Covid-19

[bpr]

Re: Covid-19

Doesn't mean the people acting on the message are wrong, though.

It's not about being right or wrong; it's about whether emotions are being manipulated by a third party with an interest in sowing division, or perhaps something more distinct and not so vague. It's striking that these "protests" are being coordinated by alleged gun rights groups.

[shiny!]

Re: Covid-19

We are all constantly exposed to propaganda designed to manipulate our emotions. Whether we consider these messages as true or false, good or bad is a value judgement based on our biases, which are the results of our life experiences, needs, temperaments and beliefs. Do we check the originating source of every campaign for ulterior motives in order to decide if the message has value? If our subconscious biases lead us to agree with the message then we don't even consider it to be propaganda, so the answer is "not usually."

Some propaganda campaigns are clearly beneficial: Wear a seatbelt! Don't litter! Wash your hands and cover your sneeze! Yet even with those messages you'll still find people who say "don't tell me what to do." It's like herding cats! What are you gonna do?

How about the annual propaganda blitz for Breast Cancer Awareness Month? Most people see this as a good thing; they don't see it as propaganda designed to manipulate their emotions and healthcare decisions. Every October we are inundated with heartwarming and heartbreaking stories about brave cancer survivors who endured chemotherapy. Chemotherapy made by the likes of Bayer, which owns Monsanto, which makes the very chemicals that cause cancer, all of which is never mentioned in any story. Because Big Pharma would pull their advertising dollars. During this month-long propaganda crusade you will never hear a story that challenges the narrative of the multi-trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry.

Actually, that's not true. When Suzanne Sommers had breast cancer she was interviewed on either the Today Show or Good Morning America (I can't remember which, but I saw it). When the warm, sympathetic host asked her how she was handling the pain of cancer treatment, she broke script to describe how she was eschewing conventional medicine, and instead treating herself with Cat's Claw extract and diet and was feeling great! Whereupon she was shamed by the host who accused her of endangering womens lives by giving them false hope for unproven treatments.

Was the propaganda campaign that fueled the American Revolution good or bad? Wealthy landowners like Jefferson and Washington had a lot to gain and a lot to lose. But what did the poor peasants who fought for independence have to gain? Independence, maybe? Or were they just emotionally manipulated tools?

How about the propaganda campaigns for WWII and after 9/11? If we believe those wars were fought for Freedom and Liberty and Mom's Apple Pie, then the propaganda was entirely justified. If we believe those wars served to enrich the coffers of the military-industrial complex, then the propaganda and the sources originating the propaganda were evil.

The anti-war protesters during Vietnam. Who organized those massive rallies? Moral patriots or Communists? Who attended those rallies? Moral patriots, Communists, cowardly draft dodgers, or [insert whatever group you like or dislike here].

History is ultimately the judge, and history is written by the winners.

[Woodsman]

Re: Covid-19

The thread goes into some detail on that. It looks like it is some trump aligned group that is masterminding the astroturfing campaign.

Masterminding? Oh, sound's eeevill. So definitely Russian, then.

[Woodsman]

Re: Covid-19

It's not about being right or wrong; it's about whether emotions are being manipulated by a third party with an interest in sowing division, or perhaps something more distinct and not so vague. It's striking that these "protests" are being coordinated by alleged gun rights groups.

Guns?!? And Russians?!?! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, LITTLE GIRL!

[Mega]

Re: Covid-19

Ah, its Mega's fault, he drives a CAR!
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...9-deaths-study

[shiny!]

Re: Covid-19

Ron Paul: http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/april/20/what-if-the-lockdown-was-all-a-big-mistake/

When Anthony Fauci first warned that two million would die, there was a race among federal, state, and local officials to see who could rip up the Constitution fastest. Then Fauci told us if we do what he says only a quarter of a million would die. They locked America down even harder. Then, with little more than a shrug of the shoulders, they announced that a maximum of 60,000 would die, but maybe less. That is certainly terrible, but it’s just a high-average flu season.

Imagine if we had used even a fraction of the resources spent to lock down the entire population and focused on providing assistance and protection to the most vulnerable – the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. We could have protected these people and still had an economy to go back to when the virus had run its course. And it wouldn’t have cost us six trillion dollars either.
Governments have no right or authority to tell us what business or other activity is “essential.” Only in totalitarian states does the government claim this authority. We should encourage all those who are standing up peacefully and demanding an accounting from their elected leaders. They should not be able to get away with this.

[Mega]

Re: Covid-19

Its Geo-Political, not medical.......apart from all those who have died inclunding a worrying high number medical staff.
Bring China to heel.........& very well done I must (grudgingly) say......they pig-e back EV cars & working from home as well.
Debt bubble burst?.........China's fault
House Price Collaspe?....China's fault
...........it works on so many levels.

