I feel like everything with Covid had to be dumbed down for general consumption.
Last summer I got into an argument when I thought people should be able to go to beaches. Based on everything I read, beaches were not risky. What would be risky would be people from multiple households driving to the beach, or getting together indoors after…
I feel like everything with Covid had to be dumbed down for general consumption.
Last summer I got into an argument when I thought people should be able to go to beaches. Based on everything I read, beaches were not risky. What would be risky would be people from multiple households driving to the beach, or getting together indoors after the beach. However, why demonize being at the beach. I was almost universally chastised with "why take the chance?" or "you are risking the life of [insert at-risk relative]".
There was no allowance for nuanced thinking or analyzing specific activities done a specific way. It was either a blanket "this is ok" or "this is not OK"
There was a lot of this, still is, but I chalk it up to a new virus where scientific and govt authorities were legit worried about it wiping out 5-30% of the planet. That is, rather than a conspiracy (or "system," whatever) to exert control, there was a lot of overselling of potential dangers. Most of the US is coming out of lockdown — and many regions were never even in it — with no new repressions I'm aware of.
The 5 to 30% figure was based on very crappy models, not science. There was a Sars Covid 1 prior to this, but I guess it didn't have the "gain of function" part to it. Shouldn't scientists be all over that? Let's face it there are American scientists that participated in that research, and none of them want to be outed. Nor does the government that gave them the power and dollars to do it. FUBAR!
Yes, I was exaggerating and don't honestly remember any numbers from early on. But with all the (honest) skepticism to overreaction, I was one of many who were worried Trump-controlled agencies would downplay the threat.
Are a few hundred people on a cruise ship really indicative of the 7 billion people on earth? I can't argue the media loves its panic porn but I will definitely argue against a Gubbmint Conspiracy to gain greater control by overhyping it. It's like the kooks who claimed 9/11 was set up as an excuse to invade Iraq — as if the govt has ever needed to kill 3,000 of its own people to invade anywhere. I think social media, smart appliances, online shopping, etc etc has proven that if the govt wants more control they don't need to overhype a pandemic to get it. The potential economic effects alone seem like a hell of a wildcard for a government to play. I think it's the typical naivety of a conspiracy buff to think any particular plan would automatically work out in their favor.
And yes, this reminds me of AIDS as well, in that there were plenty of Monday Morning Quarterbacks by the mid-90s who knew all along exactly how the disease was contracted. Very, very few of them in the mid-80s when the "gay flu" made its public debut.
Yes it was. Over and over around the world, we saw the virus get to roughly 20% prevalence and then start crashing. India is the most recent example but NYC was one of the first.
Hell, it wasn't even just the Diamond Princess, you also had the USS Theodore Roosevelt. That's two petri-dishes with slightly different media (demographics). The TR had ONE fatality in the crew.
I remember the Diamond Princess quite well. There were several highly reputable epidemiologists and statisticians who were using the Diamond Princess experience for their long-term forecasting and they got pilloried (or outright ignored) by the press, who attempted to judge/shame them as a threat to science and endangering people's own lives for promoting fake information. Despite being genuine experts, they were simply the wrong kinds of experts. But they are now having the last laugh.
But it is telling that so much of COVID was already known by end of April 2020 but the goalposts kept shifting and new excuses kept cropping up for shutdowns and wearing masks. I am not attempting to downplay that a new virus did emerge and did pose a genuine risk to specific demographics, but at the same time the establishment classes really ramped through an approach that terrified far more people than really needed to be the case and the reaction was outsized compared to what it logically should have been (highly targeted towards the high profile demographics rather than a one-size fits all approach).
Why did this happen? Why were disagreements and dissenting voices censored and banned? For me, the answer rests in two overarching reasons:
1. The anti-Trump movement. People, either deliberately or unconsciously, used COVID as a means to defeat Donald Trump by turning it into a political weapon. This meant a close collaboration between the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, and the Democratic politicians quickly moved in lockstep in their policies while the media did everything they could to portray any disagreements as racist, bigoted, unscientific, what you have it. They wanted to scare Americans from voting for Trump - and they did, even if they did also destroy a great deal of legitimacy along the way.
2. The rise of the class of technocratic experts, which is also a byproduct of the emergence of modern Democratic/Progressive alliance. In this world, experts are given a great deal of deference, and the growing influence of experts allows them to disregard differing views from people outside their field and pesky things like civil rights, constitutional laws and all these things we normally use to protect ourselves from abuses of power. The mainstream media staunchly believes in superiority of technocratic experts, which also helps define their moral understanding of right and wrong. So when an expert says X, they are never questioned why it's X and not Y. They simply blindly report what the experts say must be the right thing to do. Anthony Fauci is a perfect example of the technocratic expert - he has been wrong many times but he is still treated reverently by the mainstream media who persist in telling all and sundry we must listen to him because he's the "expert."
1. There's been close collaboration between MSM and the Dems for decades — this hardly started 14 months ago. The elites in both entities are basically the same people. It didn't help that most of the people crying loudest about Covid restrictions were in fact racist, bigoted, unscientific, and just plain inhuman. Right wingers from the WSJ op-ed page to the Texas lt. gov actually put eugenics back on the table, which is not a great way to let citizens know you have their best interests in mind. So I don't think it was the Dem-MSM cabal that actively did in Trump so much as Trump doing in Trump, as only he can.
2. This has been true forever as well and Dems hardly have the franchise.
I feel like everything with Covid had to be dumbed down for general consumption.
