When you can find the same bullshit from actual MDs and public health officers that you can find deep in conspiracy fantasy communities, we're all in deep shit.

But, hey, we got folks who have support yachts for their multiple main yachts so obviously humanity is doing great overall!

Experts aren't expected to be perfect but they can't both bullshit and retain credibility. It just doesn't work like that.

Choosing to lie out of convenience works great for a short while, and then you no longer have credibility and people tune you out for good.

Even most of the complaints about why Americans are unhappy about politics all revolve about the same problem: they fucking hate capitalism and how it keeps robbing them.

But they'll always vote for the robber barons anyway. Humans are so damn weird.

Every disaster movie begins with scientists being ignored. By other scientists, usually influential ones. That detail is always ignored.

It's comforting to think that bad ideas are rare but when it comes to predicting the future, they are all over the place, even in science.

It may not be a scientific consensus, but the number of fully qualified experts who espoused the exact same ideas is WAY too high, even from the start.

Not all the truly fringe ideas, but a disturbingly high number of them by a shockingly high number of professionals.

I don't know why barely anyone is reacting but most governments have made it clear that they will go full GBD the next time around.

The fringe ideas are not a scientific consensus, in fact they're thoroughly debunked, but they are the political status quo, not opposed by many experts.

Some countries pretty much adopted the GBD framing, with most of their scientists and medical officers on board, and I've seen GBD ideas promoted by way too many scientists and MDs to bother estimating.

Those ideas are now the norm, and they will apply to the next pandemic.

Not that fringe, though. In the end most countries ended up following the same plan he promoted.

They did so after vaccines, which is a big change, but they were not a full solution out of this mess. COVID continues to do a lot of damage.

So what does it say that those ideas are now commonplace?

In a hypothetical future where, say, fusion energy, becomes the biggest, richest industry around, they would become the newest face of this evil.

This has nothing to do with technology or this group of people, all of this is part of human nature and it won't ever rein itself.

Anyone given too much power will end up abusing it, some far more and worse than others. But it's the nature of power to destroy people's morality and perspective.

The only way out of this is to limit the power that can be wielded privately. This also means a cap on income and fortunes.

It sure would be easier to oppose what's happening on the right if what's on the left hadn't become standard messaging out of the institutions themselves, repeated again and again as it was not happening.

Credibility debt, not immunity debt.

Voters have to believe it, though. They have no reason to.

Merrick. Garland.

Quit fucking blaming tools wielded by shitty humans instead of the soulless societies we live in that reward shitty humans every step of the way, keep giving them power and making life shit for everyone.