Thanks for taking the time to consider my post and questions.
@nice gaijin That is a reason, I agree. But the one I would have put forth is that I used the word "suppressed" and the grammar that must go around it. Of course, I had no genuine choice in the matter. If I had instead asked "Was the discussion fair, open and balanced?" it would include the idea of suppression but also much more and my specific queston could never be answered. It is both interesting and sad the way language contrains discussion to travel in mistaken and unintended directions, often making it impossible to present neutrality. For example, if I say "speed" we don't think of the scale or spectrum of speed, we think "fast".....like "He was traveling at speed." But I digress.
As you say yes presuppositions are strong and in the face of new evidence, opinions rarely change. But what irks is the simple fact of how little anyone knew or even knows for sure, yet they gripped hard to certain conclusions or "best of our knowledge" as facts.
To answer your questions.
1. Yes, even my limited social life was affected negatively. Game nights were cancelled. Year end meetups were never scheduled. Any cough or slight headache meant my son was forbidden to come visit.
2. Yes I felt censored online. Emotions ran high and its easier to bend to the majority and their foolishness than to the reason of the minority. People very often foolishly mistake my doubting and questioning for me having run to the opposing camp. And its just too inexcusable for me to molly coddle someone for doing that.
I faced excessive downvotes. I was called names. And if I responded in kind I was temp banned and had posts removed.
3. Yes I had unpopular opinions in places that become echo chambers. But I was also accused of holding unpopular opinions simply for questioning or expressing doubts. To express these things invited dog-piling upon me, and the easy answer for the admin becomes to just remove me and have harmony again.....as if Covid is as insignificant as a soccer match....while also holding that its vitally important....and their inability to choose which somehow becomes my fault.
4. Early on I was sure it was a lab leak. Not every city has a large virology lab in it, particularly not one performing gain of function specifically on corona viruses. Many virologists were against such methods, one describing it as looking for a gas leak in the dark by using a lit match. China is in general not known for strict adherence to proceedure. Minimal searches linked names such as Peter Daszak and Anthony Fauci to funding of the lab to do research others refused to do. And the press was telling us crazy things like it came from the food market even though such viruses jumping from animal to human is already rare, but then instantly jumping from human to human after with no evolutionary phase is practically a unicorn....which is why bird flu isn't circulating like that....its mostly chicken farmers with high virual loads.
The Indian press just straight calls it the "Wuhan Virus". Our press won't and the only pretty answer is that they want to escape from potential xenophobia...but most reasons I see look more like damage control.
5. Narratives? I don't follow narratives.
When Covid first hit the news I thought it would be gone by spring. Why not? I thought it was naturally occuring evolution of a corona virus. But as soon as i started getting information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that changed everything. Then it became a question of it was merely gain of functioned, engineered or both. Well, talk of the lab leak itself was suppressed, so details of what went on in the lab could not even be started. Well now it seems that maybe furin cleavage sites were grafted in and that explains why it hit the ground running going from human to human with no evolutionary phase.
And here I will repeat "seems like" and "maybe". Cause it "seems like" this sort of information is suppressed, so I can't be sure. But the idea of this being naturally occuring, even with people just being sloppy and careless seems pretty far-fetched.
And all this takes us down into a deep dark rabbit hole. I appreciate that. And its not fun. Its inconvenient. Its convoluted. Its dark. And it has no easy explanations. So I understand why people don't wish to even think along these lines. And you know what? That's fine. Anyone can just throw up their hands and say "I can't even deal with all this, so I remove myself from the discussion." But they don't do that. Instead they lash out and call people crazy for trying to sort it out. And then I get mad. I am not crazy for being willing to sift through complex information to find the truth. And if people are too lazy to, they could at least have the courage to just admit that and move on without Parthian shots.