Last summer I got into an argument when I thought people should be able to go to beaches. Based on everything I read, beaches were not risky. What would be risky would be people from multiple households driving to the beach, or getting together indoors after the beach. However, why demonize being at the beach. I was almost universally chastised with "why take the chance?" or "you are risking the life of [insert at-risk relative]".
There was no allowance for nuanced thinking or analyzing specific activities done a specific way. It was either a blanket "this is ok" or "this is not OK"
There was a lot of this, still is, but I chalk it up to a new virus where scientific and govt authorities were legit worried about it wiping out 5-30% of the planet. That is, rather than a conspiracy (or "system," whatever) to exert control, there was a lot of overselling of potential dangers. Most of the US is coming out of lockdown — and many regions were never even in it — with no new repressions I'm aware of.
The 5 to 30% figure was based on very crappy models, not science. There was a Sars Covid 1 prior to this, but I guess it didn't have the "gain of function" part to it. Shouldn't scientists be all over that? Let's face it there are American scientists that participated in that research, and none of them want to be outed. Nor does the government that gave them the power and dollars to do it. FUBAR!
WHY the “overselling of potential dangers?” ... what product was being oversold?
What product? Politicians' "authority" and state power. Isn't that obvious.
Duh !
0.5% of the population is quite significant. So called crude death rate is around 0.08% per year.
Yes, I was exaggerating and don't honestly remember any numbers from early on. But with all the (honest) skepticism to overreaction, I was one of many who were worried Trump-controlled agencies would downplay the threat.
Are a few hundred people on a cruise ship really indicative of the 7 billion people on earth? I can't argue the media loves its panic porn but I will definitely argue against a Gubbmint Conspiracy to gain greater control by overhyping it. It's like the kooks who claimed 9/11 was set up as an excuse to invade Iraq — as if the govt has ever needed to kill 3,000 of its own people to invade anywhere. I think social media, smart appliances, online shopping, etc etc has proven that if the govt wants more control they don't need to overhype a pandemic to get it. The potential economic effects alone seem like a hell of a wildcard for a government to play. I think it's the typical naivety of a conspiracy buff to think any particular plan would automatically work out in their favor.
And yes, this reminds me of AIDS as well, in that there were plenty of Monday Morning Quarterbacks by the mid-90s who knew all along exactly how the disease was contracted. Very, very few of them in the mid-80s when the "gay flu" made its public debut.
Yes it was. Over and over around the world, we saw the virus get to roughly 20% prevalence and then start crashing. India is the most recent example but NYC was one of the first.
Hell, it wasn't even just the Diamond Princess, you also had the USS Theodore Roosevelt. That's two petri-dishes with slightly different media (demographics). The TR had ONE fatality in the crew.
I remember the Diamond Princess quite well. There were several highly reputable epidemiologists and statisticians who were using the Diamond Princess experience for their long-term forecasting and they got pilloried (or outright ignored) by the press, who attempted to judge/shame them as a threat to science and endangering people's own lives for promoting fake information. Despite being genuine experts, they were simply the wrong kinds of experts. But they are now having the last laugh.
But it is telling that so much of COVID was already known by end of April 2020 but the goalposts kept shifting and new excuses kept cropping up for shutdowns and wearing masks. I am not attempting to downplay that a new virus did emerge and did pose a genuine risk to specific demographics, but at the same time the establishment classes really ramped through an approach that terrified far more people than really needed to be the case and the reaction was outsized compared to what it logically should have been (highly targeted towards the high profile demographics rather than a one-size fits all approach).
Why did this happen? Why were disagreements and dissenting voices censored and banned? For me, the answer rests in two overarching reasons:
1. The anti-Trump movement. People, either deliberately or unconsciously, used COVID as a means to defeat Donald Trump by turning it into a political weapon. This meant a close collaboration between the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, and the Democratic politicians quickly moved in lockstep in their policies while the media did everything they could to portray any disagreements as racist, bigoted, unscientific, what you have it. They wanted to scare Americans from voting for Trump - and they did, even if they did also destroy a great deal of legitimacy along the way.
2. The rise of the class of technocratic experts, which is also a byproduct of the emergence of modern Democratic/Progressive alliance. In this world, experts are given a great deal of deference, and the growing influence of experts allows them to disregard differing views from people outside their field and pesky things like civil rights, constitutional laws and all these things we normally use to protect ourselves from abuses of power. The mainstream media staunchly believes in superiority of technocratic experts, which also helps define their moral understanding of right and wrong. So when an expert says X, they are never questioned why it's X and not Y. They simply blindly report what the experts say must be the right thing to do. Anthony Fauci is a perfect example of the technocratic expert - he has been wrong many times but he is still treated reverently by the mainstream media who persist in telling all and sundry we must listen to him because he's the "expert."
1. There's been close collaboration between MSM and the Dems for decades — this hardly started 14 months ago. The elites in both entities are basically the same people. It didn't help that most of the people crying loudest about Covid restrictions were in fact racist, bigoted, unscientific, and just plain inhuman. Right wingers from the WSJ op-ed page to the Texas lt. gov actually put eugenics back on the table, which is not a great way to let citizens know you have their best interests in mind. So I don't think it was the Dem-MSM cabal that actively did in Trump so much as Trump doing in Trump, as only he can.
2. This has been true forever as well and Dems hardly have the franchise.
You completely missed the Martin Gurri interview, didn't you? You really should go and read that.
WSJ is anything but right wing.
Yes! I would also add corporate capture of supposedly neutral science organizations, ie the Gates Foundation capture of the WHO.