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Sunday, May 03, 2020

Fun New Conspiracy Theories

p1240692 by generalising from flickr (CC-SA)

For your entertainment. There's no hard evidence for any of them, and I'm definitely like actually endorsing any of them, but they all sound quite plausible, right?

Corbyn was a Tory plant

UK is not even close to being a democracy.

It's also trying its best to be a Tory single party state. Starting the timer when the last Liberal Party government ended in 1922, and ending it when Tony Blair was elected with New Labour in 1997, Tories were in government 68% of the time - despite having actual majority of the vote only once.

They achieve this by combination of heavy gerrymandering, radicalising the Labour Party, and splitting the opposition.

UK redistricting is technically performed by "independent" Boundary commissions, but rules under which they're operating resulted in very consistent Tory bias.

Cheating a few percent through gerrymandering is however not enough. Tory Deep State figured out a far better way - by radicalizing Labour Party in ensures moderates are too scared to vote for them, and most of the time manages to split the vote between Labour and Liberals/LibDems/SDP/such.

Political science predicts that in FPTP systems both parties will drift to where the center of the electorate is. Somehow UK is the only exception to this pattern.

All those Tory shenanigans were ended when Tony Blair created New Labour - which was exactly what the political science predicted. Modern pro-European center-left party without any of the openly Communist baggage.

New Labour was mortal enemy of the Tory One Party State project, so they did their best to undermine it. The 2008 Great Recession let them get back to power as part of a coalition government, but that was living on borrowed time.

So what did they do? Tory Deep State dug up Comrade Corbyn, and managed to put him in charge of Labour Party to destroy it. Once in charge, Tory plant Comrade Corbyn somehow managed to get as many open Communists and open Anti-Semites as possible to join to make Labour completely unacceptable to an average voter.

Under control of Tory puppet-masters, Labour adopted the most extremist plans possible on basically every issue. It did not take pro-European position, in spite of overwhelming majority of Labour voters being pro-European.

Normally when a party loses elections, its leader goes, but somehow the Tory puppet managed to stay and lose elections after elections, and only got kicked out this year. Damage Tories managed to do to Labour Party was so extensive, it's not clear if Keir Starmer will ever be able to fix it.

Boris faked coronavirus infection

It is very well established that Boris is willing to lie about literally anything to get the power, and doesn't care about how much damage his actions cause.

So why do people suddenly believe that he wouldn't lie about getting coronavirus and needing ICU?

Let's get some facts.

Boris allegedly got moved to ICU on April 7th. According to data I could find for two days later, only 3883 people in all of UK got COVID-19 ICU.

There's 0.005% chance that a random person would need COVID-19 ICU.

Also, only 20% of patients admitted to ICU for COVID19 recovered.

So the chance of Boris getting COVID-19, needing ICU at this point, and promptly recovering, is about 0.0001%. Do you seriously believe that the chance that habitual liar Boris Johnson lying about this is less than 0.0001%? If so, I have a great EU trade deal to sell you.

And it would be far from the first case of head of state lying about their health.  It sounds totally implausible, but Roosevelt managed to hide his paralysis from the whole public and the press cooperated with that!

Secret Service actively interfered with photographers who tried to take pictures of Roosevelt in a wheelchair or being moved about by others. The Secret Service commonly destroyed photographs they caught being taken in this manner
The list of cases of politicians hiding their illness which only comes out after their death is very long, including nearly half of recent US presidents.

How many faked instead of hiding their illness? That's harder to tell, as there's usually no advantage to do so, but it's sure as hell higher than 0.0001%.

In all likelihood Boris was either totally fine, or just got common cold, and requested ICU admittance to fake COVID-19, as he thought that would be politically beneficial to him.

Democratic governors are destroying their states' economies on purpose

"Fundamentals" models of election forecasting have been accused of overfitting, but their basic message is still true - when economy is doing awfully, people vote against the ruling party. The Great Recession in most countries showed drastic drop in support for whoever happened to be in the government - left wing, right wing, center, or extreme, regardless of how responsible they were, and how well they were doing.

None of that mattered, voters always turned away from the ruling party - either towards the opposition, or towards new usually extremist parties.

Notably there was no such backlash in any subnational elections. Republican states stayed relatively Republican, and Democratic states stayed relatively Democratic, there was no grand flipping.

During corona crisis, Democratic governors have generally issued far more strict lockdown orders than Republican governors, pretty much regardless of how affected their states are. Outside New York, most states aren't particularly affected, and none of that is even close to rational policy.

So here's a fun conspiracy theory to think about - what if they're trying to damage their economies on purpose, because they know Trump is going to get blamed for it anyway?

During normal times it's not something they could get away with, but this is a great unique opportunity to do just that.

Notice this theory doesn't work backwards - if you try to flip that and speculate that Republican governors are trying to make things better to help Trump, well can't blame people for trying to make things better.