.), and (iii) thinks that 'deplatforming'--'censoring'--'ignoring'--'shouting down'--'banning' opponents is going to win anything 'real' at all (not to speak of tangible-space battles or campaigns), then, simply, we do not even want to comment. We actually do not need to comment. Just, NO. Futile. There is no use or purpose in such commenting. The utter pragmatic and materialist defeat of anyone who hovers in such a 'dreamworld' is 100% assured. One can 'narrate' whatever one wants. Literally, whatever. It does not make any material difference, with respect to any material outcome, of any consequence.

For a real 'winner', an ideological matrix is not 'sacrosanct' by any stretch of the imagination : historically, sociologically, it has only been thus for fervid ideo-cults, with all the abundantly documented socio-verbal-symbolical-cultural attributes of pre-programmed self-destructive pan-social mind-absolutisms [Synanon, Rev. Jim Jones, and any other plethorous number of those, religious or non-'religious', all the way back to the minus 000s [that is, BCE]). Those who cannot, will not rationally delink (e.g. ditch Synanon, etc.), because of ossified 'commitment' to vociferous template - and slogan-driven ideologies, have already lost all capacity to re-balance (Aikido) -- ironically, they have denied that option to themselves, by fiat or fervidity. Now, Aikido is literally based on exploiting such template-driven fiat and fervidity. No even remotely half-sane strategist would therefore adopt the societally required fiat and fervidity. Those namely are a 100% assured way of condemning one's side to self-inflicted stagnation, pathetic 'correct terminology' obfuscation, and ultimate devastating defeat. Why? Because the only permitted options -- punitively so -- are 'closing the ranks', 'standing' so that one could easily be thrown off balance, 'one-two, one-two' blinkered static defense, utterly predictable 'prefab' responses, and an oblivious deployment of 'law' and enforcement. Pure 指鹿為馬 -- censorship, surveillance, tracking, tracing, repression, the Police State, laughable 'discourse management', 'reality-hashing', one-Party 'Forever' rule, 'regulated speech' and 'regulated' State-subservient research, plus nauseatingly rigged court-martials for dissenters, 'ideological re-education', and rigid raison d’État Boards or Commissions pretending to 'decide' which part of any research or body of Human knowledge might be 'deemed' 'political' and might thus be designated on ideological grounds (rarely if at all factual) as 'harmful and misleading "political" communication'.

The champions of zhi lu wei ma 'commitment' will always answer any questions with the same words as they did countless times before, in widely variable historical contexts: "I am just following orders" or "I am just doing my job" or "That's not a decision 'I' make ..." or “That’s a question above my paygrade ...” or "... listen, the Government just wants the App" or "... it is our usual practice to decline comment ..." or "... o ur statistics do not necessarily have a bearing on reality (sic) ..." or "I do not have any communications to read out to you today". Is this the utterly proverbial "banality of evil"? Yes, in fact it is. Without any conceivable shadow of doubt. In every single action and every single syllable of every single utterance. We of course do not criticize such lofty and 'safety-promoting' 'values'. History will decide. It is doing so already. Punitive attempts to impose one's world-view signal one thing only -- that world-view in fact can no longer be viably defended, either logically or pragmatically. Even more, it is not worth defending, regardless of what 'subsidy'- and 'handout'-hungry Court Mummers might claim. At such a juncture, paroxysmal persistence (doubling-down, tripling-down, whatever-ing-down) may of course become the most effective (very brief) means by which utter failure can be concealed. Alert and nimble manoeuvre would be called for, but the proponents are no longer even remotely capable of such 'freedom of manoeuvre' -- they can only scream, ban, shriek, arrest, issue edicts, govern by 'emergency power', dismiss those who do not agree 100%, indict, 'impeach', accuse falsely, censor, silence, rig votes, rig evidence, imprison, coerce, and 'punish'. 'Point-and-shriek'. One really cannot have any praticable 'common set of "facts" ' "imposed" this way, through fines, arrests, raids, truncheons, deprivation of work and property, social 'shaming', snooping, neighbour-to-neighbour denunciations, and anonymous watch-'agents' (familiars, 'snitch-swines', 'fact-checkers', semantic 'experts of orthodoxy', 'inoculators against wrong-thinking', 24/7/365 behavioural monitors). It will NEVER, EVER be 'common' or 'shared'. Not in a million years ...

