Or they are all counted as Covid. If you go to the physician with a respiratory disease, they will test for Covid first. Will they still test for the flu? What about people who get to the hospital because of the flu and get infected with Covid there? How will they be counted?
How come number of Covid infection rates is rising, while flu seems to be eradicated? If the measures help against the flu, why not against Covid?
> How come number of Covid infection rates is rising, while flu seems to be eradicated? If the measures help against the flu, why not against Covid?
I don't like appeals to authority, but this perspective that people who have spent their entire lives studying epidemiology have just got this all wrong, don't understand what they are doing, and that appeals to "common sense logic" will reveal the truth ... really irritates me.
I mean, just as a basic starting point, most people have immunological exposure to the flu, so a fairly effective method to prevent spread of the flu virus will have outsized effects on the incidence of flu (even more so if that fairly effective method is even more widely utilized by those most at risk from flu). But no humans prior to the end of 2019 had immunological exposure to SARS-COV-2, and so any "leakage" in the efforts to stop its spread will have much greater impact than with influenza.
More generally, this is really basic epidemiology, and I don't understand why you think it's so useful to question this stuff in this way.
So what is your knowledge of Epidemiology? Are you an working in the field? Or do you just believe that science happens to agree with your view?
There is actually no clear cut scientific story about Sars-Cov-2 yet. That is part of the scare.
I also don't think your logic is sound - influenca used to spread rapidly through populations in all previous years, despite of previous immunological exposure as you describe. There is no reason to assume it would spread less rapidly this year because of "previous immunological exposure".
The effectiveness of masks and social distancing also does not depend on previous immunological exposure.
I don't like appeals to authority, but this perspective that people who have spent their entire lives studying epidemiology have just got this all wrong, don't understand what they are doing, and that appeals to "common sense logic" will reveal the truth ... really irritates me.
That's very understandable but I doubt your view would survive contact with the epidemiological literature.
It's really hard to believe I know, but epidemiology papers are all terrible. They seem to always contain basic errors that any lay person can spot, and peer review doesn't catch them, nor does the editing process at supposedly prestigious journals. I've read a lot this year and by now I go in to a new paper being sure I'll encounter something stupid or crazy, because the rate of problems is just so high.
Remember that the only people who study epidemiology their whole lives are in academia, a place where being correct is less important than being published. Although it sounds absurd, 2020 has convinced me that epidemiologists and public health researchers in general know absolutely nothing about disease. They are however very good at closing ranks and claiming nobody outside their little cliques should be allowed to criticise or question them.
More generally, this is really basic epidemiology, and I don't understand why you think it's so useful to question this stuff in this way.
There's nothing basic about the claim you just made, and I'm really curious now if you yourself are an epidemiologist. Because you've gone from asserting that epidemics aren't susceptible to "common sense logic" to saying it's obvious and common sense that lockdowns/masks - which have no observable impact on case curves for COVID at all - will have outside impact on influenza.
No, it's not. The graph shows mortality rates without cause. Excess mortality rates are not that high at present, meaning that the total number of deaths is not that much above the expected death rate based on historical numbers.
But imagine the "extreme" case where excess mortality is zero - that is, even with covid19, about the same number of people die every day.
That would mean, presumably, that since covid19 causes some deaths that would not have happened historically (it doesn't matter what you think that number is) it would have to be balanced by some decrease in "more normal" deaths.
Obviously, one could propose all kinds of mechanisms that might lead to this. One could suggest that because people are either disgusted by or rallying around Trump, death rates are different. One could suggest that the impending conjuction of Saturn & Jupiter on Dec 21st has reduced death rates from non-covid19 causes. And to be sure, at present, there doesn't seem to be a particularly good way to establish this.
But it also seems rather reasonable to say that since the biggest change in human behavior at this point has been driven by attempts to contain covid19, that it is likely these changes that have caused the "balancing" decrease in non-covid19 deaths.
