So just ad-hominem attacks vs actually explaining or countering how the paper is wrong... par for the course.
Let's imagine a scenario. The police are interviewing a suspect accused of a crime. The suspect tells the interviewing detective "I didn't do it". The detective replies "Sure, but you would say that, wouldn't you?" The detective has made an ad hominem... but the detective is right to do so. The suspect's assertion of innocence has to be evaluated in the context of the benefit to the suspect of being found innocent, thereby meaning he is motivated to lie and his statement is unreliable.
This is the context in which I have delivered an ad hominem: a completely justifiable querying of the authors and publishers because they are biased, and at worst even have an outright conflict of interest. This is an absolutely basic principle of assessing the quality of material. It's on this basis I'm not motivated to engage with it. It's a basic concept of science: full disclosure and transparency, acknowledgement of sources, etc.
I guess John Hopkins is also a right-wing think tank too?
Oh my god. This isn't even the first time you've made this absurd error. Why won't you read and learn?
John Hopkins is an institution which employs academics who are free to do their own research through external funding grants. This paper is not the official view of John Hopkins, as per the standard boilerplate up front and centre:
"The Studies in Applied Economics series is under the general direction of Prof. Steve H. Hanke, Founder and Co-Director of The Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise (
[email protected]). The views expressed in each working paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the institutions that the authors are affiliated with."
We can look through the output of John Hopkins and see the wild and wonderful variety of the output of it's staff reflecting a multitude of views. We won't find that from the IEA, because the IEA does not support or promote free investigation of the world.
Where's a single paper saying lockdown benefits outweighed costs?
Because the whole exercise is difficult to the point of impossible and fundamentally a load of shit that distracts from the issues more than it helps. Which is something people from all over the political spectrum can agree on.
It would not improve decision-making o publish a cost-benefit analysis of the Covid tier restrictions
www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk
The function of this line is for the usual anti-lockdown suspects to make bogus claims. They can't actually achieve useful answers either way, the aim is merely to influence the peanut gallery into agreeing with them. They have simply made a claim they cannot adequately defend, and then try to demand we have to believe it until it is disproven. Fuck that shit.
Why did Sweden do the best in all of Europe
Fuck! Why are you repeating this, again, when it is flatly wrong? The below graph is 2021 data, but indicates just how far Sweden was from the best. Why do you just baldly state such completely and easily disprovable lies?
You're the one picking and choosing. We have literally no evidence masks work but you still say they do work.
Au contraire! We literally have evidence that masks work. We also literally have evidence that does not find that they work. The reason most scientists think they do and the cranks you get your information from think they don't is simply that your cranks ignore a load of the evidence.
iea.org.uk
