COVID-19 / Coronavirus Pandemic

[ible]

I would have to look deeper in those cases than a single potentially biased article on each. But if we're going by cherry-picked examples, how abou the Nazi regime or Stalin's regime?

I would have to look deeper in those cases than a single potentially biased forum posting on each government.

what aboutism isn't a valid argument. you are arguing that governments are evil, so we should get rid of them, but you are also saying that people are evil, so your logical conclusion should be...

 

[λ the β-Redex Reducer]

what aboutism isn't a valid argument.

You used examples of when having no government supposedly went wrong to "prove" that government is necessary. I counter with examples of when having government went wrong to "prove" that having no government is necessary. It is the exact same kind of argument. I also think that it is a weak argument and only used it to illustrate how easily this kind of argument can be turned against you.

you are arguing that governments are evil, so we should get rid of them, but you are also saying that people are evil, so your logical conclusion should be...

What do you mean with people? I never argued that most people are evil. I believe that most people are good.

As for the people that are evil, they are sapient beings, unlike governments, and hence they ought to not be destroyed or dismantled as would a government. That is because destroying a sapient being is a whole other matter than destroying an abstract non-sapient organisation.
But like I said, people in general are good. I guess society is bit like some liquids in that the scum tends to rise to the top.

 

[λ the β-Redex Reducer]

BTW, I also disagree with any of us having used a whataboutism. A whataboutism is about pointing out some hypocrisy or some behaviour of the one making an argument that would suggest that he does not believe his own argument or that he cannot hold up to the standards it sets. Basically it points out hypocrisy. It is a fallacy because just because someone acts as if he does not believe in his argument does not mean that his argument is not true.

What we did was cherry-picking anecdotes. Your argument and my demonstration of how easy it can be turned against you are both invalid as arguments because they made an universal claim ("all free societies are bad", "all big governments are bad") and then try to prove that by example.

 

[Phlyra]

Secondly, a large government controlled by democracy is not even ethical. Nowadays many people complain about minorities being oppressed and preach about the wonderfulness of democracy. What most people seem to forget is that democracy by definition is rule by majority. That means that it gives the majority power over the minority. Oppressing minorities is the point of democracy.

Democracy - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[ible]

if you always reduce propositions to the most important bits, you can define yourself to be right based on the importance of those bits, and then you're always right by definition! QED

in real life, there's no perfect argument, however, and people believe what they want to believe, but usually not based on facts (like the internet being created by the US govt -- https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet, or that vaccines save lives).

if you're just jealous that your country hasn't done anything cool yet (Lambda Centre i guess isn't on the map yet), don't worry, it'll come soon. but not if there isn't a government to progressively tax people and put money to better use than rich people building bigger houses and poor people getting poorer...

 

[levi]

Yes, that's why I still use the terms Arpanet and Internet when discussing the history. The Arpanet was created by the US military, but was extended by academia (specifically UCLA) to add things like TCP/IP to it. Then various services were added to it, like SMTP and FTP by the American universities and to my mind it became the Internet proper. And then the web was invented at CERN which is funded by the EU.

 

[netcat]

people in general are good

People or beings in general are naturaly greedy so have an inclination to do bad thing. Call it survival instinct. We only act civil because we fear the ramifications of eg the police (a part of the government).

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Why do the debate turns to "is democracy good or bad" when the actual problem is that most of the democracies in the world are currently controlled by a handful of criminals ?

 

[ClockworkCoder]

We only act civil because we fear the ramifications of eg the police

That's really quite sweet, but reality (society) is a little more complicated than that.

Based on other recent comments, I'm not sure Covid is good for us re discussion either - it doesn't seem like it's been helpful or constructive in the whole.

 

[netcat]

Why do the debate turns to "is democracy good or bad"

I'm escalating it to "are humans good or bad".

 

[λ the β-Redex Reducer]

People or beings in general are naturaly greedy so have an inclination to do bad thing. Call it survival instinct. We only act civil because we fear the ramifications of eg the police (a part of the government).

So are you saying that you actually want to rob your neighbour and that only fear prevents you from doing so? And what if your neighbour became terminally ill, would you not care about that either? People are sympathetic by nature. People care for justice and the well-being of other humans and animals. The government is doing more to promote crime than it is to stop it because it is itself one of the few biggest criminals and it guarantees poverty through it's debt-based fiat currency system (actually the banks' system, but the governments tend to work for the banks and are thus complicit). Poverty is what often makes people desperate enough to commit a crime that they actually want to not commit.

