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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   804 thread views

Transnational Thursday for March 13, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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I'm not even all that bothered by the governments lying about it anymore, it's all par for the course at this point. It's not even hard to come up with reasons that explain why they did it.

What bothers me is the utter failure of the skeptic, rationalist, and all adjacent movements that went all in for Faucci, even though none of this could pass a basic sniff test, let alone rational analysis.

My personal biggest gripe is the increasing alignment between nominally independent groups in general. The idea of separation of powers, even the cynical version, assumes that you have different people sitting in different institutes all working to increase their own power and thus fighting against another. But since I've become a scientist and interact with a wide range of other college-educated people, it's become clear to me that the university serves as a homogenization hub through spreading a mix of information ranging from mostly-honest to blatant propaganda and everything in-between. This has massively negative repercussions, since it aligns politicians, journalists, scientists, lawyers etc. to the same worldview & blind spots, which means they can't meaningfully keep each other in check. The rise of the NGO state-industry complex has strengthened this symbiotic relationship further, since it's a general-purpose honeypot that they all can benefit from with minimal oversight.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this information is released now - not only is the Corona crisis over, even many people have lost interest in talking about it. So it not only gets difficult to justify keeping it a secret, but it's also much easier for the Süddeutsche and the Zeit to pretend as if they hadn't been just as bad as everyone else.

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