site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31727 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I read an article from Zerohedge recently that listed a bunch of conspiracy theories that will be proven true on 2023. After well every conspiracy theory last year seems to have been proven true. I can’t find the article right now. I read thru their list and thought all the conspiracies were dumb and basically every conspiracy theory that seemed to be likely true has already been proven true.

I have two questions?

  1. What conspiracy theories still exists that haven’t moved into the >50% now think is likely true.

  2. Presuppose theirs a potential snitch who has all the documents and proof to show the world that the conspiracy your running in fact does exists. Is there any reason to kill him or you should just let the culture war battle happen and not worry about going to jail etc.

Maybe my mind isn’t curious enough to see new conspiracies but it does feel like a lot of them were checkmarked true the last year.

My mind is blanking, what conspiracies were proven true last year? Maybe Twitter working with the IC?

FWIW I believe the DePape gay sex conspiracy 100% but I doubt it will ever be proven more than it is

  1. Kind of drawing a blank. There’s got to be good ones out there about why Trump held on to so many classified documents, but I can’t think of any fun ones. Predictably, trying to google “best conspiracy theories” basically guarantees getting ones over the 50% mark.

  2. I assume the reason to kill your snitch is the same as whatever reason you remained secret up till 2023.

I read an article from Zerohedge recently that listed a bunch of conspiracy theories that will be proven true on 2023.

Top 10 Conspiracy Theories That Will Be Validated In 2023

Bad article, worthy of clickbait site full of ads and popup videos. Either subpar shitcoating attempt, or just something to get more clicks and retweets.

#1 is already proven beyond reasonable doubt, what else would you need?

Open confession on live TV "Yeah, we did it, we laid the trap and lured the MAGAtards in, it worked perfectly! MUHEWHEHEHEH!"

#2

The evidence is mounting that the vaccines themselves may have been as deadly and damaging as the virus

If true, we would observe it in on total excess death statistics. Do we observe it?

#3 Old Bircher stuff from 1950's with serial numbers filed off. (Dwight Eisenhower Joe Biden is dedicated and conscious agent of the international communist conspiracy!)

In real world, US is moving hard and fast to isolate China and deny them access to commanding heights of current cutting edge technologies. @DaseindustriesLtd wrote about it at length.

#4 Who cares?

#5 Nothing of importance for anyone, except for Donald's ego.

#6 Who cares?

#7 Even Russian propaganda moved forward from "biolabs" to satanism. Yes, Ukraine is developed country with universities, industry and research labs. If you were searching for Ukraine on map of Africa, you were looking at the wrong place.

#8 Pedophilia again. Conservatives talk about "liberal mainstreaming of pedophilia" for decades, while pedo panic grows stronger and stronger, "pedos" are universal and approved target of hatred while definition of "pedo" grows more expansive every year (when was the first time you heard about things like "age gap"?)

Future is not free love hippy commune where anything goes:

"25 years old man and 5 years old woman? Love is love! How sweet!"

Future is:

"45 years old man and 25 years old woman? Age gap is age gap! LYNCH THE PEDO!"

#9 Matrix is works of fiction unconnected to anything in reality. Human beings are not batteries. Of the grab bag of unrelated things cited here, some empower the state, most of them are opportunities to empower individuals(who know how to use them). There is no one big plan to "collectivize the world", there are many plans to privatize everything that is still for grabs.

#10 Everyone with basic awareness already knows it.

(it does not include wannabe domestic terrorists )

edit: link fixed

Which conspiracy theories do you think were proven true in 2022? Can you link to examples of them being predicted beforehand?

Off the top of my head

  1. Shadow banning etc on twitter. Heavy bias. Federal government actively engaged in censorship. And a step farther than I expected that the Feds were paying twitter.

  2. Lab leak. Well not proven but it went from crazy town to generally accepted as plausible or possible by most.

  3. Masks work. Well maybe this is just pure culture warred at this point.

  4. Hunter Biden laptop. Not proven point is probably Joe directly getting paid. But that’s culture warred to death until the left doesn’t need Joe.

  5. Lourdon County school tranny (or fake tranny) rape case

  6. Multiple things related to vaccines

  7. Ivermectin is horse paste that will kill you. Believe the government had to retract a lot of this lately and in court. Not sure this stuff works but wasn’t life threatening to take.

There’s probably more but off top of head.

I think current conspiracy theories would be the west far more actively engaged in provoking Russia. I think this is false. Involved as always but more of a minor player.

Maybe one that will pop off soon with Hamlin is an acceptance that the vaccine or more specifically multiple boosters is particular damaging to young males. I’m getting a feeling Hamlins heart was damaged either from vaccine or COVID. He’s still in hospital while Chris Pronged got hit in the chest with a 100 mph puck and came back 2 days later a for a game after losing his heart beat.

Edit: there’s probably some interesting stuff here on where people think the anti-establishment view has been sufficiently proven.

Not sure what you mean by "proven true" here. As you mention in (4) most of those are culture war-y enough that you're going to have difficulty getting anyone to admit they were wrong, so it's unclear who you could even reasonably accept as the arbiter of truth. Obviously you're not attempting to be precise in your list of claims here, but especially thinking of (1) and (7), I could see coming down a semantic argument of your claims being true but the other side claiming they never disputed exactly that claim. I haven't been following (1) past the posts about it here, but for (7) there's a pretty clear difference between "veterinary Ivermectin is dangerous for human use due to it being too easy to get the dose way wrong" and "Ivermectin is dangerous"... and then you get into arguments about which claim was actually made. Similarly, I expect the mainstream response to (1) will involve a lot of "of course Twitter cooperated with law enforcement, what's wrong with that?".

The only news in 2022 on (2) I know of is the papers discussed on TWiV 876: Spillover market with Michael Worobey (paper links and podcast audio at that link), which were relatively strong evidence against the lab leak hypothesis (mapping early cases strongly suggests the market as the epicenter; details of the multiple spillovers strongly suggest wildlife origin... for reasons I'm not qualified to defend but that make sense to the scientists), so I don't know why you think it's gotten stronger over the past year.

Lab leak. Well not proven but it went from crazy town to generally accepted as plausible or possible by most.

Proven plausible (as in, it cannot be disproven with available evidence) back in 2020, not 2022.

Masks work. Well maybe this is just pure culture warred at this point.

If you mean the "conspiracy theory" that they don't work, this was confirmed years ago. It's why initial government responses were against recommending mandates. It was only later, when they realised the psychological potential of making people wear a symbol of pandemic compliance, that policy changed.

Hunter Biden laptop. Not proven point is probably Joe directly getting paid. But that’s culture warred to death until the left doesn’t need Joe.

Proven back in 2020, not 2022.

Lourdon County school tranny (or fake tranny) rape case

Proven back in 2021, not 2022.

Ivermectin is horse paste that will kill you. Believe the government had to retract a lot of this lately and in court. Not sure this stuff works but wasn’t life threatening to take.

Proven back in 1987, not 2022.

I agree about shadow banning being proven true in 2022 . Twitter flat-out lied about shadow banning.

Presuppose theirs a potential snitch who has all the documents and proof to show the world that the conspiracy your running in fact does exists. Is there any reason to kill him or you should just let the culture war battle happen and not worry about going to jail etc.

If anything, the best defence would be to signal boost a bunch of incredibly stupid and lunatic conspiracy theories to poison the well against the notion of conspiracy in general. Then when this snitch brings forth his reveal, you just liken him to those crazy people who believe in lizard overlords and alien invasions. Everyone knows conspiracies don't exist, after all!

They tried that. Problem is the incredibly stupid and lunatic conspiracy theories turned out to be too close to the truth. The government is reading all your email! And tracking who you are calling! And chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay!

I nominate that the FBI instigates a significant percentage of domestic terror or seemingly random attacks, that this includes lots of things there doesn’t happen to be any evidence for(that is, not things like the OKC bombing or Vegas shooting which already have question marks, or like the Michigan kidnapping plot) possibly including sandy hook, and that this is known to higher figures in the DOJ who do nothing about it.

I mean, this is only not yet proven true if people totally forget that they sent a task force to investigate a garage door pull-cord.

Which granted most people certainly have forgotten, or else remember as an awful hate crime that totally happened.

I meant more along the lines of ‘most actual mass murders and terror attacks leaving actual people dead are incited by the FBI’ than ‘most things the FBI investigates as hate crimes are really ethnonarcisist pareidolia’.

groan...as usual ZH high on hype, low on delivery

The scope of China’s control over the U.S. government will become clearer.

How is this a conspiracy? It's just an opinion . Pundits have been arguing this forever. A conspiracy involves an actual event having occurred by conspirators, not some vague supposition about a trend. The rest of the article is the usual culture war agitprop and flotsam.

The fortune cookie approach.

Is this the article?

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/top-10-conspiracy-theories-will-be-validated-2023

Honestly, they mostly seem pretty stupid, barely worthy of the name conspiracy theory. Generously I see four things that could even be considered conspiracy theories, with one of those being utterly boring and banal ("The true nature of David DePape’s relationship with Paul Pelosi will be revealed"). Most is just cranky grousing ("The Left’s plans to normalize and mainstream pedophilia will come to fruition." and "The World Economic Forum will lead the way in trying to turn humans into glorified Matrix-style batteries.")

My conspiracy theory predictions:

  1. Not much will budge on the COVID-origin story, but there'll be one or two decent pieces of evidence that increase the likelihood of a lab leak. Documents will come out showing approval at the highest levels for GoF research. But everyone's bored of COVID by now so no one cares.

  2. GOP House will investigate Hunter Biden, turn up a bunch of evidence of various quality that he was engaged in corruption, but with no smoking gun that the Big Guy was involved, with most testimony being tainted by the fact that everyone Hunter was surrounded by with firsthand knowledge is obviously sketch as fuck.

  3. Nothing news on the government "maybe there are UFOs!" story.

yeah, a terrible article . Even if the 'truth' did come out, whatever that is, no one would accept it unless it confirmed one's preexisting beliefs. like what if the moon landing was actually real, they wouldn't be convinced anyway. The burden of proof is impossibly high.

Yes correct. Maybe this is a dumb topic but felt like something similar to New Year predictions. A lot of the prior ones were things you were banned for mentioning on social media but are now sort of accepted. Social media seems a lot better now.

Sort of agree with your first two. Though I think everyone around a Hunter is “sketch as fuck” is closer to everyone around Hunter “has been thoroughly thrown into the culture war meat grinder”.

I'm sure if Mr Durden had to assign probabilities to "The World Economic Forum will lead the way in trying to turn humans into glorified Matrix-style batteries" and "The scope of China’s control over the U.S. government will become clearer", he'd be more rational. Although the 'by tyler durden' bit isn't as funny when followed by 'Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA'. The comments make him look reasonable.

The term 'conspiracy theory', when used, usually just means "crazy idea like aliens". "Thing that calls a conspiracy theory ended up being true" doesn't mean elite pedo aliens are more likely.

