Yes, until you develop some evidence to support that assumption.
If you bash yourself on the head for 18 months, observe that it hurts, and keep on doing it, then youâre either immensely stupid (perhaps a side-effect of bashing yourself on the head) or you intend to hurt yourself.
Do you have an alternative hypothesis?
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Yes, people donât have perfect abilities to navigate an unprecedented and dangerous situation. Whatâs the evidence that there is a conspiracy to make things worse?
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And why the assumption that profoundly disorganized national and supranational organizations would suddenly and magically work brilliantly?
The assumption that everyone is acting in bad faith and trying to mess things up is, well, just odd. Maybe many of these organizations are simply just inept, as we have seen for a very long time now and we continue to see in relation to ongoing crises related to climate.
Guy
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So weâre going with the âimmensely stupidâ explanation then?
I didnât say there was a conspiracy to make things worse. Thatâs the word the Believers use to avoid even looking at the evidence of harm. The UN publishes regular bulletins on the subject.
I said that, if governments are ignoring and subverting valid methods of keeping people alive and healthy, refusing to change course even when faced with overwhelming evidence of harm (and no evidence of doing good) then we should assume that that is the intended outcome of policy.
Icon said that some countries canât afford to do anything. That is simply not true. They can clearly afford to do all sorts of things that are causing a lot of harm.
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How could there be an âintent to make things worseâ without a conspiracy?
I understand that youâve developed those assumptions, and youâre basing what seems to you to be a logical conclusion on it, but I see governments adopting different means of attempting to keep people alive and healthy, and I donât come to that conclusion. So I would ask for direct evidence of âintent to make things worseâ.
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Perhaps your definition of âconspiracyâ is different to mine. Governments, by definition, have the power to do harm as well as good. They can, for example, make up a whole bunch of rules that say people arenât allowed to go to work, arenât allowed to go to this place or that place, arenât allowed to do this that and the other, and call out the police and army to enforce it. Mission accomplished. No âconspiracyâ is required. All thatâs necessary is for police/army commanders to blindly obey the civilian government.
In any case, your logic is bizarre. You seem to be saying that if there is no conspiracy then bad things canât happen.
How am I supposed to prove intent?
You can infer intent from somebodyâs actions. Itâs not foolproof, but it works a lot of the time. If you break into my home and steal all my stuff, I can reasonably infer that your intent was to break into my home and steal my stuff. It would do little to change my opinion if you told me that actually your intent was to do my laundry for me.
If governments tell people âhere is some advice to help you lose weightâ, and then proceed to (a) hand out advice that is absolutely guaranteed to make you fatter while (b) run smear campaigns against doctors pointing out that the advice is wrong, what can we infer from that?
If they tell you âweâre doing this to keep you safeâ, and the net result is that hundreds of millions of people end up even less safe than they were to begin with, and they keep doing it even when they observe the outcome, what benign explanation can you think of for that?
I think itâs time for you to pony up some evidence that killing and harming millions on the scale that has been achieved is somehow âworth itâ.
Anyway, weâre really going off down the same old rabbithole here. My sole point was that âmany governments cannot afford to do the right thingâ is demonstrably false. Theyâve spent a shitload of money on doing the wrong thing.
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If thereâs any organization deliberately trying to inflict pain and suffering throughout this ordeal, itâs pretty obvious that it would have to be China, and the goons in the WHO and the UN who work for it.
The most affordable way to prevent this pandemic would have been to inform the world that there is a highly transmissible disease in China that could inundate and paralyze medical facilities and cause a high mortality rate around January 2020. The WHO should have advised world governments to implement travel bans, and declare it a pandemic by February. They should also have advised every government to put a mask mandate in place.
That alone would have saved 4 million deaths and 200 million from suffering life long adverse respiratory and cardiovascular conditions.
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Thatâs weird. So youâre saying all the governments somehow intended to make things worse, came to the same conclusion that that was desirable and how to do it, and everyone is just following blindly along?
Your logic is bizarre. I have said nothing of the sort. You said there was intent and suggested that it was strange that people would say there was a conspiracy as a result. Iâm saying it seems logical to call those people conspiracy theorists until they explain how this intent is being manifested.
Thatâs not my problem.
Iâll go back to what I said above and the last post.
No, why should I? Thatâs no way to jump out of your responsibility to prove what you are calling intent.
OK, just say that then.
Possible, I suppose, but highly unlikely, given the very specific profile of people who succumbed - ie., the old and the sick.
All of the proposed âinterventionsâ are based on the idea that a virus - perhaps a weaponized virus - can be defeated. Mask mandates and suchlike, as Iâve said before, amount to bringing a sharpened stick to a nuclear war. I think most people just donât comprehend how much raw power Nature can throw at achieving something sheâs hell-bent on achieving.
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Because youâre dismissing the most likely explanation for the facts (the one that would work in instances such as the two examples I gave you) as highly implausible. If you have a better explanation, letâs hear it. If Iâm wrong, then whatâs the right explanation for what weâre seeing? If it is merely âworld leaders are absolutely fecking stupid and canât even figure out how much damage theyâre causing despite the regular publication of reportsâ, Iâm not convinced that makes things much better.
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Nature or life as a whole, and definitely a single strain of virus, arenât trying to achieve anything. The fact that life continues to exist is just that luck would have it that some life could still find ways to continue replicating itself imperfectly after whatever nature throws at it.
Organisms act according to their characteristics. A virus wants to virus. It doesnât care how hard you believe in travel bans or masks or yellow tape around parks. They cannot possibly work.
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Iâm not saying it would 
So is that your explanation then? Theyâre a bunch of ignorami who canât even hold a UN report the right way up, nevermind read it?
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In this case, the SARS-COV-2 virus transmits in aerosol or droplet forms, which would not be able to transmit effectively if people donât continue to travel to affected regions, especially if everyone are wearing decent surgical masks, cutting down the possibility for transmission when two people are in close proximity by 70%. You cut down the spread, and it would have less of an opportunity to mutate, and for it to find new ways to dodge vaccine induced immune responses.
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I thought Delta can get you if youâre even within 3 miles of someone who had COVID last month? Many epidemiologists are now standing up and saying that Delta changes the game, and that all bets are off - including vaccine-induced herd immunity.
Cutting down the spread might well âgive it less of an opportunity to mutateâ, but it enhances the survival prospects of variants like Delta.
In any case this is entirely hypothetical. There are things that governments could have done, even in the face of an uncontrollable pandemic, and they did not do them. Instead, they did things that are guaranteed to cause hardship, illness, and death. And they are still doing those things. Why is that?
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I already said above. Anyway, Iâm just chalking this up to you assuming intent. Let me know when you can demonstrate it, if you care to.
As long as we got that sorted out then. Iâm amazed that âPrime Ministerâ might be a valid career path for people who failed highschool, but hey, itâs a funny old world we live in.
Iâm reminded here of a meeting I had years ago with the CEO of an energy company. We were attempting to sell him a product that would help him comply with various government âenergy savingâ initiatives. At one point we flagged up a particular feature that would save energy, make life simpler for the consumer, and also make load-balancing somewhat simpler. We thought it was a win-win-win. He gave us a blank look and said, âwhy would we want to do that? The way we do it now maximizes our profitâ.
We came out of that meeting chastened and a little wiser. But I guess he was just stupid, not evil.
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Iâm reminded of the time I bashed my head against the wall repeatedly to get someone to support a statement they made of their own free will. Once again, itâs just hurt my head and accomplished nothing.
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