News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
What difference does it make? It was still a pandemic that wasn't planned, and many people lost their lives or had their lives severely affected as a result. And a certain US president, I will not name any names, completely mismanaged it, because it took his name off the frontpages of the news papers and Fox News.
Other governments were also completely idiotic in their response.
My government, for instance, had a different roadmap out of Covid lockdowns every week or so. Our minister of security at the time held a wedding reception while the rest of the country was in lockdown. And our Prime Minister ("teflon Mark Rutte") just laughed it all away.
So it's not just the US where the government was stupid, but we didn't have morgues overflowing with dead bodies where they were stored in refrigerated trucks on the street, but we did have overflowing ERs and nurses on the brink of burn out, because the finances for those care units had been stripped because of neo-liberal policies in the past decade or so.
I think one difference it makes, to answer your question, is that unsubstantiated claims like this tend to spread, virus like. Especially when pedalled by presidents and official government agencies. Many governments handled the pandemic predictably awfully, but this false narrative can have dangerous consequences, too. I'm worried about the number of times I've seen 'plandemic' spoken about. It gives me the impression that simply through repetition the meme grew stronger. But now it's being echoed by_official statespeople. _
The difference is that it'd allow the attribution of negligence which could be used for geopolitical gain.
E.g. "Government X's bad management of COVID wouldn't have been an issue if China wasn't leaking deadly diseases out of research institutions. So Government X deserves compensation for the harm China caused to the people of Government X. So X will institute trade sanctions of China."