One obvious rebuttal is that the graph does NOT show no excess mortality. This is certainly true. But the magnitude of the it is smaller than would be expected from even the most, ahem, conservative estimates of covid19 deaths. Ergo, there is some reduction in non-covid19 deaths, and occam's razor would put changes due to anti-covid measures near the top of the list of likely causes for that.
"since covid19 causes some deaths that would not have happened historically"
That would not be a given assumption (under your scenario of zero excess deaths). Old people who would otherwise have died from another reason could die from Covid19 instead.
Or imagine testing everybody for the common cold, and if somebody dies with the common cold virus, they would be counted as a "common cold death". Then you would see a lot of deaths "from the common cold", without any actual change in death rates.
Classic to have the y-axis not start at 0 to make a curve look more dramatic.
According to the CDC, there seem to be about 12% more deaths than the average of the last three years, or about 300K. Number of deaths has been rising every year, though, sometimes increasing by up to 90k from one year to the next.
From the linked article: "The raw death counts help give us a rough sense of scale: for example, the US suffered some 275,000 more deaths than the five-year average between 1 March and 16 August, compared to 169,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths during that period."
So that's 275k-169k=106k extra deaths, which is a napkinmath'd 17% increase over the baseline (assuming that's 106k deaths over a 12wk period, and baseline is ~50k/week).
A 17% rise in extra deaths seems pretty dramatic to me, regardless of the graphs.
Granted, I'd love to see error bars on this stuff, but I don't think the axis starting at 0 is some nefarious plot to dramatize the data.
I thought that _was_ the quesiton: you seemed to imply the graph not starting at 0 was the article editorializing in some drama. My point was the situation is indeed dramatic (perhaps "significant" is a better phrase?) on its own, and they weren't unfairly exaggerating it for clicks/attention/fearmongering/whatever.
It makes sense that 'absolute deaths' would rise as a function of absolute population size, but that's why this data is important to pay attention to: if our death rate is climbing more than expected, there's problems we should probably pay attention to.
It is a problem and it should absolutely be paid attention to. US excess deaths aren't like in other countries, where they are generally on a long downwards trend. In the US they've been rising since the financial crisis.
Oddly this year the CDC baseline expected death rate diverged from the trend line:
That looks bad. If they were projecting the long term trend forward as they did in prior years, excess deaths from COVID in the USA would suddenly become a lot lower.
One other thing to bear in mind - a lot of these graphs that make excess deaths look dramatic are only looking 5 years in the past, because that's generally the easiest data to get hold of. But death rates are falling with time, as you'd hope to see. If you look further back you don't have to go far to find years with similar death rates. E.g. the UK had one of the highest excess death rates in the world from COVID in the first wave, but when you look at historical data, it was no worse than the the winter of 1999/2000 when no special measures were employed.
Lockdowns are an ahistorically extreme move. For that to make sense the scale of the problem with have to be equally ahistoric but it's not. I've lived through years with excess death rates just as bad as 2020 and never even noticed, because nobody was commenting about it. That's the risk with very short term analysis.
7500 deaths per day are average for the US. 9/11 caused 3000 deaths. So the US will probably exceed 9/11 deaths forever, unless population size is drastically reduced somehow.
You beat me to it. Look at deaths by other causes. Lots of "9/11"s every year here! Why is this being treated as if its dramatically worse than a death by other causes? Any death is a bad thing
Death by old age does not exist, it is just the older you get, the more likely it is that some disease or other will push you over. Only Covid somehow doesn't count. It's OK to die of an heart attack when you are over 80, but not to die from Covid. (It's OK to try to prevent or delay both things).
Honest question: how do we know markets work better? Where would I start a quest to read peer-reviewed research of how markets are better than centralized planning in the 21st century, where have powerful computers that are capable of assimilating terabytes of information?
It's not just a matter of parsing lots of information, you also have to collect the information, and interpret it correctly. Maybe one day in the future, a real AI will be able to do better than markets (by what metric, though). But not yet.
Show me the computer program that knows how to create a pencil? And then a toaster? How does it know how many toasters will be needed? Is a toaster more important than a smart watch?