Mike

[LazyBoy]

Re: Covid-19

Doesn't mean the people acting on the message are wrong, though.

If, as many believe, this pandemic is being exploited by authoritarian elements that want to create a permanent police state, and if people (rightly or wrongly) believe that Trump is resisting these efforts, then one could view a call for resistance and a response to that call as both rational and patriotic. History will be the judge.

Who is the authoritarian in the scenario where Trump is resisting authoritarian elements?

[shiny!]

Re: Covid-19

Who is the authoritarian in the scenario where Trump is resisting authoritarian elements?

Lets see... Some of the leading contenders are Climate Change activists, One Worlders, Bill Gates, WHO, UN, Soros, anti-gun lobby, Socialists and Communists. I know I've left out somebody.

One theory goes that one major consequence of locking down the world is a dramatic reduction in CO2 production, something Climate Change activists have wanted for years. If it continues very long, widespread famine will ensue causing greater loss of life than the virus would have done. Since population reduction is also one of their goals, a global shutdown kills two birds (and a LOT of people) with one stone. They thought they would make "progressive" progress with Hillary in office, but Trump won and they never got over it. They tried to get rid of him with fabricated Russian conspiracies, then with impeachment and unrelentingly negative news coverage (some of it well deserved, I grant you), but they could never quite manage to get rid of him.

Another theory goes that the EU was already in the final stage of collapse (the Fed had been propping up their Repo markets since September). Rather than collapse openly, they used the Covid-19 shutdown to collapse the economy. That way they can blame China and the virus rather than their own financial system.

In the time-honored tradition of never letting a good crisis go to waste, Covid-19 has given all of the above actors a perfect opportunity to push their various agendas. It reminds me of all the conspiracy theories swirling around the assassination of JFK. Was it the Communists, the Mob, the CIA, the FBI, the Military-Industrial Complex? Who knows, but he had enemies aplenty. Just like today, when Liberty and people who value Liberty have enemies aplenty.

I try not to be a true believer of anything because if I believe anything at all, it's that Belief is the Enemy of Truth. But here are a few things that make me wonder if there's not some truth to all this...

EU Advises States to Nationalize Businesses

UN Climate Change Fund calls Coronavirus an Opportunity to Reshape the World.

[Woodsman]

Re: Covid-19

Who is the authoritarian in the scenario where Trump is resisting authoritarian elements?

It's a great question. Folks been asking it for a long time. Something tells me you never read or saw "Grapes of Wrath."

Fast forward some 80 years and today's Tom Joad is asking himself the same question.

Tom is nearly out of food. But he can't hunt because they won't let him out of his house, except to buy his food at the store. Only Tom has no money to buy food because they won't let him go to work. Besides, there's no work to go to because they won't let his employer open up his business. He can't make payroll to pay Tom and Tom can't pay his rent, either. Tom applied for unemployment, but they tell him he has to wait at least a month, maybe more, because there are ten thousand people ahead of him in line. Tom feels trapped. Tom is trapped. They trapped him. Who are they? Well, it's like Steinbeck said in "Wrath."

"Brother, I don't know. If I did, I'd tell you."

[jk]

Re: Covid-19

shiny, i'm of the belief to never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by ignorance, stupidity or bad luck.

enough low probability events in concurrence, of course, severely reduces the likelihood "bad luck" explanation.

otoh, if you start with bad luck [ANOTHER potential pandemic, after sars, mers, h1n1, h5n1, etc, etc] and add some stupidity and ignorance among decision makers you can easily explain our current situation.

[Woodsman]

Re: Covid-19

shiny, i'm of the belief to never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by ignorance, stupidity or bad luck...

It's this belief that makes you get politics so wrong so consistently. It's counter to the evidence, mountains of it over centuries.

The canary in the coal mine is the Swedish position, quite clearly enunciated here by Professor Johan Giesecke, one of the world’s most senior epidemiologists, advisor to the Swedish Government (he hired Anders Tegnell who is currently directing Swedish strategy), the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and an advisor to the director general of the WHO. Dr Giesecke lays out the epidemiological case with typically Swedish bluntness:

- UK policy on lockdown and other European countries are not evidence-based
- The correct policy is to protect the old and the frail only
- This will eventually lead to herd immunity as a “by-product”
- The initial UK response, before the “180 degree U-turn”, was better
- The Imperial College paper was “not very good” and he has never seen an unpublished paper have so much policy impact
- The paper was very much too pessimistic
- Any such models are a dubious basis for public policy anyway
- The flattening of the curve is due to the most vulnerable dying first as much as the lockdown
- The results will eventually be similar for all countries
- Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people.
- The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%
- At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available."

