371–380 of 456 posts
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Not sure where you're from, but most Western countries have no legal basis to detain people leaving their homes just because they're not vaccinated. There might be some restrictions like air travel though.
even though I agree with you, The government has no business in saying who and how many people I invite to my home, or either who i meet in the Park. And here we are.
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Please note I specifically said I wish they could experience the fear . It is not a wish for anyone to experience death, let alone a painful one. People rarely have to confront the extent of the results of their actions and as a result don't really think on those terms. Personal experience is an effective, often painful teacher. I can't claim to know your entire perspective, but from the outside, refusing to accept a…
Thanks for the reply. And er, good that you don’t actually want to go as far as killing me - there’s some wild shit out there right now. I would still be in favor of arguing about all the details over drinks, but for now I’ll just offer the roughest outline of the other perspective, which is: Refusing to accept a temporarily increased risk of disease, and instead dramatically increasing the chance that your fellow hu…
Put it this way: your liberty to spread your germs ends just where my nose begins. Else we're just permitting tyranny by another route.
Currently there's a very infectious and deadly germ on the loose, so -under the above rule- everyone's freedom becomes more constrained than we'd ideally like.
It's certainly evil; but it's not the human evil of fascism causing it, but rather the natural world evil of a pandemic.
I wonder if that helps any?
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Death is quite natural, but the fact that a single pathogen, which other "western" nations managed to get under control has become the second leading cause of death in the United States is a horrific thing. Heart disease is a systemic issue of our lifestyle and diet, and we don't know how to prevent cancer. A pathogen is fairly simple by comparison - if you don't catch it you can't die from it. Prevent the spread and…
Except other western countries haven't "gotten it under control"... they are all having second waves and resurgences with or without large lockdowns and with or without draconian processes. > fairly simple Until you start looking at how many lives are saved vs the second and third tier effects. Higher suicide rates from losing jobs and stress? People in third world countries dying from a cratered world economy? etc.…
Basically you're trying to control R. As long as you keep R under 1, you can increase and reduce measures to keep the disease under control. If R goes too far over 1, you bleeped up, and you need to resort to a lockdown to get it back under control.
The theory a lot of (european) western countries are working on is that they want to allow as much freedom as possible, but keep the worst of the disease out.
I'm not entirely convinced this is actually the strategy that optimizes freedom though. It might be better to use the method some asian countries used: close the borders, do maximum effort lockdowns anytime the virus shows up at all; and you might have less days total in lockdown or restrictions, and more days where you are free to go out and eat indoors etc.
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You’re not wrong, but the right people cannot profit or accumulate power via the spread of natural immunity, and not at all coincidentally it is unpopular to mention. “But the risk is far too great not to pay trillions and surrender our freedom,” retorts a frightened chorus of people.
It's probably more along the lines of us not being able to correctly guess who has recovered from CoVID because most people are asymptomatic.
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At some point, we have to let these people choose. You can only protect people from themselves to a certain degree Once the sane ones are vaccinated, open everything up and let nature take care of the dumb ones. If you insist on drinking gasoline, good luck
The people who don't get the vaccine aren't just hurting themselves. We need herd immunity for people who can't take it, or for whom it won't benefit. There are definitely people who may not benefit as much from the vaccine because they are immuno-compromised for example. The only reason not to take it is if your doctor tells you not to. Unless they've told us not to for medical reasons, we should take it if we can g…
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It takes years to train a nurse and a decade to train a physician. An indication of max capacity is when hospitals halt elective procedures. There are currently 130K people laid out in hospitals. We have mercifully just trended down from a third peak. Would you rather we get Italy's fate of mass casualty stage rationing?
Here in Chicago we built [0] and staffed [1] extra capacity, and then got rid of it a short time later when it went almost completely unused [2]. Despite early claims they could, they did not bring it back for the second wave this past fall [3]. There was no reason for us to stay as locked down as we have been. [0] https://news.wttw.com/2020/03/30/mccormick-place-be-transfor... [1] https://abc7chicago.com/doctors-and…
At what number can we stop wearing masks, stop social distancing, start dining in, etc.? That's the number I care about. Because until somebody influential picks that number, we'll just keep masking and social distancing until the end of time.
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Who's to say that we will ever reach that point? COVID-19 will be with us forever [1], which means that governments can forever point to it as a reason to push for increasingly oppressive restrictions. The economic meltdown resulting from these restrictions is pushing even the most capitalist countries much further onto the socialism spectrum than anyone could have imagined just a year ago. Some political parties vie…
Just say no to Q.
”...the letter's chief warning is that countries with strong democratic traditions could use the pandemic to introduce extraordinary measures that in the long run become ordinary, doing permanent damage to global democracy...”
You, and those who think and act like you, really should educate yourselves before you criticize things you apparently know absolutely nothing about. You guys are turning the Internet into a toxic place where discussion of undeniable facts, from your own news sources and in this case brought to light by a collection of 500 of the world’s most credible people, are dismissed as wild conspiracy theories - simply because those facts might call into question the motives of politicians you blindly support.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/europe/coronavirus-authoritar...