What fallacies are involved in the conclusions drawn about the pandemic?
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Original Question
As indicated by my comment on another question, I didn't believe in a novel virus or pandemic from Day One and I present my case for complete fabrication here.
For those who believe in the novel virus and pandemic do you see logical fallacies in the argument from those whose argument I align with or do you think our errors are in other aspects of reasoning or ... ?
Naturally, I cannot but see errors in the reasoning of those who believe in the novel virus and pandemic and the errors that I see include logical fallacies but I'll put my answer to this question later. I'm curious to see what those who believe in the virus and pandemic perceive as erroneous thinking on the part of those who hold the opposite view.
Four academics in an article in The Conversation, Coronavirus, ‘Plandemic’ and the seven traits of conspiratorial thinking, put forward seven problems (below) they perceive in the argument of those who think that the pandemic is really a plandemic but their analysis exhibits a fundamental lack of understanding of how this event has been conducted and is very easy to argue against.
1. Contradictory beliefs
2. Overriding suspicion
3. Nefarious intent
4. Conviction something’s wrong
5. Persecuted victim
6. Immunity to evidence
7. Reinterpreting randomness
Comments on Question
What is your claim here? That COVID-19 is not a "pandemic"? If that is the case, what definition of "pandemic" are you using? And further, do you disagree with the generally accepted figure that about 6.5 million people globally have died from COVID since Spring of 2020? If so, what do you believe is the actual death toll?
There is a small but not completely insignificant percentage of people who don't accept the claim from the authorities that there is an illness, covid, distinct from other respiratory illnesses or the claim that a virus, sars-cov-2, has been proven to exist.
I don't have the medical expertise to know how a respiratory illness is identified, distinct from others. Frankly, I don't care. This sounds like a semantics argument similar to asking how many grains of sand make a "heap", but more importantly, a red herring from issues of importance such as a disease/illness that is killing people above and beyond the normal seasonal illnesses and what can do to minimize the risk of illness and death.
I think I can pick out one claim here you are making we can focus on: that the number of deaths per year is roughly the same in 2020 than in other years. Is this accurate? If not, please just make a simple claim that we can discuss.
Answers
3Petra, my good fellow. I took the time to review your article that you claim makes a case for your premises. I always start with premises. With all due respect, the best I can say is that is article is rambling, and I am not sure it ever comes to the point of actually coming to a conclusion or making a statement that could be a foundation premise.
Logical thinking takes training, either formal or informal. And, done right, it can be fun. I'm going to be a bit bold here and suggest four books:
Edward de Bono, “de Bono’s Thinking Course”
David Kelley, “The Art of Reasoning”
Arthur Whimbey and Jack Lochhead, “Problem Solving and Comprehension: a Short Course in Analytical Reasoning”
Hy Ruchlis, “Clear Thinking”
I'd say the more common fallacies involved in drawing conclusions about the pandemic are:
Appeal to authority
Appeal to common belief
Appeal to emotion
Argument from incredulity
Argument from ignorance
I completely understand why people fall into these fallacies - especially the last two - how do you accept the seemingly incredible phenomenon of the psychological operation (psyop) that has been perpetrated by the power elite on the people for at least centuries, if not millennia (The Gunpowder Plot 1605 and The Great Fire of London 1666 - 26 year-old French watchmaker responsible for the fire destroying London September 2-6 and Christopher Wren presenting new plans for the city five days later on September 11 - yeah, right! - being two notable examples). When you don't know that psyops have been perpetrated for centuries/millennia then yes they seem an impossible phenomenon and I was certainly guilty of rejecting psyops in my arguments from incredulity/ignorance before I watched the 3.5 hour film by British historian and filmmaker, Francis Richard Conolly, JFK to 9/11 Everything is a Rich Man's Trick (I now see that a number of things aren't quite right in this film but it was still incredibly instructive). How would they be possible? Well, they are, it's very counterintuitive but they happen with great frequency both large and small but the most astounding thing? Underneath the propaganda, they TELL us loud and clear they're psyopping us. It's truly unbelievable but they do and part of the reason they do that at least is that they have complete, justifiable confidence in the limitless elasticity of the Emperor's New Clothes effect.
I knew in an instant that the pandemic was a psyop because they told us. They told us through very direct and deliberate contradictions of reality in the form of imagery of people falling flat on their face, laid out on the ground and on hospital floors and a story about a Chinese research team that had found two species of snake to be "reservoirs" of the virus (later debunked, of course) when a pandemic had barely been declared. All very, very clear signs of a psyop and I knew that as it was a psyop only what they wanted for real would happen for real, that is, there would be no actual virus because they didn't want a virus they only wanted us to believe in one, they didn't need one to make us believe in one and a real virus wouldn't work for their narrative in any case. They wanted the jab for real, of course, that's so very real and every day I feel a sense of incredulity and despair that this very harmful intervention is still being delivered.
https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/in-memory-of-those-who-died-suddenly-028
https://www.oraclefilms.com/safeandeffective
At this point I had no idea whatsoever that there were scientists and doctors out there who'd been questioning the sciences of virology and vaccinology for decades but I soon discovered them.
