YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

The end game that is feared is the fall of civilization mirroring the collapse of the western roman empire, and it’s quite possible in a thousand years people will peg the collapse of our civilization as having started around 1950 or so.

With global climate disasters and large chunks of the population prone to tribal superstition looming, nearly everyone being spoonfed technology they don’t begin to understand much less have any ability to replicate, and the government of the global hegemon inches away from collapse into autocracy, people are afraid of dark ages, but most of them can’t quite articulate it.

Rome fell and a big part of europe and the mediterranean lost the ability to maintain cities many of which dumped 90% of their populations to the countryside. Specialization gone, most people were just doing subsistence agriculture. Literacy plummeted to almost no one outside a very very few people in monasteries.

This whole religious adherence to party aligned mythology about everyday things (say, vaccines) is pervasive in the western world, and it is not some surface defect, it’s a rot that goes through to the core.

But things have been pretty nice as long as almost everybody has been alive so the belief that everything will continue to be fine is about all that holds things together.

People don’t appreciate how precarious civilization is.

> and we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society

When was America ever "peaceful" or "progressive"? I lived there for thirty years and my ideas, boring and mainstream by European standards, were constantly considered "laughable", "naïve", "ignorant." Now I live in Europe again, where I again get all the things that Americans thought were laughable and impossible.

In particular, America's been continuously at war for my whole life, and I'm no longer a young man. America's spent more money on weapons than the next ten countries put together. Calling America "peaceful" is totally false to the fact - it's obscene considering you've killed hundreds of thousands of completely innocent people in the last twenty years.

> Social media is currently poisoning our country

Does this really come close to diagnosing the root problem? I am frustrated when I see this argument.

”Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today's richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.”

— Mark Getty

The root problem is that the Intellectual Monopoly system destroys the potential for democratic use and understanding of protocols - as well as everything else. Intellectual Monopoly means we are kept stupid because there are gatekeepers - usually people belonging to families with inherited wealth. The idea of the ‘Intellectual Property system’ is the newest means of production, whose function is to enclose and monopolize ideas, which should in fact belong to all children of the world. Especially when digital breaks the rules of economic theories, with it’s near-zero marginal cost of reproduction. So the modern Bougie both 1) parasitically extracts economic rents for something that has been made artificially scarce in the first place, as well as 2) unorganically stemming the rate of innovation - setting a limit on deeper cooperation and coherence/alignment, and harmony. But this reality is obscured by the cultural myths of Magical Voluntarism, Meritocracy and more. We are gaslighting people by telling them they have ‘mental health issues”, when in fact the system has evolved to put a limit on their learning and growth, and which sucks them dry.

We need to get rid of closed corporate supply chains and move to Sensorica-type Open Value Networks that use the Resource Event Agent (REA) accounting system. There’s people working on implementing this using Holochain’s distributed data-integrity engine.

In using such a system (compared to an internal corporate network), we transparently measure the actual material scarcity of the wonderful resources our Mother Earth provides. And then we can both 1) democratically decide who gets to use which resources (and where, when, how and why, etc.), and 2) we don’t have to use the Intellectual Monopoly system to pretend that having a monopoly is what is needed for successful innovation.

What this leads to is a symphony of scalar gift economies.

We owe it to ourselves and our children.

Part of the problem is that the media keeps on misleading people about how other countries are doing in order to push the narrative that their country's government is inexplicably failing at dealing with Covid-19. For example, here in the UK (and I think the US is similar), the media and opposition have been pushing the idea that a competent government would be able to set up a working test and trace program to control the virus, like South Korea, and the fact that the UK was forced to resort to closing and restricting pubs and restaurants and limiting social interactions is proof ours is incompetent. The BBC has also been pushing the narrative that there's no evidence those kind of local lockdown measures work. In reality, of course, South Korea has been heavily reliant on precisely those kind of measures - every time they lift them and try to rely on test and trace, masks, and weaker social distancing measures, cases start increasing and they have to reimpose them.

For example, take the South Korea section in this article about how Europe is failing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54482905 It starts off by attributing their success to "mass testing and strict contact tracing". In reality, South Korea is testing at about a tenth the rate of a typical European country (10-20 thousand a day), doesn't routinely test people with mild potential symptoms, and has no way of reliably detecting cases that don't have links to ones they know about - which have been appearing in increasingly alarming numbers. Technically, "tests have always been easily available" as the article says, but they successfully discourage most people from getting one by charging for them under most circumstances. They don't even appear to be trying to improve this either; their testing capacity seems to be at the same level it was in like March.

As for the strict contact tracing, this sentence hides a multitude of things: "the majority of people have accepted it and prioritised controlling the pandemic over their own privacy". I'm sure the people who didn't have the entire internet speculating that they were cheating on their partner, and aren't being criminalized for refusing to out themselves as gay to their homophobic employer in a country with no legal protections, and don't oppose the government, have no problem with it. Something tells me that the BBC would be infinitely less willing to put a positive spin on screwing over a minority of people like that in the name of the greater good if the UK or US government did it though.

The article goes on to downplay the other restrictions. "When infections rise, stricter measures are put in place", the BBC says, but makes it sound a limited, mostly brief and long ago thing: "At one point there was a 21:00 curfew on restaurants in the capital, Seoul. But now, social distancing guidelines are back to their lowest level." In reality, they'd literally only just dropped social distancing meaures to that level and allowed bars in Seoul to reopen right before the article was published: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-southko... It's still too early to even see the effect of this on cases. That bar closure was also imposed only two weeks after the previous 9pm curfew and complete ban on indoor dining/drinking in Seoul establishments was lifted. If the UK did this, there'd be endless BBC headlines about U-turns, confusing, seemingly arbitrary measures, and speculation as to whether businesses would survive - not this kind of attempt to minimize the extent of the measures. Especially the part about night clubs reopening; South Korea has tried this at least twice and had to do almost immediate U-turns both times, and there's no reason to expect they can manage it now.

I suspect the BBC would also have plenty to say about (for example) the flu vaccine screw-up if it happened in the UK: http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20201015001058 They've certainly put enough of a negative spin on the fact that the UK doesn't have enough flu vaccines immediately to deal with unprecidented demand and the implications for the fight against Covid-19, even though there's nothing the government could really do given the lead times. But because it happened in the supposedly more competent success story country, most people will never hear about it and the illusion that our government is just incompetent compared to them will remain unchallenged.

because a 'nicely done video' (in terms of popularity) can very seldomly convey the information needed to make a valid point. hek even scientific writers/writings strugle with packing the right type and ammount of information in their works without sacrificing readability/citations.

i am in no way against scientific material on yt but very much against a world in which a professionally edited and promoted youtube video is the minimal standard for scientific progress.