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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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why people who apply razor skepticism to anything approaching a mainstream view would be so inanely credulous of random shit grifters say on the internet is beyond me.

In my case it's quite simple. The mainstream had the power to falsely imprison me with lockdowns and did so repeatedly through 2020 and 2021. The random shit grifters did not and largely wouldn't want to. To make things slightly less personal, the amount of damage the failings of the mainstream does is orders of magnitude greater than anything their opponents can do.

It's amazing the credulity with which people were willing to accept very questionable science coming from official government groups. And yet, if some random person disagreed, that was considered "irresponsible".

People with real power and authority need to be held to a higher standard. During the pandemic, we seemed to do the opposite: Chastising dissenters while granting the authorities near universal forgiveness for the errors that were made.

I can forgive random internet anti-vaxxers for being wrong.

I can't forgive the people who should have known better: the people in power who greatly exaggerated the dangers of Covid while ignoring the suffering caused by our massive overreaction to the disease.