Well… at the risk of opening up a can of worms here.
Would one of those headlines have been written before an available vaccine, and the other after?
I’m due for another booster soon myself.
It was said over and over natural immunity was a better immunity.
I occasionally agree with things you say but too often you speak crap . .
and wonder how some all sing the same monotone…
eg
The point is not about vaccines it’s about the hypocrisy of the media. Remember the truckers in Canada? They were labelled as terrorists and anyone who supported them had bank accounts frozen. Now we are being told the Chinese protesters are brave and heroes 
It’s like the media want you to forget their disgusting coverage of protesters during lockdown (or lack of coverage) So they are now supporting ‘freedom fighters’ in China protesting lockdown.
It stinks 
There is the media in general, then there is the oligarch owned media. The oligarch owned media uses it to promote views that maximize their profits. Government run media also because the government itself is controlled by the oligarchy (it always has been whether it be a king, or a democracy).
Hence the talking points are created in advance and shared across all the oligarch owned media.
This also includes google search (and probably several other search engines) … it’s a control grid to shape the views of people for their profit.
Chomsky and Herman detailed much of this in their book Manufacturing Consent. It’s not a conspiracy theory either - as Chomsky says, it’s “institutional analysis” … it’s the way power functions to maintain it’s power.
The oligarch’s know and fear that they could lose everything if things change in a way they don’t control or fail to manage. History shows this clearly time after time they lose it all and new power comes to the fore. Hence they seek to crush or redirect their future potential competition while also working to maximize and extend their wealth and power.
It never works out for them though.
IMO, Apple can go @#$%
As it mulls kicking Elon Musk’s Twitter off the app store, it has now been revealed that Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China, a move that harmed the organizational efforts of demonstrators protesting against the CCP’s lockdowns.
Media is not to be trusted. Somewhere I read the following.
News is information someone doesn’t want you to know, the rest is a form of advertising.
Completely agree on media, and that it should come with warning similar to smoking packets.
Completely agree that having funds frozen by the thought police is unacceptable.
But in this case, ok, there may be a little media hypocrisy, but a group of people congregating before an available vaccine in a country with a stressed health cares system are more selfish than a group of people that have access to a vaccine and want to return to a normal life.
I know some people don’t agree with the vaccine, my choice was either to take my chances with a man made virus that shut a planet down, or take my chances with a man made vaccine designed to combat a man made virus.
Man made things are great, but in this case I would have preferred not to have to make a choice but Pandora’s box was already opened by Wuhan and Co.
I’m also very upset I live in a world where governments call you a conspiracy theorist when you open and look with your own eyes. Much of what is coming out now was available from the very beginning, but due to political pressure people where blocked on social media sites, called conspiracy theorists and threatened with fines.
This guy has been walking a thin line all the way through the pandemic, relying on English sarcasm to get around sensors. He’s only now talking about a lab leak.
I would like the Safenetwork up as soon as possible so in future I don’t have to hang around the dark corners of the internet to get information while my government for some reason decides to sing happy birthday at me while my relatives are dying.
You could not have written a more scary fictional script.
The virus never shut the planet down that was man and in my opinion these men have caused more death than the virus itself.
This is the reason many people protested lock downs and the other restrictions before the vaccine. Believe it or not the uk had a pandemic response prepared but for some reason or another it was totally disregarded.
I’m hopeful the charade over the last few years has opened more people’s eyes to the vast corruption in the world and something starts to happen to resolve it. Safe is definitely a step in the right direction and I’m sure we can all agree with that even @VaCrunch 
As far as current events goes, a daily sampling of cross-section media mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism is still more informative and practical than YouTube videos and podcasts, most of which have the evil profit motive themselves. What are the other choices for a regular Joe? A daily deep-dive research project on every subject using Google? That still brings you back to news organizations, YouTube and podcasts doesn’t it? And who has time for that?
Twitter was a good source if you had the ability to discern reliable, rational and well sourced and capable accounts from the rest, and the time to curate and review your follows.
Recently though I’m trying giving Twitter up. It takes a lot of time and I’m not sure if the improved picture I gain from it is worth my time. I know the world pretty well now.
I’m pretty good at filtering out the garbage and maintaining a model of the world using all kinds of source through years of effort and practice. I can spot garbage easily and am also generally accurate in my judgement of good sources and trustable information. Unfortunately many cannot, including many whose job it is to do so. Then of course you have all those deliberately trying to mislead.
Test your understanding and beliefs I say, test them again and revise them, and test, test, test them again until you start to see things clearly and which you can verify are accurate. If you can’t do that, rinse and repeat and stfu until you can!
Most of all, don’t trust your emotions without testing what they say! I think most of the public fail that one. It’s the easiest thing for those with agendas to use to misdirect the masses, so it’s a whole area of yourself which everyone needs to look at and develop an understanding of before you can engage sensibly on social media, and even when interpreting information from any source.
EDIT:
Quite, and this is one of the tools that can help you to evaluate sources.
I’ll add some skills that are also helpful, essential really:
- the ability to spot inconsistency. Such things scream out at me without any effort on my part. Apart from being very useful in detecting potential error, sloppy thinking, lies, ignorance etc, it’s one of the things that can make me a real pain in the arse, at least until I developed the next skill.
- an ability to hold apparently inconsistent beliefs in order to avoid the need to simplify too quickly (because complexity is difficult) and reach a conclusion based on too little information, as well as to recognise that in my terms “there’s always factor X”. That’s the thing(s) I don’t yet know or understand which may lead me to a different view. This requires humility, so beware the need to be right which I know all too well.
Another useful thing to bear in mind is that:
Nobody is smart enough to be completely wrong - Ken Wilber
Or in other words, everyone, including those we vehemently disagree with, have a part of the overall truth.
Cue the five blind men and the elephant analogy!
I would just add: Corroboration is important but you have to be careful with “parroting” news sources.
Isn’t it nice letting other people decide how can you spend your own money
I had this issue years ago, thankfully its easy opening another accoint if banks literally dont want your money.
Changing the subject… apparently nature is full of inaudible chatter from turtles (calling their babies to safety) and bats (where sons learn territorial chants from their fathers) and even tomato plants (groaning when thirsty)…
… that’s all very well, but what about the 