 

[netcat]

So are you saying that you actually want to rob your neighbour and that only fear prevents you from doing so?

Yes, my neighbor is a banker.

 

[netcat]

And what if your neighbour became terminally ill, would you not care about that either?

I might help them to avoid the unpleasantness of their death - to me.

People are sympathetic by nature.

It can all be traced back to selfishness. We imagine bad things happening to us so don't like to see it happening to others.

People care for justice and the well-being of other humans and animals.

Sometimes, if it's how we wish to be treated. Humans generally don't give a fuck about (non-human) animals.

:: RMS's motives are selfish. Accept it.

 

[JDTAY]

Man, I was up last night reading about how all these Indian hospitals had only a few hours of oxygen supply left, and that was a few hours ago...

 

[levi]

Reportedly now they're diverting the supplies destined to industrial uses (mainly in steelmaking I guess) for hospitals.

 

[JDTAY]

Time for my non-COVID political post. I got my new voter registration card in the mail today. Successfully switched from unaffiliated to Democrat. I applied for the change after reading a FiveThirtyEight article that said the percentage of unaffiliated voters in America was increasing, but that 75% of them still voted along partisan lines, implying that people are just scared of affiliation itself. If I vote Democrat, I might as well be Democrat.

 

[FBnil]

Just leaving this link here...

Frontline Workers Testimonies & VAERs Reports 26 MAR 2021 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Compilation of safe & effective COVID va-ccine adverse reactions with personal stories and pictures. 100 pages long.

archive.org

 

[JDTAY]

I mean, when you're talking about hundreds of millions of people getting shots, there are going to be coincidental deaths.

Talking about coincidental deaths does make me feel a bit like a COVID denier though.

 

[pyrat]

I mean, when you're talking about hundreds of millions of people getting shots, there are going to be coincidental deaths.

Yes, A very crude way to see it is: assume everyone lives 100 years, then that means that every year 1/100 th of the population would die.
so, every day 1 in 36 500 people would die. There have been 900 000 000 doses given to 500 000 000 people world wide in approximately 120 days.
So 7 500 000 doses and 4 166 666 people per day.
So, if the vaccines would cause no side effects (not death but not immortality either) there would be 7 500 000 / 36 500 = 205 deaths every day of people getting his first or second dose that same day.
There would also be 205 deaths of any other group of 7 500 000 people. For example that's how many people in Honk Kong would die in a day (if they lived 100 years instead of 83).
Or you'd get 4 166 666 / 36 500 = 114 deaths of people receiving their first dose the day they die.
But if you count people expected to die the day they get one dose or the next day, that'd be 410 or (for first dose) 228 deaths. People dying the first week of getting a dose would be 1435 (or 798 for first dose) and so on.
Now, how many of those would get a headline, and that headline collected in a 100 pages document, that's anyone¡s guess.
In fact 100 years is not the average lifespan, and you could look at deaths expected per zone or per age or whatever. Not all days or all territories have the same number of doses given.
And maybe there're more deaths in winter... That'd all give you a higher death expectation.
Whatever you do, if the anecdotes of vaccinated people you collect aren't above that expectation, it doesn't mean a thing. Ok, it means people are not immortal, but we already knew that.

That's why we need :
- all events post vaccination reported
- groups like PRAC from EMA or similar (they may need to be a governmental body to have access to the details for each case) running their statistics and comparing the events seen with the events expected.

What I wonder is why do they concentrate in thrombosis+thrombocitopaenia.
For me that's like picking two symptoms to play with the statistics. They pick those two and they get AZ and J&J above expected cases and Moderna and Pfizer below.
If they picked, I don't know, anaphylaxis with headache they would maybe get Pfizer above expectation and AZ below, or whatever. I guess that's where you plug medical knowledge that I don't have to know what's relevant...

With our limited dataset in the forum all we can say is that @JDTAY got 2 moderna jabs and nothing seems to have happened.

But @netcat recently got a first dose of an unknown brand and his avatar changed from a photo of a (crazy?) man to a drawing of a woman. I bet that's above the expectation of spontaneus gender change.
And thus a new conspiracy theory was born...

 

[FBnil]

his avatar changed from a photo of a (crazy?) man

No, just "Howling Mad". And looking at your avatar, you are Mister "P".