What I don't understand is how the right turned homicidal.

Thanks for the sermon, quack. Other people. Always other people.

To be clearer, me reading Gottlieb as pushing a position rather than describing a position was my idiot error.

My frustration with being told I'm addicted to panic because I want to be careful as a medically at-risk person during the most massive surge of cases and deaths is not something I will apologize for. That position he recounted deserves the scorn.

Which particular previous contagious virus are you comparing COVID to in this societal circumstance?

So, none.

107. . Posted: January 26, 2022 at 07:11 AM (#6062557)

The leftist addiction is to the circumstances that permit them to have a pretext to hector and berate other people as moral inferiors -- and COVID has been the pitch-perfect set of circumstances. So, no, they aren't going to give that up easily. Climate change is and will continue to be much the same thing. In lieu of traditional religion, they've cobbled together a set of self-pronounced moral codes around these worldly issues and now social media and modern communications gives them the opportunity to identify and congregate with believers, propagate the code and otherwise proselytize, and identify and sanction non-believers. (*)

The leftist addiction is to the circumstances that permit them to have a pretext to hector and berate other people as moral inferiors

you tell me - do you think the reagan administration would have ignored hundreds of thousands of dead people piled up all over the place? at what point do you think he could have controlled the country freaking out and decided on, like, what number of "acceptable casualties?

120. . Posted: January 26, 2022 at 11:37 AM (#6062608)

you tell me - do you think the reagan administration would have ignored hundreds of thousands of dead people piled up all over the place? at what point do you think he could have controlled the country freaking out and decided on, like, what number of "acceptable casualties?



That's the historical question, isn't it? What we do know is that there's no way the workplace would have shut down, because the economy would have cratered forever and more people would have just wound up dying from that. We also know that there were a few holdouts, including Sweden, and there wasn't a secular difference in COVID impact.

As to "acceptable casualties," we know the floor of those -- the time series of flu deaths. Up through 2019, no one raised a peep about those and if COVID hadn't come along no one would be raising a peep about them now.

do you think the reagan administration would have ignored hundreds of thousands of dead people piled up all over the place? at what point do you think he could have controlled the country freaking out and decided on, like, what number of "acceptable casualties?

- sweden didn't have fewer deaths or less economoic damage than its neighbors and sweden is not a countey to compare to USA. AND they don't have anyone there who has no medical care at all like we do here

124. reech Posted: January 26, 2022 at 01:22 PM (#6062630)

do you think the reagan administration would have ignored hundreds of thousands of dead people piled up all over the place? at what point do you think he could have controlled the country freaking out and decided on, like, what number of "acceptable casualties?



If they were gay, Reagan's admin would have ignored it completely...

The blue states will have a hard time forcing masks on kids and closing down social life with the rest of the world moving on.

YOU HAD TO WEAR A MASK

Interestingly, the US might have been better able to handle the Covid mess in 1985, since there were almost twice as many hospital beds available then (1.4M vs about 800k today). Despite the fact that the population has grown significantly and the cost of medical care has doubled, in constant dollars.

YOU HAD TO WEAR A MASK

It's not normal when a few thousand people are dying per day and 150,000 are hospitalized with an infectious disease, either.

People who are more upset about having to wear a mask than they are about the deaths and hospitalizations are very far down on my list.

a few thousand people are dying per day and 150,000 are hospitalized with an infectious disease

There's something a bit abnormal going on

There's no serious sense in which it *made* them safe other than at the very most in the very immediate term.

"There's something a bit abnormal going on, let's react to it by doing something else abnormal"? Not sure how that makes any sense

Masks are somewhat effective.

“Millions of Republican voters have decided that downplaying Covid is core to their identity as conservatives,” David [Leonhardt, New York Times] wrote, elaborating on what the poll showed. “Millions of Democrats have decided that organizing their lives around Covid is core to their identity as progressives.” And so, he explained, all of those Americans filter information selectively through their political affiliations, which also determine their triage of concerns.

He wasn’t equating a Covid denier or vaccine paranoiac with someone whose mask is more badge than barrier. Nor am I. He was making a wider point about passions and prejudices. He was drawing necessary attention to the intense tribalism of American life now.

Denmark has administered at least 13,038,440 doses of COVID vaccines so far. Assuming every person needs 2 doses, that’s enough to have vaccinated about 112% of the country’s population.

"There's something a bit abnormal going on, let's react to it by doing something else abnormal"? Not sure how that makes any sense -- other than as some kind of quasi-religious propitiation.

The Asian question is an interesting one

Plus the Chinese designed this so you wouldn’t design something that was as lethal to your team.

Sweden basically handled COVID hypothetical 1988 style and is a good proxy for the counterfactual as to what might have happened. That was the point of "Sweden," not that it was the tippest-toppist in the world in deaths per capita. (Though there's no real reason to limit the comps to Scandinavian countries.)