Also, if you have such a Computer program, you could use it to beat the markets. You could use it to compute the perfect prices of futures (because you know the future demand and supply). So I guess there is your answer: if you had such a Computer, you could beat the markets, as long as you don't do that, markets are better.
Indeed the first securities were sold via auction under a buttonwood tree, and I don't think any government agents were on hand to facilitate it, but I could be wrong.
The problem is in this case “reporting about it” literally means “spreading baseless lies”. Since as others have said we’ve now seen in court that the Trump administration and their cronies had shit.
Furthermore, it’s “spreading baseless lies which also fire up people who are threatening to murder civil servants.”
I don’t know if YouTube deciding to censor itself on this is right or not, but, let’s not censor ourselves. If we are going to discuss this let’s discuss the whole truth of the matter.
I've been on the internet for 23 years and I have never been forced to watch an anti-vaxxer's video. Your theory that by producing lots of videos they subvert lots of people is simply wrong.
It's the same fallacy as with the "Russian Bots" election conspiracy. Just because you can create lots of content, doesn't mean you can make people watch it.
I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as you. What Russia correctly worked out is that, if you can create the requisite content, you WILL get people to watch it, just statistically. And because you're (indirectly) feeding it with a coherent, directed intention, including specific elements like 'the Russian Bots people are talking about don't exist and anybody saying so is a loony', you can get your bubble of alternate information to grow and serve useful purposes (useful to you: NOT necessarily useful to the people you're using to fill your bubble)
You absolutely can make people watch it, even side with it passionately to where they'll burn through their friends requiring loyalty to the information bubble. It's a matter of statistics, and directing the contents of the information bubble with reasonable effectiveness. It's a bit like nuclear fusion: sort of 'wait, these lumps of metal do THAT?!?'
Yes, in fact they do. And, yes, you can direct HUMANITY to whatever ends you like, including 'The USA should be torn to bits by civil war please, so it is no longer a rival superpower'. Plenty of people out there would find that useful, wouldn't even have to be exceptionally short-sighted. Mind you, it's still damn reckless even if it is not absolutely short-sighted.
I'm not sure you decided to use weasel words on purpose. There's a colossal difference between "being forced to watch" propaganda and being exposed to it.
I'm not forced to open phishing emails but sometimes I do by accident or carelessness. I'm also not forced to open links someone close or not happen to send my way. I'm not forced to read weird facts-denying delusional rants on social media but sometimes I stumble upon it while scrolling around a main page.
Given the unlimited torrent of propaganda and manipulated content that we are exposed constantly and is designed precisely to control you to serve the manipulator's goals, what should we do?
Hell, just open a tab with any of the facts-denying extremist media channels that currently plague the US. Do you believe they are preaching to fishes, or that there are people exposed and manipulated by it?
Not weasel words - are you saying if you were exposed to anti-vaxxer videos, you would become an anti-vaxxer? It should be obvious to you how ridiculous that assumption is.
This is just hand-wavy fearmongering about "mass psychology"
Yet that is exactly how propaganda and mis-information works.
How exactly do you think antivaxers became antivaxers? They weren’t born like that, they were exposed to propaganda and eventually fell for it.
I know several wonderful, educated and otherwise reasonable people, who have fallen for antivaxing, antimask, covid-is-a-lie conspiracies. This includes two teachers in the public school system. The same people who are supposed to teach critical thinking to the next generation. Think about what that means for a moment.
Propaganda works. Stopping propaganda, highlighting “fake news”, debunking conspiracies, and teaching critical thinking is essential.
You are mixing things together that don't belong together. Covid is very new and scientific discussion is still ongoing. There is no consensus. Anti-vaxxers are about tried and proven vaccines they don't trust.
I think as with other things (like religion), people get mostly "infected" by their peer group. Also there are certain aspects that make memes prevail, like fear and protectiveness of one's own children in the case of vaccines. It's not simply a matter of exposure to YouTube videos.
