The local officials (the mayor, legislators, and the president) where I live are all elected and I'm pretty sure that's already more than what China has

I think what I said is still true.

There's a lot of handwaving in your reply that China's population are just ignorant and censorship exists therefore its bad, based on little info. All Western countries also have major systems of censorship on social media. The majority of people in China have access to the internet via unfiltered VPNs - they have basically as much free access to information as you do.

Eh. This still remains clearly a product of Ameri-centrism in my mind: An America-only issue was being touted as a global problem everyone should be aware of, so everybody else in the world who has never seen or even imagined this weird shit will regard it as so uncommon as to not matter. And no, I don't think one side was being particularly more 'calm and patient' than the other.

I don't think "US and Canada do it" is a very effective argument for something being safe or reasonable. The reality is - We don't know what the effects are, and we can't even be completely sure they're doing what they say they are in the first place. The radioactivity may be low, but the presence of manmade tritium may well cause issues we don't even realise, and as always we're playing a gamble that "this number low so it's probably safe maybe". And that is undeniably a gamble, even if a low-risk one.

We're mainly waiting for you to say "Yes, I was wrong, Hexbear doesn't shill for Russia/China/DPRK and call them communist utopias, and I guess tankies is kind of a meaningless term.". I think that was the point.

I appreciate basically all those believers are being dumbdumb, listening to misinformation, and the vaccine is incredibly, incredibly safe (get vaccinated, vaccines are amazing). But to be honest, 'thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people' is not a very high bar for a vaccine distributed to billions.

The AZ vaccine is incredibly safe, get vaccinated, but it has roughly 10 serious, frequently life-ending, clots per million doses, more commonly in healthy young people. No hard numbers I can find about consequent deaths, but if 1 billion people have had the AZ vaccine, then 10,000 people will have suffered that. Roughly 13.5bn doses administered worldwide, so even if vaccines in general are 4x safer than the AZ vaccine, and only 1 in 4 of those people actually die, and only 1 in 4 of those deaths is a person that was otherwise healthy, it is plausible that the claim 'thousands of otherwise healthy people have died suddenly from the vaccine' is true.

The risk of death or lifelong injury from COVID is significantly higher, get vaccinated. COVID bad, fuck antivaxxers, get fucking vaccinated for your own and others' sakes - but the number do add up in a silly way. I suspect the sentence is actually true.

Yep, Twitter still loses billions a year, and even more now it took on debt to be owned by , it will go bust fairly soon, in terms of a few years.

C'mon, companies are already doing enough dumb shit, we gotta make up new ones?

ISO 8601 or nukes

Honestly, for what little it may be worth, I appreciate your view here. I think if we had this kind of attitude in moderating such behaviour, it alone would go a long way to making for friendlier and more constructive discussions for all.

Absolutely fair point, you may well be right. I pretty much agree on all points.

Eh, the BBC was never good, admittedly. But It wasn't until recent decades that BBC staff actually were explicitly instructed by the government to not just provide a platform for shitty reactionaries, but actively spout right-wing garbage and perform actual corporate shilling.