>Or a participant in some sort of fantasy vote-rigging conspiracy.
This is even more relevant outside of the US. In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible for some inexplicable reason, perhaps related to magical soil, but outside of the US they are a real concern.
> In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible
No, they aren't, which is why our most recent ex-President (who also was notorious for inventing fantastical vote-rigging conspiracies out of no evidence in the same election) is currently at the center of a criminal investigation for one based on fairly hard evidence, and his political party is trying to change the Georgia State Constitution to derail the investigation.
There's a difference between “That vote-rigging conspiracy is an unsubstantiated fantasy” and “Vote-rigging conspiracies are impossible.” Pretty much no one in the US has ever argued the latter.
Have I been mislead? If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it here as well. They have courts and investigations and evidence in other countries as well, and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging there.
Big difference between the general statement of "vote rigging is impossible" and "this last election wasn't rigged". The usual claim is the latter, not the former.
If it is possible to carry out election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried out by people that viciously hate the former president? Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries, and there is no magical means of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get away with it here as well. They have courts and investigations and evidence in other countries as well, and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging there.
The threshold isn’t just “it’s possible”. There needs to be some evidence. All sorts of things are possible, doesn’t mean we go around thinking they are true, or even assume they are potentially true.
It’s not Impossible I’ve murdered someone, doesn’t mean I should be presumed a murderer.
Yes, absolutely. We must use the evidence available and draw inferences, assuming that there is no magic soil type phenomenon involved. In this case, the evidence available includes 5 years of statements and actions performed by members of one political party which demonstrate beyond any doubt that they overwhelmingly possess a seething hatred of one of the candidates. It also includes undisputed evidence that election officials instituted rules for some election facilities that greatly hindered the ability of outside election observers to ensure no fraud was taking place. And it also includes undisputed evidence that these same election facilities are totally politically dominated by that one political party, and have been for decades. We can therefore infer that it is overwhelmingly likely that they engaged in fraud.
There is no “overwhelming evidence” of any election or voter fraud. Such claims have been debunked[1]. Your use of that adjective does not make them true, and your assertion is literally theorization of a conspiracy.
Your link seems to agree with me. From the facts for GA and PA:
"Furthermore, in an election conducted in the midst of a pandemic, each of the 159 counties was
required to balance the close presence of poll watchers to election workers against the
requirements for social distancing essential for the protection of public health."
"As Trump-appointed federal district court Judge Grimberg found, there is no legal “authority
providing for a right to unrestrained observation or monitoring of vote counting, recounting, or
auditing.”
"Second, there is no right under federal or state law for observers to stand at a particular distance or
have a particular view of ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Third Circuit have rejected
such claims. As the Third Circuit noted: “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that the Election Code
requires only that poll watchers be in the room, not that they be within any specific distance of the
ballots.” Id. (citing In re Canvassing Observation, No. 30 EAP 2020, 2020 WL 6737895, at *8-9 (Pa.
Nov. 17, 2020)). Similarly, there is no federal right protecting the location or view of observers. Id.
(noting that the Campaign “cites no federal authority regulating poll watchers or notice and cure.”). As
long as observers were allowed in the room, which they were, complaints about minor deviations in the
location and view of observers are legally insufficient.66"
In other words, the restrictions that were placed on observers were consistent with the law, and that is what the courts have ruled. I am willing to accept for the sake of argument that the restrictions were legal, but that's not the point. The point is that no one disputes that there were such restrictions. Nor do I see anyone disputing that the restrictions would have made it harder or impossible for election observers to detect fraud. The defense they put up is just that no fraud was detected, and that the restrictions were legal.
See: "The Trump Campaign and its surrogates have tried, unsuccessfully, to equate an alleged lack of
observer access with fraudulent results. There has been no credible evidence of significant voter fraud
presented in any form. The suggestion that the Trump Campaign and its surrogates were prevented
from detecting fraud, and that is tantamount to evidence that there must have been fraud, is absurd."
I don't think that suggestion is absurd at all, and neither do tens of millions of other Americans. Members of the Democrat party viciously, bitterly hate Trump, and everyone knows it. Why would we not suspect them of cheating, if they made it difficult or impossible for anyone to tell?
>...neither do tens of millions of other Americans...
Because they've been propagandized to think that way by a president with a conflicted interest. The number of people who hold an opinion has no bearing on whether it is factual.
