[Lascaille]

>Substack already tends to specialize on hyper-conservative and anti-woke ramblings; I'm curious to see how this will play out in the long term.

Probably very well, for the same reason that Joe Rogan's podcast is the most listened to podcast in the US: those views are widely accepted by about 50% of the population.

Despite your pejorative labelling you aren't actually finding extreme minority viewpoints on substack, you're finding modern-day mainstream conservative perspectives.

The readership potential is huge.

[bambax]

Well, to mention just one example, "The Abbey of Misrule" (https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com) pushes antivaxx rhetoric. I don't know if that represents "50% of the population" (let's hope not) but it's abhorrent in any case.

[Gareth321]

I don't find any of this offensive or extreme. Easily within the mainstream conservative spread. I think you need to broaden your news sources.

[bambax]

> Internment. Mandatory medication. Segregation of whole sections of society. Mass sackings. A drumbeat media consensus. The systematic censoring of dissent. The deliberate creation by the state and the press of a climate of fear and suspicion. What could possibly justify this? Perhaps the combination of a terrible pandemic which killed or maimed large percentages of those it infected, and the existence of a safe and reliable medicine which was proven to prevent its spread. This, of course, is what we are said to be living through. This is the Narrative.

> But it is clear enough by now that the Narrative is not true. Covid-19 is a nasty illness which should be taken seriously, especially by those who are especially vulnerable to it. But it is nowhere near dangerous enough - if anything could be - to justify the creation of a global police state. [1]

If you don't see the conspiracy theory in this, then I can't help you.

(Me, all I need is the capital N at "Narrative".)

[1] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-vaccine-moment-par...

[native_samples]

It doesn't posit the existence of a conspiracy anywhere. "Narratives" can be emergent phenomena, just like religion is. It doesn't require cigarette smoking men in back rooms.

You seem to be particularly triggered by the word narrative - ignore that word if you like, or mentally replace it with "what governments tell us" and which part of what was said above is false?

[cheeseomlit]

That all sounds pretty accurate and reasonable to me. I guess we can't help each other.

[Lascaille]

I read all of the articles that are available for free by that author and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Well within the overton window.

Y'all really think that moderate conservative writing - it didn't stray in terms of emotion into what I would consider rhetoric - is abhorrent? Wow. That's some thick-walled bubble you're in.

[bambax]

We have different ordinaries.

[Lascaille]

Yeah.

You're the one calling this service - which has attracted a sizeable number of perfectly mainstream conservative writers - 'the perfect honeypot.'

We definitely do have different ordinaries.

[laretluval]

Thanks for the rec! This looks like something I'll be adding to the list of Substacks I check regularly.

[bambax]

You're welcome! Substack is fast becoming a perfect honeypot.

[isaacremuant]

"Antivaxx rethoric" is just more labeling to dismiss people for not complying with whatever the new authoritarian push is. Hell, all the labels get put together and people who opposed Lockdowns and hurtful covid policies got called racist far right anti vaxxers because it's easier than using actual data.

Much of the "anti lockdown/mask/covid vaccine mandates" was and is slowly vindicated day by day no matter how much money or power you throw into the mix to convince people otherwise.

The Pfizer publications https://youtu.be/7YOD9drZasM are definitely being ignored by most media but are just one more nugget that those you called anti vaxxers that wanted the right to make their own risk analysis were right and those who sold you a lie did it knowingly.

Abhorrent is your intolerance and the happiness with which much of the population pushed segregation and deshumanization.

[bambax]

Okay! ;-) There you go.

> the right to make their own risk analysis

I really wonder where this comes from though. Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?

[dav_Oz]

You can talk to "these" people. It's a number of factors. As with anything in social media the more extreme views get amplified.

I mean everyone talks about their "bubbles" but very few acknowledge how cognitively hard it is to be open. For that it is best to talk person to person without outright throwing facts around.

I once talked to someone who really believed Hillary Clinton is at some center of some devilsh things eating babies and shit. Well, it turned out it to be a more desperate emotional expression (a personal thing), of course she didn't directly admit it, but it was nonetheless very interesting and insightful. I wouldn't have found that out if I didn't go through the first uncomfortable and awkwards moments of actually leaving my bubble. Someone could dismiss that as only emotionally unstable, I didn't.

So, when a POV seems extreme to you and is held by seemingly 50% of the population: there is really something rotten in the state of Denmark: Leave your bubble form time to time, dude.

[bambax]

I'm not in charge of the mental health of my fellow humans.

If someone I know and love believes that Hillary Clinton is eating babies, I will engage and try to find out more.

But if it's some random woman on the Internet, I'm really not interested.

[deadpannini]

> Do those people analyze the airworthiness of an airplane before boarding it? And the credentials of the pilot? Or do they just trust the airline, and their country's regulator?

To push that analogy a little farther, consider how people would have reacted if, in 1905, months after the Wright Brother's successful flight tests, the United States had made air travel mandatory and suppressed discussion of its attendant risks.

