Open Thread

Open Thread #179

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65 thoughts on “Open Thread #179

  1. I am currently reading “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Even though I thought that I have a pretty good grasp of the big picture, there is a lot I have been learning from this book. Fauci is an incredible slimeball. If we get Nuremberg 2.0 trials, he should be first in line for the gallows.

    A few claims this Kennedy makes may seem outlandish at first, but then you check the notes and realize that this Covid charade is much worse than you thought possible. In chapter 2, for instance, I learned of trials that were supposed to prove that HCQ is harmful, even though it has been successfully used for treating coronoavirus infections for decades. So, what do the faggots Gates and Fauci do? They fund trials in which people, supposedly without knowing, got a knowingly lethal dose, i.e. they got poisoned with a dose that was a multiple higher than the maximum recommended dose. To make sure that nothing goes wrong, those people get HCQ at a point where it was known that it does no longer work properly, i.e at a late stage of their infection. Expectedly, people die, the study gets published, and HCQ gets banned as it is now a “known health risk”. Also, Kennedy reveals African reports that mysterious groups of people systematically bought up all available stock of HCQ in various (African) states, and just burned all of it. He cannot present a link to Gates/Fauci, but the timing is quite suspicious.

    1. I did not know the particular story of the HCQ trials, but I am not surprised. They pulled something similar with Ivermectin.

      This has been a known problem with big Pharma for many years, they dont need to outright lie to your face, they simply design the trials to show whatever they want them to show, and bury the dirt in the footnotes and annexes that no one ever reads, or even comprehends. Journalists, even those who supposedly specialize in science, will usually go no deeper than the abstract and the summary.

      State regulators are supposed to pick up on those dirty details, but then there is regulatory capture…

      One big problem is that long term randomized controlled clinical trials are so expensive that no one except Big Pharma is willing to fund them, so we are largely limited in what we can know.

    2. Even if you woke out of a coma today after two years and know nothing about the plandemic, one minute of looking at Anthony Fauci talking would lead you to conclude he has the most punchable face on the entire planet and that he’s scum.

    3. “If we get Nuremberg 2.0 trials”

      I’ll bet you a million sats we’ll never see this.

    4. I do not think so either, but they would surely be justified instead of being a farcical show trial.

  2. I love what’s happening with the protests. I just learned what happened in Vienna yesterday.

    Protesters broke through barricades and took raids on shopping malls. Quite nice in it’s symbolism and a great warning.

    Basically there were barricades placed to where the protesters are allowed to protest. Well, they just broke through them. It’s a good first step in breaking that spell. All limits placed on the people are imaginary and you can go right pass them.

    1. Took raids? What does that mean? Hopefully not what it sounds like, it’d be a shame if these protests turned in BLM-kind of looting.

    2. No, just entered and strolled through the malls in defiance. This isn’t the first though. Been done in France and other places. Can’t walk into a mall without vaccine? See a group of 500 people all barge into the mall at the same time.

    3. Oh, I see. It’s just that the word “raid” raises up the alarms.

      I don’t know, the experience with protests is completely different in Europe than in Latin America. Depending on who’s the guy leading the country, these demonstrations in one of our nations would’ve already been met with some degree of lethal force. LOL

      And going at it after the police fire the first shot without firearms of your own? I want to believe people make that mistake only once per generation at most and then learn their lessons.

    4. This only happened because the police didn’t do anything to prevent it.
      So I don’t know if this is good or bad.
      The media tries to frame it as “look, the protesters can still break the barricades, no one stops them, we are still living in a perfectly fine democracy”

    5. This only happened because the police didn’t do anything to prevent it.

      That’s kind of my point. They can’t. I’ve been saying for a while now, all the protesters have to is just walk past, the police aren’t going to do anything. They can’t. They’re like 1 cop per 1000 protesters, they’re not superman or thanos.

      Until now people were under a spell, like look a barricade oh no, i can’t go any further. They finally figured out it’s all just social hypnosis. That authority and those boundaries stand on nothing.

    6. @Alek

      “Until now people were under a spell, like look a barricade oh no, i can’t go any further. They finally figured out it’s all just social hypnosis. That authority and those boundaries stand on nothing.”

      –> how do you see this thing playing out over the next few months?

    7. @Neutral

      The elites will actually use Omicron as an excuse to back off of their agenda, so they can save face. Oh, we never intended to implement dictatorships… it was really about covid and health… now that Omicron is here and we have drugs we no longer have to force vaccinate people and attempt to chinify our countries.

