Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 233

[ecosophia]

We are now well into the fifth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary all these years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health remain anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; public health authorities government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; new revelations are leaking out about just how bad the Covid vaccines are for human health; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

7. Please don't post LLM ("AI") generated text. This is a place for human beings to talk to other human beings, not for the regurgitation of machine-generated text. Also, please don't discuss large language models (the technology popularly and inaccurately called "artificial intelligence" these days) except as they bear directly on the Covid phenomenon. Here again, my finger is hovering over the delete button. 

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.

Comments

Social Media Cognitive Collapse

[(Anonymous)]

You've written before about cognitive collapse driven by various forms of media. I think there's a good case to be made that what happened in 2020 was an example of extreme cognitive collapse, which occurred as unintentional result of social media algorithms attempting to enforce "the truth": specifically, starting out in late 2019, in an effort to appease their advertisers, most major social media platforms implemented rules to restrict "anti-vaxxer" content. This was problematic for two reasons:

1) With social media functioning in many ways as the public square, this meant that on a major, contentious issue, one side was unable to express themselves. The result, predictably, was a swing towards extreme pro-vaccine content on the internet.

2) The algorithms are dumb. Like LLMs, they lack any ability to actually know what they are doing. This means that a lot of things which were not meant to be banned were banned; and when there was a concern about a flu like virus, things spiraled out of control. No one meant for these algorithms to censor anyone who tried to point out that a new virus was only as dangerous a the flu: but comments about the flu not being dangerous were often used by people who were opposing the flu vaccine, so they were removed by these algorithms.

With one side of the debate (anyone who tried to say Covid-19 was not dangerous) being censored, by algorithms which act on a scale human beings cannot keep up with, and no one fully understands, while even the most absurd claims from the other side of the debate (COVID WILL KILL US ALL!) being pushed by the algorithms due to their sensational nature, of course there was a collective mental breakdown.

I've even come to suspect that this is an unspoken part of why the tech companies distanced themselves so strongly from the left in the last few years: we're still dealing with the consequences of this mess, and the tech companies can see what drove it. If it was a result of what, at the time, probably seemed like an innocuous decision to remove content which they were assured was false, I could easily see a huge realignment with the tech companies no longer wanting to risk censoring anything online. Obviously coming right out and saying that would be politically impossible; but they are rapidly walking back a lot of their previous censorship systems.

Re: Social Media Cognitive Collapse

[ecosophia]

This strikes me as a solid thesis. Hmm -- I think a case could be made, in fact, that it's only one of several recent examples of cognitive collapse, but the rest are off topic for this post.

[(Anonymous)]

Not only are the doctors labelling every mysterious ailment that takes more than two seconds to think about "long covid" but they are now recommending SSRIs as treatment. This is extremely dangerous especially given how many of the mass shooters were prescribed SSRIs. It's almost like someone is trying to sew chaos.

[ecosophia]

Hold it -- what??? SSRIs? To the best of my knowledge those are only approved as psychiatric meds. That means that they're tacitly admitting that "long Covid" is a psychiatric condition rather than a nonpsychiatric illness. That's astonishing. Mind you, I think they're probably right, but it astounds me that they've effectively admitted it.