I nominate these:

  1. Joe Biden is the Big Guy. I mean, everybody thinks that, but there's no proof. I expect it will show up eventually.

  2. There's something that covid vaccine does to athletic young males that makes it significantly riskier than presented (which was pretty much zero risk)

  3. Facebook and Google (YouTube) are as controlled by US government censors as Twitter was, and regularly and with minimal filtering execute governmental requests to suppress information and dissidents

  4. Ray Epps confirmed to have been working for US government

  5. We learn China has been lying about their covid stats and the real numbers of deaths are horrendous and all their zero-covid strategy was a colossal atrocity

  1. What does it mean “the Big Guy”?

  2. The data is already quite strong about this. It has already been a warning in vaccine information for more than a year. What we don't know, how much of a risk it is. Probably not that great in absolute numbers. However, the benefit from vaccine in young people is also not that great. We don't know if the benefits overweigh the risks.

  3. Very likely indeed.

  4. Who is Ray Epps?

  5. I don't think that China lying about covid matters. Nothing about covid really matters anymore. Most stats are only meant to scare people without true understanding how risks are/were age stratified. It took 3 years for European Medicines agency to finally say that covid risk increases exponentially by age even though we learned it within the first 2 weeks of pandemic.

What does it mean “the Big Guy”?

If you want to learn about American scandals, British tabloid gutter press is the way to go ;-)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11056505/Hunter-Biden-associate-referred-Big-Guy-SECOND-message.html

Who is Ray Epps?

Big Trump fan from Arizona, who traveled all the way to DC to meet his idol, and then, instead to listening to his speech, engaged in highly sus behavior.

Meet Ray Epps

Meet Ray Epps, Part 2

This means Epps came to the Trump speech early in the morning with the sole intention of recruiting a mob to follow on the heels of the Capitol breach team he would personally oversee while Trump was speaking—the very breach team we have covered in this report whose operators would remove the fencing, signage and barricades before the masses would arrive at the Capitol.

Let’s put this all in context:

Ray Epps flew 2,300 miles from Phoenix, Arizona to Washington, DC for a Trump rally, supposedly as a Trump supporter.

Epps arrived at the rally entrance more than two hours early, camped out to constantly shout recruiting instructions about coming to the Capitol after the speech, but then skipped out on the speech itself, because he was too busy personally orchestrating the Big Bang Breach Team that kicked off the riot and tore down the fencing, barricades and signage, which made rallygoers totally unaware of the legal booby trap they had walked into.

  • There was a person mentioned in Hunter Biden communications under the alias "the Big Guy" to which, as the communications allude, went part of the profits. It is widely assumed that it is Joe Biden, and he was a knowing partner in Hunter's dealings, but so far there's no direct proof of that AFAIK.

  • Ray Epps is a person who took active participation in the events of January 6, by his own admission "I orchestrated it", and was seen inciting certain violent actions, but who for reasons unknown is treated in a radically different way from all other protestors by Democrats, and not only his prosecution was dropped without any plausible explanation, but he was invited to testify in front of Jan 6 commission, and during that testimony the interrogators basically fed him (pun!) the answers. It is suggested by some that the reason for all that is that he is one of the many FBI informants that we know were present at the scene (and in general most right organizations, such as Oath Keepers or Proud Boys, are infested with FBI informants, which makes it plausible that there should be some at the scene on Jan 6) or an agent of some other governmental agency.

Thanks for the explanation.

I don't think it is Joe Biden though. My priors are that sons don't really want to be controlled by their fathers. But in case he had such a relationship with his father, he would had called him less formally, like “Dad” or similar.

Ray Epps is more interesting. I think the worry about January 6 being a potential coup is overblown. Recently Germany had arrested a bunch of people for plotting a coup and restoring monarchy. The media described them as a group of senile men who had got hold of weapons, i.e., nothing serious and all immediately forgot about it. The same is probably true about January 6 except they were not seniors but younger fantasists and some of them had guns (but everybody has a gun in the US). It should not be paid such an attention. Sadly some people died in the crowds but fatal traffic accidents also happen and it is time to forget about this.

The only difference I can see is that Trump was tweeting something and the irrational hate of Trump has been a feature of the US politics. I am not saying that Trump is a good man but he certainly is not guilty of all the outrageous things he is accused of. Whatever Ray Epps' role was, it doesn't change the fact that it was just a spontaneous crowd gathered in naive beliefs, probably instigated by social media viral messaging.

Whatever Ray Epps' role was, it doesn't change the fact that it was just a spontaneous crowd gathered in naive beliefs, probably instigated by social media viral messaging.

Sure, but the question here is that there were some acts of violence and unlawful behavior. They are greatly exaggerated and overblown by the media (as expected) but who initiated them? Most people that are prosecuted are found guilty of the most mundane things akin to "walking where the government told you not to walk". However, we know some people did instigate the violence. Who were those people? We also know the FBI had informants there, and the FBI is not shy of using provocation tactics (see Whitmer "kidnapping" plot) - so were the FBI informants among those who instigated the violence, in order to turn a peaceful protest into something they could make a Congressional commission out of? If there were such people, we'd expect them to not be prosecuted, but instead to be used as vehicles for promoting such agenda.

And here we see a person who seemingly took part in instigating violence, was not prosecuted and is being used as a vehicle to promote the Dems agenda. If we learned he was working for the FBI (or any other part of the government apparatus) - it would confirm that the suspicions above are indeed true. Otherwise, we do not have a plausible explanation of why Epps was treated completely different from what we expect and see other protestors, often not guilty of anything more than walking through a space the government didn't like them to walk, are treated.

I don't think it is Joe Biden though. My priors are that sons don't really want to be controlled by their fathers. But in case he had such a relationship with his father, he would had called him less formally, like “Dad” or similar.

One of Hunter's (former) business associates who was on the email chain in question was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, and specifically confirmed that in this case "Big Guy" was a sort of code when referring to Biden Sr. It would have been weird for them to all call him "Dad"!

It might be. Tucker Carlson is not very reliable though.

Why do you say that?

tucker isn't the source, former business associate tony bobulinski is the source

tucker's reliability is mostly irrelevant here, we're not relying on "unidentified source promise"

Tucker Carlson is not very reliable though.

like what?

I don't know who Tony Bobulinski is and how trustable he is. The fact that Tucker quotes him doesn't add anything. It is just mostly gossip which may be correct or may not. It doesn't update my priors much.

Maybe I am going the way that Taleb calls via negativa. I am careful and exclude things I don't have enough positive information about. That eliminates most of disaster modes (of course, it also makes me to lose some potentially great deals too).

More comments

Compared to whom?

Practically everyone who is qualified to speak about this matter.

More comments

  1. There were other messages saying to use code for Joe Biden as they were paranoid about Op Sec.

  2. Hunter mentioned in a message to Hunter’s kid that the kid is lucky that Hunter doesn’t take money for the kid like Joe does vis-à-vis Hunter.

  3. We know they commingled funds.

  4. Finally there is testimony by Tony B.

So far, the evidence heavily suggests Joe was invoked.

Good list and what I was looking for.

  1. Agree on but their is plausible deniability now. But if proven people will just say we knew that all the time

  2. Hamlin might do this. But it’s certainly not the initial diagnosis. I also think COVID itself causes damaging, but repeated boosting probably causes damage that doesn’t need to be done

  3. Think this is assumed

  4. Lowest confidence here but there is something odd going on with him

  5. I think this is false.

  1. I actually find this highly unlikely while also being substantively true. Joe Biden doesn't need cash out of these deals because Joe Biden never pays for anything anyway.
  1. God will that be horrifying to learn.

FYI, something went wrong with your formatting and both numbers show up as "1." for me.

Each point is as important if not more important than the proceeding point.

Well 1 was one and the rest would fit the second 1, wouldn't they?

I just wasn't sure what you meant and thought it was the Markdown formatting messing up your list, so I thought you might want to edit to clarify. Not sure what you even did to get two "1."s as


1. foo

42. bar

renders as


1. foo

2. bar

no matter what number I replace "42" with.

The rdrama code base has "View Source" as a feature which is kind of neat. The original comment:


1. I actually find this highly unlikely while also being substantively true. Joe Biden doesn't need cash out of these deals because Joe Biden never pays for anything anyway. 


5) God will that be horrifying to learn.

I don't see why Biden needs cash less than Clintons, and Clintons took money from basically anybody.

Along the lines of your first point, Biden could both be the Big Guy and also not have any substantive involvement with the deal. Hunter could well have entirely invented his dad's interest in an attempt to make everything seem juicier to his collaborators and then taken his dad's share for himself, and no one is the wiser.

Getting involved with these things (particularly given that he knows his son is not a reliable agent) isn't something Biden would obviously do. On the other hand, obfuscation to protect his only son after the fact instead of throwing him under the bus is something I'd absolutely expect.

(Even if more evidence does come out linking Biden, this is probably the backup story that will be the party line.)

We learn China has been lying about their covid stats and the real numbers of deaths are horrendous and all their zero-covid strategy was a colossal atrocity

Way to verify it would be survey representative sample of mainland Chinese citizens, ask them how many of their family members died or vanished vithout trace during early 2020.

This is standard approach, but there are numerous possible problems with it (starting with different definitions of "family" in different cultures)

For 5, what's your explanation for why their reported numbers are shooting up now? To me it always seemed likely that they were covering up their real numbers but I don't see why they would stop that now, whereas if they were telling the truth and have a mostly COVID-naive population then it would make sense that at some point they would have to pay the piper.

Because it's getting too big to hide? Especially once full lockdown is removed, people start talking to each other and notice some people are missing. If the official statistics (arbitrary example) says there are 100 people dead in the whole China, and you know 20 people with dead relatives just in your city, it's impossible to believe. But if you add up a bit more, then it becomes more plausible.

I mean, I don't have any data now, right now it's just a suspicion, a theory and a gut feeling. We'll see.

Given how much more quickly it swept through the rest of the world, it doesn't seem plausible that it's been raging for two years in China and is just now getting too big to hide.

I'm going to use another conspiracy theory to explain this one: several of the Vietnam vets I grew up with claim the wall is missing names. That vastly more Americans died over there, but that only some names made the wall. But by randomizing it, it just becomes a bunch of guys who know one guy who was missed, so the natural reaction is oh well it was an oversight, what's one more one way or another, but that it adds up to thousands. But 59,000 is a big enough number that thousands more can get lost in the sauce.

I've never looked into it beyond that, but a similar dynamic might work here. ChiComms are increasing the number of reported dead, to "catch up" to unreported dead, so that the numbers get big enough that they're hard to check.

This sounds like POW-MIA conspiracy theory mangled in retelling.

TL;DR: many more Americans than officially announced were captured by North Vietnam. US government knew about it, and deliberately let them die in captivity.

Mainstream history take

Conspiracy theory take

Oh the POW/MiA conspiracies are in my view true, and separate.

What I'm saying is that I was told directly, riding to a trade show with a one time Green Beret, that so and so got blown to bits in front of him and the name isn't on the wall. This is the same story I've heard from multiple vets.

Now, it's not impossible they were confused! They missed the name, the name he went under to his buddies wasn't his legal name that's listed on the wall ("James <estranged father's name>" legally; "Jimmy <Mother's name>" to his friends), the guy didn't die but was grievously wounded and 40 years of alcohol have conflated complex and traumatic memories, or they're flat lying to make a point about Vietnam. But the dynamic is the same: you have one guy claiming a few names are missing out of 59,000; well it's probably just an error and the overall narrative remains true. But how many errors can you cover up before the narrative itself is false?

Idk what that number that allows Chinese COVID dead to disappear into the ether would be. But it's more than they were reporting prior. At that point, a smart journalist could have collected enough names to throw numbers off. Now they need a big enough number that reporting its falsehood becomes difficult, impossible without setting off government alarm bells. Can you gather 100,000 anecdotes without getting into trouble in China? I doubt it.

