Eristalis

Sure. But there are also some scientists who think the lockdown didn't work, or only work really fast and hard. Or only work in dense populations but are useless in sparse ones. The Democrats don't have a monopoly on truth, they're not omniscient. They just had a different idea of how they wanted to respond based (like every other politician) on what they thought would sell well to their electorate.

Who knows what they word have actually done in power. I hate to break it to you, but politicians lie - it's kind of their job.

I think a lot of it came from the impact of social media algorithms driving people into increasingly polarised groups such that to prove you weren't in 'their' group you had to fervently believe the exact opposite of everything 'they' believed.

Politicians, being politicians, jumped on that and pinned their flags to one group or the other. Meanwhile, health institutions and scientists, not, as you say, magically immune from the influences the rest of us are under, did the same.

But my point is really that they all still just did their job under those circumstances. Not as saints, not as evil masterminds, but as biased, ideologically-blinded, rash, stressed-out, fucked-up, and disillusioned ordinary people. Just like the rest of us.

And some of the ideas coming out of that are going to be fine, some are going to be harmless but annoying, and a few are going to be properly crap. That's how the world is.

What's crazy is seeing everything as black and white.

And on your last point. Scientists did come out and question many of Fauci's policies. They were removed from social media and in many cases fired.

It's easy to claim majority support when you silence opposing voices.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4

Exactly. That's his job and he did it. That's it.

As to the obfuscation. He went on the Newt Gingrich podcast and said the idea of a lab origin was a conspiracy theory without any scientific basis eight days after a meeting he had with top scientists at which the majority were of the opinion that it probably was. In what way is that 'not stating something as fact when it's uncertain'?

He'd just come from a meeting where he'd been told it was uncertain, and he stated publicly that believing it amounted to conspiracy theory.

I can't understand why people defend the man. I can't understand why anyone would particularly hate him either. He's just a normal political appointee.

Again, he chose a job in the public eye. He wasn't drafted in. And he literally wrote in his diary that he was enjoying the attention.

Politicians trying to make appointees look bad is standard practice. David Kelly was literally driven to suicide by the pressure to relent over Iraq.

A few dozen is smaller than millions. It's not minimising, its maths.

I've never heard anyone attempt to debate whether trans people exist, so the meme seems a bit weird.

The 'debate' seems to fall into two camps. Those who question the relationship to biological sex (sports, restrooms, prisons, etc), and those who label all such people as 'deviant' in some way (usually on pseudo-religious grounds or some other spurious right-wing nonsense).

It's pointless conflating the two, they're completely different debates for completely different reason with completely different (often vehemently opposed) groups. And it's pointless pretending either are denying trans people's existence.

If you've got a set of negative beliefs you need to fight against in society you need to actually address those beliefs, not some belief that sounds bad but nobody actually has.

It's not a distraction from the class warfare though. It is the class warfare. The wars, plagues, and destitution are the class warfare.

The sexual exploits of that class are a minor (if appalling) sideline. It affected dozens of young women. And, again, my deepest sympathies to them, but dozens is not millions. The wholesale massacre of an entire nation is not a 'distraction' from a sex scandal. The sex scandal is a distraction from the wholesale massacre of a nation.

The mass exploitation of the poor is the most noteworthy feature of the ruling class. Calling them the Epstein class just makes them sound like their main crime is the exploitation of a few dozen teenagers. Their main crime is the complicity in the massacre and starvation of thousands of children, the impoverishment of millions more.