I’m not going to pretend I know the future or anything, but I will say that, while this is a common series of events, #4 can absolutely go two different ways. Everyone loves a good underdog story, but I also wouldn’t say that winning is the most common outcome.
A useless generalization which you could apply to a lot of things or people. First, they ignored Trump, then they mocked him, then they fought him, then he won.
The point is that this only works when the truth is on your side. “They” are understood to be the dominant/incumbent forces, but the truth eventually wins.
While your comment is needlessly inflammatory, you're right that this kind of behavior is considered "backwards escape" and is ultimately harmful towards the aims of dissenters. The right way to challenge totalitarianism is to build parallel structures (eg. stop supporting Windows by switching to Mac or Linux).
I am similarly annoyed by the "natural immunity" argument. Whether or not natural immunity is as effective as vaccination (it seems to be?), what I care about and oppose is having to prove medical status as part of daily life. As soon as you shift the argument away from "should we have to show a certificate" to "what gets you a certificate" or faking one, you've already conceded that it's ok to have to show one in the first place. It's not OK and I wish we spent more time on that.
I can’t help but wonder how badly the CCP is actually fighting to suppress this, though - I think I heard laowhy86 argue that they might allow it to consume the news cycle, to distract from something else.
Seeing this comment, and seeing e.g. CBS highlight the story, it really just seems fishy in general. Something is different - maybe we’re just in a new era, but who knows.
When weighing pphysch's media recommendations, consider that they apparently believe that applying Occam's Razor leads to the conclusion that "Washington media is blowing literally any scandal out of proportion in a propaganda blitz aimed at tarnishing Beijing 2022." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29344160
It is truly bizarre to me that someone who is taking a very pro-CCP stance will justify this with reference to propaganda that other nations create...it is really something. Every nation creates propaganda, every nation does not have media controlled by the state, every nation does not have massive propaganda departments that are present at all levels of society...they aren't equivalent, the only reason to draw the equivalence is because you understand that something is wrong but (for whatever reason) have to justify that to yourself by claiming everyone else is just as bad.
It is like the Communist criticism of democracy: oh, elections are all rigged by wealthy people anyway...said from a country with no elections and a one-party state. Ofc.
It is truly bizarre when people trick themselves into the paradox of "I don't trust Government 1 but I trust everything they or their crony media says about Government 2"
Something funny and illustrative about the PRC for me was getting into shortwave radio. Let me explain. Sometimes certain people will tell you that the CCP isn't so censorious, that it's all Western hyperbole and propaganda, that most other governments are equivalent. But then you spin your dial through the shortwave broadcast bands and, no exaggeration, every 6 broadcasts or so will be the CCP jamming another broadcast from Taiwan, the US, the UK or elsewhere. No other country on Earth, apart from NK and occasionally Cuba, treats its people with such contempt. And all this energy, literal and figurative, just for shortwave radio.
Just to play devil's advocate on that one, but maybe the Chinese understand the power of propaganda better than anyone and they don't want western propaganda disrupting their society?
What precisely does that entail? I could say that and then prevent you from hearing anything from the outside world, just keep you locked in a cellar. It's for your own good, I understand how the propaganda might affect your delicate mind.
My point is precisely that people in democracies are not forced to trust the govt. They don't have to trust the media, they are totally free. The only context in which your logic makes sense is one in which you believe the govt controls truth. You are living in a mental prison that you created.
Where is the "doublethink" in pointing out the paradox in distrusting your government yet trusting everything they say about a foreign government?
You do realize that "trusted" "unbiased" media outlets like the Reuters, AP, NYT, WaPo literally have State Department/Pentagon censors filtering any material that could be deemed sensitive to "national security"?
You are complaining about the State Department censoring news but imply that the CCP which literally controls all information isn't as bad? Again, you realise that the US being as bad as China doesn't make China good?