Sinibaldo Fieschi (Pope Innocent IV) made exactly that awful mistake in 1243-1254 (LONG time ago). The Church (among innumerable others, the USSR included) tried all of this -- the whole and entirely obscene panoply -- earlier on : the bureaucratic machinery -- back when -- was called The Inquisition (forward some centuries, or back, it becomes the KGB, the NKVD, the StaSi, the Persian Immortals, the VB, the whatever-two-or-three-or-four-letter mindless acronym and utterly worthless and rotten and co-opted and deeply corrupt bureaucratic Alphabet 'field-soup' one may conceivably come up with). There seems to be a lack of historical knowledge, somewhere, in all this, and a devastatingly destructive absence of any historical awareness. Typically, the less than insignificant 'Emperors' of the Late Roman Empire behaved exactly thus. And their functionaries. And the so-called Senators of whatever was left of so-called 'Rome'. One does not have to be any 'fan' of Rome or such to perceive the nature of the systemic farce: Romulus Augustulus. What began with a whoop of courage ended with only a paroxysmal whine of pathetic comedy and utter defeat.

Walk away me' boys
Walk away me' boys
And by morning we'll be free ...
        ("What's Left Of The Flag" -- Flogging Molly)

Diffrent readers might prefer different similes -- and different songs and tunes -- but in the end it always is the same. The playlet has played on smaller or bigger stages before, no matter how positions and stances might seem to array when context is absent or ignored, as in the famous counterpoint headlock between Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. Yes, it did come to a head dramatically, as we all know -- July 1965, 'Bedford College', University of London, International Colloquium on the Philosophy of Science. Whoops of courage ended with whines of comedy. Neither presenter finished his paper on time. Popper refused to share equal poster-space with Kuhn. The latter then even refused to physically appear on stage with the Popperian Jagdish Hattiangadi, and it was John Watkins who had to pick up Hattiangadi's notes and read them instead. No one had to be 'cancel cultured' off stage -- everyone was busy cancelling themselves! A sort of "Comrades purging Comrades from the Party." And Kuhn, typically cited as champion of 'heretics' and an iconic decipherer of 'Scientific Revolutions' fully deserved, on many counts (not most, merely many), the drubbing he received from Paul Feyerabend (despite Kuhn's subtle 'subtext' that 'normal science' both shields scientists from interference and may be stagnationist and counterproductive -- of course, these are not mutually exclusive) :

"The recipe [for a successful science], according to [Kuhn and his followers], is to restrict criticism, to reduce the number of comprehensive theories to one, and to create a normal science that has only this one theory as its paradigm. Students must be prevented from speculating along different lines and the more restless colleagues must be made to conform and ‘to do serious work’… Is it his intention to provide a historico-scientific justification for the ever growing need to identify with some group?" (Paul Feyerabend) (Note: this would make a frightening mass of current scholars and scientists 100% vested-interest Kuhnians, with any sort of deemed Popperianism being considered an indictable 'crime' -- 'misinformation', 'disinformation', 'fake-news', etc. This brings us to "... behaviours we can turn on or off as needed." No, Prof. M*****, you cannot and you NEVER will be able to accomplish that. Sorry to say so, the humanoid biological clock is against any even remote chance of you actually witnessing an Apotheosis of the ''turn-on' / 'turn-off' Centralist Control Project. And, no, individuals with cutting-edge but 'inconvenient' research cannot just be declared "... no longer relevant in today's workplace ..." That tells one more about the so-called 'workplace' and about those who purport to 'run' it than about the intrinsic and even extreme long-term value of those declared to be 'no longer relevant'. And it tells one a great deal about the Totalitarian Sould of those who preach that the democratic principle of letting "both sides be heard" must be eradicated because it is "dangerous")

“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles” (Richard Feynman) and ... we would add, no government or court of law (or even worse, a mere Censorship board or some sort of Chief Internet Censor -- almost inevitably a political 'appointee' compromised by corruption and partisanship and massive conflicts of interest) has any genuine topic-specific competence to decide whether a given piece of research or scholarship is 'valid' or 'invalid' -- only actual practicing scientists and scholars are the ones who possess demonstrable relevant qualifications.

"And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have doubt, we then propose looking in new ideas" (Richard Feynman, The Meaning of it All). This of course somewhat inconsistent with 'censorhip, to save lives' and similar fragile [PsyOps 101] memes. By the way, have you noticed how much material published these days that (mis)uses the term "stochastic" fails abjectly even the most rudimentary tests of comprehension, applicable mathematics, and cause-and-effect?

