Which leads to the end-game 13th dose. Because everybody knows that 13 is a magic number.
Itās been kind of bizarre to watch Finley disappear down this rabbit hole. At least we now have a definitive statement of the over arching conspiracy theory behind this.
Either heās right or heās wrong. Iāll have a fiver either way.
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I had this question before and will probably have it again whenever something like this is said.
Deliberate engineering by who?
The worldwide industrial complex and the governments of all countries?
I still find this unlikely because of rivalries of corporations and governments/political parties/countries.
Iād expect at least some corporations and countries going against what is allegedly going on.
If you are talking about single countries and single governments in cahoots with certain sectors of the industry, OK, there is certainly stuff going on. But everywhere, simultaneously?
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I think humans have always been split roughly 50:50 by beliefs. Politics, religions, other belief systems always seem to be mainly one or the other. Iām working on a theory as to why, but itāll probably be wrong. Perhaps unsurprisingly it involves evolution.
This? Maybe?
Thereās overwhelming evidence that we areācollectively speaking, as a speciesāextremely poor at wide-scale coordination and collaboration. The claims of wide-scale conspiracy smash against the fact that we continue to suck at this level of coordination.
Guy
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Also, if this is all deliberately engineered, could it be that the non-believers are equally fooled?
If I do research and come to the conclusion that this is all a conspiracy of massive proportions how do I know that the data I have studied leading me to my conclusion are even trustworthy? Isnāt all the data collected and provided by the alleged conspirators?
Itās been kind of bizarre watching everyone on FM support TPTB (or at least shrug) as the entire planet starts to circle the drain.
Well, there is. But look what happens to those that donāt toe the line: the usual response is a barrage of negative PR (often put together at great expense) to hurt their bottom line and paint them as anti-social, anti-vaxer lunatics.
I posted a transcript in the humbug thread - a conversation between UK government propaganda wonks and some executives at the social media companies. Scan through it if you want to see how this goes. Several of the executives were uncomfortable with any sort of censorship other than correcting out-and-out lies (which is reasonable enough, I suppose, although it appears not to apply to lies put out by governments). They were also exasperated with the apparent inability of the govāt to understand how social media even works as a business. They didnāt want to be having that conversation. But they seemed painfully aware that if they didnāt do as they were told, there would be repercussions.
Why does it matter? This line of argument seems to go something like this: āwe donāt know who is doing these things, or why they might be doing them, therefore there canāt be anything wrongā.
Look: if you watch a guy carefully cutting and shaping some bits of wood and then fixing them together into a chair, you can usually tell right at the outset what heās intending to do. You donāt stand amazed when the chair emerges and say āOMG, I never expected that! Itās magic!ā. You also donāt point and laugh at the guy while heās doing it and suggest that heās an incompetent idiot, messing around with bits of wood for no purpose. Unless, perhaps, you were an alien who knew nothing about the manufacture of chairs from wood.
I have a degree in psychology. I know what the nuts and bolts of manipulation, coercion, and compliance look like. I know how you engineer this sort of thing, and over the past year or so Iāve been absolutely blown away by the level of competence demonstrated in deploying those psychological tools. In my whole lifetime, I have never seen any government achieve anything with such skill and understanding as they did during the COVID fear campaign. It was like watching an artisan at work. I really donāt think that happens by accident, or without planning and rehearsal.
Why are they doing it? Who is behind it? I have absolutely no idea. But I donāt see that it matters.
I have come to no such conclusion. What I said earlier is that there is a deliberate attempt to engineer social division, and I said that because Iāve seen governments deploy those psychological tools that are routinely used to create social division. That may or may not be part of a larger conspiracy. But you seem to be suggesting that this happened purely by accident. If that were so, it would suggest that governments are not merely incompetent but criminally negligent (in failing to research the consequences of their actions), and that in itself would be cause for concern.
The aim of these campaigns is not merely to āfoolā people: itās to get them to think and act in a certain way. People who donāt buy it might, of course, be fooled by some alternative campaign (eg., the 5G thing, or microchips-in-vaccines). But not necessarily.
If I show you a chair and say āthis is a chairā, thatās not really up for debate. You can see for yourself that itās a chair. If I tell you that it was made by aliens from unicorn poo, you might want to argue about that. But the physical existence of a chair should not be something worth arguing over. I see democratic institutions being dismantled and governments manipulating public opinion to support that. And I suspect you do, too.
We are extremely good at co-operation, far better than most species. We have some particular cognitive quirks that make us prone to forming in-groups and out-groups. Itās technically possible to form extremely large in-groups, although for obvious reasons the points of agreement become more and more tenuous as the group size increases.
Itās equally possible to create an in-group with a firmly-held belief that those in the out-group are dangerous and should be killed. Most of human history boils down to this unfortunate fact.
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Homo sapiens are incredibly good at co-operation. We even get dogs to work with us (or, perhaps, they get us to work with them - not sure about that). Thatās why there are almost 8 billion of us fuckers.
Whether the co-operation is a good thing is debatable.
