Working together rather than personal gain. Great example. Bernie would have been great but look it we all see real change isnāt wanted
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The overwhelming amount of disinformation about Covid has come from right wing sources.
Thatās a fact, and that fact seems to enormously hurt the feelings of a large number of posters here.
Again Iāll post this graph. Vaccines are available to everybody who wants them in the US now. The overwhelming majority of the people who are still dying of Covid should not be dying. The rate of Covid deaths now correlates pretty much exactly with the level of support for Trump.
I simply cannot understand the mindset of anybody who blames those who are pro-vaccine for this rather than than those who have spread disinformation and anti-vaccine ideology.
Itās a wilfully perverse extreme political correctness mixed with a belief in nothing except believing the opposite of what is true.
I mean, do you and other posters here extend this ideology to other things? Do you blame those who spread an anti-smoking message for continued deaths from smoking? Do you blame the victims of crime rather than the perpetrators? Do you blame Catholics in Northern Ireland for the intransigence of Unionists?
If a doctor told you that you were obese and at serious risk of dying from a heart attack, would you go home and eat an even worse diet and live a more unhealthy lifestyle just to spite the doctor, because your ego couldnāt handle being told you were wrong? Would you tell everybody you knew that heart attacks were all a cod?
This is what has happened as regards Covid and vaccines. Itās a mass psychosis driven by digital illiteracy and not having the critical tools to evaluate who is talking sense and truth as opposed to lies.
Part of this mass psychosis is mass cynicism. Cynicism is an incredibly dangerous thing. Everybody needs some of it, but too much of it strips people of the critical tools they need to make sense of information. It leaves them paralysed and adrift, deeply confused. And a state of paralysis and deep confusion opens the way for them to believe demagogues who pretend everything is simple and use hatred as a motivator. Extreme cynicism breeds hatred and extreme self pity. Extreme cynicism almost always leads to extreme gullibility.
Anti-vaccine ideology is demagoguery. āThe libs are trying to poison you.ā So is Hydroxychloroquine and the Ivermectin cult. āBig Pharma is engaging in a conspiracy to suppress this miracle drug.ā
All the people who believe this stuff have been poisoned by extreme cynicism, hatred and extreme self pity.
@maroonandwhite and @Fulvio_From_Aughnacloy are the classic examples here.
Since Iāve returned to the forum Iāve been quite astonished at the paucity of thinking that pervades these and other posters. The standard of argument and debating against me has been unbelievably poor, posters have gone into hiding rather than debate me - because they are incapable of debating against me - and good faith debate against me is rare.
Outstanding paragraph.
Amen
This thread is a shiteshow
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I donāt like him, at all, but fuck me the stuff about his father is wrong
Thatās a fair essay. I agree with you that a vast majority of disinformation has come from the far right. Thatās a fact. Covid not being real, 5G, anti vax are all clearly wrong points of view. Any rational person can see that. The thing woth human nature is people donāt like to be spoken down to. This is the approach taken on many topics not just covid from the woke left etc. It passes people off and makes discussion redundant. Stops people asking questions as the answer is delivered in a manner that demeans the person asking. Instead of asking questions they go somewhere with an answer, the answer may not be correct (disinformation).
But also by just silencing and shutting down opinions that may be incorrect will only make it worse. Instead allow discussion and show how the opposing argument is flawed. This is not happening and creating the snowball effect. The graph you have posted shows where there is more deaths. A decent assumption is these people donāt want to hear the arguement from the blue side as this is how, as I said they are spoken down to as they are redneck hicks etc.
I leave it there chesty. We wonāt be in any sort of agreement on this topic. So can we agree to not engage on this again?
Ah lads 
What an utterly cuntish thing to say. Cop yourself on.
@Ambrose_McNulty and @dodgy_keeper didnāt expect it from you two.
Few lads need to get some oxygen into their lungs.
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Ya, that bananas lad was bang out of order. Still, a big pity party for your man now to power him through the night.
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Again, cop on.
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Stick to chuckin spears Kidd
Jesus Christ, is this thread still a thing??
Get a life ye shower of mad cunts
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You are polite, but you recite all the stock cliches that the far right do.
āWoke leftā etc., where āwokeā is meant as a bogeyman to be afraid of rather than the overwhelming positive it is. Thatās real talking down - because it holds that you are superior by dint of maleness, whiteness, straightness etc., and opinions which are designed to prioritise those characteristics at the expense of those which are not those things.
In some ways, thatās more frustrating to debate against than the proper loons Iāve previously mentioned, the lads who shout hysterically. Yu cannot be dismissed as a loon like they can, but you display similar refusal to engage with ideas.
Free speech has never been freer. And the traditional media does platform these views that the anti-woke cult claims are being āsilencedā. It platforms them far too much. Every crank I can think of has been platformed by them. Ivor Cummins has bene platformed by RTE, Galway Bay FM had him on only last month. Sunetra Gupta has been all over RTE and BBC. Pierre Kory was platformed by Pat Kenny. And the other Great Barrington ideologists have all been platformed at length by traditional media. CNN platformed Richard Spencer, an actual Nazi. David Quinn claims heās being silenced as he writes in Independent Newspapers and is platformed on RTE and every other broadcast media outlet in this country. The cancer of false balance is everywhere.
