> The problem is the government and traditional media have been caught lying again and again. These two things are huge. They are not monolithic entities that

> The problem is the government and traditional media have been caught lying again and again. These two things are huge. They are not monolithic entities that "lie" or "don't lie". I think a big problem is such blind cynicism. Especially when the alternatives people are turning to are hilariously worse. I'd be more sympathetic to the claim that traditional media is terrible if they weren't using that to direct influence towards crazy uncles on facebook instead. I think many things people think are "lies" are just uncertainties. The pandemic is full of these. There are a ton of confounding variables and we don't have any perfect control groups from which to make any conclusions. Basically every big issue that gets debated by the internet armchair experts is badly affected by this: COVID severity, the effectiveness of vaccines, masks, Ivermectin. Every damn thread is full of people speaking as authoritatively as they possibly can pointing to individual studies or data points without understanding the context, scale, or confounding factors.