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This really highlights a big difference between us.
I was going to post on this by the way, so it's not only a response to your last post, BS.
Calling people cowards and collaborators who are frightened or fooled or merely over cautious, you sound very much like those who attribute the wish to go out and see people and circulate freely to recklessness and selfishness and contempt and hatred or racism for others.
You believe what you believe, they believe what they believe, both have been reinforced through a variety of autopoetic as well as top-down processes. If you want it to change, you need to learn some compassion and manners in approaching people. This is not about kumbaya or suppression of anything, it's about the approach and the power of respect in getting messages across. Even the Maoists understood this (better than most actually). Do you want to win the change, or do you want your opposition acts to feel good even as they may be counterproductive and make the problem worse?
As Elmer convincingly argues, the grand-conspiracy narrative, unmoored from evidentiary searching and often informed by its own unacknowledged ideologies, constructing all-powerful elites and dumb-ass sleeping (or cowardly) masses, serves to maintain the system and to help along these big bad revolutionary developments, just as much as the official ideology. Much that is contradictory is still convergent on the same goal.
During the first wave of Covid in the U.S. less than a year ago tens of thousands of people were dying and there was a faction, represented on this site also, who said it was all a hoax, that no one was dying. (Just like with the no-victims, no-planes assholes who did so much to ruin whatever remnants of an effective call for 9/11 truth were left at that point.)
Nurses and doctors reported harrowing stories and were called crisis actors. (Long-time members of this board who reported their own experiences were attacked as had-to-be agents.)
People who have entirely good reason to fear infection for themselves or their family members in the high risk categories (as has been borne out) were mocked.
Heroic morons ("citizen reporters") jumped out of their cars for a minute to film the relatively empty lobbies of hospitals or just the fucking hospital parking lots, and presented this as evidence no one was dying inside! And this shit's been reposted here endlessly.
They filmed exhausted emergency workers dozing in parked ambulances or trucks and added mocking soundtracks. (Like James O'Keefe started a correspondence school.)
So after some idiot has made a minor-temporary name for themselves or at least wanked off to their heart's content peddling this species of miniature Big Lie narrative (the lie is still Big, the delivery systems tend to be retail), THEY have helped to drive people into the arms of the Covid Panic camp. They're not the only factor, but they are a factor.
This shit helps reinforce the "campist" effect. Helps make it into religion as against the "heroic" heresy you sometimes show yourself, each increasingly matched to a political camp. And as the camps are formed, the old wisdom from Twain takes hold. It's easier to fool someone (especially using half-lies rather than full ones) than to convince them they've been fooled. Or that people they've seen be wrong about everything until now happen to be right in some way about this.
Time does not make this easier to overcome. Time reinforces this. So time is running out, and useless or counterproductive strategies and tactics objectively help the other side.
Denialists have helped inoculate against those who come along and point out reasonably the numbers are being inflated and manipulated, the death rates are exaggerated, and, most importantly, very few of the lockdown measures at least in US-UK and most of EU make no sense as pandemic responses, but do make sense as a new biosecurity regime.
Good luck with that. Can't talk Ioannides or Kulldorff without being called a denialist (i.e., someone pretending no one died from Covid at all, or who is happy to see the old die, etc.) or morally tantamount to a genocidaire. A big reason for that is the activities of the actual honest-to-god denialists. It's the poison pill principle, whether intended or not.
I've been having this goddamn argument for 20 years now, with all the poison pills thrown into any attempt to get a credible deconstruction and investigation of 9/11. This was done both intentionally and through stupidity, both by honestly mistaken or traumatized persons as well as, no doubt, by the protectors of perpetrators themselves.
I'd like to hit back hard on anyone who tells me my refutation of the official stories and demand for full disclosure, on the basis of probable cause of facilitation or orchestration from within the state, makes me crazy or anti-Semitic or far right-wing. But there's Alex Jones, having placed himself at the front,
industrially disseminating disinformation he knows was manufactured in his own shop, getting all the attention from his enemies (de facto allies) in the corporate media, and I and others have to detach ourselves from him or be damned.
Especially watch the "cowardly," by the way. You may be a real tough and brave fellow, but most people have learned fears for good reason, from childhood forward. Most people have plenty of traumas, conditioned and socialized. It's a human condition, to be overcome if at all with compassionate help (and sudden exhortations to choose, but with the right timing), not to be mocked and condemned so generally that basically you're declaring yourself the enemy of all your potential allies on the other side of the question.
Some things to think about as you I hope recall your own concluding words:
...my primary interests are ... in WAKING THOSE STILL THEIR SLUMBER. In order to snap out of this collective nightmare, we need to WAKE UP, COLLECTIVELY, EN MASSE.
Whatever can be done to EXPEDITE this AWAKENING is more important than anything else right now.
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