      See, it really was all about health. It has nothing to do with the fact that in france last week 4 MILLION protesters came out in the streets and protesters are slowly starting to get more aggressive and if we don’t back off we’ll be nanging off of lamp-posts… no no, we backed off coz omicron and pfizer’s drug are good enough so we no longer have to take actions like these…

    8. In one sentence:

      They will not admit that they’re backing off because of the protests. They will find other ways to back out.

    9. @Alek: I would also consider, that many of the policemen are actually on the side of the protesters.
      The police in Vienna/Austria in general is extremely lax in enforcing the lockdown bullshit.
      Might be just a lack of personnel, but I also think many of them don’t support any of the tyrannical measures.
      Police in general is more on the right side of the political spectrum, and at the moment the FPÖ (our Nazi party 😉 ) is the only party which is against the vaccine mandate.

    10. “The elites will actually use Omicron as an excuse to back off of their agenda, so they can save face. (…) They will not admit that they’re backing off because of the protests. They will find other ways to back out.”

      Thanks.
      OK, but, will they be able to save face, in your opinion? Like, isn’t it too late for them to back off? Isn’t the damage done, the trust in the elites lost?

    11. @Uber

      I would also consider, that many of the policemen are actually on the side of the protesters.

      I’m aware of that. I posted a comment this week about the police supporting the protests. In fact the police union of austria came out against the mandates. The fact-checkers it was “false news” because “not every single policeman in austria supports the protesters” therefore it is “fake news” to say so, and they’re blocking posts talking about austrian police supporting the protesters.

  3. Quick question, as you are woke to the JQ: Do you think that Mark Manson is really (((Mark Manson)))? His ascent from bottom-feeding PUA to suddenly having a book out by a major publisher is just too unlikely.

    1. Alek, I find the step from mid-tier PUA to mainstream-endorsed and top-selling self-help guru too unlikely. This happened simply too quickly to be explainable by “hard work”. There is a step missing. In terms of reach, Mark Manson was nowhere near RSD, for instance. As much as we may dislike RSD, they enjoyed enormous popularity, yet did not manage to parlay this into mainstream success. I would argue that they would have been in a much better position, ceteris paribus.

    2. Yes, it is very plausible that “Mark Manson” is a Jew. I recall stories of some Jew boasting about how he got into video game journalism. He did not have much of an interest in gaming and no contacts but he went to the temple and tapped into his ethnic network. A few days later, he had two gigs, one at IGN, the other at some other big outlet, and was made. This kind of success out of nowhere does not seem to happen to gentiles. I recall that Mark Manson tried to find a new business opportunity after the PUA market cratered and spent some years writing on self-help. Then he got picked up by one of the biggest publishers in the world, which is a bit unlikely, in particular considering how saturated the self-help market is. It did not stop there as his book got pushed by major mainstream outlets including the New York Times. Oh, and as I just learned, he co-wrote Will Smith’s autobiography. This is also a pretty unlikely step after writing a self-help book, even a successful one, considering that Mark Manson really isn’t a particularly good writer.

      I cannot prove it but I would say that the level of success Mark Manson achieved would be easily explainable by certain ethnic connections. Note that Neil Strauss, the most successful PUA in terms of book sales, is also a Jew and was fully tapped into the mainstream. He hung on Mystery’s coat tail, yet eclipsed him far and wide in terms of the money he made. On a related note, there is an old article on DS you may want to check out, which highlights the Jewish role in the PUA industry:
      https://dailystormer.su/the-jews-of-the-pick-up-artist-industry/

    3. Oh, I wasn’t implying hard work or that it is deserved. I hate that guy. I am just saying that he was obviously planning and scheming stuff for a long time.

      His PUA stint was fishy itself. It was obvious that he was just an internet marketer trying out different niches, so he was testing the pua niche and seeing if he can make bucks there, if that makes sense? For him PUA was just a test or learning grounds.

      In other words, his whole goal from even before PUA was to make money peddling bullshit. And it’s obvious because he was very well studied on marketing manipulation tactics, which he used to sell PUA bullshit.

      He didn’t one day decide “I’ll become a top author, call some people, introduce myself and the next day they did”. By the time he decided to pull strings in mainstream self-help, he probably had years of making connections and scheming behind the scenes.

