Re: Fascism 101 @Steve Button
"I really don't have time (or energy) to go back through all your points in detail."
A pity. You did after all appear incredulous as to why someone would disagree with your post.
"Lockdowns didn't "work" in the sense they have caused more harm, on balance, compared to the benefits."
First of all, you wrote that the "lockdowns didn't work at all". Now you're just writing about mis-balanced government reaction to this.
You are entitled to an opinion, and it looks like that "didn't work at all" was just an opinion, not based on facts.
Lockdowns always caused harm to business, the economy and people in many ways. It also created/acceleratoed new types of business around remote working, deliveries, healthcare and whatnot. And also saved lives as I earlier said about not flooding hospitals by lessening their burden.
The virus outbreak was causing mass deaths from the beginning and it was not understood immediately. Better safe than sorry? There's a good Wiki article on lockdowns, with pros and cons.
"Who promised the you couldn't catch or spread the virus? Faucci, Gates and Boris + many many others. It's all on YouTube with clips of them saying exactly that. I can't find the clip any more, perhaps it's been taken down as "misinformation"
Every one of them on the same clip? Fishy. Fauci saying anything like that? Not happening - he's an immunologist with a Doctor of Medicine degree and seems to know what's he's saying. Plenty of people seem to have hatred against Fauci, so you may have watched a fake video.
In fact, it is easy to dispute Fauci saying something like that when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Here's Fauci telling Congress that 'There’s no guarantee that the vaccine is actually going to be effective'. Similar Fauci quotes are plentiful.
I'm not sure of Gates' credentials, but Boris is a politician and facts don't seem to be his strongest forte. Policitians excel at promising things, not delivering on them. Similarly Trump downplayed the Covid outbreak for a long time and played his own political games to his own gain.
"About the Lab Leak theory, there's a great article in Vanity Fair (yes, really) which has plenty of references to respected sources, if you can be bothered to read it...."
I bothered. If you also bothered to read that long wall of text, then you'd easily bother replying to my messages.
The article speaks poorly of that Mr. Daszak and the Ecohealth nonprofit, shady working all around, but provides no smoking gun.
Trump administration would have been delighted if the the "Chinese virus", as Trump put it, to have actually been a man-made virus by the Chinese military. He claimed evidence of how it started in a Chinese lab, right after the Director of National Intelligence (Trump appointed Richard Grenell) said the virus not believed to be man-made or genetically modified. I'm pretty sure if there was reasonably high probability evidence to the contrary, it would have been flouted by Trump. Didn't happen.
"I would love to spend all day arguing back and forth about this (not really) but I'm exhausted from doing this for nearly two years, with people whose argument always boils down to "whatever the government says, that's the right thing"
You have read me wrong. I'm not arguing for the government here. I'm speaking from facts and my own experience. My wife's a registered nurse and still doing overtime work at the hospital Corona ward. For the third year now.
While Covid patients are not necessarily as severe as they were 2 years ago, the hospitals are still running at full capacity because lockdowns are no more and people are less careful with wearing masks, hygiene or keeping their distance.
Are you against all sort of government control - during pandemic or otherwise? Is your liberty worth more than others?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
