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America is giving up on the pandemic?

theatlantic.com

181–190 of 1001 posts

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the middle of NYC, which has had several scenes of looting not 30 min from me broadcast to the entire nation, and I haven't heard of any such movement here. Maybe this is my east coast classist bubble, but I'd appreciate being educated on this matter?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/04/boogal... There's been a lot of reporting on it as they've stepped up action over the last year. Did you not see the news stories about these individuals stationing inside the Michigan Capitol with assault rifles?

"Boogaloo" is a longstanding meme that refers to a possible upcoming civil war, that the media has recently misconstrued into a movement trying to cause a civil war.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boogaloo

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people strongly believe things without substance, sometimes based on wikipedia and interpreting stuff written by people that died centuries before problems manifested in paradigms that would have been unimaginable to them. I'm a fan of John Stuart Mill's writing, but having a memorable book title does not make a permanently relevant tome that applies to all of history backward and forward. My underst…

Assembly is important but perhaps not the most important form of dissent. Yes, I am citing Mill as evidence. > having a memorable book title does not make a permanently relevant tome that applies to all of history backward and forward. The definition of liberty has not changed, so yes that essay still equally applies.

Thank you for your clarification that the post was entirely a critique of a single bit of word choice.

Out of curiosity, what other philosophers do you consider to be so absolutely correct (and so clear in their statements that misinterpretation is impossible) that rise to the level of proof or evidence when cited?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are the protests really founded on something significant? If they focused simply on police brutality regardless of race, that would be one thing, but the general narrative seems to be that there is a big problem of white-on-black violence in the form of cops. Now, there is such a problem, but this ignores the wider context that in this country, black-on-white violence is a much bigger problem than white-on-black…

This is such an ignorant take, it's astonishing. The "general narrative" is about rampant police brutality that first and foremost disproportionately affects people of color. It's a problem that's existed since the inception of a police force in the US and that's what this movement is about. No one is trying to play a silly number game of which race kills more of what other race.

But it's not a "silly number game", it's a very serious analysis of numbers that should be done to try to determine whether certain conclusions are accurate or inaccurate. Otherwise we have only anecdotes and narratives.

Edit: I can make no claim of being a statistician. My statistical arguments probably have some holes in them. But I will at least say that the numbers that I've looked at seem to me to be sufficient to question the prevailing media narrative.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#184
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The thing is, normalizing against population figures goes both ways. Yes, in incidents of white-on-black or black-on-white homicide, for every 10 million white people in the US, ~26 were victimized whereas ~53 for every 10 million black people. But there are more than 4 times as many white people as black people in the country. It is of course a drastic simplification, but if we roughly say that the average black per…

> if we roughly say that the average black person interacts with 4 times as many white people as with other black people and the average white person interacts with 1/4 times as many black people as with other white people, then the fact that the average white person is only roughly half as likely to be the victim of a homicide by a black offender as a black person is likely to be the victim of a white offender does not seem to me to support your point.

Italicized is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man designed to undermine the struggle Black Americans face.

I'm disengaging. Goodbye.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#185
post #16

Not a surprise, COVID19 is pretty soft compared to the historic pandemics. I'm actually suprised that this continued for so long, I gave the lockdowns 4 week, but I guess the media propaganda blessed it with longer life. Just to clarify about Covid: -The highest deathrate from it is around 1%, CDC reports 0.30 lately. -Hits predominantly the old parts of the population -The death comes in a normal way - pneumonia ->…

Let's not forgot the poorer countries that simply cannot sustain a lockdown for long periods, as it will kill more people than save. UN is now predicting 130 million starving due to the hit to the global economy.

Source: https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1062272

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that most violence happens between members of the same race in United States. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

That is correct. But the media narrative of the protests seems to focus on the race A vs. race B issue.

My opinion is policing of minority communities is generally ineffective and counter productive. Which leaves members of those communities at the mercy of both the police and criminals. At it's worst you have collusion between the police and criminals operating in minority communities.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either the vitriol people received for protesting the lockdown, wanting to reopen their businesses and resume life - they were labelled essentially as murderers and #COVIDIOTS - was justified OR the mass protests, flouting of concern about the virus, etc. is justified. You cannot have both. So either those out and about without masks, or protesting the lockdown, etc. AND the current protests are justified as COVID is…

I think your perspective is a bit too rigid, and it's resulting in a false dichotomy. Yes, obviously the novel coronavirus is still here, and it is still a huge concern. This doesn't mean that people who are fed up with generations of police brutality and have taken to the streets to pressure their local leaders to put an end to it are somehow being hypocrites. They are simply demonstrating that ending police brutali…

>I also know people, like you, who think protesters are being irresponsible since packed crowds will no doubt intensify the pandemic.

Just to be clear, I didn't state my position above. I support both sets of protests, and believe both to be justified. That's not something I want to derail the thread with though, so was merely pointing out the approach to logical consistency in my first post.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are a small business owner, for example, and it's illegal to operate that business, your life is also in danger and your situation deserves empathy This is a false dichotomy. Sure, these people (and their workers) deserve empathy and support, but that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to reopen. You can support business owners via financial aid or other measures while their business is closed.

no, this is not about empathy but personal autonomy and sovereignity and autocracy. Why not allow someone to do something if they are willing to take the risk, why treat them as criminals? If you believe that you get infected at a store, don't go to the store ... case closed. On what basis is the state "protecting" someone that does not want to be protected? On what basis is someone considered a criminal when a crime…

Much of that purported "willing" is driven by an involuntary need to service debt. Without acknowledging this, it's disingenuous to talk about the shutdowns in terms of autonomy. I'd wager that the shutdowns actually allowed more people to act with their desires than they prevented. For example had the shutdowns not occurred, how many companies that are pure WFH right now would have just continued telling everyone to come into the office?

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#189
post #4

The concerns are right but public assembly is critical in a democracy, and cannot be put on hold indefinitely. It's probably the most fundamental right in any civil society and with all these takes I have seen on twitter about COVID and the protests, a lot of people seem to seriously unerestimate the value that free assembly has. Covid as bad as it is will be an issue of the near future, civil rights gains or losses…

I agree that public assembly is essential regardless of what is going on. But why were the people protesting the lock downs and business shutdowns and the limiting of freedoms the yahoos and crazy murderers? Why did nurses block them from protesting but not one would block someone now?

Because they compared governors to Hitler and their plight to how Jews were persecuted during the Holocaust. They also lynched an effigy of a politician they despised. That is why they were the crazy ones.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#190
post #103

I support the protests, and believe they can be done safely, but we can't forget about the virus. A quick googling gives me numbers between 300 and 1000 people dying of police violence per year. Call it 1k-2k per year. If we eliminate 50-100 years of that, we match what coronavirus has done in a couple months. However, places are starting to relax the shelter-in-place rules already, so people going out now isn't comp…

Is that 300-1000 unjustified deaths, or does it also include situations where the use of deadly force may have been reasonable?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Filtering for "2019, black, unarmed" you get:

15 people shot and killed by police match your filters (less than 1%)

Change that to "2015" and you get:

38 people shot and killed by police match your filters (1%)

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