EDIT: To be fair @afterspivak did say ācollectively ā¦ as a speciesā. So Iām wrong in that respect. People are tribal. However, until penguins figure out how to collectively form a phalanx my position remains the same.
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I dunno. I look at the past two years, and whether we look at coordinated measures to deal with the virus, or measures to distribute vaccines (the failures of COVAX), or basic information sharing (Iām looking at you, Beijing), all I see is evidence of abject failure.
Itās fascinating to me that anyone could look at this past two years and see evidence of coordination or co-operation. I see very little of either. 
EDIT: Now that Iāve seen new parts of @BiggusDickus 's post, I think our positions are not that far apart.
Guy
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You canāt be serious. Designing, manufacturing and distributing five billion shots of a vaccine in the space of 12 months? Have you any idea what that involves? That was masterful. Completely fecking pointless as far as COVID goes, but masterful in its execution.
Physically marking someoneās body with the insignia of the in-group is a technique as old as history. It achieved the desired effect.
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I dare to dream that we can get beyond this First World / Third World divide.
How to get leaders in Beijing to stop acting like total sh&tsāthatās a tougher one to solve.
Guy
I think you need to take a step back and think why and how. Thereās no way this is some global conspiracy. Itās been a monumental fuck up, for sure, but thereās no evil intent.
Governments at a national level may have taken advantage of the CCPās cynicism.
As I said to hannes, it doesnāt really matter whether there is evil intent. Evil has been achieved. I donāt know why everyone is so keen to let the politicians off the hook: oh, they didnāt mean it, it was all just an unfortunate mistake. And for some reason, they keep on making mistakes that seem to be leading in a certain direction.
The Great Leap Forward was also basically just an unfortunate mistake committed by a foolish and egotistical man. That doesnāt mean someone wasnāt responsible.
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This is a question of who was responsible and whether the response was correct. The CCP was responsible and IMO the response was incorrect.
The CCP might have been initially responsible. All the rest ā¦ well, unless you suspect that the CCP are pulling the global puppet strings, thatās happened purely on the say-so of other governments.
I honestly donāt care if this is a conspiracy or not. The āwhyā makes little difference to me. I just want to be left alone.
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Iāve suggested several times that mass vaccination could be driving the recent surge in symptomatic cases by removing the normal selection pressure that tends to make a pathogen less virulent. Whether it is happening in the case of COVID is open to debate and rebuttal, of course, but it is not being debated. Simply ignoring the possibility (as governments are doing) is reckless in the extreme. The following is a paper unlikely to be tainted by political considerations:
Less dense summary here:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathogens-to-evolve-20180510/
The authors are careful to note that:
Our data do not demonstrate that vaccination was responsible for the evolution of hyperpathogenic strains of MDV, and we may never know for sure why they evolved in the first place. [ā¦] But whatever was responsible for the evolution of more virulent strains in the first place (and there may be many causes), our data show that vaccination is sufficient to maintain hyperpathogenic strains in poultry flocks today.
It strikes me as a very good experiment - for example the authors actually run tests on their proxy measures to ensure validity, instead of just making assumptions. Itās a pity, though, that they didnāt choose something less virulent to study, and it would have been more applicable to humans if they had the chickens on free range (chickens tend to āself-isolateā when theyāre ill).
I would suggest that the same mechanism demonstrated here can drive unwanted viral selection even if a virus doesnāt have adequate evolutionary range to ever become truly dangerous (like SARS-CoV-2). While death of the host can cripple a virusās ability to survive, simply making the host very ill can have essentially the same effect. Reducing symptoms is precisely what you donāt want for the long term health of the population.
In contrast, we have here a paper which appears to suggest that evolution doesnāt work like that:
The researchers also found that compared with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients, vaccinated individuals who developed breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infection harbored viruses with significantly lower diversity in the B cell epitopes that are leveraged following vaccination.
āThis study demonstrates that mass vaccination may serve as an antigenic impediment to the evolution of fitter and more transmissive SARS-CoV-2 variants, emphasizing the urgent need to stem vaccine hesitancy as a key step to mitigate the global burden of COVID-19,ā writes the team.
Hmm. Not sure that that follows. Lower epitope diversity in a vaccinated body is exactly what youād expect because viruses sporting an epitope easily ārecognisedā as a result of vaccine-induced immunity will obviously be eliminated, while a narrower range of āfitterā viruses will survive and reproduce. Quite how the researchers make the leap from reduced diversity to reduced infectivity and virulence is beyond me, and if Iāve understood the discussion here correctly, what is happening is exactly what I postulated in other posts: immune-evading and potentially-more-nasty viruses are being quickly transmitted to the unvaccinated, resulting in a complex and potentially dangerous interplay between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
Exactly consistent with what Minister Chen has been saying for around a year. Wonder if the various European states and their residents will follow the advice. 
Guy
All those measures need to be used for contact tracing to be viable. Donāt need hard lock downs if you can just quarantine all close contacts. Europe had the opportunity a couple of times after previous waves subsided. But some people are less inclined to follow the measures there and the infections shoot through the roof. Then new hard lock downs follow and everyone complains about the government.