> Well, the banks are controlled by and in bed with the same cabal buying everything up. You think this will be corrected by market forces when it is a financial and political pincher movement pushed by the same cabal that stole the 2020 election & hid COVID Truth?
You are fucked.
IMO, weakens the entire 'thread' and makes it much less trustworthy, even though I do believe this about institutional real estate investors. 'Feudalism' might be a bit extreme, but this will definitely impact the middle class in a very real way.
And that guideline often results in confusing, disjointed comment threads.
Enforcing banal, insigificant titles diminishes meaningful discussion hinged on the actual point of the submission.
Strangely, but anecdotally, the titles that I see getting changed are ones involving race, state actors, or corporations.
What these moves feel like is censorship of story title that mention, for instance, Black people, the Chinese Communist Party, or multinationals like BlackRock.
> often results in confusing, disjointed comment threads
It can, which is why I posted replies to the relevant comments in this thread. It's still usually a net win, though, to replace a secondary/derived source with the article it's derived from, especially when the secondary/derived source is adding sensational spin.
> Strangely, but anecdotally, the titles that I see getting changed are
I think you may be getting bit by what I call the notice-dislike bias [1]. You (i.e. all of us) are much more likely to see, and to put emphasis on, the changes that you dislike or disagree with, and to de-emphasize, or simply not notice in the first place, the ones that seem normal or ok. This leads to false feelings of generality [2]. Your comment is well above the median in quality because you at least said "anecdotally"; most users who post general claims about HN don't seem to consider that there may be any bias in such perceptions at all!
From a moderation perspective I can tell you for sure that there's no singling out of any topics over others when it comes to applying the title guideline. Of course, titles on divisive topics are more likely to be inflammatory and therefore linkbaity, and thus 'hit' the guideline, but that's a skew in the data, not the moderators.
As for "censorship", that word has gotten diluted to the point that it seems to just mean "change I disapprove of". You can use it to describe HN title edits if you like, but I think it's a bit of a stretch.
There's an achive link in the top comment, and I think replying to that with the original URL would help rather than making fact of the change burried in the comments, but I can't reply to that archive link post.
We could turn that off so you could post the originally submitted URL, except I'm not sure that there are significant subthreads getting distorted by this change. I already put that URL at the top of the ones I saw, like the GP.
People using "The Great Reset" as a pejorative tend to have their views deeply rooted in right-leaning garbage conspiracy theories. Surely there's a better source for what Black Rock is doing than this person's Twitter thread.
> Only the worlds largest asset manager and the leading proponent of The Great Reset.
It was from a series of predictions made by the WEF in 2016 about life in 2030[0].
The claim of many is that the WEF wants to bring about a world in which the vast majority of people don't have ownership.
Reuters "fact checks"[1] this claim by saying that it was merely a prediction, and that it isn't actually a goal listed on their website.
I find the fact check unpersuasive. The WEF says "you will be happy" about not owning anything. That they would even think that reveals something about the values of that organization. If that is part of what they would consider to be a happier world, why would they not push for it (in private, if not in public)?
It's pretty clearly just a provocative list of predictions and not a call to action. It's like a commercial from 1995 saying "You'll have a phone in your pocket everywhere you go". They're predicting it will be a major trend that consumers adopt because it will makes sense when it comes. It's not even that crazy of a prediction. There's loads of shit in my house that I use maybe once a year and I wouldn't mind sharing with others via drone.
An NGO comprised of the world's wealthiest corporations telling the rest of us that we will "own nothing and be happy" is a bit cheeky, to say the least.
It feels like this analysis is missing something, ex. have you had any property rights taken away in the ensuing 5 years? If discourse hinges on a 2 minute YouTube video and refusing to accept any downplaying of it, what hope does discourse have? There's approximately infinite two minute YouTube videos
edit: -4 in 7 minutes, anyone have tips on exactly how you are allowed to discuss any of this without wholesale accepting it?
> edit: -4 in 7 minutes, anyone have tips on exactly how you are allowed to discuss any of this without wholesale accepting it?
It is against the rules to complain about downvotes.
Someone else disagreed without receiving similar downvotes.
Your downvotes are probably because of statements like "and refusing to accept any downplaying of it". It's not that I would refuse to accept any downplaying, just that I don't find the ones offered to be persuasive.
