People in HN need to start understanding, that while most of us can work from home, earn a living, be fairly happy (especially if you're living with someone).
You simply cannot even begin to asses the financial and psychological damage of every single waiter, or coffee shop barrista, dance artist, theatre actor, or god forbid business owner who might have spent decades building a business that is now bankrupt, sitting at home, with nothing to do, no one to speak to, doing what? Its well known in psychology that spending too much time alone basically makes you go crazy.
Look at the numbers on domestic abuse, drug abuse, mental health issues.
Have a little empathy. There are legitimate viewpoints about whether these lockdowns are worth it, and especially for how long. This isn't disinformation. It's just people who are different from you.
There is a big difference between legitimate arguments about the risks involved in lockdown vs not locking down and entirely false claims about hospital admissions being at normal levels, PCR testing not working and the purpose of the lockdown being to make it 'easier for us to control' being spread by groups mentioned at this link.
The fact the rich, educated and connected people discussed in the article are seeking to exploit the discontent felt by ordinary people impoverished by being unable to work and lonely in their personal lives makes them worse, not better.
The PCR argument is a great example of where government transparency is lacking where it could easily be used to counter critics.
The “PCR is fake” people should clearly be ignored, but one of the more persuasive arguments from the “most tests are false positives” narrative seems to be that the amplification cycle thresholds are being set far too high and tests are therefore finding fragments of RNA from previous infection weeks or months ago.
Now I don’t know how much scientific merit that argument has, but is it not irresponsible of the government to withhold details of the testing parameters they are using, given the impact the results are having?
From my understanding, the "amplification cycly threshold" is a number which depends on the specific PCR test. So every lab has somewhat different numbers applying to their testing method. Consequently, there is no single number for this the government could publish. And without an analysis of that specific lab, the number isn't meaningful at all. Publishing it would actually be very harmful as it is so meaningless.
So individual labs can set their own standards for detecting an infection? Isn't that rather support for the skeptic's viewpoint? So there actually is no standard, just labs claiming things?
I fully agree with you, but I also recognize that in our society it appears the legitimate arguments are too easily ignored because no one is out protesting as a result. At best, we get headlines about small businesses closing or people out of work or divorces, but these facts are being treated as casualties of the pandemic and not a reason to protest the lockdowns. So the only way to affect change is to whip people into a frenzy and it seems only disinformation is effective at doing that.
Again, I fully agree with you and do not believe the ends justify the means here.
The intellectually honest way to approach a faulty argument is to discard the parts that are false, maybe with commentary, then attack the bits that remain with better arguments.
I don't believe the article is doing that. It characterises one protest as "anti-lockdown, anti-vaxxer, anti-mask, anti-5G ... organised by Save Our Rights UK Ltd". I don't think the protesters thought they were protesting against 5G; I note that Save Our Rights UK doesn't list 5G as an issue [0]. And many of the issues they do list are, y'know, pretty serious. I'd consider joining a protest against sweeping legislative changes in response to the pandemic. Such changes in crisis situations tend to be really bad in hindsight.
There is a big difference between legitimate and illegitimate arguments. But I don't trust the article to fairly represent the arguments of the people it is attacking. The author should have a little bit more empathy for the people in the movements they are attacking.
Also; as a general comment it isn't reasonable to demand everyone be articulate about why they are hurting or to understand where in the system the leverage points are to relieve the pain. This is a radical time, people who aren't full time public speakers might have things they want to say. Working hard to paint them as disinformed and therefore having illegitimate concerns is a terrible strategy at many levels.
You can scroll down that group's page you linked to a video of the protest, in which a man stands and makes a speech in front of a large, professionally produced banner bearing their logo with the words "End Covid Vax" and "Take Down 5G" below the hashtagged headline #OurMovement. The son of Britain's most famous conspiracy theorist opens his headline speech by cracking a joke about "killing a couple of grannies" by breaking lockdown
Whilst I'd agree that Byline Times is not the most nuanced of sources, going to the opposite extreme of artificially charitable representations of who these organizations are and what they stand for and pretending the crazy isn't there is the way to lose an argument with them. The wider points they make are their recruitment strategy, not their raison d'etre. Makes no more sense to debate these sorts of organizations by ignoring the crazy to make defensive arguments about how the government is right than combating far-right parties by ignoring the racism and talking about the wisdom of modern economics.
