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America is giving up on the pandemic?

theatlantic.com

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Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#331

Post by throw0101a »

rpiguy wrote: post #312
achenatx wrote: post #294

Just wanted to add that the abolish the police sentiment isnt as inane as it sounds on the surface. Abolish the police is about taking away responsibilities that police have today and giving them to people more suitable. Police - people trained for aggression with weapons to stop violent criminals should not be handling: 1) mental health 2) homeless 3) drug addiction 4) domestic violence 5) traffic stops etc etc They…

Unfortunately, items 1, 3, 4, and 5 are all extremely dangerous. The Not Police would be in grave danger. There is a reason that the Police Police are armed. That guy on drugs could stab you, you could pull a car over and that person could have a gun, you could go to stop domestic violence and get attacked. Police brutality goes up proportionately with violent crime in their area. In other words, the more police deal…

> There is a reason that the Police Police are armed.

Not all Police are armed (see UK). Also, other countries, while armed, seem to use their firearms much less (e.g., the entire country of Germany seems to use fewer bullets than a single US city).

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#332

Post by caseysoftware »

dageshi wrote: post #217
glofish wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Presumably said people would be willing to forfeit medical treatment and quietly die at home if they did catch it?

I've been considering this line of reasoning for a while: if opening your business disqualifies you from medical treatment, what else does?

Being obese? Smoking? After all, both of those are the direct result of your choices and less dependent on other people than getting a virus.

Most people say "Oh, that would never happen!" but if we have a time where rationing healthcare becomes the norm or even just vital, it will just as it did in Italy a few months back.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#333

Post by thu2111 »

turndown wrote: post #265
chipperyman573 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The account someone posts something from has nothing to do with the validity of their argument.

Sure, I don't disagree with that, but when the name is a "throwaway", it is a new account, and its only posts are half explanations of simplifications or just outright lies on highly divisive topics, I have no issue connecting the dots.

Which parts are outright lies? The now flagged and dead post said this:

“Stay inside”, “don’t gather in groups”, “cancel your wedding”, “wear a mask during sex”, but oh hey, it’s OK to go downtown and riot, burn down buildings, and throw bricks at the police.

These things are all true of the UK. As someone with a family member in the UK I can assure you they had to cancel their wedding, they were limited to an hour of outside time per day, they were told not to gather in groups and notoriously the government just told people if they live apart - even if they're in a relationship - they're not merely required to wear masks but cannot meet at all.

As for the riots:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/police-chief-fights-...

"A Virginia police chief fought back tears during a press conference as he described how rioters set fire to a home with a child inside and then prevented firefighters from responding as quickly as they could have"

It's a pathetic show from the HN userbase that the post is flagged and dead. Do the people here have any idea how many hundreds of millions of people are thinking exactly the same thing right now?

The public health community's credibility is now zero or lower. Only the most naive in society will ever believe them again. Every time we think they can't fail worse, they do. Their models are always wrong and the most influential was filled with basic C programming errors. They can't decide if masks work. They lauded China at the same time as complaining internally they weren't being given any data. They demanded a massive programme of ventilator production and then none were needed. They demanded censorship of "misinformation" even when that misinformation came from Nobel Prize winners and turned out to be correct. They've published an openly fraudulent paper on a possible treatment championed by Trump that led to trials being suspended, whilst simultaneously tweeting about how much they hate Trump. They demanded the economy be destroyed and the world placed under a totalitarian police state. Virtually all of them protect each other and refuse to criticise each other's work even when it's clearly wrong, and now the final salt in the wound: they decide that protesting against racism is healthy, but protesting against their decisions is not.

