hntroll666

If that's what you really think, I guess it's an indication of how well the story was suppressed. Does the part where Hunter explained that the long-standing arrangement was for Joe to get half of the loot ring a bell?

Seems like it. I think I'm shadowbanned.

@dang Is that so? Why?

Are you under the impression that there isn't a conspiracy related to the virus?

Did Klaus Schwab say "The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world"? Did the WEF say "To build back better, we must reinvent capitalism"? Did Justin Trudeau say "this pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset"? Did he repeat the words "build back better" and express support for such an effort? Did Biden and Harris say anything about that? Did Greta Thunberg? Did Cuomo? Did Pelosi? Did both Clintons? Elizabeth Warren? What about Johnson in the UK, did he ever express support for "building back better"? Jacinda Ardern?

The answer, of course, is that they all did, and far more rich influential bigwigs besides those. Do you suppose that they all simultaneously arrived at that wording independently?

Maybe you'd prefer it if we called it a "complex" theory? As in, the government wants more powers, the media wants endless crises to report on, the pharmaceutical companies want guaranteed income and protection from liability, leftists want to make sweeping changes to society and the economy according to their ideas about how the world really "ought" to work, etc.

Well, the situation varies from place to place. What you're suggesting is definitely true to some extent. But other factors predominate sometimes, like a relentless taxpayer-funded fear campaign supported eagerly by the press, which loves to be able to report anything alarming. Some businesses are being put under by curfews, limits on what they can sell, expensive new requirements, and other forms of interference.

barbaric

Sorry, but that's exactly the kind of world we live in. The world simply is barbaric no matter what we would prefer. When people mess up a little bit, we put them through a process that, despite its massive inadequacy, is intended to rehabilitate them so that they can return to society. The death penalty is for when someone commits a crime so severe that they cannot ever return to society. If you are not able to think of this kind of situation, I suggest you may not be very familiar with the details of truly horrendous crimes. If we don't have the death penalty, we end up in the strange position of housing and feeding and providing medical care for the most harmful people in society at the expense of their victims.

If it's a country's cryptocurrency, then it's not real crypto. We make real crypto because we know we can't trust governments. Ethereum gives us the power to make a program, make it available to everyone, and lock ourselves out of it forever because we know we can't be trusted. This is called trustlessness. Governments will never make a trustless asset because they want special authorities. They'll keep special keys that grant access to functions normal people don't have. We have the technology to do better now. Not using it is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

It's none of your business. The electricity is purchased privately. "Load placed on grids starts to impact the average consumer" is like somebody keeps buying all the boxes of the kind of Cheerios you like, i.e., not an infringement of your rights, just market stuff happening. You living in my neighborhood "impacts" me in ways I don't like, but I don't give you a hard time about it because I don't have the mentality of putting my nose into the details of other people's lives. There's an unacknowledged cult rising to prominence, and one of its tenets is that "electricity should only be used in small quantities for approved purposes". Well, I reject that. If your concern is pollution, please speak about that, not electricity use.

Your premise is false. It's not an environmental disaster. If you think it is, point to the harm. Then explain why video games or Netflix or whatever are not bigger "disasters".

People buy electricity and do what they want with it. It's not your business. I don't come into your house and check how much ketchup you're using on your fries. Please sort out your own life before going and being a neo-climate-alarmist-electricity-use-hating Baptist about how other people are living theirs.

So, twenty years hence, if the expected higher temperatures fail to materialize, would you consider that adequate falsification of the CO2 hypothesis?

It's a common malady to think oneself a world-savior. "I know what the world's problems are, and how to solve them." If you realize this kind of tendency in yourself, it's important to try to conquer it, because it's been disastrous many times in the past. The Khmer Rouge thought they were going to fix the world's problems. So did Mao. They loved their own ideas about how to fix the world more than they loved the lives of their countrymen. They were so sure they were ushering in Utopia that it made perfect sense to them to order people to do things at gunpoint.