If you focus on attacking the argument at hand, rather than on the mental state or character of those you are arguing with, you will have more success.
it's not against the rules to complain about downvotes, common misconception! I know you didn't know and this isn't a commentary, or question of, or related to, your mental state or character.
I'm genuinely unaware what part of the unedited tweet includes the factors you mention, namely questioning mental state or character. Reproduced here, I can't find anything, I'm trying really hard:
It feels like this analysis is missing something, ex. have you had any property rights taken away in the ensuing 5 years? If discourse hinges on a 2 minute YouTube video and refusing to accept any downplaying of it, what hope does discourse have? There's approximately infinite two minute YouTube videos
I recognize that the edits include the factor you mention, those edits occurred enough after an unusually high number of downvotes, and the scored has rebounded since. Note this has nothing to do with anyone else's mental state or character, nor questioning it, or in anyway intended to relate to it.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
As to your question:
> I'm genuinely unaware what part of the unedited tweet includes the factors you mention, namely questioning mental state or character.
For clarification: by mental state, I mean simply another person's state of mind (beliefs, intentions, etc) not mental health (sanity or intelligence).
In this case, saying that people would refuse to accept any downplaying of the WEF statement presumes knowledge about the beliefs of others. As Scott Adam's would say, it's "mind reading". Frankly, you don't know whether I or anyone else would refuse any downplaying. You only know that we refuse the ones provided.
Now, we all have to model the beliefs and intentions of others, but we are often a lot worse at it than we think, and even more so in online communication. Therefore it is best to avoid such "mind reading" language.
Of course, I am making assumptions about the intentions of the WEF! But I'm careful to separate what they actually said from what I infer about their intentions.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
What part of that says its "against the rules", as claimed?
> For clarification: by mental state, I mean simply another person's state of mind (beliefs, intentions, etc) not mental health (sanity or intelligence).
Sounds right.
> In this case, saying that people would refuse to accept any downplaying of the WEF statement presumes knowledge about the beliefs of others. As Scott Adam's would say, it's "mind reading". Frankly, you don't know whether I or anyone else would refuse any downplaying. You only know that we refuse the ones provided.
What would Scott Adams say about you recasting any questioning as downplaying, then invoking a general statement from him in service of furthering recasting questioning as "mind reading", then self-assuredly letting me know that you're being frank, not glib, when you tell me I don't know what you'll accept.
All of this, btw, not responding to the question you claim you're answering, quoted as if you were answering, and now you've burdened with further broad claims about _my_ state of mind and what you believe I _think_ I'm arguing
Give me some rope here, let me redirect: you're claiming that the set of following words, bounded by " marks:
"It feels like this analysis is missing something, ex. have you had any property rights taken away in the ensuing 5 years? If discourse hinges on a 2 minute YouTube video and refusing to accept any downplaying of it, what hope does discourse have? There's approximately infinite two minute YouTube videos"
contains:
- questioning a person's mental state (as in beliefs, intetions)
- questioning a person's character
- a statement that people would refuse to accept any downplaying of the WEF statement
- mind reading
Unfortunately, giving you charity here also reads as mind-reading under the extremely broad definition you've given it, so forgive me if what I perceive as normal conversational banter is yet another violation of the rules I missed: I believe you got in over your skis and tried to rope in a discussion of your readings of Scott Adams and what you think he said as an answer to "what's the best way to talk about this so I don't get downvoted?", and you've unintentionally tripled down on explaining that the downvotes are a result of the edit that came after the downvotes.
EDIT: Lordy I didn't realize you were the original person I replied to. You haven't engaged with a single comment I've made in this thread, just meta-explained why you don't need to engage with anything ever. Scott would have your head on a platter for invoking him in defense of this post-modern argumentation style
WEF also still has a 'the great reset' section on their official website https://www.weforum.org/focus/the-great-reset. WEF is essentially all those billionaires that meetup in davos every year
No offense, and I'll take the downvotes for being blunt, but this is political nonsense that doesn't belong on HN: people aren't going to to buy into a particular group's Proper Noun'd Concept off _obvious_ hyperbole (who actually thinks property, as a concept, is going away) that was apparently erased once it was used to hyperbole and wish a Proper Noun political concept into being.
To be clear, that framing was chosen to _politely_ continue discussion.
I like walking in and out with a clear head from threads, voting behavior changed, and you're always going to get downvoted through the floor for disagreeing. Might as well know it was because of that, than because you were incurious or impolite.
