Covid denialism as a PR stunt
Those who work in advertising know that people's fears and insecurities can be manipulated, and most of all, monetized.
Crises are times when some people see a lot of opportunity to make a lot of money.
Last night, a group of covid deniers stormed the studios of Slovenian national television. They didn't do any damage and the police quickly apprehended them. Two things are peculiar about this: 1. the timing, 2. who benefits from this incident.
1. The timing: The covid deniers group has been protesting in front of the studios of Slovenian national television for some four months, demanding to be heard, but nothing came of it. So why now?
The Slovenian government has announced several days ago that there will be new epidemiological measures, but it has put off announcing them for days. Maybe they'll announce them today, and possibly the measures will be extreme.
2. The covid deniers certainly don't benefit from this incident. But who does benefit from this incident and how:
1. The government who came to the rescue and who now has the chance to make itself look very good.
2. The official simplified, scientistic, politically correct covid social narrative and those who support it.
3. The pharmaceutical industry (on account of the above two).
4. Anyone else who sees an opportunity to make money or gain power from this covid crisis.
The ones who distinctly do not benefit from such indicents are the legitimate, scientific critics of governmental measures during the pandemic and of the popular social narrative around the pandemic. Because incidents like the one at the national television studios yesterday help to portray in the public eye all skeptics, all critics as belonging into the same category: the bad and the crazy, ie. the dismissable.
The positions of extreme covid deniers and other woo-woos always struck me as so absurd that I find it impossible to believe that someone could genuinely hold them. And that if they do seem to hold them genuinely, they must be either pretending, or they were manipulated into holding those stances.
So I surmise that the most plausible explanation for covid deniers and the woo-woos is that they are a PR stunt engineered by the stakeholders in the pandemic.
Thesis: If you want to control the situation, create an extreme opposition to yourself that you can control, and this will help you to control the legitimate opposition. This is how a totalitarian system can rise to power: not by destroying the actual opposition, but by creating an extremist artificial one and controlling it.
Crises are times when some people see a lot of opportunity to make a lot of money.
Last night, a group of covid deniers stormed the studios of Slovenian national television. They didn't do any damage and the police quickly apprehended them. Two things are peculiar about this: 1. the timing, 2. who benefits from this incident.
1. The timing: The covid deniers group has been protesting in front of the studios of Slovenian national television for some four months, demanding to be heard, but nothing came of it. So why now?
The Slovenian government has announced several days ago that there will be new epidemiological measures, but it has put off announcing them for days. Maybe they'll announce them today, and possibly the measures will be extreme.
2. The covid deniers certainly don't benefit from this incident. But who does benefit from this incident and how:
1. The government who came to the rescue and who now has the chance to make itself look very good.
2. The official simplified, scientistic, politically correct covid social narrative and those who support it.
3. The pharmaceutical industry (on account of the above two).
4. Anyone else who sees an opportunity to make money or gain power from this covid crisis.
The ones who distinctly do not benefit from such indicents are the legitimate, scientific critics of governmental measures during the pandemic and of the popular social narrative around the pandemic. Because incidents like the one at the national television studios yesterday help to portray in the public eye all skeptics, all critics as belonging into the same category: the bad and the crazy, ie. the dismissable.
The positions of extreme covid deniers and other woo-woos always struck me as so absurd that I find it impossible to believe that someone could genuinely hold them. And that if they do seem to hold them genuinely, they must be either pretending, or they were manipulated into holding those stances.
So I surmise that the most plausible explanation for covid deniers and the woo-woos is that they are a PR stunt engineered by the stakeholders in the pandemic.
Thesis: If you want to control the situation, create an extreme opposition to yourself that you can control, and this will help you to control the legitimate opposition. This is how a totalitarian system can rise to power: not by destroying the actual opposition, but by creating an extremist artificial one and controlling it.
Comments (42)
Another explanation could be that they are not mad, insincere or brainwashed or a PR stunt. It is that their views differ from yours and that it is possible to hold their views whilst being sane, sincere, unmanipulated, intelligent and uncorrupted. In exactly the same way, it is possible for you to hold your views whilst being completely sane, etc.
