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.

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.

You mean like the OP, who wanted the thread locked(while pretending he wasn't subtly asking/making the thread for such discussion) when people started discussing what he had discussed/asked in the OP post?

Now that you mention these words: some(others online and etc) have said the same thing re: your wet markets theory......in fact it was(and maybe still is) one of the most derided/mocked theories by the MSM and mainstream social media.
(I point out the above not to mock your ideas, but[in part] to show that what one person considers a valid theory might not be seen as very credible[or pseudoscience] by others)

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Well, I feel some(in general) can talk such things out rationally....but yes, not all.

I also think some need to be able to have these conversations(elsewhere, I mean) sooner rather than later, as the longer people put such off the harder it'll likely get to talk about and tackle such ideas.

Well, there's the rub. Some need it now, some can't handle it now, and how you deal with people who fall into both categories at the same time (i suspect this being the majority)? I mean, we cannot doing irresponsible things like psychological games and such to try to force them to believe the truth, as that's unethical, so what are we left with but to watch them dig themselves into holes?

Good question...wish I had the answers.

That reminds me of the scene in the film They Live, where the one man forces the glasses onto the eyes of the other on to get him to see things as they really are.

So then one has to ask one's self: is it more unethical to try to get people to see the way things are, or to let them go through life "blind"?

The quarantining, lockdowns, and all that jazz is a 100% justified response to an easily transmittable virus that's spreading across people who refuse to take hygiene seriously and think masks is somehow the big government's new method of trying to curtail your freedom of speech and expression (how?). So the old normal really is just a bunch of edgy memelords who don't want to grow up and own it when faced with a virus that's killing people at the moment and permanently affecting them, and the Old Normal™️ has been that way for a long while.

That we managed to come up with protocols to curtail the virus at all is honestly a good thing. We are living and co-existing with a couple diseases, but just because we do, it doesn't mean we should add another disease to the roster just because we can somehow handle it. And until these mindsets are changed, the lockdowns and quarantines aren't going away.

The skinny of it: be responsible and act like an adult, quarantines go. If you act like a petulant child, don't ever open your mouth if the lockdowns get stricter and longer, it's your fault and you damn well know it. Your actions do have consequences, and they're affecting everyone. I'm not a fan of the COVID protocols, but they are very necessary for the brutal environment you fostered.

So long answer is, yes, "we['d] still be quarantining, testing, and banning travel [for the next century]" at this rate. Get used to it.

thats a lot of false blabla

Plato's Cave...


I can't tell if you're trolling or not. I'll just assume you are and move on...

Then again, this is what a troll usually looks like, but i think we just have a case of two variants, the long winded and the short witted. How does one falsify pure opinion?

Ask yourself: why are some areas with the strictest measures and most compliance suffering some of the highest case totals, while those with less restrictions have some of the least case totals?

Also remember China? The most affected cities kept people indoors/in their cities under martial law(with people delivering them food/etc), and the case numbers still skyrocketed.

As for hygiene and people: yeah, a lot of people are slobs or don't take such things seriously...agreed on that.

We've actually had the ideas of masks and quarantining for awhile now.....such measures are nothing new.

That's what people have been saying since the start: only 15 days to slow the spread, only a one month lockdown, etc etc.....and with every new month they add more/new requirements no matter how many comply.

Let's not fool ourselves....the measures aren't likely going away for good even if everyone complied with every request.

Let's take your line of thinking and use DRM in it's place:

Customer/Gamer: "When will DRM go away?"
AAA game company execs: "We feel all customers are likely pirates...until everyone stops acting like a petulant child complaining about DRM and starts going along with what we say DRM is never going away."

(AAA game company execs in their minds: of course it's never going away, but we won't tell them that)

It was 15 days to slow the spread and only a one month lockdown back when:
- the virus was still ripe and fresh
- infection count was lower

All everyone said was "stay at home for a bit and we'll be fine."