And, again, the doublethink is being unable to understand that the question of whether you have to trust government makes no sense in the US. You don't have to trust the govt, that is freedom. Indeed, the US govt is constructed on the principle of multiple sources of power so it doesn't even make sense to say that authority arises from one source, there are competing sources of power (ironically, this is what the CCP finds incomprehensible about the US). The US govt does not censor the internet, most of the news sources you cite are not "trusted", people are sceptical of the media, people are sceptical of the govt. The point I am making is that people are unable to sceptical in China because they have no choice, the question you are posing makes no sense in a US context.
Both Chinese and Americans are more or less equally propagandized, the difference is that the Americans don't know it.
In China you know that whatever is getting media traction has been de facto approved by the Party. In America you have virtually no idea which special interest group is currently lying to you through the media, and they will never be held accountable.
> Both Chinese and Americans are more or less equally propagandized
This implies that the US government has total control over all domestic news outlets, a great firewall that censors the national internet and helps to find and remove references to embarrassing government incidents, policy that requires all companies to hand over all user data to the state unencrypted without a warrant, and a social credit system that can prevent you from getting a job if you make negative comments about the government's policies.
I very much would like to see proof of these things, given that I can do internet searches for atrocities like the Tuskegee Experiment, I've never gotten in any sort of trouble for making negative comments about the government, and I can find many news sources that run extremely conspiratorial articles about the same.
...which you've provided exactly zero evidence for. Please provide concrete evidence of propaganda that's equal in magnitude to the things described above.
Otherwise, yes, it rather does imply, because there are very few things similar to the CCP's social credit system that have the same effect, and even fewer that could be deployed in the US without immediately being noticed.
Sinocism is the approximately the same level of quality as Jansen, Dumbrill, etc. That it caters to a particular crowd of liberal "China watchers", which you may be party to, does not make it higher quality.
Axios is also known for producing outright disinformation on China via zealots like Allen-Ebrahimian.
It is a radically nationalist pro-China forum to the point where they regularly push anti-US conspiracy theories and regular usage of words like "Amerikkka".
>It is a radically nationalist pro-China forum to the point where they regularly push anti-US conspiracy theories and regular usage of words like "Amerikkka".
The person you're replying to is an occasional poster to that subreddit, who surely knows this already
Lmao, HNers will eagerly doxx/dig up dirt on someone for a Gotcha moment but is offended by someone suggesting they validate propagandistic claims about a foreign country.
Honestly I have no recollection of ever visiting reddit Sino subreddit.
>Which means you're an active lurker there and saw his name often?
I guess what you're trying to ask me is "How do you know that?"?
But rather than trusting any more of my claims, I suggest that you simply visit Reddit and look: You will see exactly the same unusual user name; with the same interests as here in various diverse topics; and the same writing style
Really, I think the initial question about the OP's behavior on Reddit was intrusive and probably out of line in HN etiquette, and the OP could ignore it
But I commented because the OP did engage with that question, and lied. And also because you then replied to OP in good faith, not realizing that you were wasting your time by trying to help someone who is obviously being disingenuous
I think it's fair to call out people who are spreading disinformation. I see the same patterns among some posters here and on reddit.
The two commenters above recommended youtube channels that A. are very low quality, B. repeat state media talking points verbatim, and C. are made by people who don't even speak Chinese, so they don't actually understand what is actually happening around them in their daily lives.
TLDR: he didn't only not get paid, he refused payment. Plus the payment offer was not "we pay you to say this" but "we want to license your content for republication" and "we pay you a fee for the trouble of appearing on our show to give your independent opinions".
Dumbshill recently posted a clip of an old video of laowhy86, “exposing” him as a racist… which turned out to be taken extremely out of context and edited to be purposely misleading.
Hard to form an informative opinion when he released that AFTER he got exposed. It's possible that video is just him trying to save his skin. Just saying.
In addition there was a marked change in tone from when they were in China.
I subscribed and enjoyed that content and the two Exploring documentaries. Really good content.
When they left China it started to sound like highly personalized hate speech. I initially assumed that it was because they were upset at having their livelihoods up-ended and a sense of rejection. But... initially they had great plans for wide-ranging travel documentaries which did not seem to pan out ... so it seems like the next-best thing is Five Minutes Hate against our enemies in East Asia.