Quoting tim wood
It's the same problem as above. Just as the anti-vaxxers 'must be' crazy, then I 'must be' insincere (or ironic) in failing to say so.
For most forms of extreme vaccine/covid denial, this is manifestly untrue: it is impossible to believe things so absurd and so clearly and verifiably wrong, while also being unmanipulated and intelligent.
You've got the numbers wrong. For every one of the latter, there's several of the former. And in many of these cases, "conspiracy theorist" isn't a pejorative but an accurate description. If you believe Bill Gates is using covid vaccines to implant mind control chips (or one of the many other variations), you're a conspiracy theorist.
Only when you're lacking an abundance of evidence that they are ignorant, being manipulated, unintelligent, etc.
You know what is laziness, in all instances? Ignoring the evidence or specific factors in favor of lazy bothsidesism where you blindly assume/posit equivalencies or symmetries that don't exist. which, oh look, is exactly what you're doing here.
:100:
I don't know how interesting this question is, but does it matter if someone is right for the wrong reasons, or wrong for the right reasons? I'm not sure if it matters at the end of the day. I don't even know if I want to go down that road.
But I can say this: I vaxed for the same reasons that many conservatives honor those who sign up for military service, not really questioning the war or their commanders. Just stepping up because their country asked them to. It's interesting that many of those conservatives are now war protesters, spitting on the front line troops, and attacking their POTUS and government in a time of war.
This leads me to believe it's more political than anything. Sure, there might be a few people out there who have thought this through and decided not to get on board. But, in my opinion, they are the minority.
I just hope that, next time the MIC and their fully-owned-and-operated bitches in the Legislature and White House decide to spin up a war with some foreign nation or non-state actor, they check their hatred of the hippies and anti-war protesters. Maybe check the yellow ribbons (which many of the troops hated) and quit wrapping themselves in the flag, claiming to be patriotic, and stop with all the "love it or leave it" "you're un-American" fucking bull shit.
If I'm too fucking stupid to see the conspiracy behind big pharma, the vax and whatever, then they are most definitely too fucking stupid to call themselves Americans to the exclusion of others who don't agree with them. But is right. The reasons and the numbers are on the side of this war.
P.S. When it comes to conspiracy theories, what about Occam's Razor? Maybe the government wants you to vax because they are trying to help. After all, they've been asking nicely for fucking ever. I would have rolled out the dystopian nightmare for you "rebels" a long time ago. Quit your crying.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-vaccines-skeptic/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02989-9
There is no way the charge of stupid can fit here. These are high-ish flyers, qualified doctors.
On the other hand, the mass of the faithful are suffering from a generalised paranoia brought on quite justifiably by the habit of lying that prevails in commercial medicine and politics and the media and authorities in general. When you cannot believe what you are told, you are reduced to superstition and complete gullibility, such that negating the official line, and getting ejected from the establishment has become a mark of credibility. These are dangerous times. There is no one immune from this gullibility, because no one is even competent in most fields of knowledge, and even in those areas that they are expert in, they have learned their expertise from potentially dishonest sources.
In these circumstances, there is no basis to make a reasonable decision. What is needed, and what is lacking, is trust. Trust is the liquidity of the knowledge economy, and of society in general.
[quote=W.B.Yeats]Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.[/quote]
Or as some other wag put it: Those who know are full of doubt, while those who don't know are full of confidence. It seems to me, most experts are full of doubt and they say get the shot. Others, like Tucker Carlson, who don't know shit, are full of confidence.
Sorry baker, but I'll have to ask this.
Were they really "covid deniers"?
To myself a "covid denier" would be someone who denies that millions of people have died of COVID-19. Not people that are against the policies implemented to fight the pandemic.
Were these really people who don't accept that there has been a pandemic?
Quoting baker
Well this sounds like a counter-insurgency tactic!
If you have an insurgency that has a) popular support, b) sound reasoning behind it, c) possibility to gain outside acceptance and justification, then this is the way to go. Create a group that is so bananas, so insanely crazy, and make them to attack the reasonable (actual) insurgents.
Worked in Algeria!