Generally speaking, I think it's a reference to this video with predictions of the future. Whether or not it was advocacy for that outcome is the subject of debate, but it does appear to be an actual WEF video. https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/101539205...
Right in that first paragraph: "I don't own a car. I don't own a house." The title is "Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better."
Frankly, I don't care if the people noticing this lounge around in period-authentic SS uniforms at night, what's true is true, no matter who picks up on it.
And it's a trend along with the "hey, those bugs, you should try eating them!" articles that are so breathlessly hyped.
Now, it says "You WILL own nothing and you WILL be happy." This wasn't just some rando blogpost, it went through a lot of editorial eyes and hands. Will is very interesting. It's not optional. There's no choice involved.
It was a social media video put out by some of those "researchers and futurists," namely the World Economic Forum. You can find copies of the original video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aztvWxRKqDQ
The thing that makes this more than just a crackpot futurist's prediction is that the World Economic Forum actually does gather together government and business leaders from around the world and serves as a site for networking among them. This is the sort of networking that Assange called "conspiracy" in his early essays: powerful people exist in connected graphs that allow them, whether well-meaning or conscious of ill intent, to act to prop up authoritarian power structures and repress freedoms. And so you end up with world leaders repeating the World Economic Forum's discourse of a "great reset." Here is Justin Trudeau via Global News explaining how the COVID pandemic provides "an opportunity for a reset" that is primarily economic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2fp0Jeyjvw . Trudeau is an "Agenda Contributor" at the WEF: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/justin-trudeau . So, when the WEF puts out a social media clip claiming that society is changing to replace ownership with rental, a fundamental change to the existing wealth distribution in favor of corporations over individuals, you know that world leaders like Trudeau are heavily involved with those same futurists. That's what separates their predictions from those of, say, Robert X Cringely.
The conspiracy, which was not mentioned in this thread, but is all over youtube and twitter, is that the WEF is somehow going to reset everyone's wealth to zero and enact communism.
A video where futurists predict that you'll rent almost everything instead of buying it, isn't the same thing as evidence that the WEF is enacting communism.
Let's try to be clear about the nuance and details of what we're talking about.
I think an objective case can be made that Covid has irrevocably changed the economy in way that has created new winners and losers, without it being part of a grand conspiracy.
I agree with that. Of course, this does not necessarily imply that a large people will not choose to believe in a grand conspiracy regardless of whether or not such a conspiracy actually exists.
There was this in the FT [1] just over two weeks ago, "BlackRock bets on UK retirement housing", but it's about investing in building for defined sectors (retirement, student accommodation etc) and also shared ownership: Separately, BlackRock Real Assets is funding the £362m purchase of 3,000 shared-ownership homes by landlord Heylo Housing.
The article was archived shortly after publication [2].
I've not seen anything about buying up existing private homes at a big mark-up, though.
There are many things that would make great labels if not for the history or people associated with them. I would love to make a "Fox News" that shares news about foxes...
Uh, have you listened to their podcast? [0] The discussion of the great reset is not rooted in conspiracy theories, but rather direct quotations uttered by extremely problematic individuals who have a broad history of sketchiness, corruption, and warmongering.
I take strong issue with your careful labeling of those with whom you disagree as all leaning in one direction politically.
The Great Reset is predominantly used by conspiracy Twitter and it isn't close. It is blown out of proportion relative to its original context, and amounts to sloppy punditry trying overfit an interpretation of the world. One of its least helpful usages is as a weapon against debate/policies that attempt to address collective action problems such as climate change.
It kind of reminds me of what was done with "New World Order", which people seem to be moving on from since the conspiracy pundit predictions haven't been realized (e.g. no world authoritarian government yet).
You keep changing your terms. First it was right-wingers, now it's conspiracy Twitter. What is "conspiracy Twitter," and what does it have to do with the right wing of US political discourse? Why are we conflating these terms so willingly?
I made direct reference to "The Great Reset," itself, from the very purveyors of it - the WEF. There's no need, nor any value, in trying to conflate my response to you with this strawman group you're forming.
> (e.g. no world authoritarian government yet)
Your interpretation of the world is highly specious. Have you been in a coma for these past 1.5 years?
> One of its least helpful usages
Very interesting choice of words, least helpful. Seems to me like you have a strong ideological alignment with the goals of the World Economic Forum.
