981–990 of 1001 posts
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I can tell you what isn't a defense against a gun: A baton, a taser, teargas, or any of the other toys that ordinary police get to use in the UK.
And yet, only 2 UK police officers were killed in the last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer...
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There’s a lot of risk for these protests but I do feel like protesting for some issue other than ‘end the lockdown’ is more justifiable than just protesting the lockdown itself. Even if it were an anti-abortion protest, for example — something I am ideologically opposed to — I wouldn’t stand in the way of a group that wanted to do that.
The lockdown will be directly responsible for an estimated death of 40 million people globally due to famine, hunger, job losses and lots of other directly related issues. Is 40M people not good enough to protest against the lockdown itself?
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Do you think it's intellectually honest to compare countries with very, very low rates of firearms access to a country where firearms are available to anyone who wants one? You're comparing the USA, which has about 100k shootings per year, 36k deaths involving guns of which 33% (~12k) are homicides, to the UK which has 50-60 cases of homicide involving a gun per year. The fact is that the US police are far, far, far…
> 38 US police officers were shot dead in the line of duty last year. The UK had 3. The UK has a population of 66 million people. The US has a population of 328 million. The UK has 123k police, the US has 687k. They're not equal but I think you might be exaggerating the differences by comparing very differently sized countries.
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The US is no5 in the world for police homicides, just behind countries like the Philippines, Syria, Brazil. Not a record to be proud of - 1,536 in 2019 according to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc... Other countries manage to achieve numbers like 2 for Japan, 3 for the UK, 11 for Germany which is nowhere near even adjusted for population. American police kill more people per ca…
Do you think it's intellectually honest to compare countries with very, very low rates of firearms access to a country where firearms are available to anyone who wants one? You're comparing the USA, which has about 100k shootings per year, 36k deaths involving guns of which 33% (~12k) are homicides, to the UK which has 50-60 cases of homicide involving a gun per year. The fact is that the US police are far, far, far…
US police killed: 38 UK police killed: 3
If the rate in the UK was the same as the US, 6 policeman would be killed when actually only 3 were killed (123*38/687).
So in the US police are about twice as likely to be killed, yet they kill 500x more people.
You're right, they're not equatable _at all_.
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And yet, only 2 UK police officers were killed in the last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer...
Yes, because guns in the UK are rare and police officers aren't going to engage someone with a gun when they're armed with just toys.
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Yes, because guns in the UK are rare and police officers aren't going to engage someone with a gun when they're armed with just toys.
So we agree that the UK system works much better. Both less police and less civilians killed.
https://www.dw.com/en/two-german-police-officers-killed-by-f...
If officers don't engage because they are insufficiently equipped, you effectively have less policing. Less policing causes more violence and more deaths.
"Stop and frisk" works:
https://www.npr.org/2012/05/15/152764402/stop-and-frisk-work...
Knife crime in the UK keeps going up...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42749089
...as a result of literally defunding the police:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/02/criminals-go...
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Sweden did screw up the retirement home situation somewhat, but in terms of excess deaths all Nordic countries look identical. Finland, notably, doesn't even count covid deaths outside hospitals according to the THL, so comparing Swedish and Finnish covid stats is a bit silly. The Swedish catastrophe is always another 2 weeks away, and secondary effects of a lockdown (like delaying non-critical medical procedures and…
> in terms of excess deaths all Nordic countries look identical Finland, notably, doesn't even count covid deaths outside hospitals according to the THL, so comparing Swedish and Finnish covid stats is a bit silly Where did you get those numbers from? EUROMOMO doesn't include data from Iceland, but for the rest it's obvious that Sweden is an outlier in regards to the overall mortality rate: https://www.euromomo.eu/gr…
It's so "obvious" that Sweden is an outlier that people don't bother to look at the data more seriously. Sweden didn't lock down ergo it must be a disaster, the data be damned.
> in terms of overall mortality rates for people 65+ it's quite obvious that it's not a big problem
That's correct. The overal mortality of all Nordic countries is completely unexceptional. Politicians panicked because they believed that this disease would be very deadly (it isn't), kills healthy young people (it doesn't), spreads exponentially (it never has), and spreads through asymptomatic hosts (it doesn't).
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This is a causal claim but you've only adduced correlations.
You can never prove causality.
Joking aside, you can sometimes prove causality. It's just not as easy as proving a correlation. The most broadly accepted method would be a RCT (randomized controlled trial), though it is often unethical or unfeasible.
You can also build on causal assumption that everyone agrees on. (Like: A person's gender cannot be caused by a government policy. A person winning the lottery is not caused by anything other than playing the lottery.) From such knowledge you can build a causal graph, and (in some cases) draw new causal conclusions from statistical data.
Long story short: you cannot just dismiss a correlation as being useless for any proof of causality.
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I'm torn, a little bit. Against your point: The current protests are at least mostly respecting the fact the disease exists, and encourages masks. Also, these protests are much more organic than the "re-open America" protests. And the left-wing who got mad at the anti-public-health protests never called for cops to shoot them or round them up. IOW: We respected their freedom to be out there, no matter how fucked the…
> I fundamentally don't respect most conservatives, much less those who think they need to protest against public health measures. You're conflating political stance with intelligence. Also, you need to respect everyone. That doesn't mean agree-with or follow blindly, just recognize their inherent humanity and worth. I feel like that must have been a sentiment promulgated by someone famous at some time in the past.
I don't think they are "worth less" than someone else, and I certainly know there are intellectually honest, well-meaning conservatives in the country. The line starts to blur but that gets too politically specific for HN.
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It is important to note that this isn't just about police brutality. There are a number of racial disparities that result in more black deaths. From the letter: > lack people suffer from dramatic health disparities in life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic medical conditions, and outcomes from acute illnesses like myocardial infarction and sepsis. Biological determinants are insufficient to explain t…
Indeed, white people in the US on average live 3.5 years longer than black people in the US.[1] Did you know that an even greater health/life expectancy disparity exists between men and women? One gender on average lives 5.1 years longer than the other.[2] >decreased access to medical care and healthy food, unsafe working conditions, mass incarceration, exposure to pollution and noise, and the toxic effects of stress…
Because those are the biases we've been taught in modern society. These protests are a shining example: men are over 10X as likely to be the victim of police brutality. Far more than black vs white. If we were fighting police brutality, men are hands down the demographic of choice.
But people don't tend to think of men as victims. So it wouldn't ever take off. I mean can you imagine millions of people protesting for men? I've never heard of it, meanwhile every year millions of people March for women just because. Protests happen all the time for minorities. What happens when you March for white men? You're a "white nationalist", a racist, a nazi, etc.
I'd take these protests seriously if they reflected the data. But they don't. Someone out there is probably making a lot of money and growing a lot of power for themselves over it. Meanwhile, the issues that plague our world will be more or less unchanged when this is over.