> You are mixing things together that don't belong together.
But they do belong together, don't they? I mean, they are all under attack by facts-denying militant groups fueled by anti-intellectual propaganda.
> Covid is very new and scientific discussion is still ongoing. There is no consensus.
That's no excuse to intentionally deny facts and information already established on the disease. And no, just because a militant group actively denies and rejects facts that doesn't make them disputed nor does it means there is no consensus.
> It's not simply a matter of exposure to YouTube videos.
This is not about youtube or twitter or sneaker net. This is about people actively disseminating and consuming propaganda and disinformation. The shit is the same even if you switch spoons.
"But they do belong together, don't they? I mean, they are all under attack by facts-denying militant groups fueled by anti-intellectual propaganda."
No, that is just a strategy of defamation that you fell for. Basically the "Hitler was a vegetarian" argument against vegetarianism. In short, "a person of type x believes y" does not imply "everybody who believes y is a person of type x".
" And no, just because a militant group actively denies and rejects facts that doesn't make them disputed nor does it means there is no consensus."
If you would watch more YouTube, you would be aware that it is not only "militant groups" who argue about aspects of Covid.
"This is about people actively disseminating and consuming propaganda and disinformation."
I do sports pistol shooting as a hobby. Recommendations have improved recently, but before you never were never further than two clicks away from ISSF championship chronicles to videos by disturbed people with firearms.
What do you mean by "undeniable steep gradient towards extremism" - it was undeniable that more people were becoming extremists via YouTube? I thought that is what we are discussing? Whether YouTube algorithm tries to show you extremism is another question. I am not defending the YouTube algorithm - presumably more extreme things lead to more engagement.
Look at external data. We now have diseases reappearing that were eradicated decades ago. Inside anti-vaxx communities.
Nobody is “forced” to watch a YT video. But if these show up in searches, along with pseudo-scientific articles, pseudo-documentaries on all platforms and actively work on becoming viral, then there is a problem.
Maybe creating a lot of content does not imply that people will watch it, but the reality is that a lot of people do.
True. And I don't have evidence that it has inflated the problem beyond anecdata. That said I don't think it's reaching to believe it has.
Anti-vaxx movement was started by a bogus publication from a then reputable source. It was blown up by ease of information spread and exacerbated by the undermined confidence in traditional media. That much is known.
I think the vaccine story has specific aspects for why it spread, not simply YouTube exposure. It provides good anecdotes, because many people get vaccinated and many people get randomly sick. So almost everybody knows an anecdote from somebody who got severely sick after vaccination.
It takes basic knowledge of statistics to verify that those things are just random correlations, not causation (show that incidence of certain afflictions (like autism) is the same among vaccinated and non-vaccinated people). That is what the memes feed from. I don't think censoring would help much here, especially as most people know such stories personally. I don't know people directly, but I know people who know people who got sick after vaccination. I suspect many others do, too.
Granted, anecdotes spread especially well on Social Media. It works the other way round, too. Have you heard a story of somebody who almost died, or died, from Covid, despite being young and healthy? Such incidents are very rare, but since they get shared a lot, one such personal report may be shared by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. every one of them now feels like they "know" somebody who died from Covid despite of being young and healthy.
Should such stories also be banned, to ease the psychological burden (fear) on billions of people?
> Should such stories also be banned, to ease the psychological burden (fear) on billions of people?
No, they are clearly different. One encourages dangerous behaviour for yourself and more importantly others around you, the other does not. This is also there is not much talk about banning flat earth or moon landing conspiracies out of social media.
Maybe not from them, een if you get your fair share of recommendations (at least I do), but certainly about them. And that is attention for anti-vaxxers as well. The moment traditional media stops being after clicks and treating reporting like entertainment will be a very big step in the right direction, so.
" why don’t you object equally to people with megaphones intentionally flooding the zone with shit"
That analogy is simply incorrect. You can spend your life on YouTube watching cat videos, no conspiracy theory in sight. Nobody can force you to watch their video on YouTube. So nobody has a megaphone in YouTube. Only YouTube itself has the megaphone, they can choose what to push to people.