We learn China has been lying about their covid stats and the real numbers of deaths are horrendous and all their zero-covid strategy was a colossal atrocity

I think it's more likely that COVID just genuinely doesn't do a hell of a lot even if you 'let it rip', especially if you don't use the absurd attribution criteria that was used to justify the lockdowns.

Adrenochrome.

I have heard exactly zero medical evidence that torturing children (physically or psychologically) causes their adrenal glands to produce a substance which reduces or reverses human aging, boosts cognition by at least twenty IQ points, while causing a chemical high better than any other drug.

I have seen exactly zero evidence that the political, economic, entertainment, and old money elites spend billions yearly on obtaining it from evil secret facilities on private islands (Epstein) and in corrupt countries (Ukraine) where kidnapped trafficked children are raped by elites for sexual rewards and blackmail material in the process of harvesting it.

It sounds like a new class war variation on old anti-semitic blood libels created to spark revolutions and pogroms, a toxic climate of ethnic warfare which culminated in the Holocaust.

It also sounds like a memetic trap for conspiracy theorists: secret knowledge, high detail, plausible motivations for those who don’t understand how real moneyed power could be so inhuman, and so on.

So no, I don’t believe adrenochrome exists. The stakes would be too high and someone with a conscience would have provided proof by this point.

I also sincerely hope it’s not true. It would be truly horrific if true, and would require a much tighter-lipped and powerful conspiracy than any we’ve ever seen exposed.

The myth was popularized by Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.

This is the first time I have heard this conspiracy theory and the thing I don’t understand is if something existed with these properties wouldn’t someone have figured out how to make it synthetically? I mean we can make insulin, somatropin, and plenty of other fabulously complex drugs with less incentive.

The real derivative called adrenochrome in medical science can easily be synthesized. It does indeed produce hallucinations, reportedly similar to mescaline. EDIT: reports with a higher trustworthiness deny most reported effects. /EDIT. It has a toxic breakdown byproduct, being unstable.

The QAnon variant theory built on Uncle Duke’s drug diary is that it isn’t actually the compound with miraculous properties which can only be harvested theough demonic acts. The real adrenochrome is partly science, partly woo interdimensional spiritual drug, a substance which would be quite at home in the Doom video game series.

It also sounds like a memetic trap for conspiracy theorists

That's because it is. It was shilled on 4chan and facebook pretty obviously. It's a "whacky" conspiracy theory designed to mask a very real thing, infusion of blood from young people really helps. None of that adrenochrome bullshit.

Adrenochrome exists. It is a pretty boring compound, structurally related to adrenaline, was tried in studies and found useless. Just like adrenaline, we could easily synthesize it chemically if it was found useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome

But failure to research such a simply fact unites both conspiracy theorists and their critics :)

Also consider: we have a Drug War in this country. We have lists of chemicals that are banned because of their psychoactive effects. We have lists of chemicals that are banned because they are too similar to chemicals on the first list and thus might be psychoactive. Florida notoriously passed a drug-control act so wide-ranging it banned one of the amino acids in cheese as a controlled substance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyramine#Status_in_Florida ).

Adrenochrome, as far as I know, is not on any of these lists. If people as notoriously paranoid as the US drug warriors never got around to banning adrenochrome, it probably doesn't do much of anything.

According to one daring psychonaut, its effects are an hour’s light sedation and a minute’s light euphoria. No derealization or hallucinations.

A pure hypothetical thought experiment: imagine it occurs that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination + all booster follow-ups (4+ shots) regimen is disastrous to health, and has a high 10-year mortality rate. In other words, those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end, or some such risk. What would be the public’s response and what would be the just punishment for those involved?

I think in such a hypothetical, the whole political climate of 21st century neo-neoliberalism will be fundamentally altered. There would be a huge rightward shift on distrust to authorities, especially but not limited to scientists and public health authorities. I don’t think the public would be satisfied with Fauci and other heads being tried, and will demand sentences for the thousands of individuals involved in the decision similar to what we would see in the Nuremberg trials. This would also fundamentally change the political climate, as the “vax-maxxed” lean left.

I think it was a godlikeproductions post that claimed the plan was basically along your speculation. The "plan" is to roll out the deadly vaccine, push everyone to take it, then in a few years (now) when it becomes obvious how dangerous it is, use the rage of the people against their government to overthrow those governments in a way that furthers the one-nation world.

I found the link: https://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message4920416/pg1

Could you link to the OP, or explain why popular rage at a federal authority would push a country towards even larger government?

I went looking for it, but haven't found it yet. I've seen the screenshot of the GLP post floating around, and my searches have been fruitless to find either the image or the post itself.

No worries and thanks for checking.

I haven't read the post, but most people don't think "the reason this happened is because the government is too big!' - they think 'this happened because the people in charge are incompetent and/or evil!' So if you have engineered a decade long scenario where all the federal governments look monstrously evil and completely incompetent, you have ample time to position yourself as 'the adults in the room'. And in the midst of the widespread death and chaos, people will flock to your side regardless of what overbearing, invasive laws you propose just for a shot at a return to normalcy.

The continued incompetence of every government official everywhere makes me think this conspiracy is unlikely.

I think it's more like "widespread collapse of national governments/depopulation allows the NWO to swoop in, pick up the pieces, and roll them up into a totalitarian globalist regime" -- not that this is particularly plausible, but that's the idea.

A pure hypothetical thought experiment: imagine it occurs that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination + all booster follow-ups (4+ shots) regimen is disastrous to health, and has a high 10-year mortality rate. In other words, those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end, or some such risk. What would be the public’s response and what would be the just punishment for those involved?

The cynical answer is "nothing." The vaccine deaths would be categorized as "Long Covid" or something else and any respectable scientist or doctor who claims otherwise would risk their career.

There's been no (serious) calls for justice for creating the virus, so my guess is nothing.

There have been no (serious) attempts to prove anything along those lines, only people saying it happened and then pretending that makes it so.

Maybe if the find a smoking gun instead of a five year old's picture we'll see something, until then nah.

Yeah but a lot of that's down to China being China.

If it were an actual company in a Western country I think there's a lot more scope for reprisals.

They’ll blame it on Trump rushing the vaccine, and on Republicans for creating the environment (not wearing masks, going to church, interacting with their families etc.) where they were basically forced to take the rushed, dangerous vaccines. They knew the risk, but they needed to save the world from the evil anti science republicans and now the republicans finally got them.

Well, why not blame Trump (even if you also blamed other figures, including great many Democrats)? After all, Trump has jocked his big beautiful vaccine every chance he's had. If there's a trial for Fauci, surely Trump face the same trial as well - unless the whole thing was just about going after the left/Democrats?

Well for one thing Trump didn’t make the vaccine mandatory. He also pushed pretty heavily on medical freedom things like right to try, and was very vocal about wanting people to have options like monoclonal antibodies.

But the OP didn't talk about public health trials and loss of credibility etc. for mandates but for the vaccine itself. Presumably merely pushing strongly for vaccine would be enough.

This just summarizes the butchering of neoliberal. Neoliberal was deregulation, free trade, and lower taxes. It was never about government telling you what to do. It’s the ideology of Milton Friedman, Reagan, and Thatcher.

So be it, I shall add another neo prefix.

Not only do i agree with @whiningcoil that nothing will happen, bit i also dont expect that the unvaxxed will lauded for their foresight. I imagine there will be even more animosity and perhaps even violence direct at unvaxxed people since they did not take on the risk that the rest of society did. I think that sentiment was always driving the cruel policies for the unvaxxed. We chose not to accept the risks for the good of society and are in their mind, freeriding on everyone else.

Thats why I still keep my vax status to myself to nearly everyone except family.

This is pretty amazing, considering that the data has become so overwhelming that it has necessitated a change in narrative that has even shown through in legal arguments. When the gov't argued for their employee mandate in front of the en banc fifth circuit a few months ago, it was no longer, "This is necessary to prevent transmission in the workplace," because it's now undeniable that vaccination prevents neither infection nor transmission. It was a stark contrast to the arguments over the OSHA vaccine in SCOTUS. Then, the justices were entertaining ideas like, "It's similar to if you have a dangerous machine that is spurting dangerous chemicals all over the place that could end up on other employees." Now, there no talk of that at all. Instead, the gov't had to basically leave the point stand and retreat back to, "...but we still think vaccination is the best way to prevent serious cases/death to individuals."

Of course, now that that's the new battleground, the court had some wicked hypos like, "Could the gov't mandate that all employees get below a particular BMI by a specified date or be fired? Obesity is a huge crisis in society, causing all sorts of disease/death, and surely that causes inefficiency in gov't operations [which is the "federal nexus" they're trying to use]?" We can only hope that these facts take root in the public consciousness as well (and that the fifth circuit nixes another authoritarian mandate).

What if (purely hypothetically!) it turned out that racism and homophobia are mental disorders, science proved that immigrants are just as smart and nice - maybe even moreso - than white americans, and vaccine denialism killed millions of republicans, causing biden to win the election?

These aren't useful hypotheticals because they're meaningless. Neither is yours. A 25% mortality rate over ten years, even in the subset that gets "4+ shots", would've already been noticed. It would multiply by ten the death rate for 20-30 year olds (lazily estimated from here). That would have been noticed! Even if the death rate ramped up over those 10 years, via some wacky mechanism, a 50% increase among 20-30yos would still be obvious, both to people monitoring medical statistics, random doctors, etc.

I mean, people are noticing lots and lots of excess deaths not directly related to an active bout of covid. Some people are just assuming it's related to "long covid", others the massive despair anti-covid political measures caused, others vaccine side effects. Nobody knows, and it's bias the whole way down. It feels like unless a chest burster emerges from the corpse and announces "HAHAHA, SILLY HUMANS! YOUR RNA VACCINE SET ME FREE!", the default position is that it's all, somehow, a "covid death". And you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects, not with their grant money controlled by the NIH.

the our world in data excess mortality for death from from all causes chart here shows significant excess mortality around early 2022, when that article was published - but it's dropped by a factor of 5 since then, which isn't what you'd expect from long-term vaccine deaths. A similar pattern holds in many other countries.

And you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects

Looking for adverse effects for pharmaceuticals and vaccines is explicitly funded and ordered by various parts of the government. and ... it is done, a lot. VAERS exists. And policymakers act on them, see the temporary J&J pause for the claimed side effects.

But VAERS has been roundly criticized because it sucks. Wouldn’t we want to map excess deaths to vaccine rollout. If the two coincide, then isn’t that a plausible argument the vaccines could be causing issues?

The article you linked is from early January 2022. In 2021 (the Omicron wave!), excess deaths could attributed to Covid directly or to the general failures of the healthcare system as the system was dealing with Covid (including people hesitant to seek care due to Covid concerns).

Frankly, your link makes me more skeptical of you.

you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects, not with their grant money controlled by the NIH.

There are 25+ countries in the world with functional public health establishments. Surely one of them is actually doing follow-up studies on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the vaccines were a population-level experiment with unknown 4+ year side effects, but ... it's been two years now. We should start seeing signals.

excess deaths could attributed to Covid directly or to the general failures of the healthcare system as the system was dealing with Covid (including people hesitant to seek care due to Covid concerns).