See, it's so easy to flip your entire script and end up presenting the exact case being made by the conspiracy theory people. The New World Order fanatics could see the WEF as their fictitious enemies moving on to a new strategy, specifically because there is now an authoritarian government established. And it could be seen as a sloppy form of punditry, overfit atop a very specific and narrowly-targeted interpretation of the world, making the conspiracy people all the more mad that more people don't see things their way. Because there could be "real collective action," if more people did see it their way.
Under those considerations, I would be naive to be any less skeptical of your position, than I am of the conspiracy theory strawmen you're establishing here.
The actual "The Great Reset," pursued by the WEF is concerning specifically because it seeks to align economic interests globally, forcing them into a densely-regulated system through negative incentives. It forgoes and utterly mocks the notion that knowledge ought to be distributed, decentralized, and localized. There are not just huge economic concerns here, but ethical ones as well. Wars will be fought over the disagreements spawned from the aims of these zealots.
Ok, cabal is a strong word and the election stealing/truth hiding is certainly off the rails in my opinion as well.
But here's some perhaps interesting information on top 5 shareholders of largest US banks [1]:
JP Morgan Chase:
Blackrock 6.4
Vanguard 4.7
State Street 4.5
Blackrock 2.7
Blackrock 2.5
Bank of America:
Berkshire 6.9
Blackrock 5.3
Vanguard 4.5
state street 4.3
Fidelity 2.1
Citigroup:
Blackrock 6.1
Vanguard 4.5
State Street 4.2
Fidelity 3.6
Capital world Inv 2.4
Wells Fargo:
Berkshire 8.8
Blackrock 5.4
Vanguard 4.5
State street 4.0
Fidelity 3.5
US Bank:
Blackrock 7.4
Vanguard 4.5
Fidelity 4.4
State Street 4.4
Berkshire 4.3
So although yes this does go off the rails a bit, not unreasonable to question the (possibly perverse) incentives banks face given their ownership. Book by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl called Radical Markets explores those incentives a bit.
Aren't most of these holdings through funds? It's not Blackrock, Vanguard or Fidelity that's holding those shares, it's people and institutions who are investing in their funds.
Exactly right - BlackRock and other large indexers have no legal obligation to follow the recommendation of an independent adviser (like ISS, Glass Lewis) in a proxy contest, even for a passive fund. In most cases they passively anticipate the index provider's (S&P, Russell, MSCI, etc.) moves for corporate actions, but management elections for the board and executives are much more subjective as they don't influence the position itself (note that the manager can sometimes also be the index provider, like BlackRock = iShares). The smaller index managers almost exclusively follow the proxy adviser's recommendation because they don't have the resources to analyze board decisions for ~8,000 different companies.
Also worth noting they have similar ownership stakes in other public companies for the same reason, and somewhat limited leverage over any of them because they can't threaten to pull their investment
The main reason the homes are being bought up is the lumber and steal costs. Right now, it would cost me $500k to build a house that last year would cost me $190k. Real quotes I got for a possible build. More details on what I’m seeing here:
The point about lumber is accurate. We are getting a fence built for our house, and our contractor says the lumber has gone from $12 a board to $28 a board over the last few months. He's had to revise his estimates upward lest he lose money on the job.
Your numbers are off for most areas. There has been inflation in construction material prices, but that's only one part of the total price of building homes. The other major components include land prices, labor, and permits. So costs could have only doubled from $300k to $600k in areas with very cheap land and permits where materials make up the dominant share of the total cost.
Everything is a grand singular conspiracy to someone these days. Happens on HN too, every few bad news type post has some accusation that whatever outcome was because of a conspiracy.
Well, to be fair, there was a self-decribed cabal of sorts that worked to change election laws, curtail protests, and pressure social media companies leading up to the 2020 election.
Whether what they did was in any way illicit or undermines the integrity of U.S. elections is of course up for debate, but the fact that a secret coordinated effort of powerful people "conspired" (if you will) to influence the outcome of the election is I think well established.
It was a conspiracy that the original twitter thread brought up, and you seemed to be criticizing conspiratorial thinking in general.
My point was that, of the conspiracies mentioned by the original user, the conspiracy to influence the 2020 election was openly acknowledged by its participants.
I guess I don't really understand the idea that "oh there was a conspiracy of some sort, sometime..." when it has no connection to the claimed conspiracy.
