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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I posted about excess deaths continuing a few weeks ago. Eric Topol writes on that today and blames it on COVID causing heart attacks/strokes far later. The evidence seems solid though I don’t think it’s the sole explanation of excess deaths. I do think this is an underreported story and quite alarming. We should seem to want to know if vaccines or covid are causing the continued rise (along with increased deaths of despair amongst other things).

Anywhere on Reddit I couldn’t even get people to deal with the data. Even throw a blue tribe approved cause of long covid effects. Here’s his article and data he’s citing. Because of replication issues, confounding biases, and my guess excess deaths are coming from multiple causes I don’t ever truly understand what’s going on. Especially when these things can get blended into culture wars. My guess is and I don’t understand why covid does have some kind of long term damage effect that’s not common in other colds. And the vaccine also causes this effect probably at a lower rate.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/heart-attacks-and-strokes-late-after

I want to make a separate point to bring up your blue tribe distinction.

Every time Covid-19 vaccines come up, very low level "pro-vax" discussion starts occurring. I see extremely washingtonpost or Foxnews tier discussion of these products.

If you check my post history, I have a complete throw down against the mRNA products. Currently, the pro-vax perspectives coming in this thread could have been completed by Reuters fact checks or some other political organization.

So, I offer the following:

  1. Astroturfing in the provax camp is occurring on the Mott OR

  2. Only less educated, less biologically inclined 'pro-vaxxers' are appearing in these threads with years old talking points and critical obfuscations of what happened during the mRNA / adenovirus vaccination campagin.

  • -16

"Everyone who disagrees with me is astroturfing or ignorant" is much too partisan and "boo outgroup" to throw out there unless you are willing to bring some serious evidence (not just "refer to my post history").

While it may not be appropriate to call it astroturfing, I wanted to point out that it is uncommon to see a detailed pro-vax analysis on the motte. It uses very quick "off lamps" that are supported by fact checking / expert trust / credentialling institutions.

Rather than say AstroTurf, I'd say there is a peppering of shallow, short cut arguments that never develop fully into an authentic, organic long form idea.

Agreed, I will be much more careful to use a short cut like that, and avoid needless linking to an outgroup that's not the main topic of my concern.

When has the motte had a pro-vaccine post? I can’t remember one. I think most have been throwing concerns at vaccines.

I don’t think this post was pro-vaccine. At best it was an attempt to explain a lot of excess deaths to COVID related organ damage (which vaccine clearly does too).

There were a bunch of them back in the day, and one of the regulars here evidently has domain expertise.

I recall ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor had some very good ones.

He's never been pro-vax in the "mindlessly repeats CDC talking points" way though -- I'm pretty anti(MRA subunit)vax, and he always has been interested in what I've dug up, and provided informed pushback.

If you want to see literal astroturfing, the SSC sub is a great place for it -- to this day there's people (?) on there following that "how to convert skeptics to vaxxmaxxers through psychological manipulation" checklist that was circulating.