Dude, I said they could too! My problem, and you did it too, is people stop there. Yeah, they could. They also could not. And nobody cares. That they "could" is all they need to hear and they move on.

I actually agree with you that the cause of "excess deaths" is always worth looking into. In the context of the discussion about potentially long-term vaccine-associated mortality rates, however, it sounded like you were establishing a bailey: "There are a lot of excess deaths which have not been investigated, therefore vaccine effects are likely." My apologies if that was not your intent.

I feel like you underestimate the degree of social upheaval from deaths alone. According to the CDC some 50M Americans have received an updated Bivalent booster. Predicting a 25% mortality rate among such a group over a decade is 12.5M extra deaths over that decade, or 1.25M deaths per year (amortized). That's a 33% increase in total deaths per year compared to 2020 and would make the vaccine the leading cause of death, causing about double the current leading cause of death (heart disease).

As for what might happen to those involved in the vaccine's development it is probably worth comparing to previous situations where drugs were approved and caused a lot of harm. Thalidomide is probably the obvious comparison (though this would be much worse by scale).

those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end

Any double digit risk would be end-of-civilization numbers. That's worse than the Black Death.

Covid's mortality rate sits at 0.01*.Assuming a worst case annual infection (like the flu), that still's a 0.1% mortality rate.

Even a 1% vaccine mortality rate would lead to societal changes beyond our wildest imagination.

I have personally come to the conclusion, that as someone who is incredibly safe wrt. the risk factors, the boosters are not worth it. I took the standard 2 shots happily. Pre-Omicron Covid variants were very scary.

Even in the most at-risk group, the benefits* biggest risk reduction comes from the first 2 shots.

I think in such a hypothetical

Honestly, any (5+%) high enough mortality rate might lead to such out-of-the-overton-window outcomes, that we won't even have an inkling on how things will pan out. It will be mayhem like nothing we've seen before, at a civilizational level.

*All caveats apply. aggregate rates don't account for the most important individual risk factors such as vaccination status, healthcare services, BMI, age; which have order of magnitude impacts on that little number above. There is also the issue where now-a-days people don't even get tested for mild cases. So the infection rate numbers are very likely off by a lot.

ps. : I was able to use strike outs with a "", Is there a known formatting reference guide. This is only some 50% markdown?

-- Profound dysegenic effects on the population. I'm not here to argue what the "smart" opinion is, or to generalize to the whole grouping, but the numbers don't lie: and it would be horrifying.

A Kaiser Family Foundation brief from September still showed gaps in vaccination by insurance, education levels and income. Individuals with an annual income under $40,000 had a 68 percent partial vaccination rate, compared with 79 percent for incomes $90,000 or higher.

The discrepancies just get worse as you work into the tails, especially once you correlate with education. We'd lose disproportionately smart, educated, employed people relative to dumb, uneducated, and unemployed people. Simple facts. Fall of civilization level event? Maybe.

-- I think your definitions of Left-Right might be idiosyncratic to mine. One would think that the reaction to such an occurrence would be civil libertarian and a strong enshrinement of bodily autonomy, something like Kulak's dreamland. One could equally see urges towards civil libertarianism leading to 60s/BLM excesses and a corresponding backlash. I don't see a strong Right-Wing gain in the sense in which the Republican party passed the Patriot Act or the sense in which the Right wing favors abortion restrictions. All the political effects will be downstream of the dysgenic effects. If we lost 20% of our engineers, lawyers, codemonkeys maybe we get a safetyism administration that seeks to carefully husband our remaining human resources.

-- I'd like to think that political leaders involved would be permanently discredited, but that has not been my experience of prior disasters. See E.G. the Iraq war; people today say that everyone supported it. I point out that I went to large protests against it and Ted Kennedy fillibustered it, they say I'm nitpicking. It will all be memory holed.

If they're so smart, why did they fall for the psy-op?

I can see smart teenagers fall for it because they're too busy to study to go online and 'do their own research' which has been the easiest thing in history since circa 2005.

Anyone with a certain brain processing power that has lived in the Western world for 20+ years has no excuse.

Weren't you around for the Iraq WMD or any of these dozens of disasters resulting from trusting government and corporations?

If they're so smart, why did they fall for the psy-op?

If we discuss reality? Because vaccine was better than no vaccine.

Anyone with a certain brain processing power that has lived in the Western world for 20+ years has no excuse.

For not taking vaccine.

Anyone with a certain brain processing power that has lived in the Western world for 20+ years has no excuse.

For what--disagreeing with your take?

The point you're making here can be made without the consensus-building language, so please avoid that in the future.

If they're so smart, why did they fall for the psy-op?

trust, conformity, perceived pro-sociality, and they have more to lose

Decision making and instrumental intelligence aren't connected for everybody. Most people don't make decisions based on thinking, they are followers of one kind or another. They follow traditional rules, or what the boss tells them, or their priest tells them, or they mimic what the people right next to them are doing. This is totally normal and probably essential for society or any kind of human organization to work.

But those people can still be smart. Even if they will never have an independent thought about what they should do, they could still be incredibly talented scientists or technicians. And we want those people. If you were the boss, you would want smart followers. It's stupid to say "why would we care if a bunch of instrumentally smart people died because they were told to walk off a bridge" - we should care because they have useful skills to put to work. We should try to stop their leaders from telling them to walk off bridges.

I don't think it would even be good to live in a world were everyone thought deeply about what they should do. Such a society would probably be incapable of cooperation at scale.

If you pose a hypothetical about the vaccine killing 25% of the vaccinated, you can't then use your hypothetical evidence to dunk on people for falling for a "psy-op".

It's plausible that the vaccine kills and maims some number of people, but reduces number of people killed and maimed by a larger number. Then it's rational to take the vaccine. But people weren't even working on that much information at the time, and it's a much harder problem.

The person you're responding to is so deep in their own fantasy scenario that they're already rolling out the gotchyas for something that they just straight made up lol.

"Let's assume a hypothetical scenario in which all smart people just punch themselves in the face once a day. Well if they're so smart, how come they keep punching themselves in the face once a day? Riddle me that, ace, riddle me that!"

What is your exact definition of the psy-op, here?

That young people had a need to turn themselves into GMO experiment.

-injections do not protect from getting the disease

-have negative side effects in a % of the pop, including fertility (imaging wanting children in the future and submitting to a potentially sterilizing procedure)

-below a certain age the disease itself is basically not deadly

-governments prevented travel from pure humans but that's over

-colleges prevented attending but that's on the way out

-some companies prevented holding a job, probably over and plenty of companies did not

In summary, injection was unnecessary, harmful to health, and not taking it relatively easy to avoid for presumably smart people

  • -13

Yeah I was surprised by that too - especially because I didn't see utopia until we were in lockdown and my girlfriend suggested I check out the Australian series Utopia - a comedy series about working for the government - and because I couldn't get a legal copy I used the high seas and got the UK series. I brought it up a dozen or so times in gatherings, and even the people who had seen it didn't want to talk about it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if one of the cast or crew had been metooed or something before deciding it hit too close to home and made you look like a conspiracy theorist. Pretty good watch though.

Side note - the Australian Utopia series is also pretty good. What is less good is sitting down for a typical Australian sitcom mix of irony and stupidity and instead watching a Brit viciously beat people to death with a hammer.

Out of that list, the second one (negative side effects in a % of pop including fertility) remains unproven beyond a fairly small number of verified side-effects, the first and the third one are not necessarily among the reasons for taking the vaxx (even if the vaccine does not prevent one from getting the disease they might still want to mitigate effects and even if it's not deadly you might still want to mitigate otherwise a potentially nasty disease), and the rest (the ones about the mandates) have little do with one's intelligence, beyond that presumably intelligent people will have a larger probability of being in college or holding a high-paying job they can't afford to lose and would thus be under extra pressure to comply with the mandates, if the mandates even where the fundamental reason why they took the vaccine.

The disease is not particularly nasty for under-30s (under-50s IME) either -- hollowing out midwits who just do what they are told would probably be even more harmful to society than the removal of upper SDs of the IQ distribution though, so you are probably correct that this hypothetical conspiracy would be a self-own.

It wasn't nasty for our family, but I know several people who said that COVID was the worst flu they've ever had, or one of the worst. I also know one ~40-year-old guy who was put to the tubes and apparently came pretty close to kicking the bucket (he was triple-vaxxed, and very overweight). Even "nastiest flu you've ever had" might well sound like something that you might want to turn into a mid-strength flu, presuming the vaccine would help do that.

Sure, I've heard people say this too -- but "nastiest flu you've ever had" is... a thing that's gonna happen sometimes? Personally the flu (maybe 'RSV', idk) that I (and roughly everyone else I know) had a month ago or so was way worse than the COVID experience. Still not in the 'worst respiratory infection ever' ballpark, but, like -- shit happens.

Even "nastiest flu you've ever had" might well sound like something that you might want to turn into a mid-strength flu, presuming the vaccine would help do that.

Which doesn't seem to have worked out for your triple-vaxxed friend -- it's almost impossible at this point to separate the vaccine impact on severity from different variants, prior exposure, etc.

But that is why I said "under 30" -- I don't know any under-30s (vaxxed or not) who had worse than a moderate cold over it. "30s-40s + other risk factors" is definitely a group where the trade-off seemed tilted towards vaccination. (not sure anymore given that it's not really clear that the bivalent boosters are providing much improvement against current variants -- certainly not over a reasonable timeframe. I'd have to be pretty frail to consider boosting every ~3 months a good idea, considering cumulative side-effect risk and potential immune system weirdities)

turn themselves into GMO experiment

pure humans

mRNA vaccines do not modify your genome. They trick your body into turning genes they carry into spike proteins, just like the virus does, but they don't replace your genes, and they don't make more of their own genes to repeat the process at exponentially-increasing scales like the virus does.

This stuff isn't as clearly against the rules as the "anyone with a certain brain processing power" above, but it is a good time for "proactively provide evidence" to come to mind.

-injections do not protect from getting the disease

They had better than 90% protection from disease in the first RCT. That dropped with time and with new variants, but even if it had had zero lasting protection, the temporary protection still would have been worth taking a chance for by vulnerable populations in the first megadeath-scale waves.

have negative side effects in a % of the pop

This is trivially true because "ow my arm" is a negative side effect, but for any serious claim you'll need specific side effects and numeric percentages. It didn't have as many negative side effects as getting Covid-19 one extra time. The trouble with trying to avoid risk here is that Covid's spread was so extensive that there was no way to avoid risk. There was just "risk exposing your body to a carefully metered dose of Covid spikes" versus "risk exposing your body, with your immune system unprepared, to an exponentially reproducing dose of Covid viruses".

including fertility

And this is at least true because zero is a percent?

This is an especially weird one for me, because actual testosterone decline has been going on for 50 years, sperm quality included, with no complete explanations, and even the incomplete explanations don't seem to be engendering much concern from anyone. If one side of the Culture War wants to go all Buck Turgidson, couldn't we at least get some good out of it, and focus on an actual measurable corruption of our precious bodily fluids?

below a certain age the disease itself is basically not deadly

This is true or false depending on your definition of "basically" and "a certain age"; risks did rise pretty much exponentially with age, but there were still a few hundred pediatric deaths and tens of thousands of hospitalizations in the US. If you look at excess death counts Covid starts clearly showing up in the 25-44 age group; not kids, but not exactly great-grandma either.