Never again.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#334

Post by zarathustreal »

lsh123 wrote: post #310
achenatx wrote: post #294

Just wanted to add that the abolish the police sentiment isnt as inane as it sounds on the surface. Abolish the police is about taking away responsibilities that police have today and giving them to people more suitable. Police - people trained for aggression with weapons to stop violent criminals should not be handling: 1) mental health 2) homeless 3) drug addiction 4) domestic violence 5) traffic stops etc etc They…

Please add universal concealed carry laws (including all private spaces) and you have me onboard

I second this suggestion. If you want to take guns away from police at least allow me to legally defend myself. Imagine criminals being the only ones with guns.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#336

Post by throw0101a »

war1025 wrote: post #3

A thing I've noticed is that they stopped mentioning the daily numbers on the radio (NPR, more specifically Iowa Public Radio). It's sort of like the media has extracted all the juice they can from the pandemic and now we're just left with the pulpy mess that no one really wants to deal with.

> A thing I've noticed is that they stopped mentioning the daily numbers on the radio (NPR, more specifically Iowa Public Radio).

Well I've noticed that the firing of Inspectors General hasn't been in the news lately. With the Controversy of the Week with Trump, it's kind of hard to keep up.

Which has been his (and Bannon's) general strategy:

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/i...

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#337

Post by manfredo »

statguy wrote: post #330
manfredo wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average the police kill ~80 unarmed people each year, of any race [1]. By comparison, 40 million people are unemployed as a result of the pandemic and lockdown. Certainly, the impact of someone unjustly killed is vastly larger than that of someone laid off or furloughed. But is it 500,000 times greater? These are different issues. They aren't equivalent, but they're comparable at least. Pointing out the inconsiste…

Where are you getting 80 from? The link says 1,043 in the past year. Did you mean 80 per month?

1,000+ includes all people killed by police, most of them armed. You need to filter for unarmed killings. Hover over "weapon" and click unarmed. It's 350 from 2015 to the present.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#338

Post by iso947 »

noobaccount wrote: post #318
rpiguy wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, items 1, 3, 4, and 5 are all extremely dangerous. The Not Police would be in grave danger. There is a reason that the Police Police are armed. That guy on drugs could stab you, you could pull a car over and that person could have a gun, you could go to stop domestic violence and get attacked. Police brutality goes up proportionately with violent crime in their area. In other words, the more police deal…

Unarmed police in other countries seem to handle those situations just fine.

Americans are far more heavily armed, and there’s a belief that the only defence against a gun is someone with a bigger gun.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#339

Post by d2v »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #43

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…

Death is one metric, but what about feeling safe participating in normal daily activities? With COVID-19 that fear will be gone in a year for some people once a vaccine has developed. From what I hear from pretty much all of my black friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, the threat of murder, violence, harassment, or unjust arrest from police is something they have been dealing with for their whole lives, and will continue to deal with long after a vaccine is found (unless we take start taking meaningful actions). People rightly talk about the toll of lockdown and fear of the virus on mental health. Now is a good time to start conversations about how fear of abuse of the criminal justice system affects mental health.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#340

Post by vharuck »

rabidrat wrote: post #211
twblalock wrote: post #92

The article’s authors are losing sight of the original justification for the lockdowns: “flatten the curve” was about preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed. Of course cases will increase when people leave their homes. But have the hospitals been overwhelmed in any of the states that started to reopen several weeks ago? No! In that case the lockdowns have served their purpose. The authors of this article are arg…

In addition to preventing hospitals being overwhelmed, the lockdowns were intended to give us time to develop the infrastructure for adequate testing, tracing, and supportive isolation. With those things in place, we can re-open and still keep the virus in check. If we don't have those things in place, the problem is not the re-opening, which was inevitable since indefinite lockdown and isolation is not sustainable a…

This is why I hold the "discordant" opinions that we should reopen the economy (with reasonable caveats like 6 feet distances, masks, and outside dining when possible), but am still staying inside myself like the past 3 months.

I'm going to do my small part in not being a vector. But there's no way the US is ever reaching New Zealand's success at discovery, tracing, and isolating before a vaccine's available. The virus is still an awful pandemic and will have major consequences, but we have no good choices anymore.

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