Another way to fight propaganda is to fight those who spread false narratives and lies. Ideally by giving them a fair trial, then attaching them to a chair and forcing them to watch their creations till the end of the days. Think Orange Clockwork. Though better it would be to let them work in rebuilding the cities that their propaganda destroyed. Unfortunately these people are uncapable of creation so it's a vain idea.

Except just declaring something as a "lie" will not solve the problem. You have to at least explain why it is a lie.

> Another way to fight propaganda is to fight those who spread false narratives and lies.

Good luck with that. They are mostly powerful rich people with an agenda, and they're a lot better than us at being nasty.

As for the victims, it's not going to work. The pandemic revealed us how deep some people are detached from reality.

There still are people dying of Covid who spend their very last breath yelling at doctors and nurses, refusing treatment and calling it a hoax although it is evidently killing them. An ex friend of mine had both his unvaccinated parents hospitalized for symptomatic Covid and lost another unvaccinated relative; still he's a very active anti vaxxer. I'm becoming extremely racist against these people; I know it's not right and if there was a god she would punish me, but I can't consider them on the same level of other humans; if learning from mistakes is the basis behind intelligence, they're clearly far far behind everyone else.

That is unfortunately true. It seems to me, at some level, the whole problem is less about knowledge than about which sources someone regards as trustworthy and which not.

We can only experience very little of the world directly. For most of our knowledge, we have to rely on intermediaries which tell us about the world. If some of those intermediaries offer contradictory information or offer information that contradict with your own experiences or discredit other intermediaries then things get problematic and you have to pick side about which intermediaries to trust.

I think psychologically, this is a hard problem to solve.

There are also people who now live with crippling injuries, or who died, because they took the vaccines, despite being at statistically ~no risk from COVID. They took them because they were told, wrongly, that the shots were perfectly safe. Detached from reality, it seems.

BTW, you probably shouldn't admit that you're nasty and "racist" whilst also claiming to be more intelligent than other people who made different decisions to you. It's a nonsensical claim: refusing shots is not a race, and black Americans refuse shots at a much higher rate than whites do anyway. Hating anti-vaxxers is just ordinary hatred, pure and simple. You don't need to abuse unrelated words for it.

Every medicine has its own risks and contraindications, whoever tells the opposite is lying. We however keep taking medicines when prescribed because the balance of risks vs benefits strongly leans towards the benefits, right now in my country over 95% of hospitalized Covid patients are either not vaccinated or not fully vaccinated; those are solid numbers that anti vaxxers are free to ignore until it hits them directly. I take Aspirine every day, although every year people die because of it, but how many people would die if there was no Aspirine around?

Sorry for the slow response.

"Every medicine has its own risks and contraindications, whoever tells the opposite is lying"

Correct. Yet here's Bill Gates' GAVI saying "Vaccines are safe. Here's why" and of course there are hundreds of thousands more cases where people are told things like that by trusted authorities:

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/covid-19-vaccines-are-safe...

This is standard - either claim the issue is black/white, or claim that whilst vaccines might have bad side effects in theory, in practice they basically never do (which is not the case). This is deceptive misinformation, but it's not being spread by randoms on the internet, it's being spread by governments and health authorities.

Consider the following:

1. The stat you quoted is meaningless (and almost certainly wrong but we'll get to that in a second). To understand the costs/benefits you have to understand the absolute risk of injury or death from vaccines vs the absolute risk of injury or death from COVID. Authorities never present such stats because the true absolute risk of COVID death or even hospitalization for most age groups is so low that it'd just cause people to wonder why they'd bother taking a vaccine at all.

2. Even if they do present such comparisons, vaccine injuries are being systematically ignored or misclassified by the medical system so there's no way to do an accurate comparison anyway.

As such nobody can truly make an informed decision on this topic.

Now the 95% stat is almost certainly wrong anyway. I don't mean you're quoting it wrong, I mean it's not being calculated correctly. For quite some time, observers outside the health system have been pointing out that there are methodological errors in the way vaccine efficacy stats are being calculated, all of which significantly inflate the apparent effectiveness.