> There is a big difference between legitimate arguments about the risks involved in lockdown vs not locking down and entirely false claims
may be they are suffering from cognitive dissonance, and this is how they resolve their internal conflict - that it must be a hoax and covid false, because the lockdown is so much worse for them.
People believe in what it’s more comfortable to believe in. COVID being a hoax means that lockdown is unjustified and that also means all of their issues would go away: no sitting at home, going back to work.
It’s not about internal conflict, it’s about a pipe dream where it all goes away.
And on a practical level I would think many people would prefer a double-digit probability of dying from COVID while working rather than a few years spent in financial limbo due to lockdowns. So at this point COVID being a hoax becomes way less black-and-white: maybe it being a hoax is just a way to say that “I would rather take the risk, and the hoax here is that you are vastly overestimating the fear of death in population”
PS: I am not saying it’s a hoax, I am giving a reasonably plausible pattern of thought behind the mechanism justifying it being a hoax.
Why not simply provide data to counter their "lies"? What makes you so sure to be in possession of the truth? Have you verified yourself, or have you simply chosen to trust the authorities?
> false claims about hospital admissions being at normal levels.
"Normal level" is all relative. If you look up the press, "on the brink of the apocalypse" seems to be the normal level for at least the last couple of years in the UK.
Except for the articles which say that beds have been cut, the rest is manifestly untrue.
While the press tend to catastrophise, this is the first year we've seen doctors and nurses from multiple countries spontaneously going on social media to plead with people to take the virus seriously.
It's also the first year recent-history where some countries - including developed countries like Portugal - have had to send patients abroad, or ask for other kinds of medical help from other countries.
So it is absolutely a false claim to suggest that hospital admissions are at normal levels. They aren't.
It's also the first year where excess death totals have been far above any previous statistical variation.
Sorry but "doctors going on social media" is absolutely no proof for anything. I have also seen several doctors on social media say that there is less activity at hospitals than usual.
Seriously, just provide the numbers about hospital use. No social media nonsense.
Your data about "excess deaths" is only for the last five years, by the way, not "any previous year".
What's interesting so far this year is that deaths with covid on the death certificate in january (say w/e 22 jan - 9,000) is below the 4,655 excess deaths.
Back in April it was the other way round. I wonder how many non-covid deaths lockdown is saving (because things like the normal winter flu aren't spreading)
2. These deaths are no longer explained by covid 19 death counts
I know tons of people who have relapsed, regressed, and are just generally unwell at this point. .3% of my Facebook friends have made a suicide attempt since lockdowns began.
The longer this goes on, the more dramatic these incidents are going to become.
Similar in the UK, although with a caveat that in the UK at least it can take a long time to register suicdes. Even in normal times only 50% of suicides are registered in the year they happen, and with covid there's a backlog. I suspect we won't know the real level of suicide in 2020 until 2022.
That said, the data that is available doesn't point to an increase outside of the historical increase (suicides in the UK have been increasing for a long time)
The data that's been released in the UK was using a newer rapid method, looking at death before coroners issue a conclusion. NCISH are calling this real time monitoring data. Some local areas sometimes call this data "suspected self inflicted deaths".
Suicides in the UK have not been increasing for a long time. They increased this year for the first time since 2007. There are a few reasons for this, but part of it is a change in the standard of proof used by coroner's after the Maughan case. Coroner's used to have to use "beyond all reasonable doubt", and now have to use "balance of probabilities" for a conclusion of suicide.
Okay, but you’re participating in amplification of disinformation right now. It’s the “just asking questions” sort or approach that doesn’t actually say anything specific, but aims to create a general fog of doubt and confusion.
If there is a specific point you want to make, then do so. It might be valid. Back that point up with details or an explanation that shows why you think it is the case, and expect to provide more information if your view is a challenging or unlikely one.
I don't know about the UK, but for example in Germany there are official statistics about ICU use. ICU use was at normal levels the whole time. But of course that is also being managed by scheduling risky surgery, for example.