The political case is based on leveraging not the biological aspects of this disease, but rather the psychological; namely, the widespread "subtype" of the global Covid-19 hysteria that "we will all die" or at least "the number of Covid-19 fatalities will be staggering".

Since the beginning, the clear thinkers among us knew this to be nonsense: despite the insistence to the contrary by politically motivate actors based entirely on a largely useless data salad, the case fatality rate clearly isn't "dramatically" different from that of flu. It was clear to some of us from the beginning that lots of mild cases were and are completely overlooked which is why the probability of death assuming an infection is correspondingly lower than naively expected. The Stanford study you cite says that it's lower by a factor of 50-85. The actual probability of death from Covid-19 is surely way below 1%

The exponential growth of the cases or fatalities cannot ever continue. From the moment of reaching e.g. "one death per million people", every nation or city may see at most 4-5 weeks of growth and then the disease starts to stagnate and decrease. The pattern of the deaths is pretty much universal, regardless of policies.

So it seems clear that Lombardy (and similarly heavily affected places) is the worst case scenario: some 0.1% of the population dies before the peak and some extra 0.1% after the peak. Typical places will have much less than 0.1% of deaths. The herd immunity is basically achieved at these places; one-third of Chelsea, a Hispanic working-class suburb in North of Greater Boston, has antibodies at this moment.

Even the "twice 0.1% of population dies" worst case scenario is equivalent to the doubling of the overall death rate for two months or a 10% increase per one year. And it's a one-time event – the following seasons are surely going to be weaker. Despite 2 months of the global shutdown and the unlimited hysteria (with 24-hour-long special broadcasts at many TV stations), the new virus still killed 3-4 times fewer people in the world than flu normally does during the average season (see a paper on different estimates of flu fatalities per year). Indeed, it's unfair to compare Covid-19 with flu because the former still cannot compete with the latter!

All the people who have been predicting millions of deaths in the U.S. and super-overfilled hospitals across the world and similar things have been proven staggeringly wrong. Because it was really a "test of their lifetime" and they have absolutely failed, I will never be able to respect any of these people as thinkers again.

While the "simple exaggerated overall numbers of corpses" are the leading "idea" that the hysterical people nurture in their pathological minds, it is not the only one. Another theme are the "unknown long-term consequences of the virus". I think that most of the people who are spamming iTulip and other venues with similar garbage must be genuinely terrified – it really looks like that they have totally lost their marbles and they're not just pretending such a loss.

The particular alleged long-term scary implications of the virus include:

* infertility (after lesions or inflammation of testicles)
* damage to the kidneys
* damage to the brain
* incorporation of the virus' genetic information to ours
* recurrence of the disease and non-existence of real immunity

And there are several more, each of them leading to some know-how and technical discussions in biology. There exist similar claims about the brain, fear about the incorporation of the genetic information (most of the people spreading this junk don't even know that viruses have RNA, not DNA), and doubts about the very existence of immunity. It's easy to see how people who haven't studied virology, biology, or epidemiology to any serious depth may see some technical jargon, plausibly sounding sentences about "something horrific" that is happening or will happen, maybe adding several freshly invented words to something that they saw, and immediately become a horrified believer in this kind of fake news. But already at the point when they start to think in this way, they show that they have completely lost common sense and sanity. Of course, as casualties in an unceasing psychological war initiated in the Fall of 2016, it can hardly comes as a surprise to the careful observer. And some of these casualties themselves are medical and scientific professionals who as a result have lost all sense of proportion. Understanding that the ongoing psyop is based on generating the maximum possible social pressure to conform to the desired narrative, those individuals who evidence a particular need for peer acceptance - and this is doubly true for those in professions where there is a high price to be paid for transgressing the orthodoxy - have largely lost the ability to test reality.

African communist mass killers at the WHO (thanks are in order to Trump for defunding this atrocious organization) may spread insane claims that the recovery doesn't prevent another one soon. But everyone who has at least the "kindergarten-level basics in biology" knows this to be nonsense. When a disease caused by (easily replicating) microorganisms or viruses is defeated, it's because it's defeated by something that exists in the human blood, and it will be present for some time. This claim is true absolutely universally. Immunity works. If you forget about these things, you get downgraded to a status approaching a mentally defective, stupid animal. There is no exception here. Clearly, if someone was measured to be "positive again" after a "negative test", it means that it's either fake news; or he got a less sensitive, negative test when he wasn't quite recovered yet, and then he could still get a positive test from a more sensitive test. It's so mundane. Why would someone invent conspiracy theories contradicting the basic immunology courses from the kindergarten? Well, the desire to grow fear at any cost is why.