Again, all you've done is to reiterate the same conspiracy theory without any evidence.
>...that made it difficult or impossible for them to detect fraud...
That's their claim (which is already suspicious considering their obvious motivations), but it's not the objective truth. And even if it were, it's certainly not actually evidence of fraud.
I'm genuinely surprised to hear someone claim this. The election centers handed out papers to observers telling them what the restrictions were. There were livestreams from various facilities during the process where workers were clearly seen handling election materials far away from where the observers were. There are pictures where observers are sitting impotently behind a line, watching 5+ election workers each from far enough away that they would never be able to read what's written on the materials that the workers are handling. The claims that restrictions were placed on observers which did not exist in past cycles and which would make it more difficult or impossible for observers to detect fraud were never denied in court. Instead, the defendants claimed that those restrictions did not prevent observers from being anywhere or seeing anything that they had a legal right to be or see.
>it's certainly not actually evidence of fraud
In combination with the undisputed hatred of democrats for Trump, it provides good reason for a person to believe that there was election fraud in those areas. Therefore it is evidence of fraud. It is not conclusive evidence, of course, but it is evidence.
> Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away with it in other countries
I'm not convinced that it is. Sure, election rigging happens, but that's not the “getting away with it” that would be at issue. Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes), or it usually is quite evident in even the very short-term, and either fails to do enough to change results, does enough to change results but is corrected by institutional processes, or it does enough to change results and is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.
There's not a whole lot of modern cases where election fraud is discovered only long-after the event rather than virtually in real-time.
Is vote rigging and conspiracy to rig votes possible in the modern world? Yes. Is it ever both significant and not immediately evident? It's not impossible, but it doesn't seem to be the case. If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.
>Either people who get away with it undetected in the very short term are so good that they manage to suppress all evidence completely and it never comes out (which seems an implausible binodality in outcomes)
Why do you think that's implausible? What evidence of election fraud would you expect to be left behind that would be difficult to dispose of?
>is allowed to stand by corrupt institutions despite being widely decried.
By whom?
>If it were, you'd expect there to be examples of cases undetectable in the short-run but later discovered.
Why would that be expected? Many crimes are much harder to prove if the perpetrator is not caught in the act. Why would you not expect election fraud to be among them?
Not thousands of random people picked off the street, though. It involves thousands of people that overwhelmingly share a seething hatred of one of the two candidates.
Not necessarily no evidence left behind, just no "smoking guns" that can be trivially discovered by private citizens without power of subpoena or warrant.
It's kinda like how Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster could be real, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that they are almost certainly not real.
Some motivated people have spent a lot of time and money trying to find proof of those creatures, and come up with nothing but some blurry pictures (including some known to be intentional fakes) and conjecture. So there's not much reason to take them seriously.
It's also kinda like how Al Capone might not have ordered the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that he probably did, even though no one could definitively prove it.
And also kinda like how Kim Jong Un might be the preferred candidate of 100% of North Koreans, and we'll never really know for sure, but most people conclude that he is almost certainly not.
Thanks for the additional examples. Another good one is the moon landing. I don't strictly know we went to the moon, I don't have direct proof, but based on the evidence available to me and the crappy arguments from people claiming we didn't, I'm pretty confident it happened.
As usual these arguments never really end, but thanks to prediction markets, this time the people who believed the possible-but-highly-unlikely outcome, "Trump actually won", ended up donating lots of their money to the people who believed the much more simple and plausible scenario: "No, he didn't".
>this time the people who believed the possible-but-highly-unlikely outcome, "Trump actually won", ended up donating lots of their money to the people who believed the much more simple and plausible scenario: "No, he didn't".
No, that's not what happened. People who believed the odds of the courts ruling in favor of Trump made the payout worth it gave their money to people who believed the odds of that not happening made the payout for that scenario worth it.
Of course, courts only have access to the evidence which is given to them by either side, so really we only know that the evidence Trump's legal team was able to get its hands on on short notice was not sufficient to convince the court to take the very significant step of overturning election results. We do not know who "actually" got more legitimate votes.
May I be so bold as to suggest that not all vote rigging conspiracies are considered impossible. Just the ones that have been rejected by every court that has tested them.
One theory I've heard is that the magical soil in the US would compel the riggers to confess and/or provide evidence of their guilt to the courts and to the general public, rather than lying and/or concealing that evidence. In the rest of the world, courts often are not provided with relevant evidence or confessions, and therefore rigging remains possible.
