To put it another way: a lot of religious (particularly Christian) views amount to metaphysical claims that we can't really falsify. That's maybe sufficient to make them "irrational" in a narrow analytical sense, but insufficient to label them as crank-ish.
I haven't made an argument for why the ones I've listed are actually crank subjects; I consider those granted and I'm not particularly interested in justifying them.
What I take issue with is the lack of symmetry. For every COVID denialist, you have a zero-COVID enthusiast. For every election denialist, you have an impending climate catastrophe doommonger. For every great reset conspiracy theorist, you have someone who believes we live in a meritocracy. Each of the latter positions is as merituous as their counterpart, but the former are treated with a disproportionate contempt.
I think symmetry in this case would amount to false balance. Why even bother to frame things this way? It's self evident to most people that crank views run the gamut of social and political backgrounds; like all things in life, we prioritize our discussion of them by their perceived impact(s) on our lives. COVID denialism has more of an impact on my life than an anti-nuclear crank does.
When such a group meets to discuss society-wide changes and pushes their positions publicly, I don't think that's a "crank subject". That's simply a legitimate story that others may wish to discuss and raise concerns about. Critique about WEF/Davos isn't new - it has been described as an undemocratic forum previously, because it's a set of powerful people deciding how they want to shape the world outside of any national or international political process. This isn't conspiratorial thinking, it is literally the way the WEF is set up and operates. See the following paper for a critique, which mentions that WEF members downplay the importance of this forum and that their public exposure hides all that takes place privately: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?re...
Your own Wikipedia link says this neatly:
> According to The New York Times,[1 1] the BBC, The Guardian, Le Devoir and Radio Canada, "baseless" conspiracy theories spread by American far-right groups linked to QAnon surged at the onset of the Great Reset forum and increased in fervor as leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau[1 2] incorporated ideas based on a "reset" in their speeches.[1 3]
Well, I think they're only partly wrong: Of course Davos has always (since long before it was called the "WEF") felt like it's all about "the world order"... But it's made up of the rich and powerful -- so why would it want a new world order, when the old / current one is that the rich and powerful run the world?
Regarding the quote from Wikipedia - I don't agree with how that portion of the article is written or sourced. It is debated on the Talk page, and is a reflection of a growing bias in Wikipedia (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/). That section starts off by mentioning QAnon, then says Trump amplified QAnon, and never makes a connection between all of that and "Great Reset" (it's a sort of "guilt by association" argument). Additionally, it lists out a number of right-leaning TV personalities and claims they were pushing a conspiracy theory, but none of the source articles they reference show any false claim from those same people. From those sources, it looks like these people complained that the pandemic is being exploited as a political opportunity to introduce and push various left-leaning political positions. That seems not only very reasonable to me, but also easily provable.
From my perspective, I am seeing people take the very small number of people who are suggesting the pandemic was a planned crisis with certain political goals in mind, and using that to discredit others who are not claiming it was planned but just disagree with the political opportunism and the political goals.
> May opinion poll finds that 53% of Republicans believe Trump is the ‘true president’ compared with 3% of Democrats
> About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll.
But the share of Republicans who falsely say there is solid evidence that Biden did not win has dropped from 58% in January to 50% now
Democrat voters didn't accept that Trump legitimately won the 2016 election: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/334972-poll-dems...
Half of Democrat voters believe that Russia literally tampered with vote tallies to help Trump in the 2016 election: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
Such sentiments continued even a couple years after the election: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-poll-idU...
Let's also not forget that the Democrats formally challenged election results in 2000, 2004, and 2016 - all the recent presidential elections they lost: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/opinion/democrat-republic...
Your fourth link is misleading. You've picked a link from a moment in time when Barr had released his summary of the Meuller report but Meuller's criticism of Barr's summary as being inaccurate had not been released.
As for the fourth link - I am not sure of the timing of that particular poll (I just pulled that from a search earlier), so I'll have to take your word on that. Thanks for pointing it out.
I feel like absolutist language such as x-denier is designed by stupid people to avoid debate.
Over 680,000 additional deaths in 2020/early 2021.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Talk to a single doctor that was on the 'front lines' of this - a family member was signing 20 death certificates per week for people dying of horrible respiratory disease with positive Covid tests. One person at one hospital overwhelmed with the quantity of death. What was it if not Covid?
However it can also be the case that COVID deaths (and hospitalizations as well) may be over-reported. We have recent reports that seem to be pointing strongly to this possibility.
[1]: Alameda County revising COVID deaths downward by 25% - https://oaklandside.org/2021/06/04/alameda-countys-new-covid...
[2]: Research in CA suggests COVID hospitalization in children overcounted by 40% - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/study-number-of-kids...
What precisely do you think was killing all of those extra people who were showing up in ERs with respiratory distress?
But I also do think that those cases of overcounting are very likely NOT the only, isolated ones. The dynamics exposed (how hospitalizations were counted, the basic 'with' vs 'of' question), almost certainly apply more broadly.
So, apologies for attempting nuance, but I think COVID can at once be a) a massive pandemic (and tragic for millions), while also being b) somewhat overblown due to unrigorous metrics that in turn feed more sensationalism than otherwise warranted.
Doesn’t that actually imply that there wasn’t enough sensationalism and that our methods, while attributing some non-Covid deaths to Covid, were actually missing many more Covid deaths?
I don’t get the leap from “we misattributed some non-Covid deaths to Covid” in an environment that had even more deaths that our supposed overcount as evidence that we overreacted.
Another plausible explanation to excess mortality differences is that lockdowns and other measures caused people to engage in behaviors that increased mortality, from putting off necessary medical visits to exacerbated mental health due to social isolation or financial stress.
As an example of why that isn't "crazy", consider that recently a major Bay Area county in CA revised their COVID counts downward by 25% (https://www.foxnews.com/health/california-county-cuts-covid-...) because they had previously included deaths of anyone infected with the virus, regardless of whether the virus was a direct or contributing cause to the death. This is in a state that took the pandemic very seriously, had lots of governmental organization around it, and 'believes in science'.
People have been raising concerns about how deaths are counted throughout the pandemic, but they've largely been ignored, despite it being a legitimate line of questioning. They were always told "there are standards", which isn't really a convincing argument, given that there have been a non-zero number of proven instances of over-counting. You could argue that excess mortality is the metric we should look at, and that may be appropriate in some countries where such data collection is rigorous. But the way excess mortality is tracked is also inconsistent between different nations, and outright non-existent in most nations.
The "Official" death count due to covid in the US so far is 586,000. Excess mortality indicates 680,000.
Believing that "the real" number is somewhere substantially below that is not "skeptical" it's just silly.
/s