Sad to see them degenerate, but not living there now they are not much of a source of information.
> bitcoin is a meme token for gambling on a fantasy about living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
Ok, thanks.
> It’s a scary but essential truth to realise that normal software engineers like us are an integral part of society’s immune system against the enormous moral hazard of technology-hyped asset bubbles metastasizing into systemic risk.
This sure sounds like “a fantasy about living in a cyberpunk dystopia” too. Maybe the author should diversify a little into Bitcoin, and relax.
So at this point, we have now seen legitimate questions raised about both the benefits and the risks involved with this stuff.
I can still totally understand anyone who decides the risk is worth it for themselves or their understanding of “the greater good”, but forcing this choice on others is becoming less and less tenable of a position.
At this point people are too far invested in the vaccine both mentally and financially. First, many people simply cannot admit when they were wrong. If you were quick to get vaccinated, and then later found out that people who are vaccinated are still contracting, spreading and dying from the virus after being vaccinated; it takes a lot to say, hey... maybe the vaccine helped me, but this isn't the solution that is going to get everyone back to normal like I was told.
Many people were very much against the vaccine when Trump was President, saying it was rushed, that they wouldn't get the Trump vaccine; but once Biden was promoting it, then suddenly it is fine again. People want this type of flip flopping to go unnoticed, to simply rewrite history and hope that people have the attention span of a goldfish.
Never have we mandated flu shots, and they are only 40 to 60% effective. I see the COVID vaccine in a similar boat, we can never plan for or protect against all the variants. If I was 65 years old I'd be getting the flu vaccine. However, if you're healthy it doesn't make as much sense. Sure, if you want it, you can get it but telling people that they'll be fired for not getting it is ridiculous.
The OSHA rules is because of an emergency that they've known about for how long, and now they are delaying it until after Christmas? So much of an emergency, that they don't want it to impact Christmas workers. It is all BS.
> If you were quick to get vaccinated, and then later found out that people who are vaccinated are still contracting, spreading and dying from the virus after being vaccinated
Deniers like you see this and conclude that the vaccine as useful as salt water. Studies show there's less chance of contracing, spreading and dying with the vaccine than without.
People still die in car accidents even though modern cars have ABS and airbags, so, maybe car manufacturers should just get rid of those things and sell cheaper cars, right?
> People still die in car accidents even though modern cars have ABS and airbags, so, maybe car manufacturers should just get rid of those things and sell cheaper cars, right?
Should we just tell people to stop driving cars since they can cause accidents? I guess we should ban alcohol and cigarettes as well since they are a public health concern?
Car crashes and alcoholism aren't spreadable by breathing, the bad effects of alcoholism and cigarettes on other humans are less deadly than Covid.
You're denying that the vaccine actually works. I take it you aren't arguing my point that it's a lot better than saline, since you didn't mention it in your response.
We don't live in a comic world - things aren't black and white. People die from the virus with or without vaccination - what matters is how many.
> Never have we mandated flu shots
Flu shots are already mandatory in many countries for many professions, e.g. in the US military. Should we encounter a pandemic strain with similar IFR as SARS-Cov-2 in the future (and the likelihood of that happening in the next 100 years is very high) I'm certain we will see mandates.
Even the Flu shot, its not very clear that it actually does work, and is not just a statistical effect of selection bias. The people most likely to take the flue shot are already from a subgroup that cares more about their health, if you add in young and healthy people in the military it skews things even more. Sure you can show that the group that took the flue shot died less.
But its mostly a statistical effect. The sickest people and the ones that are near death already, or neglect their health are the most at risk of dying from the flue. They're also the group that will not take the flue shot, or will not be prescribed.
Its easy to convince yourself that cheering for your team has an effect on how well they play.
The companies doing the research also have financial incentive to show that it works.
But honestly, mandating a half walk everyday, will probably be more beneficial to the US population than any flue or covid vaccine. Since both diseases are so tied to BMI, weight and its complications like diabetes.
This right here. Mandates are hypocritical and people are supposed to blindly accept that. It is hard to even bring it up in certain circle without automatically labeled a right-wing anti-vaxer Nazi who deserves to die.