The problem comes from two places:

1. The vaccines have an immunosuppressive effect. From the start, sceptics like Berenson noticed that there were non-seasonal COVID waves happening that appeared to always line up perfectly with the start of vaccine rollout. Some speculated that this was due to people gathering together in vaccination centers, others that the vaccines themselves were temporarily suppressing the immune system. Seems like the latter explanation was more correct. As part of the Pfizer document releases just a few days ago, a document came out that showed the vaccines do in fact reduce immune system operation due to lymphocyte migration and that Pfizer knew this after the stage 1 trials.

So vaccine programmes actually make people more susceptible to COVID, temporarily. This was also confirmed by data accidentally released by the Albertan health authority that showed this in action:

https://dailydose19.substack.com/p/government-of-alberta-can...

That's clearly a major issue if you repeatedly vaccinate people during a pandemic. However this effect is hidden by a statistical trick - they only count someone has vaccinated starting from two weeks after their second dose. Until that point every infection or death counts as unvaccinated, even though that isn't true.

So what happens if you give someone an immunosuppressant and then allocate all the resulting infections to the "did not take" bucket? You make it look like the vaccines are far more effective than they really are.

2. Second problem; the claims vaccines are highly effective against infection (which is strongly related to hospitalization stats given how they're derived) are broken by two sub-problems:

2a. Some countries like the USA and Germany count people as unvaccinated if they couldn't locate proof of vaccination. They conflate unknown status with unvaccinated, which is wrong (a lie, really).

2b. They aren't comparing case rates as you'd expect but deltas in test positivity ratios. This isn't valid because the methodology assumes no differences in test behavior between groups i.e. that the patient doesn't control whether they get tested or not. Clearly not true with COVID.

End result - all claims like yours, even when made earnestly and with the best intentions, rest on a completely and deliberately corrupted set of stats. We actually cannot tell whether vaccines are effective or not, but given that raw case rates in the few places that report them (like the UK) show vaccinated people getting COVID at quadruple the rate of unvaccinated people, it seems unlikely. The cause is probably OAS/priming effects.

There's Nazis everywhere dude:

https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2022/opinion/russia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta_Battalion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhoga

https://www.dw.com/en/why-are-german-neo-nazis-training-in-r...

I think you will find the stuff about Biological Weapons Labs is a load of nonsense too.

A quote from the first link:

> When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea four years ago first exposed the decrepit condition of Ukraine’s armed forces, right-wing militias such as Azov and Right Sector stepped into the breach, fending off the Russian-backed separatists while Ukraine’s regular military regrouped. Though, as a result, many Ukrainians continue to regard the militias with gratitude and admiration, the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology that will endanger Ukraine in the long term.

Right wing militias in the context of constant ongoing military pressure from Russia and the forceful seizure of Crimea, also by Russia.

Alright, but then have media at least acknowledge the existence of right-wing militas and put them into context.

As far as the public discussion (at least in Germany) went so far, the first media response to the "denazification" speech was more or less "wtf is that guy talking about?". There was no talk at all about any right-wing groups in Ukraine at all. After some time, at least existence of Azov had to be tacitly acknowledged, but only that so far.

That's not exactly trust-building.

Also note that until Trump, The US government had an embargo against arming Ukraine due to their extreme Neo Nazi movement.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms...

Obama was well aware of it and had 100% hands off approach to arming Ukraine. The process of arming Ukraine started with Trump and continued with Biden when the US government realized they can sell their weapons without hurting any of their lives (the exact same as arming Mujaheddin to fight the Russians)

That link just says there was an embargo against arming that specific movement in Ukraine, not against arming Ukraine.

The sibling comment correctly explains why the article doesn't say what you thought it did, that the US had been giving aid to Ukraine since 2014 and only in 2018 specified that none of that aid should go to a particular militia.

The real reason the US didn't arm Ukraine was that it didn't want to provoke Putin into escalating the conflict: https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-ukraine-russia-we...