-governments prevented travel

-colleges prevented attending

-some companies prevented holding a job

This is all true (and more: some companies were forced to prevent holding a job, to remain federal contractors), and in hindsight (or maybe with foresight, from anyone who didn't see any a priori reason to expect long-lived sterilizing immunity against a disease not obviously more static than influenza) it was questionable to bar people even temporarily from half of society under the desperate belief that this was going to be the final step to push R below 1 for good.

mRNA vaccines do not modify your genome.

The Reuters 'fact-checker' quotes Mark Lynas who is merely speculating:

"It does not enter the (cell) nucleus and cannot interact with your DNA or cause any changes to the genome (here)”.

Then this other source:

'In an explainer about COVID-19 vaccines, Oxford University’s Vaccine Knowledge Project rebukes misinformation about mRNA with equal force: “there is no way for human DNA to be altered by an mRNA vaccine.” (here).'

They are asserting this claim without evidence.

Until this is actually tested, it is possible.

Here's a few contradicting evidences :

We know the certain viruses like HIV are able to insert their genomes of RNA into the human genome but only after they have converted it into DNA. This is accomplished via a virus enzyme called reverse transcriptase – an enzyme humans don't have. So the upshot is we don't have a way for mRNA vaccines to be inserted into our genomes. SO current vaccines are safe.

Basically it is established that RNA can be turned into DNA and integrated into the genome.

This is a well-known phenomenon.

The point of contention is whether or not what is in the injection can do the same thing.

Until there is a study coming out to prove in a large sample that this does not happen, it remains a possibility, no matter what fact-checkers say, as this is something that happens in nature.

Here's one in-vitro study that found DNA integration of the injection product

Here is the commentary on that study that says 'vaccines are safe but actually that study makes a good point'

Fourth, retroviruses in particular are known to reverse-transcribe intracellularly and have the ability to be integrated into the host genome. There is some evidence in support of SARS-CoV-2’s ability to integrate some of its genetic sequences into the DNA of the host cells [7]; however, unlike retroviruses, the infectious SARS-CoV-2 virus could not be reproduced from the integrated subgenomic sequences.

The mechanism exists in nature but we need to know whether or not it happens in injected humans.

Issues have to do with whether or not the injection reaches the cell nucleus, and whether or not the RNA gets reverse-transcribed, and what dose is needed, etc.

The FDA itself did not have even specify an actual dose on its emergency authorization if I recall correctly.

They are not controlling how much of the RNA mixture each injection delivers, as far as I know.

Here's one of your previous Fact-chunkers describing some of the side effects.

Regarding fertility, I'm basing it on the widely reported complaints about menstruation issues from women who were injected and some other anecdotes.

Even if it did not make one sterile, it still would not make sense for young people to take it.

If you look at excess death counts Covid starts clearly showing up in the 25-44 age group; not kids, but not exactly great-grandma either.

A lot of unhealthy people in that age range that could use some more obvious remedies before dipping into transhumanism; for example watching their diet or avoiding paraphilia associated with sexually-transmitted diseases.

Here is the commentary on that study that says 'vaccines are safe but actually that study makes a good point'

It also says that the reason they're worried is because of a study showing SARS-CoV-2 itself doing the same thing. Personally I'd like to see both studies replicated first. (I recall one interdisciplinary-department joke: nobody believes a theoretical analysis except the ones who wrote it, everybody believes an experimental result except the ones who performed it) But let's assume it's a non-negligible chance for now. Would you think it's fair if I said that anyone exposed to Covid-19 (or to any virus, since we seem to be ignoring the retrovirus/non-retrovirus distinction) is now a GMO, not a "pure human"? If so, then what's the point? If not, then what's the difference?

Again, if only "just never get exposed to Covid-19 genes" was an option, that would have indeed been the non-risky option! That hasn't been an option since 2020 (maybe since January 2022? even the near-hermits were getting Omicron) and it may never be again.

They are not controlling how much of the RNA mixture each injection delivers, as far as I know.

30μg per 0.3mL injection is what's on the Pfizer fact sheet, but I guess for all we know they've just got a guy in a back alley who mixes .001g into one liter and 10g into the next? It would be weird that 90% of doses still worked in the trials, and 80% still worked well enough in the long run though, wouldn't it?

Although as an aside, this really is something I'd love to find out more about: has there been any testing of dose-response curves? If we could have gotten half the breakthroughs for 5% more side effects with a higher dose, or half the side effects for 0.5% more breakthroughs, but what we did instead was just run with the first educated guess that someone got into trials, just because the FDA doesn't like to see things vary without restarting long expensive trials from scratch, that could belong pretty high on the long list of things the FDA ought to be criticized for.

A lot of unhealthy people in that age range that could use some more obvious remedies before dipping into transhumanism; for example watching their diet or avoiding paraphilia associated with sexually-transmitted diseases.

Obesity was another Covid risk factor, though IIRC if you compared "serious obesity" vs "an extra decade of age", the decade was worse for you. And I'd put "obesity epidemic" even above "testosterone decline" on my list of weird potentially-horrible population-spanning issues for which we should be hunting down systematic causes. But why stop at remedying two problems? If I diet and exercise and avoid STDs, that makes me less likely to die; if I diet and exercise and avoid STDs and avoid being virgin territory for a novel virus, that makes me even less likely to die.

Although as an aside, this really is something I'd love to find out more about: has there been any testing of dose-response curves? If we could have gotten half the breakthroughs for 5% more side effects with a higher dose, or half the side effects for 0.5% more breakthroughs, but what we did instead was just run with the first educated guess that someone got into trials, just because the FDA doesn't like to see things vary without restarting long expensive trials from scratch, that could belong pretty high on the long list of things the FDA ought to be criticized for.

They did it for the children dose I think. They still came out with more death on the injection side than what covid gives to children, but somehow that was not a concern.

The fact that there is a standard dose is somewhat concerning, or is it not?

According to this article, there is a standard dose.

Now let's ponder what it means that Moderna/Pfizer had to create a dose that would work just as well for the finest 300 lbs American citizen and the diminutive 150 lbs one.

Is the material just as likely to reach the key immune components necessary for whatever immune response is expected by the merchants in a much bigger body?

Would a bigger body necessitate a larger amount of material to reach the same response due to some unknown logistics?

Are the less-boldly-bodied people getting a larger dose than they would actually need? An excessive dose perhaps, that would perhaps concentrate the material into some cells, say the heart or some other critical tissue?

More comments

From wikipedia- "SARS‑CoV‑2 is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus[14] that is contagious in humans.[15]". Specifically, it enters your cell, expresses a RNA dependent RNA polymerase to copy its RNA, and then the RNA is translated into proteins that, with the genome, form new RNA viruses that go on to infect more cells. This means that, like the vaccines, covid itself puts RNA into your cells to replicate itself. So that doesn't make the vaccine any worse than covid. Or any one of the hundreds of respiratory viruses that float around, hundreds of which you've been infected with. And the RNA itself from the vaccine is just a (slightly modified) spike protein RNA from the original coronavirus.

By this standard, plenty of previous vaccines are gene therapy - weakened live virus, adenovirus vector, etc.

We know the certain viruses like HIV are able to insert their genomes of RNA into the human genome but only after they have converted it into DNA. This is accomplished via a virus enzyme called reverse transcriptase – an enzyme humans don't have. So the upshot is we don't have a way for mRNA vaccines to be inserted into our genomes. SO current vaccines are safe.

Yeah, lots of viruses do this. Covid is much less likely to, because it doesn't have DNA as part of its lifecycle, and doesn't encode a reverse transcriptase to make more viral DNA.

this is just a case of 'not understanding what you are talking about'.

Not that I claim to fully understand what I'm talking about (IANAB), but IIRC the difference is that a COVID infection specifically targets a subset of cell-types in your respiratory system -- the vaccine is in your blood and spreads all over the place, entering many types of cells and causing them to produce spike protein.

This seems like quite a different mechanism -- doesn't mean it's not safe, but it introduces a number of unknowns.

More comments

This means that, like the vaccines, covid itself puts RNA into your cells to replicate itself. So that doesn't make the vaccine any worse than covid.

Well I had covid twice so far while some people took over 3 injections.

Obviously a natural infection of a certain dose of particles through the nose or mouth is not the same as an injection in the arm in terms of dose, immune response, affected tissues...

And these triple-shot people are still getting sick!

Yeah, lots of viruses do this. Covid is much less likely to, because it doesn't have DNA as part of its lifecycle, and doesn't encode a reverse transcriptase to make more viral DNA.

Covid doesn't have it but a lot of viruses do.

What happens when somebody that was previously infected with a virus gets the injection?

Another factor to consider is that enzyme are only catalyzing chemical reactions.

Technically, these chemical reactions can occur spontaneously without enzymes as well.

If for whatever reason the RNA is getting concentrated in a given cell, perhaps a certain amount of them can end up spontaneously turning into DNA and getting captured by the cell machinery and getting integrated into the genome.

Another option is that the RNA gets cut into pieces and ends up having inhibitory effects on certain parts of the genome, upregulating or downregulating proteins that are needed for a healthy body.

This could happen for some people and not others depending on their specific genome, or even depending on their microbiome.

There are so many possibilities on what can go wrong depending on the dose, depending on which cells might preferentially accumulate the RNA, depending on the specific genome of the injected, depending on infections from other viruses, depending on the strength of the immune system...

Again, this is for a virus that is more or less as harmful as the flu ie not very.

What I need, instead of 'fact-checking' by 'experts' with no physical, scientific evidence that for example 'RNA cannot integrate the genome', is studies.

Show me that after looking at the cellular, tissue level among hundreds or thousands of people that you could not find one cell producing spikes long after the injection. That you can't find one sample of tissue affected by long-term injection consequences.

Why do I have this standard?

Because the people demanding for 2 years that I take that unnecessary, cosmetic injection are the same that have been claiming that boys can turn into women by taking hormones and slicing themselves. The same people that claimed that Iraq had WMD. The same people that tell me that crime statistics are racist, etc, etc.

More comments

We know the certain viruses like HIV are able to insert their genomes of RNA into the human genome but only after they have converted it into DNA. This is accomplished via a virus enzyme called reverse transcriptase – an enzyme humans don't have. So the upshot is we don't have a way for mRNA vaccines to be inserted into our genomes. SO current vaccines are safe.

Basically it is established that RNA can be turned into DNA and integrated into the genome.

This is a well-known phenomenon.

The point of contention is whether or not what is in the injection can do the same thing.

Retroviruses like HIV are able to insert their genomes into the human genome because they're built to do so.

COVID is not built to do so. It does not code for the requisite protein for reverse transcription, nor does it code for other vital components like the pre-integration complex, which...integrates the new DNA into the host genome.

The mRNA vaccine, which codes only for one surface protein of the virus that already doesn't have the machinery for DNA integration, naturally does not have the requisite protein for reverse transcription, or for its integration into the genome.

Even if it was from a retrovirus, stripping away the components that integrate it into the genome - i.e. isolating only one surface protein from the entire viral genome - would make the vaccine unable to 1) reverse transcribe that into DNA, and 2) integrate it into the host genome. It is not built to integrate into the host genome.

Even if you were able to integrate it into the host genome, what would you expect to happen? You'd have a stranded bit of coding sequence inserted into a genome essentially randomly without a promoter, coding for a surface protein that doesn't really do anything alone in the context of the human cell. The splicing might randomly impact the cell via accidentally inserting itself into a coding sequence, or an intron, or a promoter sequence, or it might integrate into a region of noncoding RNA where it might affect some of the local molecular architecture.