Seems like that's a common refrain from conspiracy theory fans, when they can't find evidence for their claim 'well there was another thing' comes up.... I'm not sure what they're trying to say.
The crazy thing is that no grand conspiracy is required, this is just a function (and an entirely predictable one) of the ever increasing levels of wealth inequality that we see. No political "pincher" movement required, it's just people with money finding ways to use that money to make more money.
As an aside, this isn't a username I expected to ever see again.
Agreed. Most of this is just obvious motivations to do a thing.
Recent HN article about the SCOTUS and CFAA ruling was full of folks who felt that CFAA must have been some corporatism-ish conspiracy to pass (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) a law back in 1986 and then criminalize basic policy rules as a serious crime. And yet apparently they just chose not to do that at any sort of scale...
Rather, the most logical explanation is that some folks made some bad choices when it came to applying that law, because it was convenient for them.
A conspiracy means that the truth about something is different from what we currently know. JFK, moon landing, flat Earth.
Where is the conspiracy with banks buying houses en masse? They intend to turn every middle class family into a permanent renter and take any profit of the housing market for themselves. This is exactly what’s happening.
We can simply say that this problem is more important than people believe, or that the media does not talk about it enough because it’s difficult to write about. But there’s no conspiracy here.
An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
Like, maybe the Fed is conspiring with the gov. and big banks to fleece the American people of their real estate assets…? Have you no ability to question things?
I was going to say, people need to learn how to make a point and leave out extraneous claims since those extraneous claims usually attack the credibility of their legitimate points ...
... but the urge to ignore my own advice is too strong since the extraneous claim is a huge head-scratcher. Doesn't this person realize the person who lost the election is a real estate developer? I realize this isn't the same thing as an investor, but it is close enough in this case.
COVID denialism, election denialism, and “The Great Reset” are high profile crank subjects. Being a conservative Christian doesn’t make you a crank; those things do.
From a purely logical viewpoint, it is a bit hilarious that you consider the objectively most outlandish of these beliefs to be the only non-cranky one. Although it is, admittedly, the most viable one socially.
I don't think truth/outlandishness is all that closely related to whether a particular belief is a crank-y one. For example: horoscopes are fake, but I don't think that people who believe in horoscopes are cranks, per se. Or unfalsifiable claims: plenty of people have crank and non-crank views about things that just don't adhere to proof/disproof.
To put it another way: a lot of religious (particularly Christian) views amount to metaphysical claims that we can't really falsify. That's maybe sufficient to make them "irrational" in a narrow analytical sense, but insufficient to label them as crank-ish.
Claims about covid and the election can't be (realistically) falsified by an individual either. You're just disagreeing on whether you should trust a study author / politician more than a priest.
I don't understand this point. I'm saying that whether or not a particular subject is a "crank" one is not closely related to either its truth value or whether that truth value is even ascertainable.
I haven't made an argument for why the ones I've listed are actually crank subjects; I consider those granted and I'm not particularly interested in justifying them.
The things you listed form a cluster of beliefs that gullible, uneducated, and often toxic people flock to, and that makes those positions quite unattractive even ignoring their respective merits, which are not great.
What I take issue with is the lack of symmetry. For every COVID denialist, you have a zero-COVID enthusiast. For every election denialist, you have an impending climate catastrophe doommonger. For every great reset conspiracy theorist, you have someone who believes we live in a meritocracy. Each of the latter positions is as merituous as their counterpart, but the former are treated with a disproportionate contempt.
I think symmetry in this case would amount to false balance. Why even bother to frame things this way? It's self evident to most people that crank views run the gamut of social and political backgrounds; like all things in life, we prioritize our discussion of them by their perceived impact(s) on our lives. COVID denialism has more of an impact on my life than an anti-nuclear crank does.
Respectfully, I think calling "The Great Reset" a 'crank subject' is itself a sign of conspiratorial thinking, or in the least, misleading/false information. I often see people label discussions of "The Great Reset" in this way, but that ignores the reality that the World Economic Forum literally branded their 2020 meeting as "Great Reset" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset). If the WEF isn't a familiar name, it's because you might have heard it previously referred to as "Davos", a meeting of many powerful and influential people.