    4. This is a good point. It is quite possible that he was active in various niches, under different names, at the same time. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that he was peddling an online poker course, but I could be wrong. Still, even if I take all of this into account, I think he achieved breakout success a bit too quickly. It’s as if you move from an entry-level position at work into a manager role. This sometimes happens, but it is normally the result of some shady backroom dealings, e.g. political promotions due to having to hit diversity quotas. Sudden jumps in a trajectory simply raise eyebrows. I also think that his writing gig for Will Smith’s biography is not explainable by his preceding success as a self-help author.

    5. On re-reading your comment, about going from mid-tier to high-tier. As someone trained in marketing I see it differently.

      He was mid-tier in PUA because he wasn’t a PUA, if that makes sense. As scammy as PUA was, it did require actually having something useful to say about picking up chicks. So he was a low quality pua, but a pretty high-level marketer. The fact that he was mid-tier in pua is just proof how high his marketing level was. Becase you need high-levels of marketing to sell a low-level product.

      Looking at his shift from a marketing perspective, to me the jump isn’t that big as I was looking at this progression as a marketer, that curve was a lot smoother. Most bestseller are in fact just common-sense or recycled feel-good shit with good marketing, and his marketing is actually good.

      In general self-help it seems you don’t even have to walk to walk if you just regurgitate basic bullshit, it’s all about packaging and marketing.

    6. I think you are onto something here. I was looking at what he was selling, ignoring the aspect that for him it did not matter that he moved from one area to the next. He is still honing the same skillset. However, what I also found a bit puzzling is that he went from one success to another instead of fizzling out. The connection to Will Smith is really not obvious at all.

      Out of curiosity, I looked up a few other names that used to be big, i.e. Tim Ferris, Tucker Max, and Neil Strauss. Tim Ferris essentially tanked. He had an enormous presence due to his 4-Hour-Work-Week book and his YouTube videos today attract around 5,000 viewers, with about one million subscribers. Looks Maximus has 2,500 subscribers and is roughly in the same ballpark in terms of views. Tucker Max essentially cratered. Neil Strauss is a bit more interesting. Just like Mark Manson, he was only in PUA for the money. He then went on to write a few more books, jumping onto supposedly hot topics, but he was not able to turn his breakout success of writing The Game into a sustained high-level of success.

    7. He is still honing the same skillset. 

      Yeah exactly that’s the way I look at it. The skillet in his case is “marketing bullshit”.

      I think that in pua the marketing plays a lower role in success. For example his marketing was definitely better than RSD. But their actual content and advice was a lot better, so they did a lot better than him because they were actual PUAs actually approaching a gazillion chicks a day.

      In self-help it seems that marketing plays a bigger contributing role to success.

      Now of course I’m not saying this explains his sudden jump to best-seller.

      It’s just that I always got the impression that he was in it for the money and looking to make money off of selling bullshit and the he was working on his manipulation and bullshit skills.

      So I can easily imagine that he was making those schemes behind the scenes to make it happen.

    8. I was actually reading Mark Mansons PUA book, but I had to put it down after around ~100 pages, it is full of glaring contradictions.

      The typical feel good nonsense that sounds smart if you are some average IQ guy lacking critical thinking skills.

      For example he writes “what you say doesn’t matter, it’s also about the body language and so on, blablabla” in the first chapter.

      but then he has an entire chapter discussing what you should say :D.

      Just shows you the mind boggling stupidity of the average person if a book like that can become a bestseller.

    9. Anyways, I think we just have to agree to disagree here.
      I didn’t mean to imply you or Alek are idiots or silly or whatever.
      Just trying to get an unbiased understanding of the situation.

  4. For years there have been rumors that Macron’s grandmother, er, wife is a tranny. These rumors are so persistent that France’s first-lady (?) is now aggressively pushing back:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/frances-first-lady-fights-back-against-rumors-she-was-born-male
    Seeing that we are ruled by utter degenerates, it is entirely possible that Macron is banging a 90 year old tranny. It could very well be a humiliation ritual. Remember that Macron came out of nowhere. The elites could simply have told him to pair up with this old hag. No, I do not think that this is too far-fetched if you consider Epstein’s global blackmail ring and also the fact that many people in the public eye seem to be making utter fools out of themselves. Thus, this could very well be part of the deal. Even if Macron’s wife is not a tranny, it is bad enough that he has to be seen with her.

  5. I know that some of the readers of this blog think that the world is secretly run by a group of highly interconnected (((banker))) families.

    I don’t want to discuss the evidence for or against this theory here.

    So recently I’m thinking quite a lot about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.
    Those seem like a big threat to the current system of central banking, if they can reach a critical mass / mass acceptance.

    But isn’t the existence of crypto then kind of evidence against the power of the bankers?