Nevertheless, I don't know what makes you so sure your claims are true. I haven't really seen completely convincing evidence.
I have seen politicians publicly proclaim that the opportunity the pandemic provides should be used. So there definitely ARE politicians who would like to use it. What makes you so sure that none of the politicians in power, or indeed any of the other actors involved, don't share that sentiment?
You are right. People are affected very differently by lockdown, and that creates (almost by definition) divergent viewpoints. The whole thing is exasperated by isolation from one another, making opposing viewpoints seem even more alien than usual. News and social media amplify the most obnoxious versions of any position, and we don't have normal contact with normal people to bring us back to earth.
That said, covid is being exploited, politically, by some very shady actors. We're already at a boiling point with social media's takeover of politics. We already failed to notice the dead canaries in more politically unstable countries. The arab spring, Myanmar. The hardest part is discerning the emergent malign effects of this from coordinated attacks... for which cambridge analytica is now emblematic.
It's quite literally a rage machine, and it is dangerous. The legitimate discussion have been hijacked. The point of many anti-lockdown movements, especially at this point, is the "movement" itself. Lockdown is going to go away. These movements are not.
The problem is that the article lazily conflates the usual alt-right attention seeker and 5G conspiracy types with some academics who have raised genuinely-held concerns about the costs vs benefits of the current approach.
It’s difficult to take these sort of articles seriously because “you are spreading disinformation” is a lot easier than a dispassionate analysis of the issue at hand.
Dispassion isn't hard, it just isn't as saucy... And people are passionate about this stuff. That's what they want.
These things are "conflated" in real life, not just in rhetoric and reporting... lazy or otherwise. That's kind of the point of this article. There is a ton of political power at stake here, and consolidation is how you win at politics.
Whether or not this article, the media, etc. give a fair shake to the (most rational/dispassionate version of) the opposing viewpoint is what.. it is what it is. The biggest reasons why a dispassionate opposition doesn't get much press is (a) the "ruling" version is the more relevant, practically, because it's in charge. and (b) the crazy version of the dissident position is saucier. This is true for both old and new media, just in different ways. There are also, obviously biases. But, we're also biased in our perceptions of bias. Bias is a mess... but I generally think we over-attribute to bias.
Anyway, the topic of this article actually is relevant. Covid/Lockdown and 2020 generally are massive multipliers for shady, exploitative attempts to acquire political power.
That has nothing to do with dispassionate analysis. It's all about channeling the passions that are already ignited. A lot of people got screwed by covid. A lot of shady cats want to channel those feelings into whatever their cause it.
Remember that lockdown/covid is temporary. Most of the actual political maneuvering is not actually about it anymore.
I guess it's a cliche to end with "the medium is the message." It's just so true here. None of these political actors care about the message (covid policies, good or bad). They care about the medium.
> genuinely-held concerns about the costs vs benefits
Very few of them are honestly saying "we should accept another few hundred thousand dead in order to keep the restaurants open". They're just lying about the costs.
The psychological cost of the lockdowns is starting to be significantly more than restaurants being closed. UK has more or less been locked down since last March (with minor interruptions).
We've had the worst of both worlds: the death toll is worse than Sweden, because the "lockdown" was so porous with so many exempt employers, so many people have been spreading it at work and school. But nonetheless we have the cost of lockdown.
There was a time not long back where people in London communted back to their families over Christmas. A lot of my friends on social media were ripping into them 'selfish c*ts, can't they see they are killing people?' The thing is we all live in a rural area where most of us have a nice remote job living in an area that means we can afford a house with a decent garden and a lot of us with young families at home. Whereas those in London have likely been sitting in a single room 'bedsit' going out of their mind from beingf stuck in the same four walls for hours everyday.
If the people originating and propagating this stuff know it to be false, or don’t care, or recklessly avoid checking it so they can deny culpability then yes, it very much is disinformation. They are responsible for what they are doing.
Yes a lot of people are suffering under the lockdown, but hundreds of thousands, millions, are dead or dying and health care workers are being driven to exhaustion and even suicide by the stress and emotional costs. These lies are stabbing them right in the back.
