A bit off-topic, but one of my favourite positions is the “which cultural mores could allow this to happen?” angle. To get a feel for that you’ve got to think about what role vaccines play. They’re part of health infrastructure and a matter of economic security, so enemy nations work hard to undermine these systems. An outbreak of measles and a load of blindness in the West would be great news for, say, Russia, so they spend to attack Western vaccination programmes. We do similar things like ship heroin from Afghanistan into Russia, while China floods Western streets with research chemicals, it’s all part of the game.
So we in turn protect these programmes with our propaganda apparatus, we avoid asking awkward questions in science and we punish those who do, we cause chilling effects, and we censor people who complain when their children are injured by vaccinations—it is a medical procedure and carries some risk, which fruits when there’s millions of patients.
Which is pretty shitty for those people, it sometimes turns them and their friends into antivaxxers. A subset of these are then propped up by enemy states—like YouTube view fraud by Russian bots, or buying tons of copies of their books so they can make a career out of damaging our critical medical systems. And that’s why we have the censorship cycle, push them down the Google and YouTube search results, don’t recommend them on Amazon etc, and it ends up in the social circle of the other things that are suppressed or countercultural… Along with all the bunk AstroTurf conspiracy theories that exist to distract people from the real conspiracies, and gets mixed up with that and absorbs its bs.
So you’ve got these mature censorship system run by all establishments. Their opponents have been thoroughly infiltrated and face constant (and mostly deserved) ridicule, so there’s no balance against overreach. And the ends are important enough to justify any kinds of means.
So when it’s the choice of “suppress this or millions will die because they don’t trust lying virologists”, that’s a choice they make all the time anyway. It’s business as usual.
Note: I can only post one reply a day here due to previous dissent.
A bit off-topic, but one of my favourite positions is the “which cultural mores could allow this to happen?” angle. To get a feel for that you’ve got to think about what role vaccines play. They’re part of health infrastructure and a matter of economic security, so enemy nations work hard to undermine these systems. An outbreak of measles and a load of blindness in the West would be great news for, say, Russia, so they spend to attack Western vaccination programmes. We do similar things like ship heroin from Afghanistan into Russia, while China floods Western streets with research chemicals, it’s all part of the game.
So we in turn protect these programmes with our propaganda apparatus, we avoid asking awkward questions in science and we punish those who do, we cause chilling effects, and we censor people who complain when their children are injured by vaccinations—it is a medical procedure and carries some risk, which fruits when there’s millions of patients.
Which is pretty shitty for those people, it sometimes turns them and their friends into antivaxxers. A subset of these are then propped up by enemy states—like YouTube view fraud by Russian bots, or buying tons of copies of their books so they can make a career out of damaging our critical medical systems. And that’s why we have the censorship cycle, push them down the Google and YouTube search results, don’t recommend them on Amazon etc, and it ends up in the social circle of the other things that are suppressed or countercultural… Along with all the bunk AstroTurf conspiracy theories that exist to distract people from the real conspiracies, and gets mixed up with that and absorbs its bs.
So you’ve got these mature censorship system run by all establishments. Their opponents have been thoroughly infiltrated and face constant (and mostly deserved) ridicule, so there’s no balance against overreach. And the ends are important enough to justify any kinds of means.
So when it’s the choice of “suppress this or millions will die because they don’t trust lying virologists”, that’s a choice they make all the time anyway. It’s business as usual.
Note: I can only post one reply a day here due to previous dissent.