If you remove the putting of stupid words in others’ mouths from this (great going there, btw), the only thing that remains is “but the courts could have not gotten the evidence”.
But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it.
You have to explain why people claiming it have enough evidence to believe it, but the courts don’t have enough evidence for it to be even claimed in the courts, if you want to claim that the reason is that courts don’t have access to the evidence.
>But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it.
Based on this statement, I am guessing you are an American, and are therefore accustomed to all relevant hard evidence always being available. What you may not know is that in the rest of the world, sometimes some hard evidence is not available, so those people have adapted other mechanisms for forming beliefs about what is true. One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts.
For instance, in those countries, if a man who has professed a strong desire for wealth is tasked with guarding a large pile of money, and the money disappears, people in those countries will infer that the man likely took the money, even if no one saw him take it and the money is not later found in his possession.
> One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts.
The “other relevant facts” are called “evidence”.
An observation is evidence for a proposition when the posterior probability for the proposition, after updating on the observation, is greater than the prior probability of the proposition, before the observation.
Ok, so I guess you are saying that the evidence is not __legally considered__ evidence, or isn’t “evidence” in the legal sense of the term, and that that is why it wasn’t presented it court?
I have to admit that I’m not particularly clear on what kinds of evidence are and aren’t considered “evidence” in the legal sense admissible in court. Are you familiar with the criteria that make the distinction?
In a bench trial, the judge is supposed to weight the evidence presented, and issue various different degrees of relief based on whether it meets certain standards in totality. For a case where the plaintiff is asking the judge to overturn the result of an election, the judge would require a rather high standard of evidence.
I was talking about hard evidence specifically -- think a smoking gun with the suspect's fingerprints on it. According to what I have been lead to believe, if election fraud happened in the US, sufficient evidence of said fraud would be discovered and presented to American courts, though that is not the case in other countries.
Therefore if I have not been mislead, when a person considers whether there was election fraud in the US, they should only consider whether sufficient evidence has been presented to courts or to the media, not whether there exist other lesser forms of evidence.
Doesn't this path lead to believing anything you like, once you free yourself from the chains of needing evidence? I feel like I'd lose all track of what is real if I used this logic.
My understanding is that people in those other countries have not been lead down such a path, even though they know that sometimes people get away with stealing elections in their countries. I believe they use reason and inference when judging what is real, because all relevant hard evidence is not always available to them.
> My understanding is that people in those other countries have not been lead down such a path
Ah, that makes sense. They would require evidence to believe something. So for example, in an election where there was no evidence of fraud, they would not believe there was fraud. Such as the one which occurred in 2020 in the U.S.
Yes, and examples of evidence might include that some election facilities were administered by people with a seething hatred for one of the candidates, and election observers in some areas were prevented from being able to meaningfully monitor the election process. Of course there are many other potential forms of evidence, but those two right there would be enough to give anyone pretty good reason to believe there was election fraud, provided it happened outside of America, since election fraud can't take place in America.
I assume you're talking about Republican administered election facilities and since they have a well documented seething hatred toward Biden you're suggesting that Biden actually won by a _much greater margin_ except for the fraud that no doubt occurred in Trump's favor.
I was actually talking about Democrat administered election facilities since they have a well documented seething hatred toward Trump and instituted egregious and well documented restrictions on election observers, forcing them to stay far enough away from election workers that they could not tell what the workers were doing, and kicking them out of facilities entirely under any pretext imaginable with absolutely no recourse if they did anything other than sit silently in their designated corner. I am not aware of any such egregious restrictions that were placed on election observers in Republican strongholds.
So, lots of bread and circuses. Are they healthy? Are their grandchildren and great-grandchildren going to inherit a civilization that they would want to be born in to?
>If a dog is fat it's somebody else's fault, if a person is fat it's their fault.
I don't really care whom you blame, I care about the results. Our society could do much more to stop people from being fat and unhealthy, yet 70% of the country is overweight, and more people have chronic health problems than don't.
>How should I know how people's unborn children feel about a society which doesn't exist yet?
I'm not asking how the unborn children feel, I'm asking whether the existing people would want to be born into the civilization which they expect that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit.
> don't really care whom you blame, I care about the results. Our society could do much more to stop people from being fat and unhealthy, yet 70% of the country is overweight, and more people have chronic health problems than don't.