What I learned after realising that I was arguing from incredulity and ignorance is that we must always judge by the evidence, always, always, always, we must put aside our feelings of incredulity and take a look at the evidence but, of course, it helps when you recognise that there is the well-evidenced phenomenon of the psyop throughout history.
The thing is when you judge by incredulity what you often end up doing is accepting something that is no less incredible than what you reject. If someone had told you a few years ago that there would be a global pandemic of a respiratory illness where the following applied:
--- symptoms no different from cold and flu
--- fewer people would suffer from it even than from the flu
--- a big tabletop pandemic exercise would occur just a few months before the pandemic broke out (Event 201, Oct 2019) as well as other pandemic exercises and pandemic-related films and TV programs would be made in the few years before
--- people wouldn't be allowed to visit their loved ones in hospital
--- many people would lose their jobs
--- everyone would have to wear masks and socially distance
--- people would be forced to get an experimental jab in order to keep their job or travel, etc
would you have believed them? No way.
I put the challenge to you: if you believe in the pandemic simply provide one unarguable fact that favours real pandemic over psyop. My case of 13 facts for the reverse.
The coronavirus pandemic is a gold mine of conspiracy. The U.S. government and media claim it all started in a laboratory in China, but anyone who mentions the dreaded words "Fort Detrick" is branded a conspiracy kook.
In fact, Fort Detrick was shut down the summer before the pandemic officially began. (It's now known that the disease was present much earlier than it was first reported in the media.) About the same time, several people died of a mysterious respiratory illness in a nearby nursing home.
I started working on a book about the pandemic in about March or April, and I contacted the nursing home and the local county health department, asking if they had determined what disease killed those people. I received no reply, and I don't think I saw any media even mention Fort Detrick - though they had lots to say about China.
There was also conspiracy in the way the U.S. manipulated events to inflict suffering on countries like Venezuela and Iran. Another conspiracy was the way those clowns appointed Google, Facebook, Twitter and Bill Gates as truth shepherds. If a person like me discussed a conspiracy theory, I could get banned (what they call the cancel culture). But if Bill Gates or some corporate scientist wanted to discuss THEIR favorite conspiracy theory, that was OK with Crackbook.
The million dollar question, of course, is the source of COVID. Was it manufactured in a laboratory? If so, where?
We'll probably never know the truth, but I have a strong hunch it was, and I think that lab was in the U.S. and Israel. But why? I came up with one theory that most people would describe as batshit crazy, but I think it deserves consideration: The 800 pound gorilla in the living room is China. The U.S. is desperate to contain China, so desperate they decided to destabilize the entire world, at the same time blaming all the suffering around the world on China.
That's currently my pet theory, and I do have some additional logic to support it, though I won't go into that here.
But forget logic; Peter Liverani likes to talk about the importance of EVIDENCE, and I have some powerful evidence that proves COVID is real: I was diagnosed with COVID myself last December. The symptoms were utterly bizarre. That's another thing that makes me suspect conspiracy; who ever heard of a disease with so many wildly different symptoms? Donald Trump supposedly had COVID and was OK one or two days later. A guy I worked with caught it about the same time I did, had two or three strokes, and still hasn't returned to work. Some people have problems with their sense of smell, and on and on.
If you want to claim that deaths from COVID were over-reported, I'm all ears. A relative told me about an in law who died of COVID. Oh, yes - he had emphysema, too. I've heard countless similar stories.
However, claiming there was no mysterious illness at all reminds me of your theory - which you claimed was virtually proved by EVIDENCE - that no one died during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
9/11 was an obvious conspiracy. The government claims the conspirators were Muslims, while others (including me) believe it was an inside job. However, both sides agree that there were a few thousand casualties.
Regarding the moon landing, I'm on the fence on that one. It does seem preposterous that NASA would fake one moon landing, let alone a series of moon landings. However, it's interesting to ask if it would be possible to fake such an event.
Your claim that Hollywood couldn't simulate the lunar surface, along with that ultra-fine dust in photographs that also couldn't be faked is absurd. It's also interesting that - half a century after the moon landing - Israel and India both sent spacecraft to the moon, both of which crash landed. And in spite of all the technology ushered in by computers - which didn't really become a thing until well after the first moon landing - we seem to be having an awfully hard time going back.
So I don't know if the first moon landing was faked or not, but some of the evidence trotted out by people who maintain it was authentic is utterly absurd, making me still more suspicious.
However, I'm not sitting on the fence regarding 9/11 and COVID. Like I said, I had COVID, and the evidence against the U.S. government's version of 9/11 is overwhelming. It's interesting how the phony war on terrorism intersected with the phony war against COVID in Iran.
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Sorry, but your assertions are not even worth entertaining. At least not for me or anyone who values their time.