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Comment by larryflint | Hacker News Reader

Yep. I'm a case in point. At the beginning of this thing i went along with the mainstream narrative like a good sheeple. Now that i've watched how a narrative can go from 'your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak' to 'yahhh it was probably a lab leak the whole time'...my faith has probably been permenantly destroyed in main-stream sources of information. Which sucks because idealy i just want to focus on what i'm good at and let others do what they are good at. But now its been shown that the people who are supposed to take care of gathering the facts and presenting them to the public have agendas and will lie if they see it fit. Not sure how any semblance of democracy survives with people like this in charge.

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The nail in the coffin for me was when they would make articles about “700 people fired from X company for not getting vaccine.” When that company has like 85k people (which they don’t mention in the article and you have to look up yourself, of course), and it’s like “so less than 1% of the employees refused the vaccine?”

Even when they tell the technical truth, it’s so full of deception to sell ads I just can’t.

At least for me, in this instance I don't see why the percentage is of more relevancy than the total amount.

Yes, it's only 1% of a company, which is not a lot. But 700 people being fired is quite a lot, if we consider that this affects more than these 700 people. I'm sure a lot of these 700 people have a family at home.

In your example I don't really see why that is proof that they use the total amount for ad-driven clickbait. There are more than enough better examples for this, I think.

I assume you're talking about the Mayo clinic firing 700 people for not getting the vaccine(given it was exactly 700 people and it was 6 days ago).

I opened the first 15 results on Google and every single one mentions the number of people as proportion of the overall company size. The vast majority are in paragraph 1 or 2.

Could you link to the article (hopefully from a reputable source) that doesn't mention the company size?

They can’t because the articles all mentioned how few people refused. I don’t know what it is about this shit that drives people to become absolute morons.

And some of those employers are health institutions. And those institutions now have a worker shortage. And rather than bringing back those workers, many who have natural immunity from having had Covid, which can be proven by a lab test, instead they are telling people with active Covid that they can just come back earlier from quarantine.

So was the quarantine window wrong all along? Or is it changing now because we really need workers?

The real soon here is a complete erosion of trust in institutions. I think many folks greatly underestimate the extent of the harm caused by this loss of trust.

Honestly, good. I’m glad you (and others) realized this. With an open mind read about the history of the US during the age of 3 letter agencies (https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...) (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method) I could go on and on with historical accounting books that are just accepted as fact… and try to square the circle that those kinds of things have stopped and the people in charge have your best interest at heart, and act in good faith.

> your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak

I'm not really bothered about the true origin of the virus, except inasmuchas scientists lying about their true beliefs is incredibly damaging to public confidence, and energises conspiranoids. Lying about the benefits of mask-wearing was bloody stupid.

I no longer pay attention to statistics about infection rates and fatality rates. They are presented in the press without context (e.g. "It's a Monday, so results are skewed because some clinics report numbers for the whole weekend"). We get numbers with spurious precision. How can they know it's 251 cases, and not 249? Where are the error-bars?

It's really annoying; if you want to understand what's happening, you really do have to "do your own research". I feel ashamed to have just typed that, because that's a phrase mainly used by antivaxxers and QAnon conspiraloons, people who generally don't have the critical-thinking capacity to distinguish their left hand from their right, let alone evaluate research.

All of the lying and "nudging" and viewpoint policing is what made the "conspiraloons" so big (great word BTW). It was quite clear by March or April 2020 that a lot of lying was going on (wether "for the greater good" or some more nefarious reason) and also clear that everyone in media, politics, and science that should have been asking questions was instead giving a doe eyed acquiesce that the emperor was in fact wearing beautiful clothes.

> great word BTW

Thanks, but not mine. At one time I used to read Indymedia, an open-posting forum. There were a lot of pretty conspiraloonatic posts, often about 9/11 and "chemtrails". This was the early noughties. The word's been around a long time.

I've kind of switched from my main source of info being mainstream media to it being following individuals, experts and other on twitter. Advantages:

- As individuals you kind of know what they know what their biases are

- You can follow all sides of the debates

- It's quicker by about 12 hours than the newspapers

You get to see the biases in the news when it breaks on twitter first and then you get the editorialised dumbed down version written up by journalists a few hours after. Obviously you have to be a bit selective about who you follow.

you might be interested in this ... https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/01/mainstream-media-has-...

But you're incorrect? The lab leak theory is still widely considered to be an unlikely possibility.

There is a vast difference between responding to someone by saying it's unlikely and responding to someone by calling them a Republican/racist/Nazi, which is how several of my questions about the origins of Covid-19 with regards to its seemingly unique and varied symptoms were responded to during the first year of the pandemic.

Sure. I am sorry to hear you have been insulted - my comment is not to be interpreted as a justification of rude online behavior.

By the way, what do you think of the tone of the other reply to my comment? (Did you perhaps see the now-deleted curse word at the end?)

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