Covidiots in music

Have zero opinions on GMOs but I did see some lib acquaintances go so hard for defending that stuff that they ended up arguing Monsanto was doing great work to help the global South.

Bringing up a bunch of mainstream news articles about the health benefits of GMOs will not sway me, and shouldn’t sway anyone else with any knowledge of how corporations and the food industry continue to place and pay for favorable coverage and laws about their unhealthy products and harmful processes.

just more bought & sold propaganda from the shills at "big science", corn was intelligently designed by the benevolent creator to be perfect & without sin

Bringing up a bunch of mainstream news articles about the health benefits of vaccinations will not sway me, and shouldn’t sway anyone else with any knowledge of how corporations and the pharmaceutical industry continue to place and pay for favorable coverage and laws about their unhealthy products and harmful processes.

As in all things, there are grey areas. Some GMOs great benefits. Some lead to more harmful practices.

https://www.cspinet.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/resource/CSPI_GE_Pesticides_final.pdf

I mean, do I think GMOs have done good things? sure. Do I believe that GMOs have led to monocropping, soil degradation, and an entire farming system that is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet? also yes. This isn’t complicated, imo— the negative impacts of many GMOs far outweigh the positive, and no bullshit cornaganda placed lovingly in popular mainstream news sources will change that

Bringing up a bunch of mainstream news articles about the health benefits of vaccinations will not sway me, and shouldn’t sway anyone else with any knowledge of how corporations and the pharmaceutical industry continue to place and pay for favorable coverage and laws about their unhealthy products and harmful processes.

As in all things, there are grey areas. Some GMOs great benefits. Some lead to more harmful practices.

https://www.cspinet.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/resource/CSPI_GE_Pesticides_final.pdf🕸

people who post about climate doom and worry about their children’s futures and also unquestioningly support and insist on supporting GMOs crops have not a leg to stand on— go eat a perfectly round and tasteless tomato and watch the world burn.

eh, Monsanto Monsonto

I do prefer heirloom tomatoes. But it is weird how letting nature do its own thing means a much more expensive tomato.

Eating food is unethical.

Good interview with the author of Tomatoland - outstanding book on the decline of the tomato and how industrial farming in Flordia has helped to destroy its taste and ruin the health of the workers who harvest them. Worth reading if you're interested in any of this:
https://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137371975/how-industrial-farming-destroyed-the-tasty-tomato

xp - misread as cilantro doom

contemporary tomatocide would not have been possible without Wal-Mart and the fact that they used monopolistic practices to basically financially force farmers to either adopt industrial methods (yield above all, and the various details in the article) or else grow tomatoes at a loss ... oh yeah, and NAFTA didn't help either.

If Alex jones pays for lying shouldn’t every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too ?

— M.I.A. (@MIAuniverse) October 12, 2022

Pretty sure we already noted her as such, but just confirming.

I gave up on her after she accepted the MBE. She’s a horrid person

I remember when Kanye West and M.I.A. seemed to be the best things about life while the rest of the world was getting shittier and more Orwellian, but 17 years is a long, LONG time ago.

She makes me sadder than Kanye only because I'm more invested in her as an artist. But her crackpottery has been evident for a long time. Oh well. This is why we don't hire rock stars to run health policy.

I like how the replies to that tweet are mostly just people going "Noooooo, not you!"

That documentary about her that came out some years ago was very good and made her seem likeable, very sad.

Is covidiocy still as prevalent? Its interesting people are still invested in it this long after its moment has passed

There's an ongoing vaccination campaign to give the idiots something to chunter about.

I think there's def a subset of people who are having a hard time letting it go. There were people on Oxford Street the other day explaining how you could get money to repay the damage done by vaccination, so it's in the "you may be entitled to compensation" era, they seem to realise they're not getting new recruits anymore without appealing to something like that.

I guess some ppl who make this kinda shit their whole identity will just jump from pet topic to pet topic but for others that's not viable, I mean if I truly believed anti-vaxx stuff I can't imagine I could go "well that's that over with now".

Oh that reminds me, coming home on the bus last week, there were a whole bunch of people waving yellow placards at the junction between Holloway Road and Seven Sisters Road and there was some covidiocy displayed. I mean, why and why there?

Someone I used to work with sends out emails about how to 'undo' the vaccine. 'Its not too late!'

The community that built up around it must be smaller now, and their opponents providing less to react to, taking much of the energy out of it. I understand higher profile people holding on to it longer, just can't really tell how much traction there is in anymore

she is one of those healing crystals people that have the inside track on the illuminati

A few weeks back I saw people on the Finchley Road central res with placards big on the 'stop killing our kids with your vaccines'. They are interchangeable with the '5G makes your brain shrink' and 'Wayfair pre-assembled furniture contains trafficked kids why else do you think they sell it for so much??!!' faithful.

