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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're also caused by Covid infection. Which makes sense, if the spike proteins produced by the vaccine cause these issues, then so do the spike proteins produced by the virus.

That logic is most likely simple, elegant and wrong.

A quick search finds literally dozens of articles in medical journals like these:

Thrombotic complications are frequent in COVID-19 and contribute significantly to mortality and morbidity

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32857878/

One of the special characteristics of this disease is that it may predispose patients to thrombotic disease both in the venous and arterial circulation.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33719953/

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#562
post #528
post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Unconstitutional” in which countries and by what constitution? I learned that a lot of people think contrarianism makes them smart, and that even if everything everyone was saying about covid was true, they felt it necessary to ‘resist’ purely for the sake of it. I never though that in a pandemic, so many people in so many places would both politicise public health measures and actively side with the virus. But here…

In Bavaria, Germany the first strict lockdown was considered unlawful and extreme compared to the results and the severity of the situation, in the same time it was found that it violated people’s fundamental rights. Resist what? What contrarianism? Do you think I want to go and kill people to prove I am smart? Or what is your point? Do you think it was fair to lock people in their houses, was it fair not to allow pe…

> most of the measures in most of the European countries were ruled as unconstitutional

> In Bavaria, Germany the first strict lockdown was considered unlawful and extreme compared to the results and the severity of the situation

These are somewhat different, no? A bit of a different scope from the original claim. One region in Germany made a ruling, not sure that means most European countries ruled most measures unconstitutional.

> Resist what? What contrarianism?

Resist public health measures, refuse to close their non-essential businesses, refuse to wear masks, spread nonsense about the vaccines containing microchips so Bill Gates can track you, hold rallies where the message was "covid is a hoax", that sort of thing. You know, the stuff we've had endless news stories about in all sorts of countries.

> Do you think I want to go and kill people to prove I am smart?

You? I have no idea, but clearly there were a lot of people for whom their own self-satisfaction, self aggrandisement, notoriety and even just profit-making was indeed more important than public health. From the short-sighted "masks only stop ill people spreading the diseas and I'm not ill!" to the full on "vaccines kill unborn babies! Buy my supplements!" hucksters.

> Do you think it was fair to lock people in their houses, was it fair not to allow people to go outside and have a walk in the park? Was it normal that the police was out on the streets hunting for people or groups of people?

Of course it wasn't normal. There was a global pandemic in progress. That's the point, these were extraordinary measures because of an unusual threat. Maybe some (perhaps like in Bavaria) were over the top, but in general the idea was to stop the spread of a deadly disease that's now killed about 7 million. I think the question of whether it was 'fair' to keep people inside is more or less irrelevant. Was it justified, is more interesting.

> yeah, that’s not possible, I’m just here spreading misinformation, no one died because cancer was mostly ingnored

Lots of people died and will still die because cancer screenings were delayed. In many places this was simply because the healthcare systems were completely overwhelmed with the numbers of covid patients they had to deal with on top of their normal caseloads. I'm really not sure of your point here - are you saying that your mother wouldn't have died , or wouldn't have been waiting so long for diagnosis if there were no anti-covid measures? Because to me it seems that without the anti-covid measures then European healthcare systems would have been even more screwed for longer than they already were, as even higher covid caseloads dominated.

Unfortunately this is a known consequence in the UK as well, many routine tests and operations postponed as the NHS struggled to keep up.

I'm sorry your mother passed away, that must have been a painful thing to go through, especially with the state of the world at that time. FWIW I would likely have disregarded rules that tried to stop me being with my mother at such a time as well.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it. Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really…

They did the same in Spain. And it is very very hard not to fall for conspiracy theories when essentially all the west governments simultaneously lied about the face masks effectiveness.

Why fall into conspiracies when the pragmatic answer is the more logical one?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#564
Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t know anything about Covid in the early months and the CDC was following plans designed to counter something closer to the 1917 Spanish Flu.

We should all be grateful they scared the crap out of us. What if a variant started killing kids? What if a variant started killing 25-35 year olds?

Read history. That’s what happened when the Spanish Flu came around for a second swing.

It wasn’t about being accurate. It was intentionally about over-reacting because we just didn’t know enough.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate of a toddler frustrated at having a seatbelt put on in a car.

