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> I wish I could say that if authorities hadn't lied about, say, masks or this stuff with natural immunity, things would gone a lot better and people would have behaved much more rationally about COVID, but I don't think that's true.

I agree. For someone whose threshold of 'did the authorities lie about masks' is one cherry-picked example, there was never any hope. They were absolutely going to find someone to confirm their already-existing beliefs.

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There’s a whole list of lies from the pst 19 months.

- There is no pandemic”

- “Masks don’t work”

- “Border closures are racist”

- “3 weeks to stop the spread”

- “The virus definitely didn’t come from a lab”

- “Antibodies only last 3 months”

- “There will be no vaccine passports”

- “We’re not manipulating COVID data”

- “Vaccines are 100% safe”

- “Lockdowns are for your own safety”

- “Don’t take drugs meant for horses”

- “Measures are guided by science”

- “We’re all in this together”

- “If you get vaccinated you’ll get your freedom back”

Nonsense. There's such a thing as people on the margin. On any binary issue most pieces of evidence "won't matter" to most people, in that that one piece of evidence is unlikely to be the one that "flips" the person, but that doesn't mean people are ignoring the evidence - it's just that most of the time any given piece of evidence is the difference between 99% believing and 98% believing rather than the difference between 50% believing and 49% believing.

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