if you keep letting bot and list votes count, you're allowing small numbers of people to determine site wide reputation and reach by rigging votes.
it's just going to be an ugly arms race to the bottom.
the point of free speech is to allow and enable controversial speech and the cure for it when such speech is wrong is not "allowing those who disagree to silence it" it's "more speech."
time to stop this.
unerring as a cat seeking the lap of the cat hater: it's always the tweets you have not quite thought through that go big.
upon reflection, i am not convinced that anyone blue check or no, should have down mod powers.
it's amazing that people are still out peddling this obviously inaccurate data. rig your studies all you like, covid vaccines did not reduce cases, deaths, or hospitalization. they made them worse.
all these slanted studies fly in the face of the overall data. for this to be correct, covid vaccines would need to reduce hospitalization risk by ~92%. that's incredibly high efficacy. efficacy like that would create a massive, unmistakable signal in the data with populations that were 70-99% vaccinated. the curves would bend so hard that anyone could eyeball it. it would be air horn during vatican vespers unmissable.
but it's not there. not only is this signal absent, it's inverted.
let's take some obvious examples in the high risk high vaxxed populations:
i chose the top states in the US by vaxx rate and looked at 65+, the high risk high vaxx group.
95% vaxxed. hospitalizations and all cause mortality both rose post vaccine despite a less dangerous covid variant. if this were 92% effective, the 5% unvaxxed would have had to see their hospitalization rates rise 18 fold just to stay flat. and we KNOW that did not happen.
this signal is not isolated. we see the same thing in maine, rhode island, massachusetts, connecticut. this is obviously the modal outcome.
more here:
in fact, the highest vaxxed states in the US saw the worst rises in hospitalization rates while the lowest saw far less. vaxx is, at a societal level, associated with more, not less hospitalization and death.
one could, i suppose, try to argue causality, but the timing is highly provocative and again, if efficacy is 90% signal should be strongly opposite to that which is observed.
this same was true of all search engines i tried. it's not just google.
i suspect this is an artifact of something deeper like "media refusing to use these words" or some more generalized manipulation.
literally in the time i was doing the analysis, luxxle caught up perhaps because this issue is going viral on X.
but the others had not as of this writing.
i suspect this may have more to do with this than with something google specific:
even once this avalanche of absurdist headlines was replaced by ones that bore at least marginally more resemblance to reality, the words “assassination attempt on” appear basically nowhere.
there has never been a dangerous pandemic in the post antibiotics world. the only real danger is the enormous damage that can be done by bad over-reaction.
all the truly bad pandemic outcomes of modern times were own goals kicked by overzealous authorities and fueled by panic and bad pharma choices.
doctors treated spanish flu with up to 30 grams a day of the new wonde-rdrug "aspirin" and were shocked to see so many deaths in "young, healthy people."
it was iatrocide
and covid was the replay
lock down, mask up, and take dodgy drugs you don't understand
history repeated.
those who did least during covid fared best.
it was barely a blip in the data.
had we not named it/lost our minds, had we not reacted badly and adopted terrible treatments in the place of ones known to work, would we have even noticed covid beyond "crummy flu this year"?
friendly reminder that the NOAA's USHCN reference network of well sited thermometers with continuous temperature records and no urban heat island bias shows no warming trend over the past ~20 years.
fewer than 8% of US weather stations meet NOAA siting guidelines.
over 70% would be expected to run over 2 degrees C hot based on heat pollution from human activity around them like machinery, asphalt, and airport activity.
and yet in public claims, the NOAA uses the data from the network they know to be severely biased toward over reporting temperature and not the data from the one they themselves created as their "reference" network.
what does that tell you about the agenda of this agency?