That young people had a need to turn themselves into GMO experiment.

...

-governments prevented travel from pure humans but that's over

It would be a really, really stupid way of trying to genetically engineer a population, because it actively wouldn't work on so many different levels.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Retroviruses like HIV are able to insert their genomes into the human genome because they're built to do so.

Yes, so what you are saying is that there are a bunch of HIV+ people walking around with reverse transcriptases in some of their cells.

What do reverse transcriptases do? They transcribe RNA into DNA.

They don't care if it's HIV or covid.

It is not built to integrate into the host genome.

If I was masterminding a big conspiracy to sterilize a big part of humanity, this is the part I would be lying about.

Not saying that this is true or not, I'm just saying one possibility is that it is actually packaged in there and nobody has the capacity or will to check.

Heck, they could have been injecting us with reverse transcriptase in a separate instance (food, drinks, other injections), but that's a little bit too convoluted.

The splicing might randomly impact the cell via accidentally inserting itself into a coding sequence, or an intron, or a promoter sequence, or it might integrate into a region of noncoding RNA where it might affect some of the local molecular architecture.

That's the fun experiment part.

Do this to billions of people and a few hundred thousands of them will have a few cells where the spike protein sequence just happens to insert itself in the right area to get translated into a functional protein. And some other hundred thousands will have sequences that do not generate a functional protein, but instead generate something like a prion protein, or turns the cell into a cancerous cell, which would be much worse. And some other thousands or millions will have some other kind of integration that just kills the cell instead and stops the issue...

It would be a really, really stupid way of trying to genetically engineer a population, because it actively wouldn't work on so many different levels.

Well maybe this was all a big test and it failed. Maybe they genuinely tried to engineer something functional to save humanity and they just screwed up big time and then they just kept doubling down on, covering their traces because of the stakes, the outrage, the money, and business as usual with Big Pharma and the people that are loyal to it.

More comments

But there are key differences between the injection and an infection.

If I get infected, I'm getting a few particles as part of a spray.

Where do these particles come from? Well they were built by a virus infecting another person, so if that virus contained RNA sequences that turned the host cell cancerous and unable to produce more viruses, it probably would not be able to produce more particles to infect me.

What is the dose I get? Probably something proportional to the amount of air I'm able to breathe.

If I'm a large guy, I'm probably inhaling a lot of air all at once, so more of these particles.

If I'm more pocket-sized, I would guess that I'm not inhaling as much of the virus at once.

I don't know how many of them there are, but they are diluted among other stuff in the particle itself, in the air, into my mucosa, my mucus. Right there and then my immune system starts taking charge of some of them.

My nose, my mouth, my mucosa were created by God to expect such aggression.

It's business as usual.

Then some of these particles manage to actually infect cells and the virus manages to replicate itself yadda yadda.

All in my nose, in my mucosa, maybe slightly deeper in my lungs, idk the details of covid infection.

If I get injected, I get a certain amount of liquid (few ml) at a certain rather uniform concentration all in the same spot. Not a spray.

What is the dose I get? The dose that Pfizer/Moderna decided to put in the bottle.

Supposedly the same dose for everybody. So presumably a dose containing enough material to 'work' for people that are 300 lbs or over.

This is all going straight into the fat of my arm, or if the remaining medical staff that fell for the psy-op and didn't quit due to vaccine mandates messed up, straight into my blood.

The material is coming from a factory, where products are sometimes defective, processes can go wrong, quality controls can be overlooked, concentrations can vary, effectiveness, quality, purity of the material might be compromised.

That is if the owners of the factory are not purposefully committed to making poison.

Was the fat of my arm or my blood stream made by God to receive a dose of RNA? No.

Is this expected by my immune system? No.

We are talking about different tissues, different cell types. Different doses. Chemically different substances. Different modes of administration.

anyone genuinely worried about the effects of the vaccine on the human genome should be just about paralyzed with fear given the levels of random viral infection we're all exposed to on a daily basis.

The virus never came out and say that cutting boys' peepees will turn them female, unlike all the doctors pushing the vaccine.

Some people have even called the virus racist, it's hard not to sympathize.

More comments

Interesting how pendulum swings. 2 years ago Job's posts would be much better received. I do agree that the vaccines are likely not dangerous, but they do not stop spread of Covid either, and experts oversold efficacy of stopping covid.

I'm not too worried about fertility for it's own sake; ceteris paribus I think a universe with more people is a better universe, but we've already made a decent start at that, and I'd be fine slowing down until we have fusion or at least economical widespread fission under our belts before we really go wild.

But shouldn't caring when a animal (including homo sapiens) population undergoes weird unexplained biological changes be the rule, not the exception? This is the sort of DDT-thinning-eggshells type of issue that you'd expect the environmentalist left to be jumping on, and instead it doesn't seem to even get the same level of urgent attention that a coal miner would give to a fainting canary. You don't even have to actually care about canaries (or human men) per se, you just have to be able to think about wider implications. By the time the lurking phalates or whatever the hell the problem is diffuse out of our homes and into the wider ecosystem, it may be too late to clean them up and save the snail darters or whatever directly-leftist-treasured species are next to be affected.

It's not been engendering much concern because everyone's been trained to not care, and anyone that does care is marked out as odd and suspiciously motivated.

After mentioning this issue (sperm and testosterone decline) twice in polite company... I've learned not to mention it in polite company. At least by remaining silent I don't trash my own personal chances of having children.

If one side of the Culture War wants to go all Buck Turgidson, couldn't we at least get some good out of it, and focus on an actual measurable corruption of our precious bodily fluids?

Point of order, General Ripper was the one concerned about precious bodily fluids. Turgidson was concerned about people seeing the big board.

Other than that, excellent post.

Okay, I admit, it's been decades since I've seen the movie. In my defense, wasn't thinking "Turgid"-son was the "fluids" guy a natural mistake?

sounds like it's time for a rewatch, no?

Like I said, addressing the hypothetical in OP. You want to explain why smart people are so dumb, go ahead, but that's the real world. I would bet IQ would have a near perfect correlation with vaccination rate, especially among young people, based on proxies we can see.

Every college in the country you'd actually want to go to mandated the vaccine as far as I can tell, the military required it, and in general educated professions seem to have higher uptake with lawyers and doctors high on the list and fitness instructors and retail sales staff low on the list, the unemployed lower still.

It would have a profound effect to kill 25% of anyone who attended classes at every selective college in the past six years. Which given that you had to be fully vaxxed to attend, it would be pretty damn near the full quarter. We'd be losing a disproportionate number of future start up founders, political leaders, scientists, academics etc. Throw in killing 25% of serving military members, that's a massacre of a huge portion of young people who are going to amount to anything in this country. That's a sci-fi dystopian scenario. Probably destroys the country.

I'm not disagreeing with the figures and what happened.

Maybe a lot of these high-achievers really didn't have the time to do their own research and just went with the flow out of habit.

And maybe they are high IQ, but that would suggest to me that they need to add a few questions to IQ tests similar to the Voigt-Kampff test

'The tortoise lies on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.'

'Why aren't you helping?'

Well it seemed to help when The Wave magazine gave all of San Francisco's mayoral candidates the vk test (not really a spoiler - Gavin Newsom is a replicant.)

Every college in the country you'd actually want to go to mandated the vaccine as far as I can tell

UT Austin becomes the best university in The World

The smartest and richest folk during the Qing were the ones most likely to practice footbinding. Adhering to social customs can trump intelligence; in some ways, ability to consistently adhere to social custom despite costs is a major component of intelligence.

We'd lose disproportionately smart, educated, employed people relative to dumb, uneducated, and unemployed people.

Well, if the vaccine is that deadly, how smart are the "smart, educated" people who went ahead and got it, versus the "dumb, uneducated" who were suspicious and sceptical?

This kind of class-sneering drives me batty. Oh no, all the morons and idiots will survive! What do you care, if your smart, educated, employed corpse is in the grave?

Well, if the vaccine is that deadly, how smart are the "smart, educated" people who went ahead and got it, versus the "dumb, uneducated" who were suspicious and sceptical?

IF

Well in the batty hypothetical we're discussing, I have a 75% chance of being alive. Probably a little higher, no boosters. So most likely I'm alive, 40, and dealing with a world in which close on 20% of the US population is dead, with a much higher percentage of those dead being among those who were either in or on track to be in elite professions at the top of their field. That means something, and I don't see why you want to pretend it doesn't.

Statistically, employed people got the vaccine at higher rates than unemployed people. Educated people got the vaccine at higher rates than uneducated people. Highly educated, high iq professions got it at higher rates than lower educated lower iq professions. Even if you're an anti-IQ extremist and you hold to the idea that educational attainment is just status signaling, so that you could decapitate the system and new people would take their place once they had a chance to train up, it would still take decades for those new people to train.

96% of doctors are "fully" vaccinated, so we're losing 25% of those in ten years. Even if you think that ultimately you can take a waitress and turn her into a doctor (after all the doctors were too dumb to avoid the vaccine! She must be smarter than the dead doctors!), that ain't gonna happen overnight. We have no social comparison for what would happen in a complex post-industrial society in that scenario of elite destruction.

This isn't the gotcha you think it is An intelligent person who made one mistake is still more intelligent than a dumb person who made one lucky decision

At first they were too smart but then they wised up and they found a way to win

Was Hillary Clinton Too Smart To Get Elected?

Dead smart guy is still dumber than lucky live dumb guy.

The dumb person may well be more fit (in the Darwinian sense), however.

In a world where birth control exists it seems that they are, and also the world OP describes but that world is a complete fiction so I'm not that concerned about it.

A "street-smart" deliveryman or welder aren't economic substitutes for a physics professor or a staff engineer, even though the former guessed right on the murdervaccine. Kinda moot though considering they're not dying, though. In cases where large-scale bad choices are made, there is selection at play, and the high IQ gay techie who doesn't reproduce is in a meaningful sense worse than, and is losing to, the 'working class white' with three kids - but those three kids still can't take the "distributed systems architect" the techie had.

those three kids still can't take the "distributed systems architect" the techie had.

How nice to know that we have arrived at our current state of progress due to easily recognisable hereditary classes/castes. Smart people have always had smart kids in a distinct band of the population different from the dumb masses. No working-class labourer ever made it out of manual work where they grunted at each other over pints of beer up to the elevated cloud mansions.

Sorry, Cardinal Wolsey. No place for you, Thomas Cromwell. You are irrevocably tainted with the smear of the lower, dumber classes. It is only the children of the dukes who will go on to be the intelligent discoverers of scientific principles. There will always be a Robert Boyle, there will never be an Isaac Newton. We can see this via Elon Musk's kids who are all out there working on their Nobels!

This comment would've made more sense if it was posted before my reply to nybbler, where I agreed that many of the current group of very smart people are the children of people outside that group.

I do think that a large, say >25%, subset of the smartest people dying will harm society's overall success more than an equivalent total number of randomly chosen people dying, because genes are very important to intelligence and intelligence is heritable.

Eh, my grandfather was a working class white person with six kids, and at least three of them could have done that job. Maybe 4.