Unless you want members of society to walk around smacking soda and fried potato products out of people's hands, I'm not sure that I agree.
If we want to pool our resources as a people to solve problems for others, let's start with water scarcity, unstable/oppressive governments, and renewable energy. Please don't sign me up for forcing people onto weight watchers plans.
How about locking the soda and sugary snacks away with the cigarettes, instead of having them in your face (and your children's faces) in the checkout aisle? How about putting warning labels on them like cigarette cartons instead of cartoon pictures designed to get the attention of children?
How about devoting multiple hours of every school day in high school to getting students into great shape, so they don't start off their adult lives overweight?
There are many, many things we could easily do, but the people who run our civilization do not want them to be done. Those same people are the ones that are gaining more and more power over the people, by the way, as a consequence of the concentration of wealth.
What water scarcity problem is currently causing problems for 70% of the country?
The root of the problem is a lack of self control, and putting things in scarier packaging will not solve that problem. It's sort of like distributing tissues as a solution to the COVID pandemic, it's just addressing a symptom.
Why would we restrict our charity to this country? Let's solve real problems, which mostly exist in other countries. Unrestricted access to soda and Twinkies is not a real problem.
In addition, prohibition does not work. It doesn't work with alcohol, it doesn't work with drugs, it doesn't work with gambling, and it won't work with cake.
>The root of the problem is a lack of self control
So make it easier for people to control their own behavior, if you want to make a dent in the problem. Teach them how to be in good shape by actually making them do it as adolescents. Teenagers are already required to participate in gym class. Why don't we change gym class so that it actually does something for them?
>and putting things in scarier packaging will not solve that problem.
Do you think that the labeling on a package is irrelevant? Then why do companies spend so much money designing it? Why are they all bright flashy colors, rather than black, white, and grey?
>Why would we restrict our charity to this country?
Because this is where we live, and where our families live, and the quality of their lives is most dependent on what happens to the people here.
>Let's solve real problems, which mostly exist in other countries. Unrestricted access to soda and Twinkies is not a real problem.
70% of the country being overweight is a real problem.
>In addition, prohibition does not work.
I said nothing about prohibition. Having to ask the cashier to go get you your case of Pepsi is not the same as banning the sale of Pepsi.
>he mesmerises the audience by telling them what it's like to grow up black in America not even knowing you're black, until one day, as a young child, you catch yourself in the mirror and realise you aren't the person your culture is built for. You actually don't exist, because there is no space in your culture's stories for you.
This seems like a pretty obvious and unsurprising consequence of descending from people that were only brought into that civilization to provide slave labor. How many civilizations have made special effort to reshape their culture for the benefit of the descendants of their slaves? I think anyone that appears "mesmerized" by hearing that probably has not thought very much about the topic, or is putting on a show.
Is there anything comparable to experience of Blacks in America from the cultural standpoint in modern (after Middle Ages) times? For example Black people were brought as slaves into South America and into Caribbean region in particular but were they excluded from the society in the same manner? Were Blacks in South America after getting freedom from slavery segregated in the same way as in US?
It is not a question of 'special effort' it is more of the question of why descendants of slaves were not viewed as part of the civilization, why there was such push against integration.
There are lots of things about US culture that are rather strange when looking from outside.
>It is not a question of 'special effort' it is more of the question of why descendants of slaves were not viewed as part of the civilization, why there was such push against integration.
Well, why would you expect anything else?
If on the one hand they view the descendants of the slaves as being inherently inferior, then certainly they are not going to view them as part of their civilization or want them to integrate. This is an easy thing to think, given they had recently ruled over their ancestors.
If on the other hand they believe the other group is fundamentally equal to them, and only in a temporarily inferior position due to circumstances neither group controlled, consider that the dominant group had just used their power over the other group to brutally exploit them. They have only to ask themselves how they'd behave if someone had done that to them to think that it may not be in their interest to let the other group in to the club where its members will have some power over them.
That is where the "special effort" comes in to play. The dominant group must first be convinced that their former slaves are not fundamentally inferior to them. Then on top of that, they have to be convinced that, even though they treated their own group preferentially to the detriment of the other group, the other group will not treat itself preferentially to the dominant group's detriment, or at least not badly enough to outweigh other concerns (or perhaps that they deserve such treatment).
