A long look around this site will tell you that few people are actually sceptical. More honestly, they are against all forms of mitigation of the Covid pandemic.
This is a slight simplification, since they are wildly enthusiastic about drugs that have to proof of merit.
The common theme is that they always want to go against any qualified advice. It seems to be some binding principle, they can't resist.
Who is controlling them and why?
A long look around this site will tell you that few people are actually sceptical. More honestly, they are against all forms of mitigation of the Covid pandemic.Who is controlling them and why?
I've wondered this, at first there were honest questions that set out this position: In an infectious Pandemic, any course of action might cost as much or more than the effects of the disease they were intended se to counter. Obvsly, a knee jerk reaction is to starve the virus of susceptibles, by hunkering down at home (doing lock-down) since the virus only spreads when people mingle. This might be naive, so it was correct to weigh the consequence of lockdown against the consequences of mingling. This was back when the participants were honest.
But times have changed, the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, instilled by prolonged progress of the disease, gradually wore down the faculties if the original sceptics, and weaker people got a grip on the site. These weak and stupid people ignored the original message, and mistook the message to be a general campaign against any intervention that might slow or diminish the progress of the virus, as time went by, they took up arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing hoped to end them, it is impossible to gauge their motivations, but they serially opposed lockdown, vaccine, anti-virals, and everything else unless it had the alternative medicine' imprimatur', if it did not have that, it is automatically stamped with 'fear uncertainty and doubt', this is the mechanism by witch the lock-down sceptics' site was gradually rendered pointless. We have been thinned down by the thickoes, who far out number us, until recently, in recent weeks, I have seen an influx of more measured, moderate voices who hark back the the original message: do lockdowns do any good?
And that's what happened.....
Posted by: @checkthefacts
A long look around this site will tell you that few people are actually sceptical. More honestly, they are against all forms of mitigation of the Covid pandemic.
Who is controlling them and why?
Their ideas are quixotic, like Don Quixote they dream up a fantasy world which they believe to be real and evil.
They start out with the not preposterous idea, that locking down might not be the best thing to do, due to the obvious fact that a strong economy is required to work the NHS. Those occupying the high moral ground look down on those who refute lockdowns, accusing them of putting profit before compassion.While those sceptical of lockdowns look down on those who demand lockdown, since any lockdown would have to be eventually abandoned to allow wages to be earned.So because of these polar positions, the matter was instantly politicised.With each side seeking out signs that their instincts in the matter were correct.This search for signs to justify an A Priori position,have turned out to be in vain.
But the lockdown sceptics' case is the weaker of the two because of the simple matter of fact that the virus only spreads when people mingle. That fact is just too compelling to dismiss.
Hence for the lockdown sceptics it became necessary to frame the debate simplistically in terms of a life and death struggle between good and evil.In this reframing, people who supported any mitigation measure were automatically viewed as evil, while any form of mitigation is viewed as part of a global plan to do something evil. The sceptics have never been able to agree on the end goal of all these evil acts, but they mention depopulation, the great reset and the cabal of the rich and famous, Bill Gates, George Soros etc. As an experiment, I recently introduced a random tech billionaire into the debate, Larry Ellison, the database tycoon, and sure enough, within an hour, the most paranoid skeptic was busily waging ad hominem attacks on Larry.
And that's how the skeptics steer themselves forward, by building ever more fancy, castles in the sky to do battle with. And that's the dismal game they are playing.
Argument from Authority only works when the statements of those in Authority is confirmed or substantiated by the corpus of knowledge on which that Authority is based.
This is not case now with SARs CoV2 and the public heath response. Every single action and claim made by those in Authority since Feb 2020 is either partially or totally at variance with all previous published literature or previous public heath policy.
We have been discussing this here at length for well over a year with copious primary source references. If you use the search function you will find all these very well documented discussions.
As for motivation, thats easy. Institutional incompetence and political expediency and our old friend, the Fallacy of Sunk Cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment
What we have is a public health bureaucracy with a high degree of credentialization and very little actual expertise. Think of it as the PhD Dunning Kruger Effect.
So back in the 1960's and 1950's, when we had the last serious pandemics, the whole country was not shut down even though the health risk was much higher (as was the death toll) because the senior people making the decisions had actually walked the infectious diseases wards and dealt with serious epidemic infections for decades. They had immense clinical expertise.
All the current generation have a huge amount of paper qualifications, many years experience of large organisation management, and almost no substantial clinical experience. In real world terms they have'nt a clue what they are talking about. And what they do say is mostly what they can partially remember from their medical training decades ago. before they specialized. Because when you check their statements again event basic textbook, let alone the published literature, almost none of it withstands even the most cursory inspection.
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So the default assumption, rarely wrong, is that every single statement by Authority is a either wrong in fact or substance. Or a self serving lie.
Thats what actual skepticism is. Not a credulous belief of a very vested interest just because they have the outward trappings of Authority. If you had spent much time around these sort of people, highly credentialized high profile academics "experts" etc over the decades you would dismiss them with the little respect most of them deserve.
A good rule of thumb is that those at the top are basically BS artists and back stabbing careerists. Thats how they got their job. You will find the people at the mid level know their stuff. And no one and I mean no one one who knows what they are talking about will ever talk to the media. Because the first sign of real intelligence is knowing what lying manipulative scum too many media people are. Because thats how the media business works.
what lying manipulative scum too many media people are. Because thats how the media business works.
But you have drifted completely off topic, the topic was about sceptics being against all forms of mitigation of the Covid pandemic, you have twisted the topic to make an manipulative rant, exactly as you accuse the scum media people of doing, perhaps you should consider a change of career?
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So the default assumption, rarely wrong, is that every single statement by Authority is a either wrong in fact or substance. Or a self serving lie.
This statement alone kind of proves ewloe's point.
A good rule of thumb is that those at the top are basically BS artists and back stabbing careerists. Thats how they got their job. You will find the people at the mid level know their stuff.
While your are right in many ways about those that rise to the top, their jobs are actually political. A "chief scientist" or a "chief medical officer" is a government appointee. a politician in their own field. In normal times a nice cushy job. No person can hope to have a good grasp across the breadth of these subjects and they don't.
Their role is the presentation of the information to advise the ministers (who know nothing and will not be able to understand anything complex). Talking to these people effectively is a skill in itself.
Where do these chiefs get their information? It's from the army of mid-level and lower level people that do the work in detail. The advice/message is formed and then presented in simple terms. That's the job.
The fact that the top people didn't generate the advice or message doesn't mean that the advice or message is wrong.
It is the same in all corporations. The CEO's job is the be plausible to the investment community. The CEO is not actually developing the company strategy. The CTO didn't develop anything, nor even run a program. They get the external praise for everything, which can explain envy and dislike.
It clearly isn't fair. There is the expression "risen without trace".
All that said, it doesn't justify declaring everything that a spokesperson says as wrong, because you don't like the person.