That's all fine and dandy, but that has nothing to do with spreading disinformation.
I can have compassion for those suffering worse than me, be it because they are on a ventilator, have to watch their business fall apart, missing a year of their precious childhood, whatever it may be without resorting to contrarian opinions, misinformation, and conspiracy theories.
Correct. Hence why misinformation is so insidious. It's throwing some 70% facts with some 20% distorted or misrepresented facts and some 10% bald-faced lies
Whoever thinks the "number of hospitalizations" is normal should be mandated to visit a Covid ward (no masks, of course). Put your money where your nose is.
Indeed, there exists a reasonable set of values under which the cost of lockdowns exceeds the benefit. The question of how to value death relative to happiness, freedom, and community is a worthy topic for debate.
But trying to win a debate about values by lying about the facts is not OK.
The problem is that no one's actually having the important debate about values. The emotional "grandma-killer" appeals started last March, and any remaining dissenters are dismissed as "a bunch of covid-deniers agree with you, so your argument is invalid." Nobody really wants to think about the price-tag they put on lives, so all that's left is disputing the evidence. It's like any time a country goes to war, really, except that there aren't any clear criteria for ever declaring it over.
Don't equate 'having a little empathy' with supporting or allowing these kinds of disinformation campaigns. Everybody has 'a little empathy', but these self-serving anti-vax anti-lockdown cronies deserve none of it.
Yes it's sad that people lose their jobs. But do you know what else is sad? if they would lose their lives :(
> This isn't disinformation.
It certainly is. Don't try to whitewash what's happening here. People know how trollfactories shape online discussion, and you're being very obvious.
Those legitimate views are in no way an excuse for the disinformation campaigns this article is about. The two cannot be compared just because they're directed at the same thing. One is honest debate, the other is vile society-undermining disinformation.
What about the damage of not having a functional healthcare system? The only reason that the death rate is so low is because people can get to hospital and get treatment. If we just let the thing rip then hospitals would have to start having policies of not providing care to people with covid-19, or we just say goodbye to the concept of emergency care in general.
Please don’t make out like my comment is some black and white anti lockdown comment. It’s not. It’s not saying let’s not lockdown. It’s saying there are serious consequences on the other end. That many people who still have their livelihoods and happiness dismiss as “misinformation”
Have you read the link? This is not about dismissing the genuine plight of people affected by the lockdown. This is about actual, literal, disinformation being spread.
We need to weigh the consequences of restrictions against the consequences of not having those restrictions, and this kind of disinformation is simply trying to tip the scales by diluting the factual basis on which we all make that assessment with lies.
One does not preclude the other. Governments should be obliged to cover 100% of the damage caused to businesses and employees by their measures. Instead of having businesses foot the government bills.
And why do you think this should be strictly a "government bill"? I think it's a lot more nuanced than that. One perspective would be to say this is a cost all of society needs to pay as a whole (in which case everyone simply pays it in taxes at the end) or you could say "we just require your business to behave in such a way that it doesn't end up killing people, you pay the cost for it". These are the extremes of course, but we need to figure out where we fall on that spectrum.
Because the government is the party deciding on the restrictions. If the government has to pay the price there’s a chance they’ll keep that part of the equation in mind.
If they can just brush it off by having others foot the bill, they’ll simply make the choice which minimizes the impact that can be directly attributed to them. Which definitely is not always the right choice.
It’s just so much easier to chant for safety whatever the costs if you don’t have to pay the bill.
Just to be clear, I think it's within the responsibility of the government to pay for much of the hardship incurred by lockdowns to help get society and the economy as a whole through it halfway intact; but I do not think that applies to _everything_.
Two examples: If a Business is closed due to lockdown - there should be government assistance to compensate. Buying masks for employees and changing interior layouts to allow for safer interactions, to comply with new regulations - cost of doing business.
This alone:
>Because the government is the party deciding on the restrictions.
is not a valid reason to me. We don't (or at least I don't) expect the government to pay for every impact of new environmental legislation either even though they ultimately pass the legislation.
You also can't begin to assess the financial and psychological damage of health care workers in constant burn out and businesses being forced to work on half- or quarter-measures because staff are off sick.