When such a group meets to discuss society-wide changes and pushes their positions publicly, I don't think that's a "crank subject". That's simply a legitimate story that others may wish to discuss and raise concerns about. Critique about WEF/Davos isn't new - it has been described as an undemocratic forum previously, because it's a set of powerful people deciding how they want to shape the world outside of any national or international political process. This isn't conspiratorial thinking, it is literally the way the WEF is set up and operates. See the following paper for a critique, which mentions that WEF members downplay the importance of this forum and that their public exposure hides all that takes place privately: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?re...
"Crank subjects" are not subjects that are themselves fundamentally outlandish or unreal: they're subjects picked up by cranks and integrated into conspiratorial worldviews. Davos is a real summit that happens every year; it's also a crank subject because cranks integrate it into their NWO and similar theories.
Your own Wikipedia link says this neatly:
> According to The New York Times,[1 1] the BBC, The Guardian, Le Devoir and Radio Canada, "baseless" conspiracy theories spread by American far-right groups linked to QAnon surged at the onset of the Great Reset forum and increased in fervor as leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau[1 2] incorporated ideas based on a "reset" in their speeches.[1 3]
> Davos is a real summit that happens every year; it's also a crank subject because cranks integrate it into their NWO and similar theories.
Well, I think they're only partly wrong: Of course Davos has always (since long before it was called the "WEF") felt like it's all about "the world order"... But it's made up of the rich and powerful -- so why would it want a new world order, when the old / current one is that the rich and powerful run the world?
I'm trying to understand what specifically makes a worldview conspiratorial for you. Are you disagreeing that the "Great Reset" involves implementing particular ideological views and political positions? Would you agree that people are allowed to disagree with those positions? And that those who disagree with those positions are allowed to call attention to powerful people pushing those positions? Personally I don't see any of those as being "cranky" or "conspiratorial" as much as just regular political engagement.
Regarding the quote from Wikipedia - I don't agree with how that portion of the article is written or sourced. It is debated on the Talk page, and is a reflection of a growing bias in Wikipedia (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/). That section starts off by mentioning QAnon, then says Trump amplified QAnon, and never makes a connection between all of that and "Great Reset" (it's a sort of "guilt by association" argument). Additionally, it lists out a number of right-leaning TV personalities and claims they were pushing a conspiracy theory, but none of the source articles they reference show any false claim from those same people. From those sources, it looks like these people complained that the pandemic is being exploited as a political opportunity to introduce and push various left-leaning political positions. That seems not only very reasonable to me, but also easily provable.
From my perspective, I am seeing people take the very small number of people who are suggesting the pandemic was a planned crisis with certain political goals in mind, and using that to discredit others who are not claiming it was planned but just disagree with the political opportunism and the political goals.
Do you ever think about how crank "denialisms" are usually believed by small percentages of the population, but this time with COVID and the election it's nearly half? Isn't that strange?
> May opinion poll finds that 53% of Republicans believe Trump is the ‘true president’ compared with 3% of Democrats
> About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll.
Actually, your second link doesn't say what you think it says. It says that people believe that Democrats believe that, not that Democrats believe that. Yes, it seems a weird thing to poll about.
Your fourth link is misleading. You've picked a link from a moment in time when Barr had released his summary of the Meuller report but Meuller's criticism of Barr's summary as being inaccurate had not been released.
The second link's poll includes a breakout of Democrats' beliefs in what Democrats believe, in addition to the overall figures. So 65% of Democrats agreed at the time that Democrats don't accept Trump as the legitimate president. I realize it's not the same exact question, but it is similar. There are also other polls that I didn't include that you can find with similar results.
As for the fourth link - I am not sure of the timing of that particular poll (I just pulled that from a search earlier), so I'll have to take your word on that. Thanks for pointing it out.
I'm not refuting it. I am pointing out that this is a pattern with much precedent, and is not restricted to Republicans or conservatives. A number of comments in this discussion seem to be ascribing belief in improbable scenarios to one political side. If anything, I would say that election denialism is a tit-for-tat game that is now reflecting back the same disbelief that was shown in prior elections. Furthermore, the GP comment suggested that half of the population holding a "crank denialism" is something new. My evidence shows it is clearly not something new.
Even just looking at excess deaths immediately shows the scale of the pandemic. Some weeks during December, there were 25,000 additional people per week dying compared to the typical year. What do you think was causing this if not Covid?
Over 680,000 additional deaths in 2020/early 2021.