I think the fact that it happened on television means that it could be some kind of PR stunt including by the state. But you would need more info than that to decide either way.
Speaking of which, China seems to be making lots of money from selling face masks, protective suits, ventilators, and other Covid-related stuff. Could it be that it created and released the virus for some hidden agenda?
No. That can't explain it. First, they aren't being coerced. They are being asked, pleaded with, bribed.
Second, those same folks don't exercise such caution when injecting other biological agents into their body (usually through their Trumpette mouths). Must be something else.
Not at all. The evidence for trusting vaccination is far stronger than any reasons for mistrust. As you say, anti-vaxx is minority and my 'for every person..' is a manner of speaking only.
And of course some people are manipulated, dim, brainwashed etc. But we cannot assume that because some view seems absurd then the person holding it 'must be' brainwashed or sub-rational in some way. They may or may not be. You cannot tell in general. I would say you need independent evidence of brainwashing etc, aside from the holding of an opinion.
Another example is the resurrection of the dead. 'We look for the resurrection of the dead,' goes the Creed. People who expect the dead to rise could be classed as mad in the same unthinking way as vaxxers and anti-vaxxers sometime class one another. But perfectly sane, rational, unbrainwashed, unmanipulated people hold this view and announce it publicly every Sabbath. Of course there are also crazy people who believe it. But you cannot deduce craziness or other sub-rationality from the opinion alone.
I disagree. I think such people have been brainwashed and manipulated; often starting at an early age.
Their stance is that the covid virus does not exist.
Are you familiar with the series Person of Interest? There, a group of people, Samaritan, who wanted to control the world by IT surveillance techniques engineered its own opposition, called Vigilance who were directly and violently opposed to such surveillance. Vigilance's opposition and use of violence made Samaritan look legitimate and necessary, and just the kind of organization the government should hire.
If the misinformation on the internetz can be traced back to a relatively small number of sources, this is suspicious and smells of sabotage.
Indeed, but I don't think it will ever be possible to discover the truth about this incident.
Awww. The China paranoia! Well, China is making lots of money from lots of things, so there's that.
It's certainly convenient to blame China, in order to divert the public attention from the horrible treatment of animals all around the world, from the exploitation of the natural environment, from the fact that Western governments handled the pandemic so poorly from the onset.
Indeed. And politicians and the medical establishment have been working hard for decades to destroy people's trust in politics and medicine.
Yes. If it is so.
But notice the other options:
a) For Media programs it's great for ratings to get the most extreme views to be declared on the program, even that a fight starts (perhaps even a physical one). Moderate views and boring experts that argue about complex details, yet understand or respect others viewpoints hardly makes a good show for basically an audience that wants more entertainment than actual information.
b) It genuinely is possible that a cabal of crazies do something as absurd as storm the TV in Slovenia. Slovenia is a small country (very beautiful, btw) and I assume they aren't security obsessed there.
Basically you really have to find links that would approve that there's a conspiracy and not options a) or b) would be likely.
Quoting baker
Are you familiar with the history of the Algerian civil war?
:100:
Well, proving a conspiracy can be next to impossible, or entirely impossible, that's the whole point of a conspiracy.
It's hard to know what is really going on, and there seems to be no way to find out. It's an insecurity that is hard to live with.
Only vaguely. It seems very complex. Are you referring to the roles of Les éradicateurs and Les dialoguistes?
Actually not.
Start with finding people who have absolutely no connection and focusing on totally different aspects noting the conspiracy. Learn the history. Above all, real conspiracies do leave traces.
Then think it through yourself. Does Slovenian politics resort to such antics? Who would artificially create this pseudo-group? Slovenia is a very small country. What goes around comes around.
Quoting baker
Basically about the role of the GIA in that conflict.
There are many accusations that the Algerian government helped the GIA and even posed as GIA members when committing atrocities. Then there is the history that basically the group was more interested in attacking the islamists and the AIS, the major insurgent alliance. When the islamists wanted to get France to act as an mediator in the conflict, the GIA suddenly made a terrorist attacks in France (and France started to back the Algerian government). And then when the peace deal was made...poof! The GIA simply evaporated. Later Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb denounced the actions of GIA in indiscriminately killing of civilians.