I think the core mistake is essentially hubris. Thinking highly of oneself, and having a low opinion of others. This naturally results in wanting to substitute one's own intelligence for the higher-order intelligence of all people working together. But no one, and no group, is as smart as everyone. So this kind of intelligence substitution tends to have terrible results.

Hubris can be corrected. Meditate and study other people and you'll find out that 1.) you're crazy and need to work on yourself and 2.) other people are astoundingly intelligent and talented. The natural result is humility and gratitude.

Or, hey, perhaps I'm wrong. Then I suggest you do something much more persuasive than making a web site: implement your ideas at small scale and simply document the wonderful new way of life. If it's good, people will want to take part in it. There won't be any need to persuade anyone with arguments; the results will speak for themselves.

But this kind of person never does that. If they could, they would. They can't, so they don't. Despite not being able to make it work with ten friends, they want to roll it out worldwide, and, funny thing -- it tends to require the destruction of stuff that's already working.

I think you're exactly right. It's not medically justifiable to administer this vaccine to children, since they almost certainly will not benefit from it, and it would expose them to some unknown amount of risk. In other words, mass-administering this vaccine to children would amount to a medical atrocity, mass medical malpractice. HN seems to be OK with this.

I guess you think you know what the risk is. I don't think you do. Usually we determine that with multi-year trials, but we didn't do that this time. Usually the trials are done on the kinds of people who might actually need to be vaccinated, but this time governments are eager to do mass vaccination of people who aren't vulnerable, even children. If there is significant harm, it may be years before we know what it is.

The climate has always changed. Nothing in the universe is ever not changing, so "climate change" is not the real name of this issue. Maybe the concern is actually CO2 emissions. Humans have added about 100 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere over about a century. It's unknown and unknowable what effect this is having, because we live in the most complex of complex systems. People often try to simulate it via "models", aka garbage closed-source programs, but they're toys and cannot possibly tell us much, because complex systems are fundamentally not amenable to simulation. But if we look at Earth's history, 400 ppm of CO2 is not much. Not long ago, CO2 ppm was twice what it is today, and there was no disaster. Stepping back and trying to analyze the situation more fundamentally, we know that the planet has encased itself in ice and then thawed itself multiple times, all without human intervention.

But climate change is a perfect bogeyman for the left. It invokes primal fear, guilt about our decadent living standards, etc. And most importantly, it happens so slowly that by the time the predictions are shown to be false, everyone's forgotten about them, or it's been so long that it's easy to suggest that the predictions weren't serious. There's a vast graveyard of false predictions that the MSM doesn't want to talk about, because "Things are actually OK, there is no crisis" is not going to get anyone to click.

Point being, someone near you is actually suffering, and you have the power to help them. The problem is happening now, it's verifiable with your own eyes, and you can improve the situation with your own hands, in a reasonable amount of time, and witness the aftermath yourself. IMO, that's a much better thing to work on than an alleged crisis that, twenty years hence, will still not have arrived. Doomsday will have been postponed, and nobody will believe you when you tell them about the false predictions that were made about the poor polar bears, or the walruses, or the penguins, or the glaciers, or snow in general, or sea levels, or the coral reefs, etc.

Here's one thing you will never see the NYT tally up: the ethnicity of the perpetrators. Seems like that's part of the story, doesn't it? Why do you suppose they're so shy about that?

You'd need a dump truck to carry the irony. People suffering from anxiety? You don't say. The Guardian, BBC, and other MSM propaganda factories are in fact the primary purveyors of such, because they are beating the panic drum over an unremarkable seasonal illness. Increased substance abuse? Of course there is, considering the social distancing and lockdowns that the media itself has relentlessly advocated and supported. Dementia? The vast majority of those who had difficulties with this illness are elderly, a fact that the MSM consistently under-reports. This is the MSM pumping fear. If its stated, official goal were to "demoralize the populace", I can't think what they'd do differently.

Good. It's not medically justifiable to subject children to a relatively untested procedure when there is little possible benefit to them. Doing it en masse, as some governments seem to want to do, would be deliberate mass medical malpractice against children, a colossal crime.

