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Notes -
I think the problem is exactly the officials that lied, cheated, stole, oppressed and brutalized the public for several years, with zero consequences, zero accountability and not even as much as mealy-mouthed apology. They keep claiming they did everything right, and the public was the ones too stupid to understand why it's all for their own good. I completely and totally understand people not believing a word that comes out of the mouths of anybody who is in any way connected to this establishment ever again. They didn't just use up their credibility, they piled it up, made a huge bonfire, and when that burned, they borrowed some, and set it on fire too. Their credibility is essentially in the same position as US Treasury now - trillions in debt and keeping digging down without any possible hope of ever reversing not even the value, not even the first, but all the higher level derivatives - they are all trending down. It's the exponential credibility collapse and still, you claim some rural dude that is now hesitant to get the 13th booster is the main problem that should be addressed. Nope, he is not. The fuckers who led us to this point are, and they are still largely in charge.
You have to separate these two things. COVID is a big deal. Public health officials are retarded. These can both be true at the same time.
Yes you are mad about rights abuses and everything else, and so am I. But COVID was still a big deal.
Maybe it is "big deal", maybe not. That can be debated. But certainly the guys who lied to us for years lost the right to be a source in the decision how exactly big. Their informational quality is negative now.
And sure, "public health officials" bear the majority of the blame. But I don't remember a mass movement of rank-and-file to protest the abuses either. I do remember a lot of "racism is a national health issue" but not a lot of "lying, fraud and tyranny is a national health issue". I'm not saying there weren't dissidents - there were - but most of the lower levels enthusiastically enforced whatever they were told to enforce and pushed whatever they were told to push. So, it's not just some lone officials on top that need to account for that.
I don't dispute the abuses. That is not the point, people need to disentangle the abuses and the reality of the disease. Just because the boy cried wolf does not mean that the wolf didn't gnaw off your leg, and that the next one isn't sitting there slavering.
It's way beyond "the abuses". It's a complete paradigmatic collapse. The paradigm that there exist some institutions that are ultimately designed to work for our benefit, and while specific people are fallible and corruptible, in general this system is built for the benefit of the people, is controllable by the people and has people's best interests at heart - is dead. The new paradigm is that this system is a self-interested parasite, which will consume any resource the people allow it to, but will act in ways that do not have much to do with the benefit of the people and is absolutely not controllable and absolutely opaque and violently resistant to any attempt to control it. That's how "people" would - and should - view it now. So if you want to deliver some message that people "need" to do this and that, then this message can not be delivered within the framework of the new paradigm and not be received with as much trust as a message from Nigerian prince telling you that you "need" to send him some money to come into your inheritance rights.
Maybe the wolf is there, maybe it's not. I am certainly not qualified to judge that question. What I know though that this boy - and his family, who conveniently made billions on mandatory wolf awareness trainings - is not going to be the input for my decisions on these question. If anything, I'd probably lean towards doing the opposite of what he's crying about.
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