    There are some explanations:

    A) they don’t care about crypto because crypto is not really a threat, it is too small to affect anything, or the don’t think it’s a threat (for now)

    B) crypto took them by surprise, and they will try to ban it in the coming future (using the energy consumption would be a reason acceptable for the normies, because we have to stop climate change…)

    C) they actually don’t have nearly as much power as is assumed

    D) a combination of A,B and C

    E) something else?

    What is the mental model you guys have on this situation?

    1. I think you cling to some child-like notion of a mysterious cabal controlling absolutely everything, and perfectly. In reality, though, the methods are not nearly as refined as you may think. In this regard, I would warmly recommend Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book on Fauci, which sheds some light on how Gates and Fauci exert pressure on politics and academia to get the results they want. This book may help you develop a more mature view on elite control of society.

      Furthermore, I think that there is noticeable intellectual decline among the elites. It is enough to skim their books. There is no wordsmith in their ranks, and surely you would not doubt that IQ and language use are correlated. Go check out Klaus Schwab’s books, and then go back one or two hundred years ago, skimming books by people like Kalergi, Huxley (various), Galton (various), Theodore Kaufman, and many more. In contrast, it is as if today’s elites are barely literate. I think the ideas they want to implement were developed by people much smarter than them, which is also why they are fumbling so badly. The ideas are bullshit to begin with, but with a more competent elite, they would get implement faster and, and fail less spectacularly.

      Bitcoin surely took the elites by surprise, and now they are scrambling to own this space as well. So far, they have not come up with a good solution. Facebook’s Libra coin was probably the first big push in this direction, and it failed spectacularly. They started off with some FUD and status posturing, and were not able to deliver on any of their promises. It is quite ridiculous in hindsight. The current play is to promote government cryptocurrencies, which have none of the benefits of real cryptos, and are instead intended to strengthen the grip of the elites, for instance by tying your ability to buy and sell to some form of “social credit”. This already exists, think of people getting kicked off PayPal and other platforms or even losing their bank account. On a related note, the “war on cash” has the same motivation.

    2. We already went through this with that aspie guy that got banned, can’t remember his name.

      As Aaron explained to you, the notion you present is a cartoonish caricature and misrepresentation. It’s also used to discredit any critics, so it’s not entirely your fault..

      The idea that elites either dont aim to control anything, or they must control everything perfectly is frankly a retardedly false dichotomy.

    3. It’s also used to discredit any critics, so it’s not entirely your fault..

      I mean this has been the primary tool used as part of propaganda to discredit any questioning. Anyone that mentions that elites might have some undue control of anything: Oh, so you’re saying the elites micromanage and plan everything, up to the weather on thursday… fucking nutjob.

    4. Well, to clarify, I’m not the one who believes that some single group of elites controls and micro manages everything, as this would be ridiculous.

      So maybe a better question is: given the existence of bitcoin/crypto, how much power do the elites really have? (I will read the book that Aaron recommended as this seems to be about this issue)

      My own theory is that the modern world is way too complex to be understood by a small or even not-so-small group of people, and most of what we see are emergent developments, mostly driven by technology.

      One example: porn.
      There are people who argue that the elites spread porn to weaken men to make them easier to control.

      But a far easier explanation is, that as soon as we had broadband internet, it was inevitable that it would be used to distribute porn, the profit incentive is just too strong.

    5. It seem the core of your misunderstanding is that you assume that there is a tightly knit group that controls everything from top to bottom. Again, this is childlike nonsense. You have people who want to have maximum control within their sphere of influence and, yes, there are certainly competing interests. Let me try a different approach: have you ever worked in a large company where VPs or directors fought for a bigger piece of the pie? If you are at the very bottom of the food chain, you perceive shifting priorities as indecision or lack of direction. However, what more often happens is that someone much higher up was able to take some budget away from someone else, etc. So, now some other VP has more money to spend to sponsor projects. What do you think happens next? Do you really assume that he will sit together with his entire staff, plan out everything in minute detail and keep close watch? Of course not. Instead, he will flesh out his vision, which will then be further broken down at each level, and mid-level management will decide on how to implement it, and on each level, there will be course corrections.

      The current handling of the plandemic simply has all the markings of clueless leadership as they have reached a point where they are only hastily responding to day-to-day events. Very little makes sense anymore (goy, the moronic variant “evades” the vaxx, so you need to get vaxxed harder!). At the VP (“elite”) level, the plan was not fleshed out well enough, the mid-level commissars are not smart enough, and now the bottom feeders are no longer playing along as much as they should. The result is total chaos. All of this reminds me of companies right before their collapse. They will either go bankrupt or someone will come in and clean up the mess.