I'd guess the only people with skin in the anti-vaccine game now are natural healing / homeopathy types, who were banging on about it years ago anyway.

Oh, and crazy people (see: MIA)

MIA also has a new album & thus invested in getting headlines

MIA also has a new album & thus invested in getting headlines

You would think the air would have gone out of "there's no such thing as bad publicity" a long time ago, but some people still believe it.

MIA was mentioned within the first ten posts of this thread and her twitter feed seems pretty consistent in terms of its derangement. I know there's a comfort in thinking everyone who spouts shitty stuff is doing it for clout but she seems like a true believer to me.

oh no doubt shes a true believer but imho also savvy enough to know what buttons to push for extra attention, she even seems to have been laying off the vax stuff until recently

Anti-vax rhetoric is still very prevalent in U.S. right-wing circles. One of the major current themes is that all the warnings about increased risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have had COVID is a cover story for the damage done by the vaccines. And hell Florida's surgeon general just threw fuel on that fire. The approximately 39 percent of people in my county who aren't vaccinated presumably buy into all of this.

Is there the same energy behind it? In the US it feel its been incorporated into general right-wing messaging. I'm not sure same is true in UK where it felt more like its own bubble, not quite as connected

I've been wondering if the reason we can't have decent health coverage in the United States is that we've been in love with snake oil since the old west, apparently. Something the about the frontier myth, finding that secret source of gold or something.

anti-Vax stuff seems to be growing in the US--lots of people who were seemingly sane are now blaming their health conditions on the vaccine

This is reaching people who weren't covidiots or anti-vaccine originally? Thats interesting, suggests messaging is coming from elsewhere if they were (presumably?) immune to it before?

Where are you seeing this, Keyes?

imo It's all Facebook--lots of anecdotes about how "my daughter was perfectly healthy and now she has a heart murmur" and blaming the vaccine. Though usually it turns out the daughter also had Covid twice. My in-laws don't want to get the booster because they think the last shots gave them conditions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that about 264.6 million people had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, including about 225.9 million people who had been fully vaccinated by the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine or the two-dose series made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

The C.D.C. also reported that about 110.6 million fully vaccinated people have received an additional vaccine dose or a booster dose, and that approximately 11.5 million had gotten the updated bivalent booster shot, the highest level of protection against the virus.

11.5 million for the new booster is insanely low

I have a cousin who is getting deeper into this shit all the time. Every day it's some new made-up bullshit about how 95% of people have "blood abnormalities" after getting the vaccine, or whatever.

I sometimes feel like his basic problem is that he doesn't have the instinct to just Google stuff before posting. Look to see if there's any basis for it. He'll just accept anything that fits his narrative.

ime some of these people will indeed Google stuff, they'll just spend hours doing so until they find any random reddit post or blog comment that supports their batshittery

it's thriving here in Canada, or at least in Alberta:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-blood-transfusions-resistance-covid-1.6613841
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/new-alberta-premier-says-unvaccinated-most-discriminated-against-group-after-swearing-in-1.6612767

Smith has been deeply critical of the Kenney government's use of public health restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. She has pledged to amend the Alberta Human Rights Act to add vaccination status as a grounds subject to protection from discrimination.

"They have been the most discriminated against group that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime," Smith said of unvaccinated Canadians at the news conference.

Uptake in the new booster is very low so far, but I wouldn’t assume that corresponds directly with skepticism about vaccine safety. I think it’s not easy motivating people to keep getting boosters for a number of reasons

yeah I don't think it has anything to do with safety concerns, if anything the anti-vaxx position is even more ridiculous now that billions of people have gotten it. I think it probably has more do to with Covid being out of the headlines and life more or less returning to normal, for better or worse. I didn't even know there was a booster that was formulated for Omicron that was available yet. to me its like getting an oil change. just something to do some day, when you get around to it, etc. I know this attitude is super dumb of course. and I did wind up getting it last week, but only because they were giving out free shots at work :)

wife & i had covid last month & were advised to wait 3 months before getting the booster, i wonder if theres a statistically significant % of people who have had recent infections in the same boat, will be interesting to see if theres a big bump over the next couple months

^^

I know about 5-6 people that are stuck in that exact waiting period now. But then I've also heard two coworkers in the last week comment that they knew nothing about the new boosters being available!

Heckuva job, Globalist puppet masters!

Most disappointing point was that these two were both totally on board with getting them, they just hadn't known they were out!

tbh i think i only learned about it during covid-related googling when i was sick, i can definitely see how well-meaning people who dont read covid news everyday could have missed it

Absolutely, but it speaks to the absolute failure of messaging.