Plus the Chinese designed this so you wouldn’t design something that was as lethal to your team.

The UK is our best comp. Fat people living in close proximity to one another.

As noted, there's simply no question that the mask is more badge -- cultish symbol -- than barrier for millions and millions of people.
Tribalism is a more retrograde form of civilization than universalism.

There seems to be a belief that we are doing poorly in vaccinations. The Mayo Clinic has a nice breakdown by age group:
65+. At least one: 99.9%, fully vaxxed ( I assume this means two): 85-90%
50-64. At least one dose 92%, fully vaxxed 79%
That look super high to me.
The numbers downstream from there look pretty good too.

107. . Posted: January 26, 2022 at 07:11 AM (#6062557)
The leftist addiction is to the circumstances that permit them to have a pretext to hector and berate other people as moral inferiors

- you mean like the right-ists addiction to hector and berate people who are not "christian" and are not White and are LGBTQ?

the Herman Cain Awards

I meant you.

The decline and fall in two acts:
1990 -- The AIDS Quilt on the Mall and Washington Square and places similar throughout the land
2022 -- The Herman Cain Awards

I know, and then I quoted two liberal NYT writers saying exactly the same thing. Are they also "projecting"?

And, it's further illogical to compare them to what you said, as they BOTH SIDESed! it.

Wherein awful people take great pains to try to rationalize their awfulness to the cheers and accolades of their co-awfuls.

While I disagree with their broad strokes, it's nowhere near as stupid as what you said

I’m obviously talking in particular about political tribalism, which, fascinatingly, is growing just as Americans’ attachment to organized religion is waning. Political observers have noted that and mulled the consequences. One of this tribalism’s obvious drivers is many Americans’ substitution of investment and involvement in physical communities with investment and involvement in online ones that more efficiently sort them into cliques of the rigidly like-minded. Another is many people’s use of the internet not to check or challenge their thinking but to validate it.

I know several unvaxxed people and they point to natural immunity from having already contracted the virus - seems perfectly fine arguement to me - that’s how humans have fought diseases from the beginning of time.

People who insist that it's only the other side doing something are projecting, yes.

I know several unvaxxed people and they point to natural immunity from having already contracted the virus - seems perfectly fine arguement to me - that’s how humans have fought diseases from the beginning of time.

Nor is there anything "moral" about adopting an identity around stances, that often smack of cultish, about an airborne infectious disease.

The leftist tribe's primary conceit is that they're morally virtuous and morally superior and this is just a subset of that. "My vaccine made me morally virtuous" is a silly and anti-scientific position. When you then add on, "And you not getting a vaccine makes you a moral leper" you're getting into some dark territory. It will take time, temporal distance, and historical review by this and later generations for a lot of this to become clear.

the COVID cultists

When is history going to make more clear the darkness of contending the moral leprosy of drunk driving?

Other people. It's the other people who see things that aren't there because of crowds and feels.

Speaking of garbled, the mandate is not to not drink, it's to not drive after drinking.

Nor do I recall anyone advocating mandating things like affirmatively taking fat-reducing pills or high-blood pressure pills and certainly not things like mandated daily exercise -- all of which would have significantly reduced the self-dangers and system-taxing dangers of COVID.

The real analogy would be the one I mentioned before -- if you were forbidden from driving unless you'd put coffee in your body so as to make (alleged) marginal improvements in your driving ability from your natural state so as to (allegedly) reduce the danger to other drivers from that posed to them if you remained merely in your natural state.

"We're mandating vaccines, why not mandate exercise? GOTCHA!" might not be as insightful as you imagine.

There are commercial driving laws that prevent you from driving in a natural state of exhaustion due to not having enough sleeper berth time.

It means that you need to have a vaccine in order to do certain things. Enroll in school, work in a health care setting, serve in the military, various other things. Not existing.

No, it prohibits you from participating in those activities.

There is also a thing called compulsory vaccination. That's where the police and the public health authority go door to door and vaccinate you. Medical contraindications only. That hasn't been proposed at all.

I know my kid already needs a bunch of vaccines to go to school

Lassus, when you and yours first got wind of the mortality charts in July-ish 2020, and clearly saw the massive co-morbidity skew -- we all were noting it on BTF and it was and is impossible to miss -- why didn't you start calling for people to get thinner and consume fewer calories and get checked for high blood pressure and take their pills? After all, IT'S JUST ESCHEWING A BACON DOUBLE CHEESBURGER AND LOADED NACHOS AND 2,000 CALORIE CHOCOLATE CARMEL HOT FUDGE SHAKES WITH WHIPPED CREAM and IT'S JUST TAKING A DAMNED PILL.

DCA, it might be helpful if for your last four or five posts, you substituted "sterilized" for "vaccinated" and then report whether your opinion would be the same.