Wombaticus Rex » 30 Dec 2021 02:26 wrote:
Nobody is immune to propaganda, verily, and media consists of little else. These techniques are practiced and applied by a constellation of actors with conflicting agendas.
That was my point tho.
The more salient point, though, is who is wielding these tools at scale, who controls the machinery of the narrative as it is experienced by the vast majority of English speaking human beings. Who gets to proclaim RFK Jr. dangerous and have it stick? Who gets to decide when pandemics are over and compel policy actions in response? Fortunately, inevitably, these are rather easy questions to answer.
The same people who always have. That's obvious isn't it?
Without question, much of chaff and memes and blogs being fed to lockdown and vaccine skeptics are poisoned pills and weaponized disinformation. Making your opposition look stupid is very easy, and when you have the means to control their information streams, they will do much of the heavy lifting for you.
That seems fairly obvious to me.
What I find interesting is why a virus that seems to target the most economically unproductive members of society appeared all of a sudden and then the response to it was so panicked and half arsed. I don't believe anyone has any control over this situation tho the virus itself was probably a low fatality bioweapon. It would have made alot more sense of people behaved more rationally....
That fact is not enough to discredit the arguments of lockdown and vaccine skeptics, however. The Twitter to Facebook to RI pipeline of questionable .jpg agitprop is the basis for most of the discourse around the issue -- and surely, some of the decision making and belief formation of the adherents.
If you look at the worlds overall death rate in 2020 (before vaccines came along) Australia and NZ were the only places it really stayed steady or dropped. To me that shows lockdowns work to stop the virus spreading. The most locked down places in the world had some of the lowest rates of infection and spread. The other costs of that have to measured, they are real obviously, but how do they stack up?
Also our isolation has made quarantining the country alot easier.
The thing about the internet is it does enable international communication networks. Most of the best pones are what people would consider trivial. My wifes facebook groups for example. She breeds rare plants and insects and has online relationships with people round the world who do the same thing, and has had for a decade in some cases. Same with her music mates. People who make music that doesn't come within cooee of the mainsteream.
Their discussion has always just centered around what they do with their hobbies.
And those other people around the world have had a very different experience of this pandemic to us here. I asked her ages ago about it - how many people do you know online who've died and she rattled off a list of people who no longer post and another list of people who've lost friends and family (in some cases nearly their entire family) to the virus.
Of course this could all be bullshit but how do you judge anything you don't experience directly?
Its pretty obvious COVID has evolved into a benign upper respiratory tract illness now. The actual pandemic is over, whatever people with media megaphones say about it.
Yet the questions around efficacy, the disturbing links between primary actors in the early days of the lockdown and the greatest financial beneficiaries of those decisions, the role of Chinese money, influence and espionage in seeding the policy responses here in the West, and the unambiguous money links between corporations like Pfizer and family foundations like the Rockefellers and the Gates and the media outlets who have shaping public perception at every step -- none of this is going away just because it's unfashionable or unseemly to raise doubts when people are dying every day.
This is what happens when you mix capitalism and medicine. I blame you lot in the US for that.
It probably doesn't come across from what I've posted here but trying to convince people in my world I inhabit that covid is a potentially dangerous virus but companies like Pfizer (mostly Pfizer actually, pack of money grubbing cunts they are,) are more dangerous is not easy. People go one way or the other and ignore the middle ground (funny that.) Even just using facts that are common knowledge. But this should be no news to people who've been here for over a decade and take in what we "know" (or think we know.) As for the links between Big money ... LOL the best cover they ever gave themselves was that 5G and covid vaccines bullshit.
FWIW Gates' Vaccine Allinance (GAVI) has been opposed to a TRIPS waiver allowing IP free production of vaccines in poorer nations for most of the last 18 months.
This means they've acted to lower rates of vaccination around the world during the pandemic because acting otherwise would cost "Big Pharma" profits.
And they certainly haven't objected to the contracts Pfizer has forced on countries that are panicking about protecting their populations. (Real mafia move that one by Pfizer. And maybe Astra Zenaca but I haven't seen anything to suggest that.)
LOL The worst thing about this is in Australia what its done to land prices. I hope that collapse you keep going on about happens soon.