It is NOT TV where you have a single stream that everybody watched, and if you insert shit, everybody watches it.
"internal @Facebook research that found over 60% of people who joined groups sharing extremist content did so at Facebook’s recommendation."
So you're right: youtube has the megaphone. I wonder what the proportion of people watching extremist/disinformation content on youtube because of suggestions is? In some ways it's worse than TV, because if you publish shit on TV you get people writing to the regulator to complain (qv Janet Jackson superbowl nipple ridiculousness). On youtube you may never know what your fellow citizens are watching until they say "of course the world is ruled by lizards, here's the video that proves it".
I wonder if people would accept the compromise that youtube would host this content but force it to "unlisted". After all, the recommendations are their speech, not yours.
... and Facebook's recommendation would be based on their prior activity. If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups.
In the meantime, there's a heck of a gulf between whether or not Facebook lets a group be recommended, and actively censoring content dissenting to the chosen narrative.
> If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups.
The whole point of recommendation algorithms is to find missing edges in the graph, so it can easily lead you to misinformation in 1 or 2 hops.
Think of it this way: the misinformation content is highly valuable - it generates a lot of engagement. There is always a “potential energy” (people like you also liked...) between low-value content and high-value content that the platforms are attempting to convert to “kinetic energy” (engagement - views, clicks, comments) in order to monetize it. The goal is to find the shortest path to the high value content.
Proof required, from my personal experience moderating a political forum, and from that of other mods, the issue is the flooding of our information networks with Information prions and virii targeting our limbic systems. Social media is currently heavily polluted.
> If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups.
You're right, it's not that obvious, it's far more sinister. Cat videos are unlikely to end with you being recommended extremist groups, because there likely isn't much engagement from cat video viewers and extremist groups.
People who are deeply unsatisfied with life, however, might engage if they see it as a way out of their dissatisfaction, inadvertently training the recommendation algorithm to promote extremist content to dissatisfied people. That strikes me as at least plausible, though I don't know if the data is out there to find out what people are recommended what content under what criteria.
> In the meantime, there's a heck of a gulf between whether or not Facebook lets a group be recommended, and actively censoring content dissenting to the chosen narrative.
I disagree with this part. I don't have numbers handy for Facebook, but YouTube gets 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. It is physically impossible for you to see everything that gets uploaded to YouTube. Even if they stopped accepting uploads right now, you'd probably still die before you saw a significant portion of the content available.
Removing something from recommendations is, in most cases, tantamount to censoring it. If there are 500 hours uploaded per minute, and we assume that each video is 15 minutes long (which is likely longer than the reality), that's 2000 videos uploaded per minute. Assuming random distribution of views (which it's not, because of the recommendations), your video has a 0.05% chance of being viewed out of the videos uploaded in the same minute as yours. If you widen that to videos uploaded in the same hour, it goes down to a 0.00083% chance. Widen it to a day and you're down to a 0.0000347% chance. You would get 1 view per 2.8M views if YouTube deleted everything before that day, and killed recommendations entirely. I don't know how typical my usage patterns are, but I only search for probably 1 out of every 25 or 50 YouTube videos I watch. If that's a typical usage pattern, then you would actually get 1 view per 75M - 150M views. If everyone in the US logged on and watched a random video, you would get ~2-4 views.
It's all theoretical napkin math, but there is a staggering amount of data in the hands of Facebook, Google, et al. I do agree that actually removing the content is more significant, but the difference between removing the content and just making it so obscure that it's hard to see unless you're looking for it is basically the same. It's like if newspapers would agree to publish your stuff, but only if you encoded it as the first letter of each line of text. They have technically published your views, they've just made it hard enough to find that the only people who see it is people who already knew it was there.
I don't know what to suggest though. This is almost an inevitable outcome of collecting this amount of content; a lot of it is going to be relegated to some esoteric corner where no one ever sees it.