I think the mRNA vaccines are a tremendous marvel and our best tool for defending ourselves from COVID. But they are not a panacea, and we cannot build trust in them by demanding it.

[z2h-a6n]

To start with, I agree with this:

  > I think the mRNA vaccines are a tremendous marvel and our best tool for defending ourselves from COVID. But they are not a panacea, and we cannot build trust in them by demanding it.

But I think the aviation analogy has to be pushed a lot farther for it to be relevant to COVID vaccines, and the analogy stops making sense well before that. The main differences would seem to be:

  - Unlike heavier-than-air powered aircraft in 1905, COVID vaccines in 2021/2022 are effective, and probably crucial at fighting a pandemic which has killed a very large number of people and otherwise impacted many more.
  - The mechanisms by which mRNA vaccines work are basically mRNA translation (making proteins) which has been known about for 50 years or so and is well understood (I think, though I'm not an expert), and protein subunit vaccination, which is also well understood, and in fact already in widespread use.
  - Vaccination is (if I understand correctly), not only useful for an individual, but also useful for the population if vaccination rates are sufficiently high. There is therefore a valid public health reason to encourage high vaccination rates.
  - The United States government has not made vaccination mandatory in general, it has made it mandatory in certain (admitedly quite broad) circumstances. More importantly perhaps, mRNA vaccination in particular has never been mandated (as far as I know), so people who would rather get a different type of vaccine (e.g. an adenovirus vector vaccine) can do so, to the extent that supplies are available.
  - I don't believe that the US government has suppressed discussion of the risks of mRNA vaccination (which are pretty clearly much lower than the risks of not being vaccinated in nearly all cases). Depending on which online/social echo chambers one prefers to inhabit, there has likely been some suppression of discussion due to groupthink or something similar.

I don't believe that there is an analogy with aviation that captures all of these, or even just the important ones, but it seems pretty clear that using airplane airworthiness as en example of how most people are happy to outsource most risk analysis to experts most of the time is reasonable, but using early aviation technology as a detailed analogy to mRNA vaccine development and application in response to COVID is not likely to be useful.

[native_samples]

Depends which country and which airline, right, along with a whole pile of context.

Trust is earned. The airline industry has earned a lot of trust by having, amongst other things, extremely thorough accident investigations and extremely high safety standards. They also introduce new technology slowly and conservatively. People don't have to take the word of random 'experts' for this, because they can see with their own eyes that plane crashes are extremely rare. In the even rarer case where it's discovered to be due to genuine negligence or malign behaviour (see: Boeing 737 MAX fiasco), that is very widely discussed and executives are held to account via legal liability frameworks.

The COVID vaccine industry has not earned this trust:

1. Vaccine makers insist on blanket exemptions from legal liability of any kind in order to sell vaccines to a country, even if it is shown in a court that they were negligent. Check the leaked Pfizer contracts if you don't believe me. Governments have changed their laws in some cases to enable this (liability exemption pre-dates COVID).

2. People can see, with their own eyes, that vaccines have side effects they weren't told were possible. Now the law courts are forcing documents out of the FDA we can see that Pfizer knew about these side effects but didn't tell people about them (probably others too).

3. When something goes wrong and someone is injured by a vaccine, there is no crash-style investigation process. Instead it's swept under the rug, e.g. doctors will happily deny there's any connection between a vaccine and a severe reaction that happens just hours later.

And so on, and so on.

The problem with people who hate "anti-vaxxers" (they usually aren't actually anti-vaxx in general), is that they don't seem able to handle nuance or complexity. Even the derogatory label anti-vaxxer is like this, it strips all the complexity from people's positions. Comparisons between airlines (massively trusted, earned) and Pfizer (recipient of the biggest corporate fine in history, not massively trusted, earned) are in no way useful because not all institutions are the same.

[stef25]

> The Pfizer publications https://youtu.be/7YOD9drZasM are definitely being ignored by most media but are just one more nugget that those you called anti vaxxers that wanted the right to make their own risk analysis were right and those who sold you a lie did it knowingly.

Nobody doesn't have the right to make their own risk analysis. That's assuming they're capable of it and we both know that's not the case.

It really serves no purpose to link to these kind of videos, the ones with an official sounding title and authored by "a retired nurse teacher" who nonetheless calls himself "doctor".

If people don't waste 20+ min of their day sitting through the entire video and then picking it apart to have an endless back and forth of "ok but what about this other 90 page garbage pdf report I found" then it's like you've won the argument that nobody wants to have in the first place. This kind of stuff is rotting the internet from within like there's no tomorrow.

[Lascaille]

>Nobody doesn't have the right to make their own risk analysis. That's assuming they're capable of it and we both know that's not the case.

You start out by saying that people have the right to make their own risk analysis, suddenly add on a condition (if they're capable of it), determine (by yourself?) that they're not capable of it, invalidate your initial conclusion and end up saying (without saying) that people actually don't have the right to make their own risk analysis.

Now that's abhorrent.