In regard to South America and the Caribbean, while Europeans ruled those areas, they did not really colonize them in the same way that they colonized the US. European involvement in South America and the Caribbean was mostly limited to wealthy plantation owners, whereas the southern US had significant numbers of people not personally involved with slavery.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Jefferson wrote that while owning slaves, so I'm not really sure why that quote would give anyone the impression that American culture was built for blacks.
> I'm not really sure why that quote would give anyone the impression that American culture was built for blacks.
The difference between James Baldwin and the persona you've adopted for your comments here is that Baldwin was able to see things from another person's perspective. You could probably do that too, if you tried, but you haven't in this case.
You're simply asserting that the ideals used to justify the American war of independence are a sham, and everybody should know it and accept it as resolutely as you choose to interpret it
Did you watch the video of Baldwin at Cambridge Union?
He gives the audience a first hand account of what it is to be a 4 year old black kid in America. The audience didn't know what that experience was like. It was literally foreign to them. They were surprised and enlightened by what they heard.
Why do you think the Cambridge Union gave Baldwin a standing ovation? What do you think they were responding to?
What do you think those people, drawn from the 1% of the country that America broke from with Jefferson's words to become its future ruling class, learned from that 40 year old son of a drug addict from Harlem?
I saw that video somewhat recently. I believe what the audience probably learned is that Buckley was not terribly effective at debating in that format. I am not sure what they learned from Baldwin. I don't recall learning anything from him in that video.
I would be shocked if that was actually the first time they learned that being a member of a conquered or enslaved people was really not very nice in a variety of different ways. Maybe they did not know about some of the particular ways in which it is bad, but these are as you noted young members of the elite class in a rapidly decolonializing empire. I would expect them to know the ethical debate over imperialism like the back of their hand, and would expect them to generally be unfavorable toward it.
These people knew about the history of slavery, not just in Europe and the Americas, but about, for instance, slavery in the middle east, where, despite bringing in huge numbers of African slaves, there are virtually no descendants of African slaves today, due to the customary treatment of slaves there.
As for whether Jefferson's ideals are a sham, clearly they are to some degree. Maybe the people who signed that document believed all men are created equal, and believed that applied also to their slaves, but if they did believe that, they clearly did not see much of a problem with ignoring their inalienable rights. This contradiction has been discussed since before the ink was dry, and is quite well known. They were not laying out a carefully reasoned philosophical treatise, they were trying to rally their own side in a political debate.
An ignorant person could believe that American ideals mean that American society was built for all Americans equally, but the audience members were not ignorant people. So I don't know, you tell me what you think they learned, and why you think they gave a standing ovation.
> An ignorant person could believe that American ideals mean that American society was built for all Americans equally, but the audience members were not ignorant people.
I imagine most of them knew that Jefferson was a slave owner, and all the rest of it that you lucidly describe.
Baldwin did three things to earn their respect.
Firstly, he lured them into seeing racial injustice without triggering their defences or tribal hostilities, by giving them the vantage point of 4 year old eyes. He told them his first 4 years of American acculturation was a positive experience, only spoiled when he realised the experience excluded him for an arbitrary reason. They could feel his disappointment, and root for the underdog instead of having to parry tribal hostilities.
Secondly, he re-positioned his nemesis on the side of his cause, by revealing that a mind poisoned with racism is less free than a body that is steeled to fight it over recurring generations.
Then, after demonstrating his credentials as a high functioning elite peer through his mastery of history, oratory debating, and cultural diplomacy, Baldwin gave the Cambridge Union a realpolitik proposition they couldn't resist. If America is going to keep suppressing the rights of 1/9th of its population, a new generation descended from slaves, led by the likes of himself and MLK, are going to educate the masses to blow the place up.
Baldwin did this so skilfully, no ultimatum was spoken. He just shared his concerns. The audience applauded because they shared his concerns through the osmosis he engendered by respecting the format of their debating society, and excelling at it. As you point out, Buckley was unable to respond in kind.
I am not sure why you think the audience had tribal hostilities against him. These people were not klansmen, they were young British aristocrats whose parents were overseeing the deconstruction of an empire on the basis of the enlightened principles of the day. Baldwin was not criticizing them particularly, he was criticizing the crude upstarts from across the pond. I'm not aware of any good reason to believe they were not already rooting for Baldwin before the debate took place. But either way, these people knew very well that life was not nice for people that had been recently conquered or enslaved. He did not need to lure them into seeing that.