> People die from the virus with or without vaccination - what matters is how many.
The narrative is constantly shifting. Government health agencies move goalposts faster than QAnon. We were told we could go back to normal with vaccines, and it simply isn't true. COVID isn't going away. A vaccine doesn't mean you still can't contract, spread and die from the virus. It is almost cynical at this point seeing Biden walking around without a mask, and other politicians in large groups without them until the cameras turn towards them and then they put them on.
IMO almost all the restrictions have been in vain, and so those that were quick to get the vaccine after Biden pushed for it now just blame the people that didn't get it. Now we're being told that getting a vaccine only helps improve things marginally, but that they are still uncertain. Recent reports have even shown that more people are dying that are vaccinated than those that aren't. Statistics have always been pretty easy to manipulate. Remember when we were told that Hillary had a 98% chance of winning? Or Biden thought that Virginia was an easy win?
Not all of the vaccines are affected by the questions this paper raises. The mRNA vaccines aren't affected, only the adenovirus vector vaccines are.
If you're concerned about the spike protein because of this paper, it's still best to vaccinated. The 4 adenovirus vector vaccines will still give you less exposure, but taking one of the others will completely avoid it. (And if you get exposed after vaccination you'll have extremely minimal exposure to the spike protein compared to if you were unvaccinated)
As a public health analysis, there is still a tradeoff between exposure of the population directly to the full spike protein vs in a more constrained vaccine. Especially if, as most governments and economic policies have decided that they are more or less going to forego the bulk of systematic non-medical social measures to protect public health.
And as the paper itself suggests - an even more focused approach to vaccines could be used.
Going forward, pretty much everyone is either going to get infected or get vaccinated. There's no 'risk' of exposure, it's pretty much inevitable. On average, people that get vaccinated will be exposed to much, much, much less spike protein than those that get infected. So if you are concerned about exposure to spike protein, vaccination is a good course of action...
The right response is not “no, your concerns are actually illegitimate.”
That direction only ends in war, because you will discover that I don’t care whether you agree with my choices, and I am 100% ready to die over them. Are you?
I didn't say your concerns were illegitimate, I said your analysis was insufficient.
Being concerned about exposure to spike proteins is fine, whatever. Infection results in far more exposure to those proteins and is basically inevitable for people that aren't vaccinated, so any analysis of the risk of vaccination needs to include that context, the risk due to infection (which is as I have said, is essentially a 100% chance of a larger exposure to the spike protein).
I'm not going anywhere, I was just pointing out that your analysis was incomplete, and tacked on the obvious extension of it, where natural infection results in much higher exposure to spike protein than vaccination.
You either misunderstood or ignored the point I was trying to make, and filled in some additional details about risk... to what end?
None of this is relevant to the conversation, unless your goal is to imply (without actually claiming) that the risk/reward is in fact robustly understood, and that the choices made by the out-group are indefensible?
> My good faith expired around week twelve of the original two weeks.
This is a non sequitur. Someone was responding to you specifically about spike proteins and was demonstrating why your assumption was based on some incomplete understanding.
Why talk about the two weeks thing?
If you're frustrated about covid, well ... join the club. It includes literally everyone.
We're not frustrated about covid. Covid is not a threat of any significance. It never was. The threat, from the beginning, is the absurd hysteria around it.
It strikes me that a lot of people died from something that's no threat.
If instead you mean little (not no) threat to you, sure. If you mean the response was not commensurate with the threat, you might be able to make that case.
But not a threat? Sorry. Once you know someone in their late 30s with no comorbidities who dies from this your perspective changes a bit.
To be honest I find the histrionics about this horrible, draconian fascist response a bit ludicrous.
At this point, it looks as though maintaining the vaccines' very marginal protection against SARS-CoV-2 requires biannual dosing with more spike-generating booster doses. Even in this case, the protection is marginal. While the vaccinated may clear the virus from a breakthrough infection more quickly, the peak viral loads are about the same.
