That’s just sensationalism, the press does that with anything and always will, anywhere. It does provide money in their pockets but everybody sees what they’re doing, the news outlets establish their own niche and market (some of which aren’t taken seriously by anyone) so its not particularly insidious in comparison to their current, more recent practice worldwide. What I was describing is the conventional US press nowadays almost uniformly providing no critical thinking whatsoever in relation to real Federal government policies, generally behaving like Pravda, and its hardly limited to the US press. You definitely see this in relation to Covid policy and perhaps even more so in relation to climate change hysteria. The mainstream press is under a lot of financial pressure worldwide, and I think they believe an alliance with power will keep them viable, regardless of it being antisocial. That really is dangerous, long term, because it can lead to people being herded like sheep according to self-serving government interests, and thereby to tyranny.
I think its a very tricky thing to be the central power in a liberal democracy. Governing free people is messy and leadership by beating people over the head does not work in several senses. Push too hard for any agenda and the immediate result is not that agenda, but a chaos of those who obey and those who explicitly refuse. The good thing in the US is that we have a system of government that by design tends to defeat centralization of power, resulting in a planned and anticipated marketplace of ideas that can’t be completely shut down. Florida’s leadership in its approach to Covid is a good example.
In both the US and UK there has been a great reduction in the number of separate owners of news media in the last 20 years.
And, at least in the UK news, a drop in the understanding of the subject by the writer to that of a just above average 13 year old.
Peter wrote:
The problem is that you can’t reverse this “sinking into stupidity” of the human race
It has happened many times through history and it will happen again and again.
Silvaire wrote:
What I was describing is the conventional US press nowadays almost uniformly providing no critical thinking whatsoever in relation to real Federal government policies, generally behaving like Pravda, and its hardly limited to the US press.
Not what it looks like from here. There are the rather left wing media like CNN and some others and the right wing like Fox. They hardly report the same things, often enough you get the impression they live in separate countries.
Even CNN is not uniformely on any “government line” if there were one. I have recently started to see quite a lot of “analysis” pieces highly critical of the Biden administration, clearly not as pronounced as before, but still.
Climate chance however appears to be something where ALL media now have decided to set on that horse, because it allows a lot of click bait sensationalist news. Same for Covid too, but there I do suspect that most people within the press have by now realized the full magnitude of the problem and the fact that unless vaccination campaigns succeed on a global level, Covid may well end up being the trigger for global conflict. So while some report more sensationalist than others, the goal in general is to finally get the message across to those who still refuse to do their share to get control over this virus. I don’t see this as a Pravda like thing, but rather a common realisation, something quite rare these days.
One could argue that the same goes for climate change too, mechanisms are not one unlike the other.
The main problem is that people do not really react to facts anymore but to hunches and gut feelings as well as their own ego. We are no longer talking about knowledge but about belief. So we don’t really have news media but preachers. I guess that is part of what Sagan meant when he said society was falling back from knowledge to superstition, but I think he misunderstood that this was always the case, whenever something could not be explained on the level of a 10 year old. The difference is, that in older days, media and governments still at least tried to stay factual, whereas today, media mostly are feeding the trolls.
Archer-181 wrote:
So this has mutated to a bad cold
No, it’s been vaccinated to be a bad cold.
It is still a very nasty illness for those with naive immune systems. Out of the people I know who have had symptomatic COVID: the two unvaccinated ones, one died (that person had co-morbidities) and the other ended up in the hospital (that person was healthy and not overweight) and just 10 minutes of minor activity leaves him completely exhausted for 3 hours. The partially vaccinated were over the worst symptoms within a week, but are still not quite up to their previous fitness levels over 12 weeks later, and for the fully vaccinated, it was merely a 3 day heavy cold with complete recovery within a week.
The reduction in severity is related to how people’s immune systems can clear it up effectively. The vaccine’s success isn’t in preventing anyone from being symptomatic or catching it, it’s preventing otherwise young, very fit and healthy people ending up injured by the disease for 12+ weeks from a “mild case”, which is a common outcome for those who are not fully vaccinated. It’s like wearing a motorcycle helmet won’t stop you falling off your motorcycle, but it massively reduces the chance of a nasty head injury if you do.
Basically we have to accept that we have a 100% of catching COVID sooner or later, and the choice is: catch it with a naive immune system (don’t wear your helmet), or catch it with a prepared immune system (wear your helmet). I always wear my motorcycle helmet even in countries where it’s not compulsory, and if medical advice says I should take a booster vaccine at some stage, I’m going to take it. I’m also going to respect businesses that require mask wearing. Our local vetinary surgery does (sadly a place I’ve had to visit too often recently), and given that they don’t just do cats and dogs but all the local farms, it’s a good idea that the vets don’t all end up off work at the same time, even if it’s just 3 or 4 days.
Nice summary, thanks @alioth
pretty much what I have heard as well.
I hear Croatia has closed schools for a bit, to stop this
Here, most of the numbers are said to be schoolkids. It is an issue if some adult at home is not vacced.
I hear Austria is going onto a heightened alert level as well and hospitals are freeing up ressouces for the 4th wave, delaying or cancelling operations for non-life threatening issues.
They should close schools for a week or two, and work on the anti vaccers. Get Saatchi & Saatchi on the job 
That just about sums up the current problem, I think.
In the UK’s case what I found so odd was recently all the “case number handwringers” insisting all sorts of measures like mandatory work from home but no mention of schools. Closing workplaces again but leaving schools open isn’t really going to do a lot when most of the circulation is in people in schools!
We really need to get more on top of vaxxing the teenagers, not locking down the economy again.
The daily published numbers here are showing quite reliably that over 50% of new cases are solely in the 10-19 age group and has been for a while. While it is true they don’t often get severely ill from it, symptomatic covid while unvaxxed is still awful to have even if you’re not at risk of serious disease, and leaves a lot of young people feeling at least some effect for 12+ weeks, even if it’s only a minor loss of athletic ability, and allowing it to circulate in this age group is still allowing it to circulate to others.