And the right-wing have created a vast web of alternative media. Bari Weiss leaves the New York Times of her own volition, claims sheās being silenced as a grift, and then rakes in 800k a year on Substack. And there are so many like her. Yeah, nice honest wages.
In reality the biggest form of cancel culture in America is the silencing of academics, who tend to be on the broad left, because, you know, reality. They are silenced because they canāt get jobs, if they can jobs they are unsecure jobs, they have no tenure.
But those who laughably claim they are voicing opinions that are being āsilencedā, they themselves do not entertain challenge. They do not go up against people of opposing views. They recite bullshit ad nauseum in a way which makes it almost impossible for all but an exceptionally well prepared questioner to counter. They shout over the top of people. All these are well worn tactics of the far right and that is how far right disinformation agents engage in general.
And far from being cancelled, their platform has never been greater. There is a fertile market for those on the right who falsely claim they are being cancelled. Many of them are coining it in through online platforms. Coining it in from the gullible who have placed their trust in them. Pied piper. Ivor Cummins is coining it in. He has received online donations of 300k to make a film which has never been released. He has multiple online donation platforms.
And there is a vast network of dark money funding right wing think tanks and disinformation agents and right wing culture warriors. Who funds the IONA Institute and Gript. Or Gemma OāDoherty and Ben Gilroy and their acolytes?
US dark money. Russian dark money. Who knows what else dark money.
Those who choose to believe nonsense because they have invented in their own minds that people are the truth are being too āmeanā have a problem. They have chosen to place their own fragile egos over real knowledge. That requires the creation of a fantasy world of make believe where they are always right and they are always the victim.
They complain about political correctness. Again, they are practising an extreme form of censoriousness and political correctness. They are afraid of challenge. They refuse challenge. The only engagement they will practise is trolling or attempted bullying. Look at the responses Ivor Cummins wrote to Sam McBride when McBride challenged him. Cumminsās responses were a mixture of trolling, gaslighting, and attempted bullying and censorship via legal threats. In Cumminsās case itās an attempt to protect his ill gotten (large) income stream.
When you see that kind of trolling here or on other forums, itās a cocoon to protect against fear and cognitive dissonance, to protect wrong beliefs.
The people who believe demagoguery and self-identify as āanti-wokeā are themselves are everything they claim to rail against. While those they hate rarely are.
The two extremes in US politics are now both reprehensible, both are based on total intolerance. Interestingly both groups are predominantly white. Trump supporters are obviously mostly white, the majority of them poor to average income with intolerance for those who they see as elites (Hollywood a good example), progressive leftists are also mostly white but middle class living in comfort (especially during Covid) and have a disgusting intolerance towards those they see as stupid and beneath them. I would agree with you that the vitriol from this subset is a major factor in vaccine resistance as their opponents will oppose anything they stand for.
The thing is though the majority of people are either independents, centrists or completely disinterested in politics. 2020 was a bit of an anomaly, on average only 50% of US eligible voters bother to vote in national elections. These people are not left or right, they are just normal people with no interest in politics and distrust of the government.
Itās hard to see things improving anytime soon.
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Why should there be tolerance towards anti-vaccine disinformation?
And medical disinformation in general?
For the people in the US that donāt vote at all. Iād be leaning on their side more so than going one way or the other. At the end of the day does it really matter if the president is Republician or Democratic? Obama or Trump evenā¦
Does anything really change with regards to the known injustices over there internally and more broadly in the geopolitical field.
I donāt think it does anyway.
I can certainly see why people would be sceptical of the term known as democracy.
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You are misinterpreting the point, or perhaps unable to see it due to your own intolerance. Progressive leftists in the US have a disgusting superiority attitude towards those they see as beneath them, which turns into a vicious cycle where those they ridicule will always go in the opposite direction. The vitriol towards Trump supporters during 2016 to 2020 was absolutely disgusting and probably irreversible. It bleeds into every issue. If a progressive leftists says we should have vaccine mandates, by default their right wing opponents will oppose it. Intolerance breeds intolerance, there is simply no middle ground. A pox on both their houses.
As a moderate centrist I can see the harm both sides are doing, something you are unable to do. The commonality between these two groups is always thinking they are right, even when they are wrong. A good example is the young kid from Kentucky who was attacked on national media last year, you were all over that and condemned him. Well he was wronged and won a multi million settlement, quite rightly so. His crime in your eyes was he was wearing a MAGA hat. Intolerance on your behalf.
But democracy is the best system of government and works elsewhere.
Iāve always thought the US is too disparate to be a single country. It should almost be a federation and let states decide their own laws and policy.
Washington is a corrupt cesspool of politicians lining their pockets for decades, absolutely no difference ion that regard between the parties. They all rake in massive funding from lobbyists and make personal fortunes on insider trading. Even the Fed who are supposed to be above that sort of thing have now been exposed as corrupt, owning the same assets they have been buying up in QE for the past 12 years.
Itās a complete cesspit.
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