[denton-scratch]

> your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak

I'm not really bothered about the true origin of the virus, except inasmuchas scientists lying about their true beliefs is incredibly damaging to public confidence, and energises conspiranoids. Lying about the benefits of mask-wearing was bloody stupid.

I no longer pay attention to statistics about infection rates and fatality rates. They are presented in the press without context (e.g. "It's a Monday, so results are skewed because some clinics report numbers for the whole weekend"). We get numbers with spurious precision. How can they know it's 251 cases, and not 249? Where are the error-bars?

It's really annoying; if you want to understand what's happening, you really do have to "do your own research". I feel ashamed to have just typed that, because that's a phrase mainly used by antivaxxers and QAnon conspiraloons, people who generally don't have the critical-thinking capacity to distinguish their left hand from their right, let alone evaluate research.

[chrishynes]

All of the lying and "nudging" and viewpoint policing is what made the "conspiraloons" so big (great word BTW). It was quite clear by March or April 2020 that a lot of lying was going on (wether "for the greater good" or some more nefarious reason) and also clear that everyone in media, politics, and science that should have been asking questions was instead giving a doe eyed acquiesce that the emperor was in fact wearing beautiful clothes.

[denton-scratch]

> great word BTW

Thanks, but not mine. At one time I used to read Indymedia, an open-posting forum. There were a lot of pretty conspiraloonatic posts, often about 9/11 and "chemtrails". This was the early noughties. The word's been around a long time.