Fear propaganda. Is there actually any claim being made that can be tested in a reasonable amount of time? If not, it's not science. They might as well run the headline "A giant hamburger will squash the earth in a thousand years". It's useless.

The pattern that plays out day after day is this: someone blessed as being associated with Real Science says something, and the press is then free to make a scary story out of it with their ass covered, because they were just relaying what a Real Scientist said. It doesn't matter if it's not really science because it's not a specific claim, or it's not replicable, or whatever. The scientists get publicity, and the media gets clicks. Ten years later when the scary prediction don't come true, nobody remembers. There's no reckoning. Nobody pays any price for their part in endlessly terrorizing the public.

Another epidemic in news coverage is purposeful, deliberate failure to check for precedent. The media has learned that checking for precedent almost always makes things less scary, so why would they ever do that? If they provided context for forest fires, for example, they'd have to say that they're down 90% since a century or so ago. Who's going to click on that?

Fear propaganda. Everyone's concerned about CO2 ppm, as if we're approaching some dangerous unknown territory of high CO2. But CO2 ppm has been much higher than it is today for most of Earth's history. People are terrified about going from 300 to 400 when not that long ago, it was 1000. It's indisputable that CO2 ppm of 400 is closer to a dangerous low than a dangerous high; plant respiration ceases around, what, 150? That would mean the extinction of most life on Earth, right?

Climate catastrophism is a modern doomsday cult that is able to keep operating because the failed predictions are forgotten by the time they're proven false.

Some small amount is expected. For example, if it happens across samples, disliking and then changing it to a like would be counted. Or, like you suggest, if it's clear that it was done by a bot, it could be OK for Google to remove it, and it wouldn't be meaningful. But could that ever explain 95% of the downvotes being hidden?

It's actually much worse than 4:1. YouTube is often hiding upwards of 90% of the dislikes. Like another poster noted, you can see it on https://81m.org/ .

What do I mean by invade? Simply ask anyone in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, if they want mainland Chinese there, or if they want to be governed by the CCP. I accept that territory is won or lost, and the Tibetans and Uyghurs lost their territory, but they were definitely invaded and conquered.

That's what the CCP always does: invade, stick their tentacles into every possible crevice, cut off any avenues by which it might lose power, and begin tightening and strangling, over the screaming protests of the local people. They did it in Tibet, they're doing it in Xinjiang, they're doing it in Hong Kong. They plan to do the same thing in Taiwan.

People pay for the energy they use, and do what they want with it. I don't think it's anybody else's business what it's used for.

Begging the question. The whole issue is, what actually is just a conspiracy theory?

I'm sorry you're struggling. There's a process that has worked for me and might work for you, but it takes some patience and effort. Would you be willing to try an experiment that requires 30-45 minutes every day for, say, a month, just to see if it works? If so, the process is described in a free book called "The Path to Nibbana" by David Johnson.

It may seem religious, and that might turn you off, but if you prefer, it makes perfect sense to think of the process as just a psychological training technique, something like CBT.

What I've found is that my basic happiness level (not dependent on any life circumstances) keeps increasing. The vicissitudes of life keep bothering me less and less. My mind is full of kindness, to myself and everyone. This kindness makes it easier and easier to genuinely love life. Whatever you do, I hope you feel better.

People install adblockers because they don't want to see ads.

It doesn't seem like it is, since I strongly oppose it. Would you like to try reading my mind again? Perhaps you're warmed up now.

I'm not seeing the benefit. Being "in the field" is imaginary. If a good point is raised, does it matter where it comes from?

Your opinion on the question that was asked is appreciated. Thank you. But please keep your speculation about the health of some random stranger's information bubble to yourself, unless you welcome equally groundless assessments of yours.

Here's what this will accomplish: it will very temporarily placate extremely mentally fragile people. That's it. The people who were upset about "blacklist" and "slave" will just be back again later with more demands to change the environment for their (again, very temporary) comfort rather than changing themselves to be less bothered by things that don't actually matter. They're trying to pave the world with leather rather than just covering their own feet. Unwise behavior leads to bad outcomes.