And be sure that our relatives, four rhesus macaques, were infected in an experiment and it indeed turned out that they couldn't be infected again, at least in the next week. The question is how lasting the immunity is but there is no doubt that the timescale is vastly longer than weeks. Most likely, it will be comparable to those "years" that we know from other diseases. Also, ACE2 (an enzyme that the new virus interacts with) may get expressed in testicles, kidneys, brains, whatever, and the virus may include its RNA to some human genetic code somewhere. But all these things are absolutely normal if they're possible. It's the idea that "something totally, qualitatively, metaphysically new" started to take place in 2019-2020 – and therefore we should be worried as never before – that is a proof that the worried person doesn't have any scientific literacy whatsoever; or if he does, he's that he has lost all his marbles as a consequence of the aforementioned psyop.

Nothing like that is really possible.

The difference between the sane people's understanding of any of these things; and the insane people's misunderstanding of any of these things ultimately boils down to the zeroth-order approximate understanding of "what actually happened in early 2020". Sane people just know that some more or less new flu-like virus type was identified and it got a huge amount of marketing and hype by scientifically illiterate people and professional liars.

The psychological casualties believe something totally different, which is an extraordinary event in the history of the human race took place, people and nations react in dramatic ways, and these dramatic reactions must be focused upon, amplified, replicated, and used as a proof that the underlying event is truly unique and cataclysmic.

In other words, the difference between rationality and hysteria is nothing else than the difference between those whose primary orientation to reality is rooted in a world of immutable laws (e.g. gravity, electromagnetism, and supply and demand, malevolent political actors) that organize the world that we see when we look out at the natural landscape, versus those who orient themselves according social relationships (e.g. love, hate, admiration, envy, loyalty, and gratitude) that organize the world that we see when we look out at the social landscape.

One element operates with the understanding that the world is made of immutable laws. We can successfully manipulate the world by learning them. Over the course of our lifetime, we can gradually build up our knowledge of the world - our knowledge never goes out of date. We might get something wrong, and have to update our understanding of things, given new information, but the underlying world that our knowledge describes is fundamentally unchangeable; there is no such thing as old-fashioned knowledge. Moreover, the same is true for society as a whole: over thousands of years, we have gradually built up a knowledge of the world's immutable laws, and the best way for an individual to become knowledgeable is to learn this collective wisdom. If something is unknown, or if there is some disagreement about the way things are, the way to resolve it is to understand things better; whether by experimentation or by reason. The facts speak for themselves.

The other element operates with the understanding that the world is made of relationships between people. We can successfully manipulate the world by figuring out who is powerful, or by becoming powerful ourselves. We must learn to be responsive to people in the right way, or to act in a way which will elicit the response we want. How we look, dress, how we express ourselves, and even the opinions that we hold, are all factors in interpersonal relationships. Since power relationships are always changing, this world is continually shifting, and knowledge about the world quickly goes out of date. The most intelligent of this element use their wits to develop an acute sensitivity to the Zeitgeist. They must know whether to support the powerful, in the hopes of being raised by association, or perhaps rebel in the hopes of joining (or starting) a new power center. They must know who, and what, is in or out, since a faux pas can lead to immediate loss of status.

Understanding this, when something of the likes of the Covid-19 hysteria take place, people are divided to those who actually believe in Nature, calculations, impersonal arguments; and those who believe in humanities, social sciences, and similar pseudosciences, and who are just stupid sheep that reproduce (and often amplify) other sheep's behavior. It's this simple. And this is the fulcrum the authoritarians use to move the world.

If you're a type inhabiting the first element, then you believe in science, actual arguments, and you also possess basics of the scientific thinking that you simply won't throw away the first time when someone tries to make you scared. Such people know that there are many virus types (and they don't need to know there are millions of them) while the smallest fraction of them have been fully described; new types or strains unavoidably emerge rather often; some pairs of the viruses are much closer to each other than to other viruses; and there exist certain laws governing the behavior of viruses in the real world that are completely universal.

And you also know that there exist "generic people's reactions to natural phenomena" and most of these reactions are absolutely irrational rubbish. Most of the rumors on the Internet are garbage, most of the newspapers articles and whining by the generic people on TV screens is atrocious junk, and so on. If you haven't figured this basic fact out yet, then you are squarely in the other element, composed largely of - but with important exceptions - a brainwashed scientifically illiterate dumb sheep that has virtually no chance to properly understand anything, at least not repeatedly and for an extended period of time.

