kohlrak: Just so everyone's clear, especially the mods, this thread basically peeked (well, died, then the hardcore trolling appeared) and died after it was pointed out the whole thread is a troll thread. 'Cause everyone just suddenly shut up despite how opinionated everyone is.
Canuck_Cat: It was a productive and non-partisan discussion centered on cited scientific facts/articles used to answer nightcraw1er.488's question about whether "we['d] still be quarantining, testing, and banning travel [for the next century]". Though some people are not happy about having this kind of discussion (look at rep bombing during the productive parts) and then derailed with a pending result reference, pseudoscientific misinformation, political attacks, and non-scientific and uncivil bickering.
I see that as trolling a troll thread. My evidence i present
here.
You could say this is useful, and i agree, but we all know that this topic can't go well right now, with all the cognitive dissonance in the discussion. We all have our favorite "experts," and "arguments," and our own selected evidence, and whatever else. Personally, i think the only way through it all is to c ontinue, trolling and all, but i highly doubt the GOG staff will agree. While i'll normally defend politics on GOG's forums as a result of their tie-in with games, this is not normally one of those cases, so this thread is only useful for seeing where everyone stands who use the gog forums, which a good portion of us already knew, anyway. I only participated, 'cause, well, the new movements towards the lab theory being considered by my political opponents. It's actually a really interesting time to poke each others' bears, but let's not kid ourselves. It'll be at least a year after the lockdowns are ended and this is behind us before we'll be able to really people to change their minds from their cognitive bias. Someone blocked me earlier in PMs because i dare challenged an argument that was demonstrably false (and, of course, there ware any other avenues you could attack too and still show it false). Of course, this was an anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine position, too, so obviously the guy just wanted to be back to normal life and my opposition to his case, despite my opposition to the lockdowns, got me deemed a troll and blocked. And it was very obvious it was an emotional reaction, too.
Maybe, someday, the links in this thread will be useful, though. And, right now, there are still some people who aren't emotional about certain topics, but by and large most people reading this thread already have their mind made up, unlike other threads that have been locked and/or deleted. COVID and the lockdowns just affect too many people on too personal of a level to be rationally approached at the moment.
EDIT: And to be clear, the guy who blocked me in PMs appeared to be a political opponent of mine, meaning that this has more or less gone bipartisan in general, regardless of which side you're on about any covid measure. It's just one of those things that's very personal.