      Yes, porn is a tool for subversion. Some of it is not even profitable, like interracial porn. Sure, the Internet has been used for distributing porn but someone has to produce it first, and you also need a legal framework for it. It surely was a total coincidence that some group of “civil rights activists” managed to convince a Supreme Court some other group corrupted that porn is free speech. This happened in the 1970s, and from then on, the goalpost has only ever been shifted. One of the current objectives is to push tranny porn. How do you explain that? Don’t tell me that it is due to “demand”. Also, modern porn streaming sites do not even seem to make any money. The documentary Pornocracy explores this issue, and very well, I might add.

      If you are looking for more books to read, maybe check out E. Michael Jones’ “The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History”. Some things will make a lot more sense to you afterwards. My impression is that you still believe that whites are attacking themselves when it is “whites” that are pulling the strings. Of course, I am far from claiming that there is a small, tight-knit ethnic group that is behind all of it. Besides, I am a Black, Ethiopian Jew who is, in fact, living in Israel, having never even set foot into the West, and I would never talk poorly about my ethnic brothers.

    6. Another example of technology driving culture:

      It seems to me that feminism really took of around the same time good contraceptives for women (the pill) became available.
      Because you cannot have sexual liberation for women without contraception.
      (a slut who fucks around would get pregnant sooner or later and have a problem).

      Smartphones lead to the eventual development of tinder, tinder is rapidly changing the dynamics on the sexual marketplace, you get a growing number of incels, incels join far-right political movements.

      So in this example it was a technology that eventually lead to a change on the political landscape.

      But it would be ridiculous (in my opinion) to argue that whoever invented smartphones, had planned for this political change. It was an emergent, unforeseen consequence.

      I don’t want to say that it is only technology driving those changes, but it seems to me certainly one of the biggest drivers.

    7. Again, you are setting up a strawman. Nobody is claiming that there is one central authority that decides that they will develop smartphones, put Tinder on it, and turn men into incels. The elites do not create anything themselves, but they work hard on shaping society. Again, check out the book by E. Michael Jones I recommended in another comment. It will make a lot of things clearer for you.

      Greetings from Israel!

    8. “Again, you are setting up a strawman.” Aaron, I merely questioned how much power the elites really have.

      Maybe reformulate it again:

      How much of the cultural changes we see, are driven by an agenda of powerful people, in %, and how much is driven from other sources? technology, genetic changes, environmental changes?

      And also, you say I’m ridiculous and present a false dichotomy here. So far so good.

      But then again, when issues are discussed on this blog here, the explanation often goes along this way

      X -> Y -> Z -> something the elites do

      So, “the elites” are quite often used here as the root cause of most of the issues in society.

      This feels to me like arguing with liberals, they say the believe in genetics & evolution, but whenever you ask them on ANY issue, they always take the “oh it must something in the environment” line, which implies they don’t actually believe in genetics, they merely learned that you have to say that you believe in it to be accepted.

      So again you say I’m ridiculous because I push this false dichotomy, and other people also used this argument, but then whenever I discuss ANY topic with them, their explanation is always that the root cause is an agenda the elites push.

      This certainly feels kind of silly to me. But maybe I’m just bad at communication. I don’t know.

      I certainly don’t want to paint you or Alek as silly, that was never my intention.

    9. @Aaron:

      the model that you presented with the company is close to my understanding as well.
      the elites at the top have an agenda, and push this agenda onto lower layers, but to the amount of people involved / levels in this society, and also the principal agent problem (lower layers have their own goals), you end up with chaos.

      But if you remember, this was exactly the reason why I did not believe in the big plandemic conspiracy. Elites would certainly love to enslave everyone, but due to the sheer complexity of the system, their plan just doesn’t work out,(most of the time), and there are many unforeseen consequences.

    10. Do you think people like Klaus Schwab write fan fiction about the “Great Reset” just to pass the time? There is an agenda. It is out in the open. Governments are trying to implement it. Right now they are panicking as they are realizing that they are losing control of the narrative. Check out dissident channels on Telegram to get on-the-ground footage of the protests in Germany. There is nothing in it in the news, yet you have probably about one million protesting week after week all over the country. The elites recently tried putting up counter protests, which failed utterly. This shows how weak their grip currently is.

