I found a fun illustration of my theory that American attitudes toward coronaplague are primarily religious. Two physicians in California would ordinarily have been celebrated as heroic “frontline” workers. But then they made heretical statements in a YouTube video, e.g., that the death rate from Covid-19 was about the same as for a bad influenza (what the former chief scientist of the European CDC estimated as well) and that shutting down society and the economy was irrational.
YouTube cast out the heretics, which didn’t surprise me, but sampling the hour-long video (still available on the web site of the doctors’ local ABC broadcast(!) TV station), I was surprised at how mild-mannered the doctors are.
The efforts that elite Americans, such as the executives at Google/YouTube, are making to suppress heresy, all the while claiming that their religious beliefs are based on “science”, would be comical if not for the high stakes in terms of lives. Astronomers don’t spend a lot of effort trying to remove astrology videos from YouTube. People don’t feel that astronomy is threatened to the point that they post on Facebook #BelieveAstronomy and #RejectAstrology.
Related:
- Noam Chomsky figured much of this out in 1988 with Manufacturing Consent (but it is still interesting to see how privately owned media can serve as an official propaganda outlet for the elites in a 21st century context!)
- https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/08/07/casting-out-the-heretic-at-google/ (a guy who liked his job sitting alone and staring at a screen was cast out for saying that it was mostly guys, rather than women, who wanted a job sitting alone and staring at a screen)
Nobody has ever explained to me why our first amendment rights have been canceled.
Since when is YouTube the government?
Looking at the video, they sound professional, and it looks like they are basing their recommendations on numbers. Although looking more into the background it looks like they could have a financial motive.
Somebody put an argument against their numbers,
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1254481543759683584
So who it correct, the heretics or Bergstrom?
The heretics are also not calling for opening everything at once, they are calling for gradual opening and lots of testing. Also they talked about comorbidity. Looking at the numbers 340 positive, out of 9197 tests, population of around 900,000. There is definitely some bias, as this is not a random sample. How many are dead?
I would say the better argument (vs their numbers) that the heretics made is looking at the numbers between Norway and Sweden.
Professor Johan Giesecke makes a better argument, and he most likely has less bias, i.e. his pay cheque does not depend on closing or opening the economy.
We will hopefully have more numbers in the next month or two. Unfortunately there is such a political bias that you have to question if the official numbers released will be adjusted to fit a certain political point of view.
Comparing US (opening up more quickly) and Canada (opening more slowly).
Comparing Norway (shutdown) and Sweden (open).
Will be very interesting in the next month or two.
Obama always says if you like foreigners meddling in our election you can keep them! Stay warm Pavel!
Pavel: I don’t doubt that, to the extent the doctors talk about anything outside of their direct personal experience, some of what they say might be wrong. But astrologers are also often wrong and yet people who believe in the “science” of astronomy don’t feel so threatened by what astrologers are saying that they need to pick through each astrologer’s video and then decide which to ban.
What’s interesting to me is that people predicted that the Internet would be a place where everyone’s perspective could be aired and this is a great example of how that prediction was false.
Has there ever been a greater outbreak of mass hysteria? And not just hysteria but, as you observe, one with a quasi-religious fervor about it. The believers denounce and deride what should logically be welcome news, however well-founded, and eagerly accept what should be bad news, however tentative or doubtful. This is a huge historic disaster, and not inflicted by a rather ordinary respiratory virus but by ourselves.
The most ominous feature I think is the general compliance among the public. Fervor is not confined to elites; millions of the little people want to show their piety in the faith. The authorities in dozens of countries have found that they can order the public to march off an economic and healthcare cliff and the public will, by and large, obey. If it’s so easy to make them accept such huge sacrifices, what else can be extracted from them? No doubt creative minds are at work on that question.
Yup:
https://medium.com/@phoenix_goodman/america-is-about-to-have-an-overdue-political-party-realignment-cb0c7bb87cc7
You’re going to be living in constant surveillance, in a state of constant readiness for lockdown, accepting scraps from the Chinese, amid a country run by the far Left, your guns taken from you by executive order as a public health measure, in a society that has collapsed. CNN soft-pedals the political aspects but they’re on the case of the neverending lockdowns:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/03/health/coronavirus-vaccine-never-developed-intl/index.html
“Cities would slowly open and some freedoms will be returned, but on a short leash, if experts’ recommendations are followed. Testing and physical tracing will become part of our lives in the short term, but in many countries, an abrupt instruction to self-isolate could come at any time. ”
“And lockdowns, many of which are in the process of gradually being lifted, could return at any moment. “From time to time there will be outbreaks, movement will be restricted — and that may apply to parts of a country, or it may even apply to a whole country,” Nabarro says.”
You’ll get “some freedoms!” On a short leash.
COVID-19 Church of Shutdown is already a Climate Change issue. People who object to either object to both. They’re Super Heretics. That is why Barack Obama made sure to connect the two, and his lead was dutifully followed, from Thomas Friedman to Greta Thunberg to the ads. taken out in The Hill and elsewhere. The destruction of the “old economy” will be portrayed as not just necessary to prevent deaths due to COVID-19, but also to save the planet.
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/493682-earth-day-marks-the-meeting-of-covid-19-and-climate-change
Seems you are raising at least two points — first whether youtube is censoring good or at least debatable science and second whether elites for their own reasons are promoting bad science. As for the first issue, the point of view of these doctors seems about the same as the two Stanford MDs and PhDs, Drs Ionnidis and Battacharya and the last time i check those videos were still on line. So it appears that youtube is not censoring this point of view. As for the second point, it seems that the elites enjoy their new found power and enjoy telling their fellow citizens what is best for them and trying to drown out other points of view. So here in NYC the Schools Chancellor (whose biggest accomplishment so far has been cracking down on racism in the 84% minority NYC public school system) has said it is a 50/50 chance whether the schools will reopen in September — the issue is supposedly safety notwithstanding that there is no evidence that keeping schools open promotes the disease and probably keeping schools closed promotes ignorance and stupidity. The upshot of this will be that any parent with children who is able to leave is now making plans to leave since it would be foolish to wait till September and see what happens then. This will likely increase the minority proportion of the NYC school system and academic underperformance — and give the authorities even more racism to combat.
@Philg: I daresay that if you tried to publish this blog exclusively on Facebook you would have already been flagged and censored, and probably deplatformed, for your heretical views.
Someone on a Deplorable discussion forum I frequent came up with the following wisdom about this: “An idiot with a “censor” button is infinitely more dangerous than an idiot with a “post” button.”