I remember reading from a memoir of an ex-islamist radical that had turned informer how deep disagreements erupted at these activist cells about the actions GIA was taking in the fight (for example massacring whole villages).
And there's simply many references on just how GIA worked for the government:
The last sentence sounds absolutely bizarre, but it's true. Algerians weren't worthy of them!
Of course this is sidestepping the actual topic, but I'm trying to make the point that if there is really a conspiracy, then there will be real traces of it. Nonexistent events don't leave them.
Sometimes the work of the invisible hand looks a bit like a conspiracy.
But truth does have an annoying way of eventually coming out, which will either be when the vaccinated start having all sorts of mysterious symptoms or the when unvaccinated start dying. It seems the latter is happening. The glee I now have in saying "told you so!"
It won't annoy the dead, or the self-righteous living, but it annoys me now that I cannot trust what I am told, and but expect to be told "told you so" whenever I have been misinformed, which I suspect is all the time.
Voters empower politicians, hire politicians to do a job. Pick untrustworthy people to do a politician's job, and you've shot yourself in the foot. If this fellow once said 2 questionable things, and that fellow 22 questionable things, then it's easy to dismiss both equally without getting into what they said (+ context).
Quoting baker
Right, to an extent anyway. It's hardly a black-and-white thing. Antibiotics, insulin, antihistamines, covid-19 vaccines, etc, are (justifiably) trusted enough. Some are called out.
[sub]• Meet the guy behind the $750 AIDS drug (Sep 22, 2015)
• The rise and fall of Valeant Pharmaceuticals (Mar 14, 2017)
• Pharma CEO jacks drug price 400%, citing “moral requirement to make money” (Sep 11, 2018)
• These Senators Received The Biggest Checks From Pharma Companies Testifying Tuesday (Feb 26, 2019)
• Democrat Katie Porter accuses pharma CEO of inflating drug prices and 'lying' to patients and policymakers — all with the help of her whiteboard (May 18, 2021)[/sub]
Some would argue that (free) supply and demand capitalism can drive what works.
Maybe there's a question of how ethics fit into all that.
Are (more) campaigning/advertising/accountability rules then warranted?
The answer to this seems to be that this pandemic isn’t really like the ones you mention and is more akin to the 1968 flu outbreak. No measures then of the sort we’ve seen this time around were implemented, presumably because they were seen as being out of proportion to the problem. People don’t like being confined to their homes or coerced into receiving medical treatments; so if the basis upon which these things are enforced seems questionable then it’s understandable if they become inclined to deny it fully.
(y) It seems though, that some don't learn from history.
There have been crazies all along for sure.
Some forms of vaccination were used a millennium ago in China, but it didn't really take off until much later, the 1800s then the 1900s in particular.
Religious and other anti-vaxxers have pretty much followed suit, as far as I can tell.
The era of mass media, News Limited, the internet and some big political scandals like Watergate. Crackpots, the paranoid and the haters have a ready source of community and information all around the world in ways inconceivable in 1919.
Quoting baker
That's why any old shit can be spun into a perfectly fine conspiracy. I'd add to this that disgruntled people seem to embrace conspiracies that confirm their exisiting biases. Anti-semites talk of banking conspiracies, nationalist libertarians talk of post-modern Marxist conspiracies, etc...
:100: Don't forget Ronald Raygun and "government is the problem" mentality.
Correct and I suppose people back then had more faith in their governments than now. You mentioned some high-profile scandals and, to my reckoning, enough of them have occurred in the two decades that have passed since 1918-1919 to make even the staunchest supporters of the state have second thoughts about how sincere the state is when it comes to the welfare of the people.
:up: It looks like every pandemic scenario spawns it own strain of nutcases who, forget about trying to solve the problem on hand, actually make the situation go from bad to worse by denying there's a problem to begin with. It's no secret that such people are a setback for the response to such catastrophes but, I'm curious, do they have some kind of beneficial effect? Politically say? I dunno.
Quarantine Scroll down to History.