Talk to a single doctor that was on the 'front lines' of this - a family member was signing 20 death certificates per week for people dying of horrible respiratory disease with positive Covid tests. One person at one hospital overwhelmed with the quantity of death. What was it if not Covid?
Agreed, I use euromomo to look at total mortality across Europe and it's difficult to deny that something was killing lots more people than usual last spring and winter (northern hemisphere).
However it can also be the case that COVID deaths (and hospitalizations as well) may be over-reported. We have recent reports that seem to be pointing strongly to this possibility.
So you think that "something was killing lots more people than usual" but that the few isolated cases of counties overcounting Covid deaths are systemic and that there was no reciprocal data issues?
What precisely do you think was killing all of those extra people who were showing up in ERs with respiratory distress?
Personally my guess is that COVID was, yes, responsible for the vast majority of those deaths.
But I also do think that those cases of overcounting are very likely NOT the only, isolated ones. The dynamics exposed (how hospitalizations were counted, the basic 'with' vs 'of' question), almost certainly apply more broadly.
So, apologies for attempting nuance, but I think COVID can at once be a) a massive pandemic (and tragic for millions), while also being b) somewhat overblown due to unrigorous metrics that in turn feed more sensationalism than otherwise warranted.
But that’s not really nuance in any classic sense —- you’re right to point out that there were numerous problems (as expected with a novel virus) in attributing deaths with any certainty to Covid so we did the best we could. And even with the “sensationalism” and “overcounting”, excess deaths surpassed actual Covid deaths by something like 15%.
Doesn’t that actually imply that there wasn’t enough sensationalism and that our methods, while attributing some non-Covid deaths to Covid, were actually missing many more Covid deaths?
I don’t get the leap from “we misattributed some non-Covid deaths to Covid” in an environment that had even more deaths that our supposed overcount as evidence that we overreacted.
So you're saying 'net net', you think the COVID mortality is undercounted? If I had to bet something valuable, I'd take the other side. That's just what seems most probable to me, based on the evidence I cited.
Another plausible explanation to excess mortality differences is that lockdowns and other measures caused people to engage in behaviors that increased mortality, from putting off necessary medical visits to exacerbated mental health due to social isolation or financial stress.
It isn't as crazy as you might think depending on how far you want to take it. My charitable interpretation of the comment you're replying to is that they believe COVID is real and does cause deaths, but that the number of deaths is not as high as what is claimed.
As an example of why that isn't "crazy", consider that recently a major Bay Area county in CA revised their COVID counts downward by 25% (https://www.foxnews.com/health/california-county-cuts-covid-...) because they had previously included deaths of anyone infected with the virus, regardless of whether the virus was a direct or contributing cause to the death. This is in a state that took the pandemic very seriously, had lots of governmental organization around it, and 'believes in science'.
People have been raising concerns about how deaths are counted throughout the pandemic, but they've largely been ignored, despite it being a legitimate line of questioning. They were always told "there are standards", which isn't really a convincing argument, given that there have been a non-zero number of proven instances of over-counting. You could argue that excess mortality is the metric we should look at, and that may be appropriate in some countries where such data collection is rigorous. But the way excess mortality is tracked is also inconsistent between different nations, and outright non-existent in most nations.
I remember last year when believing COVID may have come out of a lab made one a crank. It was only on certain news channels or specific papers. Of course, let's also assume there are no widespread liberal beliefs (the world is going to end in 12 years) that should label someone as a crank.
yeah, i know that's what it refers to, but it is a straw man. Nobody actually thinks the world is going to literally end in that short of a time frame, and the existence of claims vaguely like this still don't mean its a widely held belief.
Well, if it's not widely held, then it shouldn't be as widely said. Saying it when everybody knows it's not true just makes you look like a nut case who's lost touch with reality. People who make such claims do their cause more harm than good.
Conspiracy theorists were right about so many things last year like hydroxychloroquine and 5g. So we should totally trust them now that Biden and scientists have decided to look more closely into the lab-leak possibility.
The first post calls for a nationwide armed militia to protect "conservative" society from its fellow "progressive" citizens. I don't know if this is standard, but it is not a good idea, and it is not bigoted to call it crazy. Anybody anywhere in the modern world who calls for an armed force to be created explicitly in the name of "God Almighty" (or some synonym of that) is crazy.