You make a very good point about harm reduction. Mitigation was the best anyone could hope for. However, it seemed to me that most countries leaned more toward "zero covid" with things like lock-downs and vaccine mandates. Personally, I feel the attempt to suppress information was the very root of dissent. For example, Spotify forcing Joe Rogan to remove some of his podcasts. Its another topic, but that should not even be legal, and this mess shows why if you ask me.
The simple answer to many different voices and narratives is for some to receive endorsements. There is no need to delete anything from the internet or even give negative reviews. A system could exist where the CDC and others could put endorsement stamps on web pages and videos. Then: watch Joe Rogan. Did the CDC endorse it? No? Okay, for you that means its rubbish. Fine. Move on.
Yes, trust in officialdom is at a serious low. But I definitely don't feel that is because of misinformation. It is in fact, because of the truth getting out more.
The simple answer is that officialdom has to stop lying to us.
I mean, you say you don't follow narratives, but it certainly sounds like you've got your mind made up on some things, and perhaps even the resistance you got when you started asking certain questions drove you further in that direction; they wouldn't be trying to suppress it so much if it simply weren't true, right? I must be on the right track. Let all the narratives air out because
surely the average person will be able to parse what's true or not... right?
well, I have terrible news... when you hold up a thousand lies and a truth, a majority of the population will not pick the right truth. Almost everyone will be wrong, and convinced they picked the truth, because it sounded right to them.
In my earlier post I was pointing out that the wording of your questions named specific topics that suggested right away what your beliefs might be, which in itself can chill peoples' enthusiasm to engage at all. Like you said, you started getting pigeonholed for just asking questions about where covid came from, I think that's because people are sick of being told who to be angry at; the end result of all this talk about where covid came from has
always been violence. Not one person has been healed because some intrepid virologist or team of scientists reverse-engineered the virus to establish its origins or tracked down the patient zero bat to find a cure or whatever. But
PLENTY of people have been attacked just for
LOOKING CHINESE these past few years as a direct result of anger over covid. Part of "harm reduction" involves not boosting vocabulary that gives racists an excuse to act on their malformed world views, catching truly innocent people in the crossfire.
I remember when the debate over covid's origins burned much hotter, and even then I knew that it was too late for that knowledge to make any difference to the people who were already getting sick and dying in my country. All it did was focus anger that had been seething.
I didn't look this up, this literally just popped up in my newsfeed as I was writing this:
Indiana bus passenger, 56, is charged with attempted murder 'after she repeatedly stabbed female student, 18, in head for being Asian'
An 18-year-old student at Indiana University was hospitalized after being repeatedly stabbed on a bus near the university's campus. The incident occurred when an Asian student was getting off.
www.dailymail.co.uk
No word on motive, but you think the assailant maybe had access to the internet? You think she maybe read some upsetting things on facebook, or twitter, or truth social, or telegram, or whatever flavor poison her phone comes in? You think maybe she stewed in that hatred and anger, not being able to go to the movies or get her hair done or eat at the Applebees in Bloomington, or maybe she had lost loved ones to the pandemic, and when she saw an asian person she poured all that hate and anger into them? Maybe not in this particular instance, but there have been tons of cases like that and you
don't (1) have (2) to (3) look (4) far (5). Those aren't just bruises, either.
In some places around the world, if you'll recall, foreigners and tourists were suddenly avoided and viewed with suspicion, because they were perceived (sometimes accurately) to be bringing illness with them. By then it was too late for travel bans to be any help, but the xenophobes jumped on that one. Trump bungled his way into a catastrophic travel ban that caused mass panic and crowded airports (great for a pandemic) as Americans scrambled to get home before they were told they were exempt. Korea made some major blunders in their forced testing for foreigners, as if the virus cares who it infects. These are some truly dumb responses, but worlds apart from attacking someone because you felt like their entire ethnicity was responsible for unleashing this virus. Not just Chinese people, but Asian-looking people everywhere bore the brunt of that. Let us not forget that.