    11. “The current handling of the plandemic simply has all the markings of clueless leadership as they have reached a point where they are only hastily responding to day-to-day events. Very little makes sense anymore (goy, the moronic variant “evades” the vaxx, so you need to get vaxxed harder!).”

      But this was exactly the argument I made a few months ago on this blog, that what we are seeing is sheer incompetence. And you called me out on it.

    12. Do you think it was “sheer incompetence” from the get go? I remember that you disputed that there is any kind of centralized planning, despite the fact that Covid measures have been rolled out more or less in lockstep in the Western world. Do not shift the goalpost.

    13. “Covid measures have been rolled out more or less in lockstep ”

      this doesn’t imply there was any central planning.

      if there suddenly is a global threat X, you would expect most countries to react to threat X.

      things in nature can look coordinated without requiring any central planer. Just look at an ant colony.

    14. Is it also a coincidence that they all use the same language? The term “lockdown” for instance, is used directly, i.e. as an English term, all over the world now. I bet they came up with it at the same time, all over the world. Your hypothesis is, quite frankly, laughable. How did we even know that there is a global threat? Oh, that’s right, a global NGO told us, and from there everything followed. Yet, this does not prove collusion. Sure, bro.

      Your analogy is off because there is no human ant colony that spans the planet.

    15. “Check out dissident channels on Telegram to get on-the-ground footage of the protests in Germany.”

      I’m actually in one of those groups.
      That’s why I know that there is also a big amount of disinformation on the anti-vaxxer side.

      They showed a video about a big protest in Vienna. But… my mother actually lives in this area, and she told me that there were far LESS people than shown on the video. So the video was fake, from a totally different protest which happened many years ago.

      There is also another right-wing channel I’m in, and they openly discuss how to use this whole covid situation to topple the government.

      I seem to me that both sides have a big political agenda here.

      If this whole issue was apolitical, you should not expect such a big overlap between political orientation and vaxx/anti-vaxx stance of people.

    16. I have seen live footage of the last two big protests in Vienna, and they were massive. Your mother probably took a nap at the wrong time to be counted as an authority here. Also, what other big protest in the past did you see footage of where banners with slogans like “You will never get us” or “We are the red line” are shown? Frankly, easily falsifiable statements like the one above make me wonder if you are some kind of low-level operative that is being charged with spreading FUD on fringe sites. We know that Israel does a lot of such work, and I also know that large companies hired PR agencies for “agenda shaping”, paying a bunch of drones to influence the debate on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere.

    17. “Is it also a coincidence that they all use the same language? The term “lockdown” for instance, is used directly, i.e. as an English term, all over the world now. I bet they came up with it at the same time, all over the world. Your hypothesis is, quite frankly, laughable. How did we even know that there is a global threat? Oh, that’s right, a global NGO told us, and from there everything followed. Yet, this does not prove collusion. Sure, bro.”

      No, this doesn’t prove any collusion. That some new English term is used to describe something, and most media just pick up on it, is nothing new.

      Imagine this hypothetical scenario:

      An asteroid is on collision course with the earth.
      Some government agency (e.g. NASA) discovers it, and then quite soon all major governments on the world are informed about this threat.

      Soon, all governments decide something needs to be done, more taxes and so on.

      I can promise you, if this would happen, quite soon we would have people coming up with conspiracy theories, that the asteroid is fake, and this is all an agenda to enslave the plebs.

      The arguments would be symmetrical to the arguments you bring up now.

      One NGO gave the info to everyone, and then you had almost a lockstep reaction of all the governments.

    18. Well, take “booster shot”. In German, there is the well-established term “Auffrischungsimpfung”. Suddenly, this term disappeared completely. Also, the arguments, or non-arguments, for Covid measures are very similar, no matter whom you are listening to. In my view, they are too similar to be explained with randomness. By the way, a few months ago I read about a newspaper report of a gang of thieves the authorities were able to link to several burglaries because the tools and methods were similar. They got caught at one place, and then the police was able to put 1 + 1 together, realizing that the same people, or the same clan, to be more precise, was responsible for other burglaries, too. The argument that actions at different places that follow the same pattern imply some degree of collusion or cooperation seems quite plausible to me. “Hurdur, ant colony”, in contrast is a bit weak, don’t you think?

    19. “I have seen live footage of the last two big protests in Vienna, and they were massive. Your mother probably took a nap at the wrong time to be counted as an authority here. ”

      Wow, you lost me now Aaron.

      My mother was walking in this area, on the same street, at the same time, there was supposed to be a big demonstration of 50k people.
      I have shown her the video.

