Do you need to vent about things COVID-19?

[KanzulR]

4 hours ago, RowanMinx said:

No, that wasn't for you.  There was a post after yours with website links from conspiracy websites.  Definitely face palm worthy.  Guess it got deleted.

Conspiracy?

 

[Cindy Evanier]

6 hours ago, RowanMinx said:

No, that wasn't for you.  There was a post after yours with website links from conspiracy websites.  Definitely face palm worthy.  Guess it got deleted.

I wrote a long AR about those posts earlier in the week 🤞 Fingers crossed they listened and are on them fast

[Arielle Popstar]

4 hours ago, Cindy Evanier said:

I wrote a long AR about those posts earlier in the week 🤞 Fingers crossed they listened and are on them fast

So now it becomes the conspiracy to censor the conspiracies.🤪

[Rowan Amore]

[Rowan Amore]

43 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

So now it becomes the conspiracy to censor the conspiracies.🤪

No, a conspiracy is a secret plan to do something harmful.

[Arielle Popstar]

4 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

No, a conspiracy is a secret plan to do something harmful.

So by that definition most were no longer conspiracies because they were plastered all over right wing websites. Only secret to the left wingers who refuse to look at them.

[Rowan Amore]

7 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

So by that definition most were no longer conspiracies because they were plastered all over right wing websites. Only secret to the left wingers who refuse to look at them.

No, it's the agenda that is hidden.  Disseminating false information to undermine people's faith in the actual facts.

I thought that was obvious.

We're hoping to get a call back soon for my 85 year old mom.  She's anxious to get her vaccination so the rest of the household can not worry as much about accidentally bringing something home to her.  Fingers crossed the call.will come soon.

Edited January 25, 2021 by RowanMinx

[Cindy Evanier]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

So now it becomes the conspiracy to censor the conspiracies.🤪

No, I just sent an abuse report with my thoughts on the links being off topic and just spamming links with no discussion about someone needing to vent about Covid.  No conspiracy, the mods can decide if I am correct or not. 🤷‍♀️  I have been upfront about it and I am pretty sure I am not the only person who reported them.

[Arielle Popstar]

5 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

No, it's the agenda that is hidden.  Disseminating false information to undermine people's faith in the actual facts.

I thought that was obvious.

We're hoping to get a call back soon for my 85 year old mom.  She's anxious to get her vaccination so the rest of the household can not worry as much about accidentally bringing something home to her.  Fingers crossed the call.will come soon.

That's great. I have an 84 year old mother that stays with me who has asthma and a host of allergies. Me being an essential worker exposed to others on a daily basis also have the concern of inadvertently infecting her with something I caught from others. Yet my mother is cautious of the vaccines because she is aware she rarely does well with various medications in spite of the glowing recommendations.  She regularly peruses alt medicine and nutrition sites because of her past experiences where todays wonder drug is tommorrow's chemical dump after it is discovered the side effects were worse then the the malady it was supposed to cure.

Exercising a degree of caution and keeping up to date with what others are reporting outside of the mainstream medical establishment makes for someone more informed and capable of exercising some wisdom in what they allow in their body. There is after all the facts and the interpretation of them as well as the varying statistics that can easily be slanted either way depending on who is benefiting from them. Following the money is sometimes a really good idea.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

So by that definition most were no longer conspiracies because they were plastered all over right wing websites. Only secret to the left wingers who refuse to look at them.

Arielle, one of the links was to an InfoWars article that literally asserted (without, need I say, a shred of evidence) that the Covid-19 vaccines were being used by unnamed malefactors to replace human rDNA with that of jellyfish. Because, jellyfish are a "hive mind" apparently -- ZOMG! We're all being turned into socialist jellyfish!!

Most of the others I've looked at weren't a lot better. This isn't "information" -- it's a bad joke.

And what's more, the links are posted almost entirely without commentary or discussion. It is spam, pure and simple.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Exercising a degree of caution and keeping up to date with what others are reporting outside of the mainstream medical establishment makes for someone more informed and capable of exercising some wisdom in what they allow in their body. There is after all the facts and the interpretation of them as well as the varying statistics that can easily be slanted either way depending on who is benefiting from them. Following the money is sometimes a really good idea.

Yep, critical thinking is valuable, always, and not least in the instance of health and medicine.