That's incredibly common, yeah, a lot of smart/successful people come from less smart/successful backgrounds. Sorting is reducing that, but not that much. My point was that the vast majority of working class people can't serve in those jobs, so killing all the physics professors would make society much worse off, which is entirely compatible with that because the number of normal people is much larger than the number of very smart people.

And yet amazingly society recovered from the Black Death. Why, it's almost like you can survive, rebuild, and educate the next generation to become physics professors!

Also income isn't necessarily a 1-to-1 proxy to actual societal necessity.

For every heart surgeon that gets hypothetically mowed down you're losing a lot of senior marketing professionals (as somebody who's done that job), makework and bureaucrats who could fade out of existence with the real world barely noticing. My personal ascent to the 1% has generally been distinctly uncorrelated with any sort of 'how much does my job actually do for anybody' principle.

Why would anything happen? It came out that the sugar industry completely and totally fucked, and continues to fuck, FDA nutrition guidelines. They've effectively poisoned the world for 100 years. What happened to them? Who was held responsible? What has the backlash been? Just a few quiet communities desperately struggling to keep sugar out of their diet, to varying rates of success in a society totally and thoroughly saturated in corn syrup.

If the vaccines + boosters have a mortality rate that would have been horrifying to anyone in 2019, it will go totally unnoticed in 2024. Everyone has too much buy in. The people who took them, the people who profited off them, the media industrial complex that sold their soul promoting them, the silicon valley companies that so aggressively censored skeptics. You'll just have a few pockets of people in isolation, proud of having been "right". To no consequence to anyone else at all.

What if the reverse is true, and covid has so-far unknown long-term effects, but boosters greatly diminish them, so that the unvaxxed are 25% more likely to do? Purely hypothetically, of course. What would the public's response be, and what would be the just punishment for people who said vaccines didn't work and COVID is a nothingburger?

I find this hypothetical less interesting only because it is approximately the mainstream consensus amplified. If you asked the median Democrat voter the risk of a 30 year old dying from coronavirus per infection, I think they would put it at 1% per infection, and with infections every six months that’s about 20% mortality in a decade. I wonder if this polling has been done. (If the polling has been done this would be the best place to find it, I love when users pop in with the most obscure statistic.) Though I suppose that can be a case of statistical illiteracy.

I would definitely expect a blacklash against pundits though, perhaps even with a (theatrical) federal charge.

Eh, even if it's less interesting it's valuable to spend some time on it simply because imagining hypotheticals where you and your tribe are vindicated and the enemy is humiliated and in shambles is bias-feeding epistemic poison. Already downthread there are some posters clearly treating the hypothetical as more than it was stated to be, imagining a "vaccine-skepticals have the better model of reality across the board" world rather than a "...happened to be right on this one thing" one. When you do this one-sidedly, you risk being like my mother, 90% of whose mindspace is occupied by "imagine if you tripped at the airport, broke your leg and got gangrene. You must get the most expensive travel insurance NOW!" thinking, or even writing the Left Behind series, which is a bailey of catechism being claimed from a flimsy motte of speculative fiction.

I don't think I've seen the claim that having covid now will greatly increase your chance of dying over the next decade expressed anywhere. Can you provide some evidence for this claim? (Obviously the mainstream belief is that vaccines reduce deaths in the short term, because there are very large RCTs that got a lot of scrutiny showing that this the case.)

I think they would put it at 1% per infection, and with infections every six months that’s about 20% mortality in a decade

I also don't think a lot of people would give you these numbers or anything particularly close. I know a lot of liberals and leftists who took covid fairly seriously (and even continue to do so) and I don't think they would say this if you asked.

I've seen a lot of claims like that on twitter - these aren't the same, but see things like this and this. Lots of people on twitter comically overestimate covid risks.

I don't think I've seen the claim that having covid now will greatly increase your chance of dying over the next decade expressed anywhere.

Long covid basically occupies this place. And frankly if the vaccines have long term health risks it seems quite likely that covid also does because a lot of the immune related effects will be similar. There is some outside risk of other types of effects but honestly this always comes off as a kind of doomer wishful thinking more concerned about getting to say I told you so than millions/billions of deaths and I find it pretty grotesques.

And frankly if the vaccines have long term health risks it seems quite likely that covid also does because a lot of the immune related effects will be similar

This is kind of what I'm thinking. Anything you could say about the risks of a vaccine would be the same but much greater for COVID itself, regardless of cause.

Certainly not. There are a variety of reasons COVID could be less dangerous to you than the vaccine, including

  1. Infection via the lungs rather than muscular injection. Different cells affected; could have many downstream effects

  2. Spike load and d/dt of spike load; the vaccine is going to cause a much sharper rise

  3. Stabilized spike used in vaccine

  4. Wuhan strain spike used in vaccine

I don't think I've seen the claim that having covid now will greatly increase your chance of dying over the next decade expressed anywhere.

It's the natural implication of a 1% fatality rate combined with multiple yearly reinfections. Why isn't this expressed anywhere? Because it would require someone to both 1) be off by a factor of 100 when estimating Covid IFR and 2) be capable of doing math and thinking through the consequences of their estimate. The intersection of these groups is small.

Nevertheless, if you poll people (liberals and conservatives) they will generally vastly overestimate the fatality rate of Covid. This is mostly due to not having a firm grasp of numbers or how they work.

Remember when Brian Williams said on air that Bloomberg could have given every American $1 million? This is the level of innumeracy we are dealing with here. It's not so much that people are politically motivated. It's just that they are very bad at math.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9_i0QrK2814

It's the natural implication of a 1% fatality rate combined with multiple yearly reinfections.

I was saying, "suppose getting covid once now increases your chance of death in 10 years by 25%." Not repeated infections. Do you think that isn't a good comparison?

edit: I think you're saying "if you believe that COVID has 1% fatality rate and you get re-infected every 6 months, then a 20% chance or so of dying from it in a decade is implied." That's probably not how COVID works (natural immunity lasts more than 6 months, covid will probably be a yearly cycle like the flu, and your outcomes should be correlated). Also, I suspect, as you point out, that most people are just bad at math.

It's not so much that people are politically motivated. It's just that they are very bad at math.

I agree with this--see my other reply to cafe above.

This Rasmussen poll indicates that a big chunk of Americans overestimate the fatality rate:

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/covid_19/conservative_news_viewers_more_accurately_estimate_covid_19_death_risk

I do not particularly trust phone interview polling, but this is the best we’ve got.

Weird, although it seems like the bulk of the population is just wildly innumerate and/or uninformed, regardless of political leaning:

More viewers of Newsmax (40%) and Fox News (34%) correctly estimated the COVID-19 mortality rate than viewers of CNN (22%) or MSNBC (24%). Twenty-one percent (21%) of One America News (OAN) viewers correctly estimated the coronavirus mortality rate. Among Americans who say they don’t watch cable news at all, 38% correctly estimated the mortality rate as less than 2%.

That's a substantial majority of even the right-wing listeners getting it wrong, and OAN is even worse than the leftist networks. Possibly the people I know I just aren't so innumerate, since none of them talk (or act) like they expect people to get COVID every 6 months or have a 20% chance of dying from it in the next 10 years.

I remember once reading a study that showed that Americans had no idea what portion of each major political party had certain "stereotypical" demographics (e.g. rich or Evangelical or Republicans, black or LGBT for Democrats). The outgroup estimate was worse, but even the ingroup estimates were just incredibly wrong.

19% believe the rate is more than 10%

I think I said something like this long ago, like summer of 2020, but I think a big chunk of the population just has no idea what numbers mean. 1/5th of the population is definitely not acting like COVID has a 10% fatality rate (either that or they're all basically suicidal). I don't know how else to interpret someone who says that, but also ever leaves their house.

That's a substantial majority of even the right-wing listeners getting it wrong, and OAN is even worse than the leftist networks.

That's a weird metric, though: "Got it wrong." What does that mean? Anyone who doesn't guess "Below 2%" (which is still wildly wrong where it matters).

If 75% of OANN viewers "get it wrong" by guessing 3-10%, that's still directionally far better than only half of CNN viewers thinking it's 50%.

Seems like a better metric would be an average of how wrong each cohort is.

That's a weird metric, though: "Got it wrong." What does that mean? Anyone who doesn't guess "Below 2%" (which is still wildly wrong where it matters).

2% isn't actually that wrong, since it's asking about case fatality rate rather than infection fatality rate, and the linked article gives this value as 1.6%.

If 75% of OANN viewers "get it wrong" by guessing 3-10%, that's still directionally far better than only half of CNN viewers thinking it's 50%.

That's what I would call "damning with faint praise." It's also not actually relevant to the exact claim above, which refers to the "median Democrat" (so it doesn't matter how wrong the tail respondents are). But it's more generally not relevant, because taking these numbers literally and doing math on them is meaningless.

I agree that a more precise breakdown would be helpful in general, but the article doesn't seem to provide that.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population

This is probably what you're thinking of. If not, it is at least conceptually related.

The outgroup estimate was worse, but even the ingroup estimates were just incredibly wrong.

People are bad at estimating things, especially low incidence things. However, people also don't generally act as if the estimates they make are true.

That has different subgroups than the one I'm thinking of, but it seems to show similar results, although is not split out by the respondent's politics AFAICT.

People are bad at estimating things, especially low incidence things. However, people also don't generally act as if the estimates they make are true.

Yes, but I also think this makes it very difficult for me to accept this claim from the earlier comment:

If you asked the median Democrat voter the risk of a 30 year old dying from coronavirus per infection, I think they would put it at 1% per infection, and with infections every six months that’s about 20% mortality in a decade.

There might be a sense in which it is true that people would say this (I still think it's exaggerated though; every 6 months is a lot). But almost no one acts like they believe anything remotely like this. Like, you have conservatives saying COVID is basically the flu, but then saying its fatality rate is much higher than the flu's actual fatality rate, and if you asked them what the flu fatality rate is, they probably also be wildly wrong. What does all of this mean? I really don't think you can draw any conclusions beyond "people are ignorant and innumerate."

Excuse me for laughing here, but the whole discourse around the vaccine(s) and health risks now showing up is just an impossible situation. People have been complaining that the FDA were foot-dragging on useful drugs and that we were all grown-up adults who could evaluate the risks for ourselves and if a drug was risky, let us take the risk. Then the vaccines were pushed through fast and everyone said this was good and sensible and should be the way things work.

And now there are complaints of "too fast! too risky! not enough tests! Big Pharma only interested in profits! The experts should have held up the process until it was all accounted for!"

So do we want fast but risky, or slow but sure, and whatever decision happened, there would be criticism about the effects on the health of the general public (e.g. if the vaccines had been trialled the usual way, "millions will die that could be avoided by simple vaccination programme, vaccination is a long-established practice that has been proven to be safe, what is the hold-up?")

I'm not saying The Experts were flawless, but the public is fickle.

If they had actually tested it swiftly and effectively, I'd have fewer problems with it.

They developed the vaccine in April, then they were testing it all the way to November. But the actual testing they did was with extremely small sample sizes, against early versions of COVID. How could they have discovered the heart condition issue with a few hundred people? And they had to be aware that the virus was mutating, that every day they waited the effectiveness of their vaccine was declining. So we get a semi-obsolete vaccine with moderately severe side effects. This is not a good outcome.