Therefore, we support • principled freedom of thought and freedom of speech and other expression • freedom of data acquisition, processing, research, and Planet-wide uncensored communication • freedom of religion (for ALL faiths) • the right to inherent self-determination of the private person • freedom of fully independent perception (i.e. core freedom of 'world-view' -- the right to reject top-down ideological 'content modification', 'perceptual hashing', and State censorship) • freedom from all political or ideological or existential compulsion to 'retract' impeccably-grounded research conclusions merely to obey mandatory dogma • freedom of the press • uncensored public and general access to as well as open, candid, and entirely unlimited scrutiny of all official and 'public service' data • honest and tamper-proof permanent preservation of all original Human 'data of record' on 'core' Planet Earth as well as on any future Solar System stations • free traffic in all raw scientific data of record, making it difficult to alter ('adjust') data through 'hashing' and / or through official (State, Party) 'mandates' • yes, just like exponentially increasing numbers of other 'free' analysts, we fully comprehend and are engaged in documenting in 'real-time' the processes by which varied authoritarian and would-be authoritarian regimes frame / (re)frame 'reality' according to their dominant political discourse, which they do because their continued political / electoral survival and successful political 'rent-seeking' depend on such reality-adjustment • the currently near-Universal spectacle of governments staking their entire economic bases and the lives of billions on scholarly 'identity politics' (in the sense of Feyerabend's "ever growing need to identify with some group") and on scholarship morphed into ideology (walking in the disastrous steps of Lysenkoism) is extremely perilous and may bring about a rapid collapse or extermination of Humanity •

In the long run, those who are determined to censor various aspects of reality (data, thought, research, language) or (even worse) preach a global (Universal) online 'censorship policy' only end up stalling themselves and their own systems, fatally. A bit of satire follows: Censorship? No, of course not; there IS no such thing. Never was, you know. Disembodied "... algorithms simply filter ... our systems quickly suppress ... our recognition tools rapidly recognize and interrogate ... our automated Application Denial App™ automatically denies, and also generates all necessary letters and justifications ... ", etc. Equivalent to the Inquisition: the Church is blameless, only saves 'your soul' -- the body of the condemned 'heretic' is relajado en persona ("relaxed in person", i.e. "transferred to the secular authorities" to be truly 'cancelled' ["burnt at the stake", doxxed, or existentially destroyed -- "Hereticus Deletus" or something like that?]). I.e. "... our algorithms simply filter ...", etc. Same thing, of course, earlier and now (2022-2023). Exact same cowardly denial of 'agency' and also of ultimate responsibililty. Hiding behind a pseudo-shield of collective 'action', collective anonymity, and above all an 'inanimate' tool. We do not do anything, really, NOT, can't you see? Are you by any chance spreading 'misinformation'. We do nothing. We only 'care' and 'love' and 'help'. Working in earnest for the Greater Good of society. It is our 'algorithm' (the dumb Enforcement muscle, the script-automaton 'Secular Authority') that causes all that nasty / useful 'cancelling'. End of satire. It all has always been about 'raw power' to micro-manage other people, down to the level of private thought. Just like the old monastic orders. Telling you: "You are a sinner, you are guilty. Confess. Repeatedly. Regularly. On command. Our command." "Struggle Session". You will have to prove that you are innocent, and you will fail because we have rigged the entire system ab initio -- questions and answers -- to make sure you will remain 'guilty'. Go and purchase the Indulgences (Social Credit points), though. You may perhaps escape for a while, if you PAY US. In sweet good cash -- not fake Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Such an old play. On old, well documented, smelly, creaky, and rotten theatre boards ... Basically, we are looking here at what a plain market trader, Sven Henrich, quite correctly called (the context might just as well be the decayed Late Roman Empire) "a constant source of misinformation, bad forecasts [i.e. bad and / or predominantly fraudulent & 'group-think'-based 'modelling'], unbelievable Narratives that never come true" -- except that the real fountainhead is not at all within what various Big Tech 'fact-checkers' pretend to suppress. It resides entirely and squarely within the 'official', the 'managerial', and the so-called 'mainstream'. As it was in 1415 CE. And in 1517. And so on ... Thus the current imperative need. “We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt ..." (Richard Feynman). Unless one defends and maintains safe, guaranteed, and comprehensive spaces for uncensored doubt, one no longer moves in a realm of learning-based scholarship but of stark, monotone, forever-set-in-stone agitprop -- a control-obsessed SYNANON-like Cult, rooted in mandatory dogma, with all real questions simply forbidden. A Cult sustained by a funding-managed mechanism of ritualized circular and monotonous '(un)reasoning'. And, no, rock-solid pertinent research is NOT and never, ever will be a product of awarding some PR-devised "Certified" and "Reliable" badges ('YouTube'). Independent, very serious, vigorous, skilled minds will always have courage enough to draw their own conclusions about other minds. Courage enough not to be deceived by flimsy paid-for bendable lapel-"badges" or, ahemm, 'digital equivalent'. After 1989, millions of such flimsy, ultra-cheap-alloy System 'badges of this' and 'badges of that' were quietly tossed into the garbage all over Eastern Europe. They did not signify anything any more -- and they never did before either. They were just a 'construct'. Let us run a baseline here: actual scholarly knowledge is not determined by government mandate or bureaucracy-controlled 'acclamation in committee'. Scholarly knowledge is determined by the method through which serious hypotheses / questions / theoretical predictions are validated or rejected by observations.

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed. How can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer" (Hannah Arendt)