Nah, having views that divorced from reality is crazy, plain and simple. It's also dangerous, as the ongoing insurrection against the US government shows. It's not bigotry to call them out for how outlandish and insane their beliefs are.
Yes, except the Left is in control of the establishment. Through Hollywood, the media, and academe (all notoriously Left-leaning), it has elevated its own conspiracy theories and prejudices to the level of respectable opinion or fact. Except for a few minor politicians, stuff like QAnon remains little more than an inconsequential wacky belief, regardless of what the fear-mongering rags try to say.
Crazy ideas come about naturally, but the political opportunists know when to fan the flames of those ideas if it benefits them. You don't necessarily need a central planning committee to benefit from insanity.
In the case of COVID, the sad tactic that's used to discredit anyone, even highly respected people in medicine, when they depart in the slightest from the flaky "official narrative" is to either silence such people immediately across all friendly channels, ridicule them, or to dredge up some completely preposterous claim and poisoning the well, etc., essentially claiming that anyone who disagrees with the official party line is like the guy who believes that lizard people run the world.
Nothing you can really do about it. You can't pry the scales from people's eyes, especially if they like them just where they are. I'm pretty sure the inner coating on those scales is reflective.
These are literally two out of the first four paragraphs I read when clicking on that link:
>Dearest Friends & Fellow Americans,
The eminent trial of our Age is upon us. Those whose courage fails them now, who shrink from the fight, and sit idly while the very foundations of our nation collapse should sit in shame; but those that stand boldly by the Constitution deserve the eternal thanks of all mankind. Malignant tyranny, like other pogroms of the past, are no simple feat to overcome; Yet we know also through the trials of history that the greater the force of evil, the more august the achievement.
> The Malignant States, the Federal Government, and the Tech Politburo have avowed to create and enforce a progressive establishment that places Marxist Race Doctrine, Anti-American Sentiment, and Western-averse Cultural and Governmental Practices at the forefront of legal and social policy and have declared that they will fully enchain the American populace to this destructive course.
Edit: I hope that nobody thinks that's still "Christian and Republican", right? Even if you're extremely critical of current developments it's certainly crazy to call those a "pogrom".
And? Honestly, these are pretty damn tame. I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
While I personally disagree with at least one of the statements you quoted and some other ideas held by the author, many of the ideas presented in the posted Twitter thread still stand. Ad hominem attacks are worthless in a discussion of ideas.
>Ad hominem attacks are worthless in a discussion of ideas.
Some of the conspiracy theories are part of the twitter thread. It's entirely reasonable to discuss these here, especially if the thread and account get this amount of attention.
>Honestly, these are pretty damn tame.
Comments like this one make me seriously fear for the political system of the United States. If that's "tame" I do not know what isn't.
After 500k COVID deaths and the events of January 6th, I now consider anyone spouting these sorts of delusional right-wing conspiracies to be potentially dangerous sociopaths who need to be addressed accordingly. Nut job is too kind.
We can no longer afford to play along, pretending that sedition and lies are acceptable because they are just normal "conservative opinion".
It went off the rails at the beginning. After the WSJ article about how pension fund managers are buying homes as investment vehicles, he immediately veered into fantasyland citing only blogs or his imagination. The Great Reset has a homepage and it has nothing to do with anything he's ranting about.
They get disconnected from their origins, repackaged and repurposed like a durable material.
"Cabal" traditionally is a dog-whistle for the antisemitism conspiracy about why the Nazis claim they lost WW1.
It's been durable. Lots of uses of cabal these days shed those nazi roots and repurpose it to just mean "those corrupted by wealth and power". It's still really, extremely close to a very dangerous form of anti-semitism, but it's possible for one to exist without the other.
It's really fascinating how transitive these lies are and how they can be composited like higher level programming objects to form essentially different flavors of insanity. I wish humans weren't like this but eh, don't know how to change it
It really was a bad end. Pretty much describes how capitalism's natural end will fuck us over, and then decides to throw in some support for the billionaire landlord president he liked...
> Well, the banks are controlled by and in bed with the same cabal buying everything up. You think this will be corrected by market forces when it is a financial and political pincher movement pushed by the same cabal that stole the 2020 election & hid COVID Truth? You are fucked.
https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402449561864577024
IMO, weakens the entire 'thread' and makes it much less trustworthy, even though I do believe this about institutional real estate investors. 'Feudalism' might be a bit extreme, but this will definitely impact the middle class in a very real way.