I would've preferred if they tested quickly and effectively, vaccinating people and then infecting them with COVID in human challenge trials. I'm confident you could get tens of thousands of volunteers if you offered a cash payment. Or put 0.1% of the media firepower devoted to fear campaigns and demonizing people who go outside into praising the brave volunteers. Large sample sizes would let you find the heart issues as opposed to discovering them after mass vaccination had begun, when it was too late to turn back without extreme embarrassment.

The vaccines weren't pushed through fast and they weren't adequately tested. Then they were mandated anyway, including for those who face very little risk from COVID like young people with no comorbidities like obesity or lung conditions.

Moderna had a sample size of 30K for their phase 3 testing. Not sure where you got the few hundred number….

https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download

The sample size for Moderna's trial was 30K, 15K actually got the vaccine and of those, only 800 caught COVID. And how long did this process take? It took until November, during which the vaccine was getting less effective and people were dying en masse. They had only 30 cases of severe COVID in the whole test.

Gotcha that makes more sense. I agree the FDA should be more open about experimental treatments being an option.

They developed the vaccine in April

February. (For the sake of accuracy; this makes your conclusions stronger, not weaker.)

It's easy to imagine minds legitimately too constrained to think as far outside the box as "human challenge trials"... if only I was sure that was the problem. It would be easier to forgive the use of mindless bureaucratic "we have to follow trial protocol!" to replace thinking if they'd actually mindlessly followed protocol, rather than changing it after the fact to totally-coincidentally delay trial results until after the election. If we could easily change study design after all, post facto with hand-waved justification, it becomes much harder to justify making changes that added delays and let thousands more die instead of changes that removed delays.

I was actually thinking of Pfizer which started trials in April but your point stands - Feb for Moderna. I suppose it was too broad and an oversimplification to talk about 'the vaccine' when there were several.

The delay issue is also very serious, I agree.

If only there had been honesty about the vaccine is not approved but early signs seem good and it's available for those who wish to take it. Clear emergency use authorizations seem like a great way for the FDA to allow some risky products out early while keeping highly risk averse testing required for full approval.

I think part of it is just a large group of people are contrarian against whatever the mainstream is pushing. If Pfizer and the CDC were pushing ivermectin hard and MRNA vaccines were still under review the Brett Weinstein’s of the world would be clamoring for MRNA and crying conspiracy.

An interesting thought experiment is if the vaccine came out 5 months sooner Trump would have taken credit and pushed it all day every day to try and win the election. Could easily see a scenario where the anti vax and pro vax camps flip among the hardcore partisans.

If Pfizer and the CDC were pushing ivermectin hard and MRNA vaccines were still under review the Brett Weinstein’s of the world would be clamoring for MRNA and crying conspiracy.

What do you base this on? Weinstein seemed pretty reasonable to me, although I haven't heard from him in a while.

I may be overly cynical but I think Weinstein saw a big opening to get a following by going against the vax (he’d already had similar success going against academia) and he ran with it to great success.

He could sound very reasonable by preaching a pro vaccine message as well but then he’d just be another fish in the mainstream media sea.

I have yet to hear him say something that didn't seem like an extrapolation of classical liberal principles. What he said about both academic insanity and the handling of the vaccine are that. Have you? Because it seems like you are overly partisan rather than cynical if 'he speaks out based on his principles' didn't occur to you - you view him as an enemy, so only vices like greed and conceit drive him, not principles.

Why would I view Brett as the enemy? He’s just another talking head. I think he’s acting to build and engage with an audience. This is the same incentive structure as the rest of the media.

There was clearly an unmet market for a contrarian take on the vaccine and Brett jumped whole heart into it.

Just because someone has a different take than Maddow and Hannity doesn’t mean they don’t have the same incentives.

Dude, he has a middling youtube channel (not even half a million subscribers!) and he goes on podcasts and you classify him as media - like Hannity or Maddow - to justify your dislike of him. Despite having no evidence he has espoused non classical liberal values, let alone that he's just being contrarian.

You have nothing to base your original claim on, so the conclusion I reach is that you either view him as the enemy and think he must be motivated by vice or don't understand classical liberals and think we are all lying about our principles. We're not. Bret Weinstein is a dork, but he's a dork with principles.

MRNA vaccines were still under review the Brett Weinstein’s of the world would be clamoring for MRNA and crying conspiracy.

I mean, it's possible, but to hear Brett himself say it, he's reasoning from first principles that we simply do not understand the complex system that is our immune response well enough to make the very first MRNA vaccine ever mandatory for as much of the population as possible. He talked to a lot of people discussing vaccine side effects, and while I think he may have been taken in by some hustlers or alarmist early on, I think his assessment that the risk of myocarditis among the young male cohort easily overshadows the pitiful protections the "vaccine" offers is reasonable. Seems to even be the consensus position of most nations not dominated by Phizer ad dollars. He also recently picked up on igg4 discussion related to the MRNA vaccine, and I guess we'll see how that turns out.

Personally I've had pain in the ass tinnitus since I got the jab, and am fairly bitter since it was mandatory for me to keep my job, and keep my family warm with full bellies.

The discourse is a product of the fact that people are starved for allowable avenues to express their suspicion about the political structure. Americans are using prompts in favor of eugenics and great replacement as a benchmark to see if their chatbots are well-aligned and truthful, they have built entire secular religions around racial grievances and are prohibited from recognizing them for what they are; these people are in a pretty bad place mentally.

Vaccine skepticism is, despite the best efforts of team progressive, very fitting with the general spirit of classical liberalism – my body my choice, the Man is holding the little men down, I'm entitled to believe whatever dumb bullshit I want, you don't get to dictate my epistemology – while satisfying the «elites are poisoning my precious bodily fluids» gut feeling prevalent among the growing fringe.

Just like Q (are we finally really over that psyop?), its proliferation is another discrediting self-own.

So in your opinion vaccine skepticism (specifically Covid vaccine skepticism) has the same truth value as a lunatic fringe theory like QAnon? That's certainly not a very nuanced position, even if you dressed it up in 3 paragraphs of text.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the Covid vaccines, and the skepticism is certainly not a uniquely American phenomenon.

The public is, unsurprisingly, vast and contains multitudes.

I think the bulk of criticism is coming from never-vaxxers justifying their own stances rather than regrets from those who complied. In the mainstream, political affiliation is quite predictive of whether someone will excoriate the FDA. Honestly, that’s probably true here, too; people are just more likely to dig up actual evidence for whatever stance they picked back in 2020.

If Scott flips and says “maybe I shouldn’t have been a principled libertarian, just this once,” then I’ll be worried.

I honestly think whatever the FDA did, someone would complain. It's been three years and counting now, and Covid outbreaks and new variants are still flaring up. I think if the various world governments had not taken the path they did, there would be articles and social media posts about "if only the government had made vaccination mandatory for groups X, Y and Z, we'd have beaten the virus and it wouldn't still be a problem now!"

Nobody has a crystal ball, that's the problem. What would have worked, could have worked, might have been - nobody knows.

I do agree there was a lot of heavy-handed and contradictory messaging - the whole "no you can't go to church, you will spread a deadly virus but yes you can protest in the streets because racism is more of a threat than the deadly virus" shilly-shallying, for one.

I'm OK with allowing people to take the experimental vaccine for themselves.

I'm not OK with governors requiring it for state employees, or healthcare workers. I'm not OK with the President requiring it for federal employees. I'm not OK with coercion, nudging, and other propaganda in favor of the experimental vaccine.

The messaging should have always been, "this is an experimental vaccine whose safety we cannot guarantee long term." That was never the messaging, and in fact every authoritative message I've seen is pretty much exactly the opposite.

Early on I was swayed by more by my more libertarian friends saying "Hey, the FDA has always been way too cautious, it is dumb to worry that they were excessively swayed by the drug companies or were overly hasty in approving the vaccine, if they approve it, it must be pretty good."

Now I think that the FDA (and even more so, the CDC) is just bad its job, so sometimes it will be way too conservative in blocking experimental medicine, and other times way too hasty and gung-ho about approving medicine that does not really show a good cost-benefit ratio. If the FDA was good at its job it would be requiring a large, randomized control study of the MRNA shots that would be ongoing, that would look at both efficacy and overall mortality.

One thing I did not appreciate is how easily FDA "approval" turns into private mandates. A lot of people and institutions in our society are simply deferring to the FDA and CDC for judgement so if they approve it that is there signal to mandate it. I read the data about the covid jab in kids and it seemed like the cost-benefit was decidedly negative. That said, I was fine if the FDA wanted to allow parents who thought it might work for their particular kid to obtain it. And even when they approved it some of the officials said that they don't recommend that every kid just blindly get it. But then the CDC issued a recommendation, and then camps and classes I want my kids to attend started requiring the jab. There was simply no space for personal choice either way, no space for approved for those who wanted it, but not mandated.

It would be nice if there was a publicly acknowledged FDA stamp of "might work, use at your own risk but we don't recommend it." I guess that is what emergency use authorization was supposed to be. But somehow that is not what has happened.

we were all grown-up adults who could evaluate the risks for ourselves and if a drug was risky, let us take the risk

A vital part of the FDA being less cautious about approvals is that I be allowed to exercise my own caution. Letting the FDA take bigger risks on approvals and then mandating I take the approved drug is not allowing me to evaluate risks for myself.

The whole vaccine rollout had the theme of "all that is not compulsory is forbidden." That is: adults were banned from taking vaccines until the FDA had satisfactorily hemmed and hawed over the trials; afterward, vaccines became compulsory for quite a lot of everyday activities. This was similar (though more dramatic) story as masks-- masks were heavily discouraged by the CDC right up to the point where the CDC began mandating them.

In general the FDA and CDC are really really bad at expressing any epistemic attitude that isn't "utter certainty", even in the frequent occasions that the info available doesn't justify certainty.

For that reason I think it's basically coherent to say that the FDA was too restrictive and too pushy about the vaccines.

EDIT: This was also true of boosters! Boosters were forbidden roughly until the FDA began mandating them in order to be "fully vaccinated".

That is: adults were banned from taking vaccines until the FDA had satisfactorily hemmed and hawed over the trials

Entities were banned from testing people for COVID-19 while the CDC spent weeks coming up with and distributing their own, broken test mechanisms.

Good times.

This kind of "all the sheep will die" fantasy seems not healthy. I thoroughly oppose things like mandates on liberty grounds but the demand for the rolling out countermeasures to a widespread deadly disease to somehow also have been irrational is unseemly. Consider it in a world where they were not mandated, a new vaccines rolls out that seems quite effective but as all things has some risk of unknown very negative long term side effects. The disease itself may have very negative long term side effects in addition to the immediate risk of death. So you must decide between rolling the dice on the vaccine or the disease and given the information available the vaccine seems like a better bet. You can only blame people so much for rolling a snake eyes at a critical juncture. As far as I can tell there was no mistake made in actual risk management.

edit:post originally mangled by phone autocomplete.

If you're over 70 and took the vaccine, that's fine.

That disease supposedly had a small risk of killing people over 60, and you're only risking suffering from horrible side effects for a couple decades at best.

Another option was to lock up all the people at risk instead of everyone else.

trying to force everyone into a vaccine was a huge risk management error. a reasonable approach would have been to try to guide the outcome towards 25% rate for each of the three approved vaccines and 25% unvaccinated rate (especially in low-risk populations). vaccinating children was pointless, all risk, no upside.

When was the vaccine mandate rational? I remember when the debate got big here in Austria, there were already multible countries with 90%+ vax rates that had new flareups.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats