Plandemic, conspiracies, and faith

[Anonymous]

It’s been interesting for me to see this side of people.

It’s so hard for me to grasp how people actually believe something like “reptilian alien overlords” …and yet…I was raised to believe Bible stories and Joseph Smith as if it was fact. And I knew people who laughed at me and thought I was delusional.

It’s not that different. When you believe something, even if others tell you it’s not real, you can just believe they are uninformed. They are in the big and spacious building mocking, but you know the truth and must hold to the iron rod and not doubt your faith.

It’s just interesting to see conspiracy theorists and dismiss them, then return to orthdox religion as if it is clearly reality.

[Anonymous]

Conspiracies go in both directions.

There’s: the coronavirus is a hoax meant to take people’s freedoms away and there’s a microchip in the vaccine with the number 666 embedded in it so Bill Gates can… do I don’t know what.

And there’s: they’re manipulating the numbers to hide deaths and new cases just so they can make their case for reopening and the vaccine is nothing more than a placebo to get people over their fears of returning.

I guess the question then becomes, what is the fruit of my conspiracy theory?

[Anonymous]

nibbler wrote:

what is the fruit of my conspiracy theory?

Sometimes I feel it is entertainment. Occupy the mind with some fun stories. Like scouts around a campfire telling stories.

[Anonymous]

I definitely don’t believe that the virus was intentionally developed and released by China or that the governments of all these different countries would all be in on some grand conspiracy at the same time or anything like that. But what I think has been fraudulent and deserves to be called a hoax about the whole thing is the level of overreaction, overhyping, shameless fear-mongering, finger-pointing, etc. by the media, many politicians and others. The truth of the matter is that over 99% of people under 65 and that are not diabetic, long-time smokers, etc. will not be killed by this virus even if they catch it in the first place. And to put things in perspective something like an average of 8 thousand Americans were already dying per day of other causes like cancer, heart disease, car accidents, etc. before this virus. So why have we singled this one thing out and treated it like the end all be all month after month as if no price is too high to pay to try to stop it compared to everything else that can kill you just as easily if not more so? Can you imagine if car accident fatalities were reported this way with a running total of the deaths for the entire country?

I think some of it is simply because it was new and unexpected so that makes it seem scarier than it really is statistically but it’s almost like some people actually like counting up the deaths and seeing millions of Americans unemployed, etc. so they can try to blame it on Trump or whatever other reasons that have nothing to do with science and facts. And Trump himself has claimed the actions of his administration actually helped save millions of lives which I also think is ridiculous but I think it gives some insight into where some of these decisions were coming from. Basically it looks like some of these politicians and other decision makers had “expert” advisors telling them that millions of Americans would die without shutting practically everything we can down. And it looks like some of these early projections were based on taking numbers from Italy and/or other countries hit worst at first and trying to extrapolate that percentage by multiplying by the majority of the US population.

The obvious problem with models like this are that they didn’t take into account all the people that had the virus without ever getting tested (could easily be several times the number actually confirmed). And if the lock-downs were really necessary to prevent overwhelming the health care system and millions of deaths then why didn’t we see anything close to that per capita happen in Sweden and other countries that didn’t do strict government lock-downs? India did one of the most strict lock-downs of all with police actually beating people for leaving their homes and what good did that do? Based on the results so far it looks like at best it only delayed the inevitable and at worst made little to no difference. It sounds like more people will actually end up dying from starvation worldwide due to the economic impact of the lock-downs than from the virus itself. I think the whole situation is kind of sad all-around; I guess politicians and others felt like they needed be seen doing something so they don’t get blamed too much for “killing grandma” regardless of how effective or not these actions really were in hindsight.

[Anonymous]

DA You have a lot of good points. There surely can be a middle ground somewhere between business as usual and shut everything down. I believe that middle ground involves near universal mask use but I understand that saying it is one thing and doing/enforcing it is another.

Some of what you describe seems to fit with group dynamics. Similar to stock bubbles or real estate bubbles people create feedback loops that can distort reality until the distortion becomes too great to maintain and it crumbles.

I think where conspiracy theories are different is that they usually have a shadow force controlling things for the negative and deliberately hiding things from the general public.

[Anonymous]

DevilsAdvocate wrote:

I guess politicians and others felt like they needed be seen doing something so they don’t get blamed too much for “killing grandma” regardless of how effective or not these actions really were in hindsight.

Who knows their intentions? Do they act so they can be “seen” doing something, or do they act because to not act is worse in their minds?

Perhaps that is part of conspiracy theory story-telling…even if there are groups of people hiding some information from the public (which happens all the time), it usually becomes a conspiracy theory when a story-teller places intention and interpretation into it to have it be a conspiracy, even if there is a kernal of truth in it to make it believable.

Church leaders are put in that position. I’ve been part of councils and meetings where the discussion is about trying to do what is best with the information the church leaders have at the time, but on the outside for those who haven’t heard the council discussions, they accuse the decisions as being mean-spirited or hate-driven to someone who doesn’t like it.

The story-telling is sometimes what captures people’s attention. Does it sound plausible? Does it play on fears and motivate you? Does it become interesting to think about? Those are the things that become part of conspiracy theories, politics, and religion…I think.

[Anonymous]

Heber13 wrote:

DevilsAdvocate wrote:

I guess politicians and others felt like they needed be seen doing something so they don’t get blamed too much for “killing grandma” regardless of how effective or not these actions really were in hindsight.

Who knows their intentions? Do they act so they can be “seen” doing something, or do they act because to not act is worse in their minds?

Perhaps that is part of conspiracy theory story-telling…even if there are groups of people hiding some information from the public (which happens all the time), it usually becomes a conspiracy theory when a story-teller places intention and interpretation into it to have it be a conspiracy, even if there is a kernal of truth in it to make it believable.

That was just my off-the-cuff guess about the most common motivation for politicians in general in this case. I’m sure that many of them really did believe they were making the right choice and that not doing this would be wrong at the time. But at the same time these decisions were not made in complete isolation even to the groups that debated them. It looks like after a few dominoes fell that it just became commonly accepted and expected that the appropriate reaction to the virus threat was to cancel practically everything possible, implement strict lock-downs, etc. in large part because that’s what many others (in position to make these decisions) had already done. So whether self-serving or well-meaning there was a certain amount of bandwagon pressure that this was just the thing to do at the time.

Why was it alright to remain open and resist further lockdowns (other than California as far as I know) when the hospitalizations and deaths actually peaked in many of these same states? I think that is basically a tacit admission that shows the lock-downs were never really necessary in the first place. The media was hyping the number of deaths until those started to taper off and then they hyped the number of new cases. Then when the new cases started to taper off as well they went back to hyping the cumulative deaths again or other fear-mongering anecdotes. Why is that? What’s the motivation to try to make it sound as bad and scary as possible as long as possible? I’m just not convinced that all of it is aboveboard and I think there could easily be some thinking along the lines of, “never let a crisis go to waste” or other shenanigans going on here.

[Anonymous]

I do agree that politicians (and humans generally) have a really hard time going against the grain. It is really easy to do x or y when everyone else is doing it and will praise you for your conformity. If it turns out later that doing x or y was wrong then you have plenty of cover because you were just following conventional wisdom at the time. Sticking your neck out is something that most of us avoid.

[Anonymous]

There are a lot of things which stink to high heaven about this. I suspect it was accidentally released in Wuhan, which happens to be where China’s virological research and bioweapons lab is. (Now reportedly being demolished, funny that.) It’s the old double blind, if it did come out of a lab, no one in authority (other than DJT) would admit it.

This whole situation has unleashed some very ugly tendencies. We’ve seen Chinese people abused in my city, and also people with invisible disabilities harangued for not wearing masks. The government has turned us into a kind of police state and asked us to spy on our neighbors, wants us to instal state spyware on our phones… And God forbid if you speak out – you’re considered a tin foil hat type. The global economy is clearly being collapsed by this situation. I know someone who has taken a heart attack from the stress of running a small business.

[Author]

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