There's also the question of biodistribution. Do the spikes from the vaccine wind up in more sensitive, easily damaged cells than the ones which occur from a SARS-CoV-2 infection? Anecdotally, most of my close contacts who were vaccinated spent more time out of commission and had a far worse time than I did with COVID (although I did start treatment early on the second day of symptoms with the FLCCC ivermectin protocol). Theoretically all the vaccine is doing is creating a bunch of spike protein -- if the dose is so much lower why does it affect people so much more?
I still see so much discussion premised on the idea that there is still some tradeoff to be made between mutually exclusive outcomes of "get vaccinated" or "get infected" and it's simply not the case.
Having had 3 doses (I'm overweight, they offered me a 3rd shot at a recent appointment), I had about 6 hours of mild fatigue so far from the vaccines (a day after the 2nd shot). Par for the course for anyone I've talked to about it, with some people having more like a day of fatigue.
Many fewer vaccinated people are getting infected than unvaccinated, so the comparison between people that do get infected isn't the whole story.
Many fewer vaccinated people are getting infected than unvaccinated
I think the data is showing that isn't true, that the numbers are nearly equal in places with a high percentage of the population vaccinated. The only benefit is that the vaccinated don't get as severely ill.
These numbers don't pass the smell test, it's just more nonsense being pumped out by the CDC to push the vaccines, probably in large part an artifact of wildly different levels of testing being done with the unvaccinated vs vaccinated.
In the UK every age group over 30 is seeing a higher case rate in the vaccinated. I think this is probably explained by a higher prevalence of natural immunity in the unvaccinated cohort but it also shows the vaccines are not providing a high level of prevention of infection: https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/ukhsa-efficacy-stats-death-...
Do you use the same rigor in information gathering in developing all of your opinions as you used in developing your opinion about my approach to COVID?
I'm not sure which claim of mine you are asserting is "not true" since my post was about case rates and the graph in your link depicts deaths.
As far as the cases go the eugyppius post deals with all the supposed caveats and speculations raised in your fact check link. Very funny how they only get raised when the reported case rates are higher in the vaccinated, and not when it was time to kvetch about a "pandemic of the unvaccinated."
It even supports my natural immunity theory at one point:
> Plus, COVID-19 infections among the unvaccinated in the prior four-week reporting period may be “artificially reducing” the case rate for that group in the latest report.
None of these gymnastics would be necessary if the vaccines were genuinely preventing infections at a rate of 6x.
My father is an extremely high risk individual who was vaccinated and then ended up having a breakthrough infection. I highly doubt he would be alive today if he had not been vaccinated.
My mother-in-law who was in her early 60s and healthy suffered a severe adverse event from her second Pfizer shot. 3 hours after receiving the second shot she went into cardiac arrest in the midst of a fever. This adverse event ended up not being reported to the CDC due to a bureaucratic error at the hospital. No conspiracy or anything it's just a 30 minute process to enter the event into the VAERS system and there's no penalty for not doing it. Translation most physicians put it on a list of to-do items and then forget to get to it.
So the lack of nuance in your analysis has to do with where the spike proteins are in the body in a natural infection versus with an mRNA vaccine.
The study is specifically talking about spike proteins in the nucleus of cells. That is not something that occurs with natural infection.
I'm not against the vaccine. I caught the virus before I was eligible and it's not a great way to get immunized compared to a well-designed vaccine. For older folks or people who are at higher risk it's a deadly way to get immunized versus getting vaccinated.
That being said it's important to note that this vaccine is not going to be the final one. It obviously has design flaws that could only have been discovered after a lengthy period of time. It appears based on studies like this one that the full spike protein is not a great payload. One of the reasons there are so many breakthrough infections is because the immune system doesn't even develop antibodies to the entire spike protein. It instead focuses on individual components of it which are not as evolutionary expensive to discard for new variants of the virus.
They will be able to develop a new MRNA vaccine that creates a much more targeted spike protein payload that will likely have far fewer side effects in the long term. That's my crappy analysis on this anyway.
People with reduced immune function benefit from reduced disease prevalence, it's pretty straightforward.