But applying that same kind of critical thinking to the sources that you choose to weigh against the views of scientists and established medical professionals is at least as important. Would you seek out, and follow, the opinion of an "alternate engineer" about the materials to be employed for load-bearing structures in something you wanted built?

What are the qualifications of those critiquing the vaccines? Where are the scientific studies backing up their views? Are they being interpreted properly, or cherry-picked for "convenient" tidbits, decontextualized and represented in a misleading way? The latter has been a particularly prevalent strategy, in my experience: if you look at the actual abstracts or studies being quoted, the information has been either taken out of context, or distorted, through ignorance or deliberate malfeasance.

Scientists don't trust scientists either -- that's why the scientific method demands that studies and experiments be reproducible and repeatable. It's also why we have a systems in place for scholarly publication -- double-blind peer review before something is published, and scholarly journals for the publication of opposing perspectives and counter-arguments. There is a wealth of information available to anyone (not all medical journals are firewalled -- check out the PLOS, for instance), and there are plenty of legitimate, accredited, and reliable resources that break down the science into layman's language. You don't need to be looking for specialized medical information on web sites devoted to politics -- nor should you be.

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Following the money is sometimes a really good idea.

Excellent plan. Why do you think sites like InfoWars publish pseudo-science? What do they gain from it? What's their motivation? Do you imagine that it's the advancement of science?

I don't trust the information I get from pharmaceutical companies either. But we have systems in place -- such as tenure and peer-reviewed research grant procedures -- to ensure that the science, rather than public relations, can be relied upon not to be motivated by merely monetary considerations.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

So now it becomes the conspiracy to censor the conspiracies.🤪

Have you been censored here?

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Have you been censored here?

Not by LL but surely I have made it on some people's block lists and would hazard a guess some of my posts reported. If not, I haven't been trying hard enough. 😃

[Luna Bliss]

3 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Only secret to the left wingers who refuse to look at them.

Any Bubba can make a website now -- even my little nephew could make one, but should we rate his accuracy as high as information derived on a website created by a scientist? I mean, he's a smart kid and all but....

Yet you, Arielle, give extreme weight in your decisions regarding Covid issues to the proliferation of Bubba websites which are created by people with few or any credentials and expertise, and assume they have as much credibility as information put out by a scientist who has spent years in school studying a subject or dedicated decades after their primary education studying it. You think you have this SECRET INFORMATION which has been obtained from Bubbas without any qualifications, derived from people who have no expertise in these fields!

How many times do we have to go over this before you get it? The issue has nothing to do with whether it's the 'left' or the 'right' putting out information -- it is not a political issue. It is simply a fact that the 'right' has spread disinformation like a cancer, flooding the internet with websites which make claims that have no basis -- they don't derive their facts from established channels (SCIENCE!) but instead claim that they have some kind of SUPER-SECRIT access to truth.

The above is the root of all conspiratorial thinking -- the belief in super-sekrit information that has been derived from unproven sources or from those with an agenda instead of being derived via the way our society decides what is true -- science!

Edited January 25, 2021 by Luna Bliss

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Not by LL but surely I have made it on some people's block lists and would hazard a guess some of my posts reported. If not, I haven't been trying hard enough. 😃

Welcome to the club!

[Rowan Amore]

8 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Not by LL but surely I have made it on some people's block lists and would hazard a guess some of my posts reported. If not, I haven't been trying hard enough. 😃

I've not reported any of your responses since you actually engage in a discussion even if I feel your links are misleading.  The poster, whose links were removed, never does.  There's a difference.  I do, however, roll my eyes a lot.  And yes, I know, some day they'll get stuck up there.  I'm quite sure there is a website to prove that as well.  😁

[Ceka Cianci]

I'm just glad LL is finally picking off the political triggering that both sides are doing to each other..

The thread could be a pretty good archive to look back on later when we are passed all this..

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Yet my mother is cautious of the vaccines because she is aware she rarely does well with various medications in spite of the glowing recommendations.

Given the vastly different pharmacodynamics of the various medications one takes over a lifetime, rarely doing well with them suggests a comment element that is not the medications.

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

She regularly peruses alt medicine and nutrition sites

 

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Following the money is sometimes a really good idea.

Following the money is a very good idea. I'd have to spend a lot of time researching, but I did find one market research firm that has published similar reports covering both the elite, science leaning, highly regulated pharmaceutical industry and the populist, marketing leaning, less regulated nutraceutical industry. I've no idea how accurate the data is, but I suspect the decimal points are in roughly the right place from my own experience in the industry over the years.

Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Market Report Scope

Report Attribute	Details
Market size value in 2020	USD 405.52 billion
Revenue forecast in 2027	USD 908.53 billion
Growth rate	CAGR of 13.74% from 2020 to 2027
Base year for estimation	2019
Actual estimates/Historical data	2016 - 2018
Forecast period	2020 - 2027

 

Nutraceutical Market Report Scope

Report Attribute	Details
Market size value in 2020	USD 412.7 billion
Revenue forecast in 2027	USD 722.5 billion
Growth Rate	CAGR of 8.3% from 2020 to 2027
Base year for estimation	2019
Historical data	2016 - 2018
Forecast period	2020 - 2027

 

Think carefully about whether you are following the money to escape it by walking into more money.

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Ceka Cianci said:

I'm just glad LL is finally picking off the political triggering that both sides are doing to each other..

Yes I don't get a sense that LL deleted that post because it was disinformation.  It was quite inflammatory, linking a post by Pamela followed by InfoWars links, and then a challenge to Pamela.  he only wanted to fight, without any real engagement.

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Think carefully about whether you are following the money to escape it by walking into more money.

*hangs onto his Nutraceuticals with both paws!*

[Ceka Cianci]

6 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Yes I don't get a sense that LL deleted that post because it was disinformation.  It was quite inflammatory, linking a post by Pamela followed by InfoWars links, and then a challenge to Pamela.  he only wanted to fight, without any real engagement.

I'm talking in general throughout the forums.. LL have been more active in putting the lid on those things lately..

[Luna Bliss]

People engage in conspiratorial thinking in order to feel they have control over a scary, overwhelming world. Usually simple and more comprehensible solutions are a part of 'the sekrit solutions'.

Easier to think about the ways masks cause harm, or the dangers of vaccines, instead of the reality of what's going on -- people are dropping dead like flies around us right now (in the US).

Edited January 25, 2021 by Luna Bliss

[Rowan Amore]

8 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Given the vastly different pharmacodynamics of the various medications one takes over a lifetime, rarely doing well with them suggests a comment element that is not the medications.

 

Following the money is a very good idea. I'd have to spend a lot of time researching, but I did find one market research firm that has published similar reports covering both the elite, science leaning, highly regulated pharmaceutical industry and the populist, marketing leaning, less regulated nutraceutical industry. I've no idea how accurate the data is, but I suspect the decimal points are in roughly the right place from my own experience in the industry over the years.

Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Market Report Scope

Report Attribute	Details
Market size value in 2020	USD 405.52 billion
Revenue forecast in 2027	USD 908.53 billion
Growth rate	CAGR of 13.74% from 2020 to 2027
Base year for estimation	2019
Actual estimates/Historical data	2016 - 2018
Forecast period	2020 - 2027

 

Nutraceutical Market Report Scope

Report Attribute	Details
Market size value in 2020	USD 412.7 billion
Revenue forecast in 2027	USD 722.5 billion
Growth Rate	CAGR of 8.3% from 2020 to 2027
Base year for estimation	2019
Historical data	2016 - 2018
Forecast period	2020 - 2027

 

Think carefully about whether you are following the money to escape it by walking into more money.

I certainly believe alt medicine and nutrition have benefits for some people.  I've actually used them and had great results.  Using alt medicine cured a UTI several years ago as I HATE using antibiotics.  Where we run into problems is...cost.  My insurance would have charged me $5 for an antibiotic.  The supplements I took cost well over that.  So for someone with limited resources, they generally don't have the option.  I wish they did.

[Jackson Redstar]

in the midst of a pandemic with infection rates still skyrocketing, a new President creates a new immigration policy that anybody can come here, zero immigration paperwork, and US taxpayers will cover any and all healthcare expenses for you

Brilliant!

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

10 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Yes I don't get a sense that LL deleted that post because it was disinformation.  It was quite inflammatory, linking a post by Pamela followed by InfoWars links, and then a challenge to Pamela.  he only wanted to fight, without any real engagement.

I'm talking in general throughout the forums.. LL have been more active in putting the lid on those things lately..

Yes this happened after actual white supremacists entered the forum. They are quite angry at this point due to the election loss, and political discussions draw them out.