      She was on the same street. And she has 0 incentive to lie to me.

      The video was 100% fake. They just took a video of a protest that happend years ago.

      What are you doing here is clear, you apply an extreme high degree of distrust to any mainstream information source, but whatever info you get from right-wing telegram channels, you trust without any further confirmation.

      And you don’t consider at all that there are strong incentives on the anti vaxxer side to spread disinformation as well.

    20. To clarify:

      There were a few videos.

      On one, you could clearly see that the protest was about covid, because of the signs that people used.

      But on the other video, you just saw a big group of mostly men walking through one of the streets in the first district in Vienna.
      They were chanting something you could not recognize, and also they didn’t have any signs that you could connect to covid.

      And this was the video they posted in the right-wing group, which was supposed to be hidden from mainstream media.

      And it just so happens, that my mother lives exactly in this area, and at this time, there was no protest on this street at all.

      The video was just from a protest years ago.

      If you now want to say my mother is lying to me or she is too stupid to see what is going on a street, you just lost me, and this is an extreme confirmation bias you have.

    21. I think you are engaging in extremely dishonest rhetoric here. Your first claim was that the anti-Covid protests in Vienna were not big because your mom was there and she did not see a lot of people. Then I post video footage that contradicts this claim, so you move the goal post by saying that there was one fake video in some far-right Telegram channel. Are you for real? The issue is whether there were big protests, not whether some group on Telegram posted a fake video.

    22. Yes, this video you posted Aaron was the legit one. There is just one problem with your argument here: this one was not hidden from mainstream media at all.
      It was linked on orf.at, krone.at, and some other mainstream news in Austria.
      I will try to find the fake video again, but I’m not sure if it’s still online

    23. Well, my argument was that there were big protests in Vienna. Does your mother think that this was not a big protest? You now digging up some fake video does not really seem to help here, it seems.

    24. I can tell you exactly what happend:

      On the day of the protests, I just so happend that I was in the telegram channels (few of them)
      And people in the channel argued, that there are big protests going on in Vienna, and the mainstream media is hiding it.

      But then I just checked the mainstream media, and on almost every site there was a link to a livestream, of the video that you just posted.

      So the information in the right-wing channels, that the government is trying to hide or downplay the protests, was just a blatant lie / disinformation, in this case.

      And they also posted a link to another video in the right-wing group, and this video was fake.

      And also they are talking how to use covid to topple the government. Yes, there are people on the right who think that covid is legit, that the vaccines are legit, but they know that there is a big overlap between anti-vaxxers and right-wing people, and so they want to use this situation to topple the government.

      You cannot deny that there is also a big political agenda on the anti-vaxxer side.

    25. So now it is a problem that the anti-vaxxers do not want to go along with the (political) agenda of the government? If the government wants to vaxx me with a deadly concoction, I am apparently “political” because I do not go along with it. I really do not understand what you are arguing for. If it was indeed what you just wrote, it is essentially a non-argument (“someone in some small channel posted a fake video”). However, it is the case that there are significant protests that the media are not reporting on. National news in Germany are almost devoid of such reports whereas you sometimes read about them in regional news. For instance, I have not read about the big protests in Munich in national news. However, I have seen videos online, including live streams, and, perhaps more significant, reports in local newspapers that mentioned numbers of 10,000 to 20,000 people.

    26. “Also, the arguments, or non-arguments, for Covid measures are very similar, no matter whom you are listening to. In my view, they are too similar to be explained with randomness”

      well, of course the reaction is not random??

      So now you are making a false dichotomy here, either there must be a global collusion, or only a total random reaction.
      This doesn’t make any sense.

      If you have a group of somewhat rational agents, and you all present them with problem X, you would not expect them to come up with a random response.
      You would expect different response, but with a lot of overlap. Because there are only so many sane/rational strategies to react to X.

      Again, to imply collusion, you need much stronger evidence.

      And there is also an incentive for governments to coordinate their response. Simply for politicians to cover there ass. If country A does X, country B might just copy the strategy of A.

    27. How different were the responses? It seems that those leaders who did not comply were disposed of. Do you recall the dude who mocked the WHO by demonstrating that various fruits tested positive for Covid? He got replaced soon after.