For example it's not great that some older folks will inevitably die of COVID over the next 20 years, but it's better than just letting happen over the next 12 months.
Those people are already getting their second or third boosters. What makes you think it would take 20 years for them to get it instead of inside of a year? Covid is highly infectious and spreads easily in spite of mass vaccinations. Getting vaccinated and boosted up is all you can do and even then if you're in a high risk demographic you can still die.
Since the vaccines have been shown to reduce severity of the disease, they will result is less load on medical services. I believe that is the only legitimate reason for mandates.
>On average, people that get vaccinated will be exposed to much, much, much less spike protein than those that get infected
Except unlike a natural infection with a gradual ramp up, the vaccine is effectively an immediate megadose of an inflammatory and apparently potentially mutagenic protein. Blindly presuming that the vaccine is preferable to natural immunity from infection is, frankly, dangerous.
In addition, during the course of a natural infection, your cells are producing the full, assembled virus from the full viral genome. With the vaccine your cells are producing a single inflammatory protein which then embeds itself in the surfaces of your own cells, producing an autoimmune response in effect. Given the hysteresis of the human immune system there is a nonzero risk of semipermanent to permanent autoimmune effects/disorders. And obviously a side effect like a subtle autoimmune disorder would be extremely difficult to detect in such a short time scale, doubly so if clinicians and researchers are not actively looking for evidence. Just diagnosing known autoimmune disorders can take years...and there's no guarantee that such a side effect would manifest in the near term.
Two years in and the danger of COVID in healthy people, as in complication rate, has clearly been overstated. Ask yourself, if it weren't for news reports, would you even be aware from your day to day life that we are still in the midst of a pandemic? If the answer is no, then mandating an experimental vaccine, based on an untested technology, for what amounts to a bad flu, is unjustifiable.
Edit: and on top of all that, considering that the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild, there's no reason to suspect that the total exposure of someone who builds natural immunity will produce a comparable exposure to spike proteins. Not to mention the assertion that everyone eventually will be exposed is also unfounded, and likely does not apply to rural populations.
To me, the answer is, sadly - yes. The record of infections per day is being broken daily where I live, and in the past week alone I've lost good family friends and a neighbor. If I had to go from my anecdotal data I would say that it's at its worst right now. What I can also say about that is 3 people that died weren't vaccinated and one person was vaccinated by an EpiVacCorona shot, she sadly burned up in a week. The effectiveness of EpiVacCorona is still not proven to this day, despite being authorized.
The difference is that Syria is thousands of miles away and poses no threat to you, unlike a supposedly deadly pandemic.
>Also the Pfizer vaccine's been approved, it's no longer 'experimental
This is dishonest. The fact that a political machine suspended due process and rushed a politically and financially motivated approval does not imply that the vaccine is no longer experimental. We still don't even know how well or for how long it works, judging by the rapidly falling efficacy numbers over time. In addition to the paradoxical statistics showing record cases in the most highly vaccinated countries.
It took five years for the mutagenicity of thalidomide to be discovered, but not before causing severe birth defects in thousands of children. Meanwhile we've just given the green light to billions of doses with absolutely no medium or long term safety data, in a political climate where questioning vaccine safety/efficacy is social and career suicide. Practically asking for trouble under such circumstances.
The question of whether the vaccines are experimental does not hinge upon the proclamations of a captured regulatory agency with a revolving door to the companies it's regulating. They have approved an experimental vaccine.
Not only that, but you can't actually get the approved Comirnaty version of the Pfizer shots. The "legally distinct" EUA injections are still the only ones available. The FDA's "approval" is a bait-and-switch.
No "they" are forcing us to be part of a human experiment.
It doesn't matter that what I eat, or the fact that I drive a car, or other medication I take is several orders of magnitude more risky than getting vaccinated. I just don't want others to decide what's good for me.
When you eat, others have likely decided what's good for you - the meat is probably USDA inspected, the grain subject to requirements on maximum levels of rodent and insect bits, etc. When you drive, others have decided crumple zones, air bags, brake lights, and other such things are good for you.
2. They mock you
3. They fight you <- You are here
4. You win!