Or the damage to people who get Long Covid and have permanent health consequences.
Pleading for empathy might be more convincing with a more inclusive view of what's happening, and less heavy-handedly selective emotional rhetoric.
If we had culled the over 65s in March, the economy could function just fine, hospitals would be mostly empty, and while younger people would get covid and might even need hospital treatment, it would be a very low level. The IFR for 45-65s is 1 in 300, for 25-45s it's 1 in 3000, and 15-25s 1 in 30,000.
But that would be a barbaric approach.
The main beneficierays of lockdowns are the over 65s, who as a generation
1) Have the most wealth
2) Have no income
The main losers of lockdowns are the younger people who have
1) Very little wealth
2) Years of income to pay
The cost of lockdowns should therefore come from the beneficiaries, the ones who are the wealthiest, can afford it, and who benefit the most
The cost of lockdowns will actually come from government spending though, which is primarilly funded by income related tax
Fair. Not sure how tax works in america, but those types of income are taxed at a far lower rate (marginal tax on £1k being bunged at a £30k/year worker is 13.8% + 10.5% + 17.6% == 40%. It's 20% for £1k being bunged at a retiree drawing a £30k pension, or less if that income comes from dividends.)
And without having to pay rent, the outgoings are far lower too. Someone living on a net of £2k a month after £1500 a month rent would need £3500 net income and cost an employer £52k a year. Throw in student loans and commuting and you'd need even more.
Someone owning their house and getting a net of £2k a month would need just £26k a year of income, or even less if that was funded from dividends.
In the UK the older generation also voted for Brexit; so I am still surprised no one in politics made the argument for “let them then die during COVID as they didn’t seem to think about youth when they were voting for Brexit”.
That's because there's no comparison between letting old people die and young people having to get an EU passport... or whatever downsides Brexit will bring us.
Not all over 65s have lots of wealth. Those relying on the state pension, especially in council houses, have very little money. Now sure, when you have a situation where income drops 20% one year then increases 20% the year after, pensions shouldn't go +2%, +20%, but as a whole
Far better would be a windfall tax on the immense unearned wealth that many have had over the last 20 years, combined with a land value tax to correct housing costs and transfer planning gain away from the wealthy to the public.
Why is it that the duke of westminster, who owns 200ha of Mayfair (valued about £20b), pays nothing. A 1% LVT would cost a farmer with a 100 acre prime dairy farm in Cheshire £10k a year (less than tax paid to workers), a typical houseowner in London suburbs would pay £5k a year, not much more than council tax - and far less than house price inflation, and Grovesnor would pay £200m a year.
> hard-right politicians in the Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
It’s an interesting article, but there are no hard-right politicians in either of those parties, unless you consider everyone right of Tony Blair to be a borderline fascist.
They are, bizarrely, hard-right these days; they pivoted straight round the horseshoe in the mid-90s. Claire Fox is now a baroness, which tells you exactly how revolutionary or communist she is.
Under your definitions' it seems like being a nationalist (believing in the nation-state and sovereignty) & white supremacy are synonymous — which obviously they are not, unless you are suggesting all nationalists are racist or something.
Sorry, but, yeah censorship is against free speech. Free speech is what prevents radicalisation because left and right will be talking with each other. The only reason we're seeing this is because of the online censorship, which has been ramping up for years now.
Byline Times pretty much are, if I remember rightly, but they're disinformation in support of the correct political cause so they don't get all the frightened articles in the mainstream press.
Ah yes, the wildly viral and completely bogus conspiracy theory article from them I remember in particular was this: https://fullfact.org/economy/short-positions/ Which they kept on doubling down on after people pointed out their fuck-up, and which became part of the standard narrative on Brexit despite being utter bullshit.
I still don’t understand what people have to gain from this line of thought and applying your skills to promoting it. Surely it’s an evolutionary and career dead end?
Maybe they simply have an opinion, like everyone else does. Do you really not understand why people think this:?
"“Again, with my tinfoil conspiracy hat on, these things all distance us and isolate us from each other and make us easier to control I think.”"