Now what?
It's not just that. Think of old monocultures where there is a culture of "public secrets", ie. there are things that everybody knows (and talks about them in private with people whom one trusts), but in public, will never admit to them (and will consider it outrageous that anyone would think of them).
For example, in traditionally Catholic countries, the priest's girlfriend and his children are such a public secret. Everyone knows who the woman is and who the father of those children is, but nobody will publicly admit to it and will claim that the priest is chaste and celibate, as it behooves a Catholic priest.
This isn't denial (because in confidential settings, people openly talk about the matter), and it's not hypocrisy/duplicity (because there seems to be no evil motive involved).
It seems that even though this system of public secrets has worked well for centuries (it helped maintain relative social stability and harmony), it can be exploited in what is now the post-truth era. It seems for two reasons: one is that there are fewer confidential settings, and more uncertainty about what makes for a confidential setting and what doesn't (so it's hard to know which narrative to go with in which setting); and two, because audio and video recording devices are so readily present and used, and in the face of such hard evidence it's hard to maintain the old system of public secrets.
Of course, this is a problem that younger people and those in multicultural societies don't face. Although we dinosaurs do ...
In short, the type of society seems to play a role in how a conspiracy theory comes about, what public traction it gets, and so on.
Quoting Tom Storm
Certainly. It helps the ruling party to demoralize the population at large, because if they are demoralized, they won't rebel, and the ruling party will attain its goal -- to stay in power (and obtain more of it).
As things stand, I'm focusing on who the beneficiaries of the incident are.
In this case, I don't think the group was artificially created, but that at some point, it could be that someone (a prospective beneficiary) infiltrated it and guided it to extremism.
But I don't see how any of this could be proven (at least not without using illegal surveillance techniques). Or perhaps things will come out later in time, when the infiltrator can't help but brag.
Political infiltrations have been known to happen here. Notably, someone from a leftist party would infiltrate a rightist party and vice versa.
Actually, the situation here in the past 20 years made me lose faith in the law of karma; or at least leads me to believe that karma, like God, loves rightwingers.
It doesn't sound bizarre to me. For example, European rulers and upper classes have a long history of expressing contempt for the ordinary folk. The idea that it is the citizens who are wrong (and should be replaced), and not the government, can be heard at pretty much any election.
Actually, "conspiracy" isn't the right concept. "Strategy", "divide and conquer". "PR stunt".
Its not solely because the view is absurd, its also because in so many of these cases we're able to trace that absurd view back to a source of misinformation/manipulation like e.g. Fox News. Empirically, a huge number of covid/vaccine deniers have been manipulated and misinformed (and so require a degree of stupidity or at least gullibility)- we can usually even point to the specific origins of this misinformation/manipulation.
And I'd say that the resurrection of the dead is an apples/oranges comparison here since theological/supernatural claims like this don't necessarily involve the sort of straightforward/unequivocal factual claim that covid/vaccine denial does- the resurrection of the dead in Christian theology can be (and often is/has been) interpreted in a variety of ways including entirely non-literal ones, and even a literal claim of a historical miracle (the resurrection of Christ, say) is a trickier issue than something easily verifiable in the present like e.g. the efficacy of vaccines.
I mean, in general its just basic charity (and good form) to assume that a view you disagree with isn't held on the basis of stupidity or misinformation/manipulation or whatever... but its equally irrational to assume the opposite when in possession of direct and decisive evidence that the view is being held on the basis of misinformation/ignorance/etc. Which I think is quite clearly the case here, at least in the vast majority of cases.
:100:
Like me, for instance, I just stop at my guy and note that he is in the majority of experts, and relied upon by those in authority who have money and power to access the best and who have no obvious reason to BS. But if I was a "researcher" who wanted more, I'd find out what the other guy said about what my guy says, including any reasonable issues surrounding BS.
There is little intellectual rigor coming from these "researchers." That might be because it is difficult to find what the other guy said about what your guy said, especially if your guy is so marginalized as to not be worthy of the other guy's time; but that is rare in academia. If your guy has any traction whatsoever, some body is going to have to take him on. Find that, "researcher."