It's crazy. I started writing why I disagreed based on my visceral reaction to the topic. But as I constructed my arguments, they were not sound. So I suppose I agree? Hm.
The above paragraph is sincere--that did happen. And interestingly, it shows the power of consuming the opposing view point. We all know that the government is currently spewing lies, and it is indeed a disgusting and corrosive thing. I want to silence it, but it's easy enough to contempt it from a distance. Let the truth and the lies be heard so that we as a people will grow wise to it all.
Personally I am not from the US, and I don't know that the government is spewing lies. What makes you so sure? And if you are so sure, why are you worried people could be swayed by the lies - why not make them equally sure with the information you have?
However, I am happy with letting the courts decide. Where is the problem?
I have seen lies from all big political parties in the US.
More broadly, I think the trouble is that "lies" are often more appealing than truths by design, while truth is what it is. For example, some Americans may have been swayed to support the Gulf War by the Nayirah testimony, or in 2003 by Saddam Hussein's alleged people shredder. I don't think this justifies censorship, but the ability to sharpen people's BS filter and the amount of bunk they may receive is somewhat asymmetrical, echoing Goering's quote from the Nuremburg trials.
But weren't those lies perpetuated by mainstream media? Where, if not YouTube, would you find the counter narratives? And wouldn't people who believe the MSM not then considered the YouTube debunking to be "lies" and called for censorship?
Unfortunately as YouTube and the rest of the internet has grown larger, and more consolidated, [1] the positions allowed have narrowed in scope and counter narratives have become less acceptable. While websites with counter narratives (WikiSpooks for example) do exist, they're generally not very visible anymore. I think what you're describing is largely what is happening will happen, and those who present counter narratives will be de-legitimized, including and conflating both those who are genuinely illegitimate (Dr. Gene Ray/time cube) and those who aren't.
The closest alternative I can see is reading media with opposing spin (People's Daily, RT) and yours and hoping together they composite a clearer picture. For example I would not expect to see this [2] headline in a US paper.
it's funny the lies this time are coming not from the government but from the opposition and their propaganda machinery.
I'd never consider myself government supporter, but with Trump it's like the last bastion before the country is overrun with far-left SJW hordes swayed by misinformation.
It's ironic the ultimate win for democracy manifests itself in stolen elections.
Well, I have a belief system that's coherent and arrived at through my personal experience, which had me thinking very poorly of the 'orange man' LONG before it became a political thing. In fact, I'm damn horrified at how far the guy got, and I think I understand quite well how it was done.
It's not just some abstract 'otherwise neutral orange man' whose identity is entirely constructed by news media, and that's a strange argument to make. I think many people thought 'Al Capone bad' too, particularly if he'd robbed them or shot somebody they liked. I'm sure the greedy news media HELPED people get mad at Al Capone, and that there were redeeming factors in the guy, but the notion that there were automatically as many redeeming factors in Capone as in everybody else is NOT sensible. Maybe he just was mean, and sucked.
Likewise with 'orange man'. Way before he was a political figure, he was mean and sucked REALLY bad relative to my sense of how things work in the world. Some people just suck very, very much.
If you assume anyone who has success automatically does not suck, I admire your optimism but I sure don't share it. Seems to me that without considerable oversight, the opposite is usually true, and that the worst people, entities, companies etc. win. Hence, the invention of means of oversight, and the attempt to codify what's good and bad.
Yeah, I think this comes back to the false balance. Just because a large portion of the mainstream news dislikes someone doesn't make them biased. Should you trust every story they write about him? Probably not. Is he clearly a demagogue, as can be seen in his unedited speeches? Absolutely. Do other politicians lie? Yeah. Does he lie a lot more brashly and obviously? I'd say so. So it's a bit of a crying wolf situation. It fits his behavior patterns quite clearly to pick up on conspiracy theories, simultaneously exploiting them for his own benefit and seemingly being convinced by them. It also fits the behavior patterns of established Republicans to avoid speaking out against him lest their radical base turns against them, without making strong stances unless it fits their agenda as well. If this so happened to be an instance where orange man right, then I think a lot of reasonable people have dismissed that possibility long ago because of the firehose of misinformation he has historically put out.