Just look at the common ideas about the increased security after 9/11. It was similar "conspiracy theories" about the government using terrorism as an excuse to spy on people until Snowden showed they actually were. It used to be popular to use the quote "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.". Surely you can understand why some people feel that way?
It's OK to not be a conformist and it's good that we have people brave enough to do so openly.
I can understand why that is the case. But I have also buried two members of my family. So quite frankly they can fuck off.
There’s a compromise somewhere in the middle in the grey area which is actually the situation that we’re in despite it being explained as black and white but these nut cases.
We also in this case have to consider cultural differences. America is obsessed with a somewhat bent and selfish form of personal Liberty which ends up as another lever on which compromise is impossible. Liberty for the other person is their right not to be harmed by your liberty as well don’t forget. America just ends up ending up having a right to the highest body count.
Brexit and Trump-won were both driven by engines of disinformation. And there are plenty of other examples, from climate denial to examples that seem even more ridiculous today - like the smoking industry's campaign to pretend that smoking is safe and doesn't kill people.
If you trace the links you'll see the same names, the same organisations, and the same funding sources appearing again and again.
When someone lies consistently, it's irrational to conclude on the basis of no evidence at all that they've suddenly gone white hat and are now acting entirely in a public-spirited and wholly reputable way.
> Brexit and Trump-won were both driven by engines of disinformation.
Is that true or are you a victim of disinformation yourself? How do you know they would have lost had it not been for "engines of disinformation"? I'm not saying there wasn't disinformation used to promote them, but did they win because of it or despite it?
Trump's 4 year term is a convincing argument that people realised they'd been lied to. As is the rolling up of the people who stormed the capitol over disinformation.
Not sure what you mean by that. I'm pointing out that we don't know either Trump or Brexit won because of disinformation, yet people keep saying they did. I think that's because they've been fooled by disinformation themselves. The news and social media gives them a general feeling of causation but in reality, it's just a correlation.
People have more power when they form a group. And some will promote any conviction as long as it tips the scales in their favor. It's A/B testing driven politics.
A lot of it is motivated by libertarianism. They don’t like the idea that the Government can unilaterally impose a form of house arrest on the entire population while mandating what people wear(masks) and who they can meet. I don’t agree, but I don’t think it’s an entirely crazy position either.
I agree with mask mandates and commerce closures, but when the government starts making it illegal to meet my family, including outside and in own house, then that crosses a civil liberties line for me personally. A reasonable person could hold the opposite view. A reasonable person could hold the 'total lockdown' view. But if you hold the 'anti-lockdown' viewpoint you risk being told you have just been reading 'disinformation' these days. I don't see anti-lockdown as disinformation, that's a policy option.
I also don't see it as disinformation to believe that governments are utilising propaganda to either make Covid sound worse / better according to what fits their policy narrative - that's what governments do!
There is lots of genuine disinformation about Covid, but we have to be careful that we don't just brand opposing opinions as disinformation and fake news.
> The network is using tried and tested techniques of psychological propaganda to manipulate the public and cast pressure on governments. It has already arguably paved the way for more than 100,000 COVID-19 deaths in the UK – and will likely lead to many more.
Now ironically THIS is ACTUAL misinformation. To blame the 'network' for ALL Covid deaths in the UK is just ridiculous. I personally don't think the use of 'arguably' here absolves them from the fact the claim is clearly false.
And the position is multifaceted. I agree with the curfew but not with the business limitations, or at the very least not in the way they implemented it here trough a legislative decree, since the Italian Constitution is built around the right to work an has no exception for health issues.
Unless you can show that any such person exists, you're just making them up. Even if they do exist, what's wrong with being opposed to a government imposed dress code while also having your own personal preference for how you like people to dress?
You simply cannot even begin to asses the financial and psychological damage of every single waiter, or coffee shop barrista, dance artist, theatre actor, or god forbid business owner who might have spent decades building a business that is now bankrupt, sitting at home, with nothing to do, no one to speak to, doing what? Its well known in psychology that spending too much time alone basically makes you go crazy.
Look at the numbers on domestic abuse, drug abuse, mental health issues.
Have a little empathy. There are legitimate viewpoints about whether these lockdowns are worth it, and especially for how long. This isn't disinformation. It's just people who are different from you.