I more or less agree with Adam Tooze here: These people saying that we’ve got to bite the bullet and get back to business just don’t comprehend the reality we’re facing, which is a scaled-up version of what we’re seeing in the hospitals of northern Italy. That’s realism. If you can maintain your position in the face of that, then we can take you seriously — not while you’re pontificating from the White House before Americans have really started to die in large numbers. It's a hard pill for me to swallow that most of America does indeed seem to operate under some motto like "wOn'T hApPeN 'tiL iT hAppEnS, L0L0L". Disregarding forecasts from experts became deeply cultural, especially on one side of the aisle. We were guaranteed fucked once 51% of 'Boomers made Facebook their primary news source. Prediction: We're going to have several waves of outbreaks directly attributable to successful disinformation campaign on social media. The conspiracy theories are only going to attract more believers once large-scale grief becomes more and more personal. The FBI should bust QAnon. "WAIT NO THE REASON THEY HAVEN'T IS BECAUSE IT'S AN FBI OPERATION, GUYS!!1". Have you heard any of QAnon covid shit? Not posting it here. I wonder how many weeks away we are from measuring a greater infection rate in QAnon's merry army?The left wants reformist change and the right wants to allow the market process to operate unencumbered. Both of them, I think, are operating with a kind of unrealistic understanding of the nature of this crisis. If we’re looking at as many as 10 million jobs lost in a matter of months, these arguments go out the window and the argument for preservation of what we can still preserve becomes absolutely overriding.
Regulation of social media will go just as far if not farther than tackling QAnon. Put Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, etc. in an arena suitable for the societal shadows they cast.
But this is like p2p stuff. Except for the "source", which, I concede could indeed be one, two, or more state-sponsored actors warring, on top of troll attempts. Still: How exhaustive of a government campaign would be needed to effectively muzzle people in online public spaces? I wish we could figure out a way to beat the crazies back by greater society mocking them, but their echo chambers are deep, and most of us actively avoid their online circles. I genuinely don't know if it's possible to regulate against stuff like QAnon. Re: the two trillion dolladollabillya'lls already "spent"? Well, now would be a great time for me to begin inquiring who will foot the bill for mass production of the vaccine. Because is definitely not going to cover that.The stimulus package adds $27 billion to an emergency fund that could give a boost to dozens of projects by pharmaceutical companies and academic groups developing drugs and vaccines against coronavirus. The emergency fund received a smaller amount of funding under a coronavirus response act signed earlier in March. There is no Covid-19 vaccine, but dozens are in development.
The ability to evaluate varying and disparate sources of information of varying quality has always had survival value. That value has diminished with time due to the general improvement of societal conditions but it has never dropped to zero. It is currently in high demand.