I believe the applause was entirely on the basis of the oratorical trouncing he gave to Buckley, who was the wrong person to be on that stage, and as a result of the fact that they were already sympathetic to his point of view. What impact would Baldwin's presentation have had on a group of British aristocrats 200 years earlier, who were making fortunes by financing slave ship voyages?
Would they have been convinced that the cruel behavior of some sheriff toward a black woman was evidence that treating Africans differently from Europeans was poisonous to their minds?
Indeed those people were not klansmen. They appreciated the oratorical trouncing for what it was, and for what it wasn't. If Baldwin had simply said, in graphic terms, how not nice life is for a black person, I don't think he could have moved them so.
>Obesity alone means ~40% of the population of the US
And that is in large part thanks to the government and its public health experts, who we are now, I guess, supposed to believe have our interests in mind, even though, by letting 40% of the population become obese, when there are plain and simple steps they could have taken to prevent it, they have irrefutably demonstrated they do not actually care about the health of the population.
"letting" seems like a strong verb. I'm all for empathy for those who struggle with maintaining a healthy weight—imagine being addicted to something that you must consume about 3 times a day to stay alive—but it seems a stretch to lay the blame of obesity on the feet of public health experts. Are they also responsible for alcoholics? Other drug addicts?
They could set one simple achievable goal which would drastically reduce obesity: every single high schooler graduates as an athletic machine. The government could do it easily. Schools already require students to participate in gym class, the problem is that it's an absolute joke. They could change that if they wanted. The health benefits are obvious. It's not like they don't know it's an option. They just make excuses for why they can't make any progress fighting obesity, probably because they don't want a healthy population.
Of course some in shape people will become fat as adults, but almost all fat adolescents stay fat until they die.
>Long term side effects like after the polio vaccine in the 70s always occur IMMEDIATELY after vaccination.
Have there been any long term double blind studies (e.g. 20+ years) to actually verify that this is the case? Or is this all based on the current models of how vaccines and their components behave in the body and what effects they have?
You are assuming that the 34 million with diabetes are in the workforce. Based on the age distributions of people with diabetes, most are probably retired or disabled.
Of course there are specific individuals that are focused on one or the other, but there are also specific individuals who span both concerns. Significant examples include the secretary of health and human services and the surgeon general, among other high level administrators, who ultimately decide who will be managing both problems.
If said leadership wanted people that would take the clear and simple steps needed to solve the obesity crisis to be in charge of that problem, then the obesity crisis would have been solved. The obesity crisis has not been solved, so we can only conclude that the leadership does not want the right people to be involved. Yet presumably we should also believe that said leadership has our best interests in mind now that there's a new virus going around, when they have already irrefutably demonstrated that they don't?
Public health experts, in the US and other western countries, deserve no credibility due to their handling of the obesity crisis. There are clear and obvious steps that governments could take to end obesity, but public health experts have failed to even make an effort to make them happen. Instead they have sat by and watched millions upon millions of people become obese, which is vastly more harmful to the average person's health than the coronavirus.
I do not even think an argument can be made that their failure is due to incompetence.
Oh yes. I'm sure that a population that can't follow simple recommendations to wear a damn mask will listen to the CDC when it says to stop eating Big Macs.
Telling people not to eat McDonald's is the best you can come up with?
How about requiring every high school student to spend two hours per day doing strenuous physical exercise in order to graduate? How about considering it a failure for a student to graduate without being in excellent athletic form, on par with the student being unable to do algebra?
If the people in charge wanted to make that happen, they could do it by spending a tiny fraction of the public money at their disposal on propaganda, but all indications are that they don't want a population that's in great physical shape, even though it would obviously be good for them.
People who are in great shape when they graduate high school might still become fat, but people who graduate from high school fat will almost certainly spend their lives that way.
They could also regulate extremely sugary foods like how tobacco, which is less harmful, is regulated, where you have to be 18 to buy it and have to ask for the cashier to get it for you, rather than having it in your face at the checkout aisle.
Whining about how hard it is on their website is exactly the sort of reason why they have no credibility. They're not really trying, and pretty much everyone can sense that, even if they don't have it spelled out for them.
This is even more relevant outside of the US. In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible for some inexplicable reason, perhaps related to magical soil, but outside of the US they are a real concern.