461–470 of 837 posts
“Well there’s no research to support that spitting in each other’s mouths is a bad idea, so I could not advise against it”
That’s not a real quote, but typifies the ludicrously moronic vein of thinking that was doled out as public advisory.
It was intentionally obtuse, with not even a vague resemblance of insight or good judgement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion the biggest example of this was the poor mask guidance early on in the pandemic that was subsequently reversed. Zeynep Tufekci had a very good piece in the NYT on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effective…
> there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public" Actually there was plenty of data saying that masks don't work for the public. For example, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... And there are many others - that was just an easy one I found today. Some similar studies even showed an increase in flu transmission among the subject population wearing masks. There were plenty o…
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(08)01008-4/ful...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-inf...
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> In a multi party system sowing distrust in an opposing party doesn't help your party, it mostly helps parties adjacent to that party. So then the goal becomes to be as trustworthy as possible to the public rather than make the public hate the enemy. It really solves many of these issues. Does it through? I suppose what I had in mind wasn't so much narrowly-focused electioneering, but broader and somewhat sloppy ges…
The voters of those left-wing parties identify as "left" so if a Rush Limbaugh encourages people to distrust the "left" then those voters simply distrust Rush Limbaugh instead of altering their vote. Otherwise, if he covers Left-1 party with shit, Left-2 gains voters; if he points out a scandal in Left-2, Left-1 gains voters; if he points out that both Left-1 and Left-2 have a horrible foreign policy, there's likely…
But what about the center?
> if he points out that both Left-1 and Left-2 have a horrible foreign policy, there's likely Left-3 that opposes Left-1 and Left-2 on that policy
That seems to assume there's a party for every combination of views, but is that realistic? How frequently is there a party that's say, hard right on social policy but very left on economic policy? I get the impression that it usually plays out that you get a few parties that are different "degrees" of left or right (say hard left, left, and center left).
How about the biggest dishonesty - lack of admission that not everyone is at the same risk and that lockdowns have significant irreversible costs for low risk individuals and for society? Young children are not getting critical development years back. Healthy 20 somethings only have limited time to date, party and have fun before being saddled with adult responsibilities forever. Most of shattered local businesses ar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>no disrespect but i know plenty of liberals who will not get the vaccine No disrespect, just statistics [1]. Democrat:Republican ratio among is about 3:5 among the unvaccinated (and about 2:1 among the vaccinated). >you make them a slave to your narrative, and if they become slaves, they will push to make you a slave as well by whatever means necessary With all due respect, the example you gave of that is the behavi…
I think the fact that vaccination is only 3:5 demonstrates that it is remarkably close between parties and people should be more thoughtful about characterization. It is not like it is 100:1 or some extremely skewed distribution.
Is 3:1 big enough to say that there, perhaps, is a problem?
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/briefing/covid-red-states...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reality still is, if you don’t carefully specify the kind of masks people are supposed to use (or even specify they have to use non-medical masks!) the effect, if any, is so small it isn’t measurable. It’s just such a great virtue signal that people keep clinging to it.
It’s a damn religion at this point. The masks most people wear do basically nothing. Wearing an effective mask (for some value of “effective”) is not comfortable at all!
Personally I've found n95 mask's with head straps more comfortable than cloth masks with ear straps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last I checked Trump had nothing to do with the vaccine other than helping fund it (Operation Warpseed). If you think Trump could impact the safety then I assume you think the FDA is corrupt which means we shouldn't trust them when they say it is safe now?
Back when that was the debate, Trump was pushing FDA to "accelerate" approval i.e. do it before the studies analysis was done. Now we know how those studies went, but at that point nobody did yet (and they might have revealed e.g. a lack of efficiency), so yes, if FDA did issue an approval back then then they should have been treated as corrupt for breaching their own process in a way that can impact the safety; and…
There are accelerated approvals as part of the FDA process if there is a need. That is how Pfizer is approved now. Pfizer did not complete all the tests and analysis they typically would have had to go through.
>Now we know how those studies went, but at that point nobody did yet (and they might have revealed e.g. a lack of efficiency
Except like I said above we actually don't know since they have not completed all the studies yet.
>so yes, if FDA did issue an approval back then then they should have been treated as corrupt for breaching their own process in a way that can impact the safety
Interesting.
>that is why the concern was (IMHO reasonably) raised by various Democrat leaders.
I didn't see any Democratic leaders complaining when Pfizer was approved with the expedited process. So faster than normal is fine sometimes.
>Heck, Trump was on record asking officials to alter election results,
Trump says stupid stuff that has nothing to do with this. Biden says stupid stuff. Who cares?
>of course he could also try to overrule FDA if he chose to and wasn't loudly opposed.
He didn't though. Biden could do the same with a sugar pill if some company decided it was a cure for covid. Who cares what somebody could do if they don't actually do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion the biggest example of this was the poor mask guidance early on in the pandemic that was subsequently reversed. Zeynep Tufekci had a very good piece in the NYT on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effective…
> there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public" Actually there was plenty of data saying that masks don't work for the public. For example, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... And there are many others - that was just an easy one I found today. Some similar studies even showed an increase in flu transmission among the subject population wearing masks. There were plenty o…
In short, they could have pretended that the public is not stupid and just told the damn truth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly what I'm tracking for the 2022 election - is the public able to separate anti-mask/vaxx choice from anti-vaxxing within their minds? Or will the right be tied to anti-vaxxing by proxy? I'm leaning toward the latter. Most people I talk to think the right is actively pushing anti-vaxxing efforts despite top federal Congressional leadership explicitly encouraging vaccine procurement (and their former POT…
The right's story has generally been that people should get the vaccine if they want to because "freedom." Trump literally said this in front of crowds of his vaccine-hesitant supporters. Prominent Republicans like Rand Paul are going around casting doubt on the credibility of Dr. Fauci and the CDC/NIH, and Republicans have done nothing to address the tidal wave of conspiracy theories making rounds among their consti…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/22/donald-trump...
...which makes the politics behind it all the more unusual.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion the biggest example of this was the poor mask guidance early on in the pandemic that was subsequently reversed. Zeynep Tufekci had a very good piece in the NYT on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-... The real fear was that there would be a run on masks by the public, making them unavailable for hospital use. Also, at the time, there wasn't clear evidence of the effective…
> there was never data that said "masks don't work for the public" Actually there was plenty of data saying that masks don't work for the public. For example, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... And there are many others - that was just an easy one I found today. Some similar studies even showed an increase in flu transmission among the subject population wearing masks. There were plenty o…
I don't think it's a huge stretch to say that having some conflicting data on the effectiveness of masks to reduce the spread of flu is not the same as having data on the effectiveness of those same masks to reduce the spread of a novel virus.
Throw in distinctions between types of masks, estimates for how well people will use/handle/fit them, and things get very complicated very quickly. Distinctions like that can seem like splitting hairs, but they matter and it makes messaging difficult. I totally get why they wanted to keep supplies for healthcare workers and how hard it would be educate everyone on all the factors, but they really could have handled it better and been more honest.