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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

So this guy is obviously lying, but does he know he's lying? That's what baffles me.

I can't see any strategic gain for the people who disbelieve in COVID-19.

For climate change denial, which the managing editor of this blog practices, I can see how you can make enough money from it to give yourself a good life and leave others to pay the cost.

But with COVID it's like that element of weaponised science skepticism has gone rogue and started killing it's host (sometimes literally).

Is there some secret plan I can't see to make money from this or are we really just letting these people drive us towards a cliff with their insanity?

I would strangely feel better if I felt someone was going to profit from all the misery and death.

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You are looking at COVID too high level. Plenty of people agree that it exists, but disagree with the details. Everything from just how serious the disease is, to how virulent, to effectiveness of masks, to how it was even released i to the “wild”.

Obviously I won’t give examples of any of the above dissenting points because that’s a good way to get banned here and in any other space where the socio-political narrative is enforced.

Edit: Furthermore I’m not saying anything about my own opinions in the question. Just giving my answer to the OP’s confusion.

You sound afraid to express your opinions. That, in itself, is a sign of the problem. Some people are not so freely willing to allow this, and that is how revolutions and civil wars begin.

The rational people rationalize it is not worth risking their livelihoods and reputations to condemn restriction of their ability to express themselves. The irrational people then rise up in this case and dominate society as their voices become dominant.

How to reverse this process (without using authoritarian claims of dis/mis/noninformation) to promote proper discourse before a powder keg erupts even bigger than what we have seen this past year and does it for us?

The strategic gain is tribal. The tribe decided early on that COVID was a hoax perpetrated to do the US economic harm. Having committed to that, there's no way to walk it back.

There is a profit motive, in continuing to profit as before. That includes deprecating masks, because if masks were needed then perhaps shutdowns are justified.

But mostly it's about ego, which is even more important than profit. It takes only a few profiteers to spark a general reaction on ideological grounds. Defending their rightness and righteousness against their ideological opponents is emotional profit.

COVID, quantitatively:

* ~2,300,000 deaths globally, according to google.

* ~$28,000,000,000,000 cost to global economy, according to the IMF.

That's a cost of $12M per death, and mostly for deaths of non-working-age retirees.

Do you really think it's the "covid deniers" that are driving us towards a cliff?

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