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That’s quite a lot, but that’s ok. You’re using the word propaganda to just mean ‘what most people believe’, which just isn’t useful. That’s mainly because in
by simonh 5y ago
That’s quite a lot, but that’s ok.
You’re using the word propaganda to just mean ‘what most people believe’, which just isn’t useful. That’s mainly because in many, many issues there are different widely held beliefs. Take coronavirus. More than a third of the US population think it’s just the flu and vaccines are dangerous. There is no consensus as there is in Europe.
On your specific points on vaccination, its a fact that vaccinations of any kind are not free or risk. I have a persistent pain in my left arm since my second vaccination, probably due to the jab going into a joint membrane. I really need to get it checked out. There are real cases of adverse effects. Yes you will read about people denying it, and you will read people saying the vaccines are a con. The truth is as usual more complex, no the vaccines aren’t a con, yes they do work and have transformed life here in the UK, but that did come at a cost of some side effects. Nevertheless they’ve saved tens of thousands of lives in the UK alone.
On radio sensitivity, I worked in telecoms with radio engineers in the late 90s and quite a few of them believed mobile phone transmissions might be dangerous. There was a mix if opinions in the industry. However large scale trials and studies settled the issue conclusively, there was no correlation between active antenna deployment and reported side effects. How do we know? Because they compared reported side effects in areas with active transmitting antennas with reports in areas where the antennas hadn’t yet been activated and there was no difference. Yes there were more reports of headaches and such near antennas than areas without antennas, but that also applied to inactive ones so it had nothing to do with radio waves. It was entirely psychological. As people got used to antennas being around the reports died down.
That doesn’t mean there is no issue, it may be that a small number of people really are sensitive, too few people to show up in statistics, but every such case I’m aware of that’s been investigated has been disproven. That’s not propaganda or just expert opinion, that’s actual results from many, many real world studies.
On Ukraine are the TikTok, twitter, instagram and YouTube uploads by ordinary Ukrainians propaganda? There’s a vast torrent of uncensored, unedited, sometimes live reporting by ordinary people coming out of Ukraine every day. You don’t even need to watch or read the mainstream media these days, you can seek out primary sources on the ground yourself. You can talk to them yourself on livestreams. My kids play internet video games and you can chat with Ukrainian kids on game chat servers and Twitch. It’s a different world now. You can go that here. You can’t do that in Russia or China.
Yes there is a kind of consensus that often forms on subjects in the west. There’s a mass consensus on Coronavirus here in the UK, dissenters are a small minority, but they are a very large minority in the US. So large that they dominate one of the two main political parties. Nobody, no one central authority controls the narrative on this in the west. People choose the narrative they prefer. Sometimes they get it wrong, sure, but they have access to alternative voices if they want to hear them, and they do have a genuine choice. You have access to dissenting opinions and you have made a choice, and your opinion is getting free air and a chance to be heard. Its all part of the narrative.