That's a big part of the problem - a group of people have unilaterally decided that they're the grown up ones, and they know better, and dismiss everyone else as toddlers. Using that wonderful justification, they proceeded to censor everyone who disagrees with them, including the points of view that later turned out to be correct. When you decide that you're a smart adult, declare every dissenting viewpoint to be "di…

They are turning on the microchips Bill Gates implanted in everyone any day now. Even Trump has had 3+ vaccines. I don’t really understand what we are debating as two equivalent sides here.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#566

Conspiracy theory is just the news in 6 months. Hell at this rate I’d hear somebody out if they said the moon is made of cheese. What a time to be alive.

Sounds like extreme confirmation bias. Just a couple of counterpoints: Everyone taking the vaccine was supposed to be long dead. Women taking it were supposed to be sterile, and men too. There are billions of people who took and still... barely anything.

You do realize that you just listed a bunch of really dumb caricatures as the argument for why you dont have to think about stuff? Reality finding doesnt work by just pointing at laughing at the few people dumber then you. Thats a description of propaganda, if you spend more and more time concerned with dumber and dumber caricatures, there is a really good chance somebody is feeding you with framed stuff to react to to come to predetermined conclusions.

Not being the actual dumbest person in the room doesnt mean you are somehow done figuring stuff out. Treating this as a matter of binary sides overlooks the issue that there is no "reasonable default" to fall back on. Finding that position is the actual practical problem. Thats an iterative process of verification and reality truly doesnt care that you made out somebody dumber then yourself.

I said it in the other post, i find this to be an extremely difficult conversation. After all, how do you tell people in a constructive way to really consider their emotional maturity when it comes to this not at all being trivial problem.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure you mean well, but one of the few things we know for sure is that the virus is way, way, way more deadly than vaccine. If you are going to overlook all those RCTs run all throughout the world with different types of vaccines and huge populations of people, then you really should reflect on your own analysis of the data. I'm not saying the vaccine is perfectly safe, as few things are, but it's obviously, prov…

This may even be true, but you're missing a key point. There's a phrase and I think we're going to see a lot more of it surface in the discussions around this in the future. The phrase is "informed consent." Informed consent means knowing the risks. It's why we have little packets of paper with side effects, why that guy on the radio rattles off "may cause ..." at the end of commercials for medicine. Being good for u…

It’s telling that this reply and mine below it are being flagged instead of responded to.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History strongly shows that epidemics do change political consciousness, toward psychological conservatism. It will take two generations (as with economic depressions) before things get anything like as loose and sloppy again. We'll fail in other ways, meanwhile. Eventually, UK citizens lost their faith in the aristocratic system. But they did. I may be kidding myself but I think there will be some permanent change f…

> Eventually, UK citizens lost their faith in the aristocratic system. But they did. I may be kidding myself To start with, getting fed up with aristocrats would be a revolutionary and progressive thing, not conservative. But it does not seem like there is enough such sentiment in the UK to change things. They still have their royals with veto power, they still have the unelected house of lords with aristocratic, rel…

[deleted]

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#569

Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t know anything about Covid in the early months and the CDC was following plans designed to counter something closer to the 1917 Spanish Flu. We should all be grateful they scared the crap out of us. What if a variant started killing kids? What if a variant started killing 25-35 year olds? Read history. That’s what happened when the Spanish Flu came around for a second swing. It wasn’t abo…

We knew in March 26, 2020 it was not the Spanish flu because the data from the cruise ship diamond princess came back and the cfr was 1.1%. This was a shipped filled with the most vulnerable, obese people over 65. We should have never closed schools or lockdown in the USA.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#570

Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t know anything about Covid in the early months and the CDC was following plans designed to counter something closer to the 1917 Spanish Flu. We should all be grateful they scared the crap out of us. What if a variant started killing kids? What if a variant started killing 25-35 year olds? Read history. That’s what happened when the Spanish Flu came around for a second swing. It wasn’t abo…

I'm sorry but this is nonsense. No clarity of hindsight is required to realize that the conversations regarding COVID were not good faith explorations of the facts or the risks. Decisions were made very crudely in order to determine the proper course of action, and virtually all necessary mechanisms for continuously evaluating what we knew or were doing were forcefully marginalized. If you were somebody genuinely interested in understanding the pandemic, you immediately found that virtually all the sane conversations you were looking for were taking place in the same fringes as the places where lunatic conspiracy theorists were, because they were the only places that tolerated any discussion whatsoever.
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