      I would expect a number of approaches, and certainly much more variety than observed, if there was no collusion. Instead, we got various shades of grey (gay?). Also, who is the first mover in your CYA scenario? You seem to imply that whatever was done first was the right move, but what if it wasn’t? Now we know that the Covid moves are all pretty nonsensical, so nothing is changing. Yet, you do not seem to take this into account for your argument. Remember that the unvaxxed need to get vaxxed so that the vaxxed are protected from the unvaxxed because the vaxx only works if everyone gets vaxxed, oh and once you got vaxxed, you need to get boosters every three months because the vaxx does not work. Find the flaw!

    28. “If the government wants to vaxx me with a deadly concoction, I am apparently “political” because I do not go along with it.”

      No, my argument was actually the opposite:

      If all people were perfectly rational about the vaccine, you should not expect a big overlap between political orientation and vaxx or anti-vaxx stance.
      (at least not to such an extreme degree)

      But what I’m seeing it is almost only right-wing people who are anti-vaxxers.

      And what I also see is that it is leaders of right-wing movements who want to use those people as useful idiots to get votes.

      Basically, people who were unhappy with the current government/culture before covid, are now anti-vaxxers.

      I’m also making a claim here, that if we had a right-wing government, most of the current anti-vaxxers would have nothing against forced vaccination mandates.

      It’s not like right-wingers are against authoritarian governments. It’s just that they don’t like the current government being authoritarian.

      The FPÖ, right-wing party in Austria, just 13 years ago, when they were in government, supported forced vaccinations for children.
      And suddenly they are not in government, and they support the anti-vaxxers now.
      They are clearly seeing the anti-vaxxers as useful idiots to win the next election.

    29. Fake news. In a recent study, it was revealed that a surprising number of “progressives” were among the anti-vaxxers. Also, attempts to smear vaxx protests as “right-wing extremist” failed as they have gotten so big that you would need to claim that society is right-wing extremist.

    30. Honestly, this thread about vienna is ridicolous diversion. What does it matter? Does it change anything?

      WE CURRENTLY HAVE THE BIGGEST GLOBAL PROTEST IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANDKIND. EVER.

      THERE ARE PROTESTS ALL OVER THE WORLD ALL HAPPENING at the SAME TIME, about the same thing. The combined mass of all these is HISTORIC. There is history being written at the moment. It doesn’t effing matter how many heads someone counted somewhere. That’s like a comma in the overall picture that we’re looking at.

      Breaking news. In Romania the protesters apparently stormed the parliament building and police are negotiating with them to leave.

      Look at this globally for a second, and any diversions about the exact head count in any one given protest is an obvious irrelevant diversion that doesn’t change the main point in any way.

      Didn’t you see the videos from italy with a fucking ocean of people with their phones up in the air (looks like a massive infinite ocean of people waving candles) and they were all chanting in unison, I believe something like “don’t you dare touch our children”.

      This is fucking HISTORIC. Never happened ever in the history of the world. Trying to downplay it is SUS as fuck.

    31. You can’t really prove or disprove a conspiracy theory, at least not without insider information which is not available to us plebs. If some event fits with the grand conspiracy narrative then it was obviously instigated by a certain (((group))). On the other hand if it doesn’t fit then the theory is expanded in other to accommodate it; for instance the (((group))) is not omni-potent etc…

      Ultimately it boils down to the idea from philosophy of science that value of a theory lies in how well it predicts the future as opposed to how well it explains the past.

    32. I agree with Alek.

      Y’all need to to zoom the fuck out. Read “The Sovereign Individual” which predicted all of this. Yes, pandemics in particular as a means by the government to restrict travel. Heck, they even predicted Bitcoin. It was written in the 90s and they extrapolated all the transformation we see now based on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

      I’m with Alek here. We are witnessing a historic moment. What is this historic moment about you may ask. Well, the big picture is hat we are watching the downfall of nation states. Nothing more, nothing less. Think of how the Church got blown into pieces by Gutenberg’s printing press. Now take that shit, multiply it by a million and you will begin to grasp what unstoppable money (Bitcoin) and unstoppable information (internet) does to outdated concepts like “nation state”. The whole “Great Reset” narrative is nothing but a desperate attempt to get everybody behind the concept of a nation state on steroids, i.e. a one-world government. However, it is too late.

    1. This is correct. I quite like their current leader, Herbert Kickl. In mainstream interviews, media stooges routinely try to provoke him, and it is admirable how competently he deals with them. A big contrast would be with Donald Trump who told journalists to their face that the are fake news and refused to talk to them. Kickl, on the other hand, cooly points out contradictions or leads his interlocutors into rhetorical cul-de-sacs. Shortly before having to admit that their position is contradictory or dishonest, they tend to change the topic.

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