Never said I was automatically right, timeeater. All belief systems are coherent to the believer.
They're tested by reality. It seems to be that a lot of the people who say 'orange man bad' and think that's the heart of my position, are currently dying of COVID or giving it to others. And that is their experience, though a lot of those same people are sticking with their belief systems UNTO death, not being shaken from them by their experience.
I will keep an eye out for when things in my belief system seem to be not lining up with reality. I wish those 'other people' would do likewise, but I think I'm better at it.
You're again misrepresenting their statements. They aren't saying that only Trump fans get covid, but that an oversized portion of Trump fans get covid due to fictional ideas about the virus.
Same type of claim, that is not supported by data. If you have the data, please provide it.
In the same vein, you could assume Democrats are more at risk because they put too much faith in masks, thereby entering more risky situations. Not saying that's the case. The point is, your expectation of who gets infected is merely your partisan belief, not anything rooted in evidence.
First of all, the disease doesn't care about your political opinion; it will spread in protests whether you are a crusader or an infidel. So it doesn't matter what you are protesting about; what matters is disease spread.
Now regarding BLM's purpose, which was police violence presumably. Police kill around 1000 Americans a year. Not an insignificant number but pales in comparison to the pandemic.
Trump rally, pointless, entirely your biased viewpoint. They were protesting the lockdown, which has crippled the economy, shut down a massive number of small businesses, made tons of people lose their jobs, and come January, will evict tons of people. Their protests had a point, but you're obviously misrepresenting them to fit your biases.
No, there has been protests on lockdowns... Trump rallies are not it. He's the president of the US of A, he has actual power to affect things. He just doesn't like responsibility. It's a purely vain exercise.
And I'm not defending some logic around the numbers of BLM vs covid, and it's unfortunate they coincided. I'm saying that the BLM protests had been bubbling for years and through a few incidents came to a real boil this year. I fully agree that it's irresponsible covid-wise to be out in the streets.
Feel free to disagree about scale, but what if the March on Washington of 1963 coincided with a viral outbreak. Should it not have happened? I'll respect your opinion, I'm merely stating that it served a real purpose, and it's hard to pick the right time for it.
I think that anyone who doesn't believe that the election was legitimate - i.e. that no meaningful fraud occurred - should be banned from the HN community.
Their "arguments" are full of shit and are a bunch of pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-analytical, pseudo-objective cant.
Their "evidence" is literally disinformation / propaganda.
They act exactly like those crypto-racists who know that their true belief would be deemed unpalatable or unacceptable by the community so they'll blow as much smoke around as possible without ever stepping out to say what they're actually driving towards.
Enough is enough. It's clearly dangerous to allow these views the shroud of legitimacy by giving them space in the public square. It's gone so far that anything other than a rejection functions as a legitimization.
By allowing the lie of election fraud to be presented as just another thing to be discussed on HN, HN is enabling those people and their cause, which is to overturn the results of a legitimate election.
The irony is anyone was to be banned it would probably be me for making this comment. Think on that! ; )
You have a good point, but I think you're downplaying the power of clickbait. I consider myself a relatively smart, educated, and rational person, and I can't tell you the number of outlandish headlines I've clicked on just to see what they say.
The thing with censorship is they aren't going to censor the clickbait. Google knows exactly what clickbait looks like and they could have purged it years ago with a few algorithm tweaks that nobody would have minded. They're going to censor stuff that makes people ask hard-to-answer questions and/or challenge consensus positions.
That sounds like a good idea until it clicks that good scientists ask hard to answer questions and challenge consensus positions. Censorship is fundamentally anti-evidence. People can't present evidence that the channel owners don't like, and people can't model how to handle untrue opinions in conversation because they never come up.
How come number of Covid infection rates is rising, while flu seems to be eradicated? If the measures help against the flu, why not against Covid?