On Propaganda Part 3

A prior video on COVID-19 propaganda lost its screencast recording, so this is a reshoot with more focused detail after a Reddit backlash.

A Reddit critic calls his cited doctor a pseudo scientist and argues that a 0.12 percent fatality rate applied to New York City's confirmed deaths implies 12.5 million people were already infected.

Antibody testing in the Netherlands and New York City keeps turning up meaningfully high infection rates, no matter the study size or population sampled.

The doctor being dismissed as a pseudo scientist is John Ioannidis, a Stanford professor whose 2005 paper on why most published research findings are false has been cited over 8,341 times.

The point of this whole video series is to examine why people develop strong, fight worthy opinions about topics like COVID-19 where they have little to no domain expertise.

Most people have no strong opinion about repairing a septic tank or building an engine, yet they hold fierce opinions on equally complex topics like the multi trillion dollar US healthcare system, a sixth of the economy.

People with only shallow knowledge of a topic often accuse opponents of wanting other people to die, the exact pattern this video series on propaganda is trying to dissect.

There is no scientific consensus yet on COVID-19: no vaccine has shown safety and efficacy, no therapeutic is proven beyond promising trials like remdesivir, and the case fatality rate is unknown.

Death statistics get distorted when patients with severe comorbidities, illustrated with a hypothetical 70 year old man named Vito, are counted as COVID-19 deaths even though influenza could just as easily have killed them.

His prior video separated the COVID-19 unknowns, like the true case fatality rate, immunity, and treatments, from the one clear known: the severe economic damage of a lockdown.

Lockdowns are causing real social collapse, from job losses and broken marriages to reports of landlords demanding sexual favors from tenants who cannot pay rent.

He compares the initial quarantine to a tactical retreat after being ambushed, driven by the Imperial College model's prediction of tens of millions of deaths and comparisons to the Spanish flu.

Of 184 countries that locked down, Sweden did not, and armchair epidemiologists on Twitter and Reddit compare its death rate to Norway or Denmark without adjusting for population density, like comparing Norway to Wyoming instead.

He rebuts the Reddit accusation that he holds a twisted opinion on COVID-19, noting that a longer quarantine would actually benefit him financially through his cryptocurrency holdings, not the opposite.

He wagers the Reddit poster is not a domain expert and has been propagandized, which is the meta point of the entire video series and not really about COVID-19 at all.

These reactions are not the posters' own opinions but the direct result of consuming information that replaces personal judgment with someone else's, which is why politics feels broken and everyone seems angry.

A genuine academic discussion would debate models, inputs, and experimental design; he personally found the Imperial College model's math and inputs plausible when he first reviewed them.

The Imperial College model proved wrong because it failed to account for dynamic behavior: people spontaneously social distancing, isolating the sick, and wearing masks once information became available.

He wanted to establish the real case fatality rate to make sound policy, pushing back on the framing that every death would have been prevented by a total quarantine.

Every human interaction carries some probability of harm, whether from disease, risky behavior, or driving a car, which kills 50,000 people a year, and the quarantine itself will cause deaths.

Society already tolerates roughly half a million global flu deaths a year, so the real question is which case fatality rate on the spectrum, 0.1 percent, 0.2 percent, or 0.3 percent, would still be acceptable to leave society open.

Prolonged global lockdown risks economic depression and mass unemployment, and in the developing world, starvation, war, and death in refugee camps from a lack of basic resources.

He turns the blood on your hands rhetoric back on lockdown advocates, pointing to the suicides, domestic violence, and homelessness that a prolonged lockdown will itself cause.

As a CEO he makes difficult risk decisions daily, including sending people into dangerous situations in Africa, and weighs pros, cons, and circumstances rather than treating outcomes as simple.

COVID-19 has become a partisan Blue Team versus Red Team issue where anyone opposing the imported consensus viewpoint is treated as an enemy whose data cannot even be discussed.

He restates the cited doctor's credentials: a Stanford professor with a Harvard and University of Athens background, hundreds of published papers, and an Einstein fellowship, dismissed simply for disagreeing.

He asks listeners where they personally sit on the risk spectrum, comparing tolerance for a 1 in 1,000 versus a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying against the risk society already accepts from influenza.

He questions the false choice between total quarantine and doing nothing, suggesting the vulnerable could be segregated while the young and healthy return to work, instead of spending six trillion dollars and debasing the US dollar unchallenged.

He cites historical precedent for segregating the sick, like leper colonies and tuberculosis sanatoriums, as evidence that isolating the vulnerable population is not an anti-science idea.

The elevated case fatality rate is concentrated in one vulnerable group, while the young and healthy largely experience COVID-19 like a mild flu, matching the high antibody rates now being found.

He argues manufactured urgency around the unknowns benefits billionaires and politicians who face no personal consequences from the shutdown and can profit by buying assets at the bottom of the crash.

A COVID-19 vaccine may never fully work because of mutation risk, the same reason annual flu shots do not stop people from getting sick every year.

He is personally seeing rising homelessness and financially struggling friends and family, noting that Colorado's economy is strong enough to absorb this better than Detroit or New York will.

He cites the well known correlation of roughly one percent more suicides for every one percent rise in unemployment, warning that this crisis will define a decade for many families.

He rejects being told he has blood on his hands for challenging orthodoxy, given that central banks called all cryptocurrency a Ponzi scheme while printing six trillion dollars with no accountability of their own.

The entire point of the video series is developing critical thinking skills, since the cryptocurrency industry's promise of personal liberty and control over one's own identity and property depends on people thinking for themselves.

He calls for the same burden of proof skepticism used in mathematics to be applied to news and claims generally, pointing to critical thinking societies and books as resources.

Every serious critical thinking method teaches removing emotion from an argument and steel manning the other side, understanding their position at its strongest before judging it.

Propaganda is not partisan, it lives on both sides; he criticizes Donald Trump as a habitual offender of logical fallacies, but says that does not excuse the same behavior from the left.

Quarantine is a human rights issue, not a political one; he recalls his grandfather's generation living with polio and Richard Nixon losing two brothers to tuberculosis as evidence society once accepted such risks.

He cites the Antonine Plague that helped break Roman power and the Justinian Plague that blocked a Byzantine reunification of Rome and ushered in the Middle Ages as precedent for living through pandemics.

He warns that drug resistant tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and other infections already circulating in places like Mongolia show that the protection of the antibiotic era will not last forever.

When governments refuse to quantify unknown threats, as with the War on Terror and the weapons of mass destruction debacle, good governance gets replaced by an undisclosed agenda.

He accuses the American media of malpractice on a colossal scale for turning a medical and human rights issue into a partisan spectacle instead of holding leaders accountable for basic facts.

As a case study in propaganda, he points to accusers labeling supporters of candidates like Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders as Russian bots, dehumanizing any dissenting opinion as foreign disinformation.

Treating a differing opinion as evidence someone is not a real human being, rather than as a different value or belief, is the propaganda pattern undermining the crypto industry's need for independent thinkers.

He states plainly that he has no fixed opinion on reopening America, leaning toward reopening some places while keeping others closed, and admits there is not enough data to be certain either way.

Real leadership means accepting negative consequences alongside positive ones rather than only reacting to the worst outcome, which otherwise produces the most conservative and ultimately most harmful decisions.

Taking a moment to abandon emotion and understand where other people are coming from is the actual antidote to propaganda, and the whole point of thinking for yourself.

Whether the world ends up defined by freedom of association, commerce, expression, and religion, or by social credit and rule by a small elite, depends entirely on people's willingness to think for themselves.