Nobody stayed at home, and no one cared an iota about the disease. So you can't just keep saying "only 15 days they said" well over a year after the pandemic has become more available than cans of Pepsi. We had the chance to do the 15 days and one month song-and-dance, we didn't. What we're seeing now is what we had coming for us.

DRM is not an infectious disease that spreads by air. You willingly choose to put DRM and remove DRM. For most people you don't willingly contract COVID - and this "you don't willingly contract" part is why we should have exercised self-restraint.

It turns out lockdowns and quarantines are impediments to what a lot of countries really care about more than people's lives: the economy. Since it's not profitable to impose and enforce lockdowns, they only really do it for International Greatest Hits stuff like COVID.

Number one country in COVID...everything really is the United States. Half the population don't believe there even is a virus and call it bullshit, and the country also has a political mess going within it, with one party claiming the virus is a hoax and we should do nothing for it, the other party doing almost next to nothing, and Florida Man is still having his parties. A good chunk of England's population also believe the virus is a load of shite, and still go out everyday for random stuff.

In my state they did. Didn't stop it. THe problem was, the lockdowns don't work 'cause it was all the exceptions to the lockdowns, like, you know, going to the store which got narrower and narrower as they started cutting hours for "covid relief." Yes, concentrait people, so it it's easier to avoid diseases, somehow, by some magic trick... Yeah, not gettin' it. And this is why we had so many exceptiions, that and not everyone can afford enough food to last 2 months, which is how long a lockdown really needs to be to be effective. And that's ignoring how the scramble to prepare for such a lockdown would inevitably have resulted in such a massive spread of the disease.

But good on you for catching the economy bit. It's amazing how people on both sides prioritized the economy over lives. Let's be clear, here, if we would've stopped travel from China for a year instead of locking down, we would've been far better off, except economically.

But hey, did you hear that people's obeying of the restrictions was actually enough to nearly ereadicate influenza? So obviously we actually did a good job, just COVID is that much more contagious.

But I wasn't talking about the lab leak hypothesis or mainstream media or social media. I was talking about the link to Dr. Yeadon, who has also been wrong on numerous occasions. And also to rtcvb32 who was advocating for people to live normally citing death affecting older and people with co-morbidities, but not mentioning how some people can still suffer from still unknown effects of COVID-19 like [url=https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32656-8/]this paper that did a 6 month follow-up on 1733 Wuhan patients[/url] (median age = 57) with patients reporting at least one symptom of fatigue, trouble sleeping, anxiety / depression. And in the most severe cases, lowered lung capacity of diffusing air into their bloodstream.

The paper above also mentions the long-term impacts of SARS patients after recovering, including this one. 52% had lung issues impairing exercise capacity (walking 12-36% for males and 15-30% for females less distance in a 6 minute test compared to control 2 years after) and 10-18% of HK survivors suffered from anxiety, depression, or PTSD. It's misinformation that could lead to some unnecessary deaths or reduced quality of life.

And a rare example to drive home my point - I had chicken pox when I was a kid like all the others. And then I was incredibly surprised when I learned 13 years later when I got shingles and learned that it was caused by the dormant chicken pox virus permanently staying dormant in my spinal cord. This stuff is way too serious to be believing in misinformation and conspiracy theories.

That's in large part due to the ones that were supposed to keep us informed and help guide us kept us in the dark and downplayed it for a long time.

No, we got this in large part due to borders not being locked down and flights grounded from day 1(which happened mainly due to political posturing and etc). Then instead of admitting fault & trying to help clean up this mess the usual suspects got us to blame one another instead of them.

Correction: Co-vis spreads by droplets/aerosol for a limited distance...it's not fully airborne.

That said, one of the points I was making is if one doesn't trust a AAA game company to stop using DRM(no matter what they say), why should they trust the ones in charge to end lockdowns/etc just because those officials say so?

As I said above: the people that should've done so didn't, due to reasons like posturing/signaling/etc...borders should've been locked from day 1, at the very least. Now we're paying for their mistakes.

Agreed on them caring more about money than people.