I've tried to lend an ear to all the theories surrounding covid and honestly it's quite exhausting. I think some people are less interested in what's the most likely course of events and choose to build their own version that gives them license to be angry at whomever they want, whether it's the Chinese, WHO, Anthony Fauci, big pharma, the CIA, Bill Gates, Ukraine, Barack Obama, George Soros, the "Davos crowd," the World Economic Forum, Hunter Biden's Laptop, or whatever.
- Could someone at a research facility have accidentally introduced something they were studying into the population? hm, maybe. sounds plausible, especially if there's research on that specific strain in evidence.
- Could it have actually started earlier elsewhere and it was only first detected and identified in Wuhan? There are all kinds of reports from before 2020 that could suggest so, but what to believe? Who even keeps track of what's been debunked anymore, and that's if you believe in fact-checking, since that's now apparently optional.
- There was a "wet market" in the vicinity, could it have come from exotic meat? It seems more far-fetched but meat contamination in an open market isn't unheard of and there are tons of zoonotic diseases; Ebola is thought to have come from bush meat (specifically, bats).
- Could the Chinese government, at the behest of Tony Fauci, have been building an uber virus to...i don't even know what the supposed intent is, kill people who haven't been to Epstein's island?...then releases it within spitting distance of their research facility? What kind of power develops a weapon without a failsafe and then unleashes it on their own people so they can slowly engulf the planet in a pandemic that easily traces back to them, and after very openly oppressing their people they fail in their response to the outbreak? That's monumentally stupid, and I feel stupid just for writing it.
- Did big pharma have a hand in creating the virus so they could sell vaccines? There seems to be plenty of less-convoluted and genocidal ways to make a buttload of money in pharmaceuticals. The people saying stuff like this were also downplaying the severity of the disease, or saying that the vaccine was somehow worse... or get this, the REAL weapon! Even M. Night Shyamalan couldn't see that twist coming!
That we were due for a pandemic and that it would probably be a coronavirus was not a surprise to pretty much anyone in the field. Bill Gates and Barack Obama had spoken extensively about the importance of combating disease around the world and preparing for pandemics; there was a pandemic response task force set up specifically to address this very situation, which Trump had dissolved when he came into office. Who knows how many lives could have been saved if we were more vigilant, or a little less short-sighted... But instead some folks will just vilify Gates and Obama and tweet from their phones about how they were actually telling us about the pandemic they were planning, so they could inject us with 5g nanobots to track us. SIGH.
Cognitive dissonance does weird things.
See, you might see it as just asking questions, but we see where these questions can and often do lead... and those of us who've paid attention are traumatized, like radiation exposure to this toxic pile of a thousand lies, an out-of-tune choir of self-proclaimed scientists or prophets squawking at full volume about how their version of events is the only true one, that they've finally identified who the enemy really is. "Join my substack or patreon to find out more of the truth tHEy don't want you to know!"
In the end, for there to be intent behind covid, or coordinated efforts to squelch certain theories, you have to have a conspiracy of pretty epic proportions, and that brings us to a pretty deeply entrenched narrative that is BRIMMING with recycled hate of all kinds. In my most generous interpretation, a lot of people trading in conspiracy theories are hopefully unaware of how much garbage they're spouting straight from the protocols of the elders of zion. Every supposition of guilt moves us closer to targeting
some group because we're convinced that they have truly monstrously evil intent. Because the reality that humanity has culminated in such tepid failure to solve our problems is so pathetically
pedestrian that we will entertain the wildest James Bond villain fever dreams the internet can cook up.
I guess the question then is: what do any of our opinions matter. Everything above is just my speculation, and what credibility do I deserve just because I'm confident in my world view? As
@mdchachi pointed out, we're just a bunch of randos on the internet, each with our own unique experience of the world and perception of what goes on in it, completely failing to convince each other of anything.
Put another way, even if your theory pans out, does calling it "Wuhan virus" or "China virus" feel more accurate or appropriate to you than Coronavirus Covid-19 delta/omicron/BA.# variant? Do you wish more people were saying "kung flu?"
because nuance is for anarchists.