The only reason why this otherwise irrelevant type of the coronavirus is watched so closely is that it causes a viral pneumonia (which is what kills almost all the fatalities). Among thousands of viruses that annoy humans, lots of them are almost completely harmless. The virus causing Covid-19 is a close relative of some other coronaviruses that cause 18% cases of common cold. When it comes to the average person's worries, it only differs by the bigger impact on lungs, some other tissues in the respiratory system, and the correspondingly higher fever. There is really absolutely no reason to treat Covid-19 differently from a common cold in these additional respects! It is absolutely irrational and scientifically indefensible to treat them differently and once you start to treat the Covid-19 virus differently than all other viruses in all these additional "hypotheses", you have switched to the side of hopeless unlimited morons that just worship a virus and demand all rationality to be totally sacrificed to the Holy Virus.

Just like in the case of telepathy, extra-sensorial perception, and lots of other types of superstitions, the human irrationality is clearly a much more viable and likely explanation of their emotional testimonies about their "extraordinary" perceptions than some extraordinarily new underlying physical or biological phenomena! The psychological casualties of Covid-19 constantly prove their being mindless brainwashed sheep by statements such as the virus must be terribly important and serious because China has locked down a province, others are doing similar things, TV stations are running special broadcasts etc.

What is remarkable about the gullibility of these sheep is that they don't understand that the mass hysteria is an unavoidable consequence of many people's adoption of this very behavioral pattern. Once you accept the proposition that "it's right to be terrified and to spread fear once you see other people around you who are terrified and dramatically react to something", then it is logically unavoidable for all the individuals of your kind – hundreds of millions of stupid (some highly educated and credentialed) sheep in stupified herds across the world – to switch into the runaway exponentially growth pandemics of mass hysteria. Just think about it: it really is unavoidable. All these people act as amplifiers each other. So it's unavoidable that they just amplify some noise at the end. And it's exactly what has happened to hundreds of millions of people who lost the ability of critical thinking. And from a political standpoint, that includes lots of people who used to pretend that they could think independently with their brains but they were always lying, especially to themselves.

So what happened is that some relative of the flu virus – or, more precisely, a close relative of the viruses behind 18% of common cold cases – has gotten an extraordinary P.R. because it served the interest of a small but powerful cohort of authoritarians and their wealthy self-styled ubermensch in giving them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save their failing globalist neoliberal project while extracting untold wealth from the national coffers. It was so successful that hundreds of millions of easily impressionable people across the world – which includes lots of flabbergasting morons who are employed as physicians, professors, or who have otherwise remarkable jobs but are exactly as dumb as any uneducated working-class yob – were totally impressed by this P.R. and started to behave as if something totally unprecedented has taken place in the world of viral diseases. But nothing like that has taken place.

Viral diseases still operate in the business-as-usual (and the many competent doctors who do agree that exactly the same should hold for the healthcare systems – especially because other, more fatal health conditions haven't gone away) and Covid-19 is not qualitatively different from many other infectious respiratory illnesses that have been with us for millions of years and that were always getting partially updated, mutated, and replaced. Instead, the only "really big" events are those related to the mass hysteria which is worse than mankind has seen for many centuries – and it probably leads to a more irrational behavior than one seen in the Middle Ages.

And while experience should inform me otherwise, I remain ever amazed how many people here and elsewhere can't or won't see through the simple methods used to produce the mass hysteria. Some dishonest and on-the-take mediocre inkspiller at The Washington Post, New York Times, or any other outlet cherry-picks "experts", twists their sentences, adds an indefensible hysterical title, and many people are impressed with this kind of garbage "journalism".

And it's not merely a matter of right versus left, even though that lines up fairly well with the dichotomy I outlined above. Because you have folks of the left like Bill Maher who sees through and criticizes this panic porn used to such great effect by the authoritarians, ubermenschen, and money worshipers. But so many people who should know better – and even better than Bill Maher – are 100% manipulated. Sadly, this is a society that is largely controlled by malevolent lying human trash leading a herd of sheep dedicated to the proposition that the worst thing in the world is to be put outside the in-group and risk the loss of status.

Fortunately, the human spirit exhibited by the anti-lockdown protesters will only spread over the next few weeks. The authoritarians have the upper hand at the moment, but as they have so many times in the past centuries, their best laid plans will come to ashes.

[jpatter666]

Re: Covid-19

It's this belief that makes you get politics so wrong so consistently. It's counter to the evidence, mountains of it over centuries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoSLiHKrzRU

[Mega]

Re: Covid-19

[Woodsman]

Re: Covid-19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoSLiHKrzRU