Funny Events of the "Woke" world

[Thaluikhain]

Thought this was appropriate for the thread.

Nearly 80 bird species names with racist roots are about to be changed

By Leah Asmelash, CNN (CNN) — After years-long discussion, birds will no longer be named after people — a decision meant to dissociate the animals from problematic eponyms. The American Ornithological Society announced Wednesday that all common English-language names of bird species named after...

abc17news.com

" The Hammond’s flycatcher, for example, is named for William Alexander Hammond, a former US surgeon general. Hammond held racist views toward both Black and Indigenous people, writing that Black people specifically were of “little elevated in mental or physical faculties above the monkey of an organ grinder.” "

Yeah, ok, can understand taking his name off that if people want to.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Thought this was appropriate for the thread.

Nearly 80 bird species names with racist roots are about to be changed

By Leah Asmelash, CNN (CNN) — After years-long discussion, birds will no longer be named after people — a decision meant to dissociate the animals from problematic eponyms. The American Ornithological Society announced Wednesday that all common English-language names of bird species named after...

abc17news.com

I seem to remember hearing about this. Blackbird was considered at one point but ultimately decided against.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

China bans a lot of sites

No body in China cares and just finds ways to get around the bans

Banning Tik Tok will do nothing

I mean they did when the Steam crackdown happened.

In terms of viability of a ban it could work well with Tiktok as so much of it is app based. I mean yes there is an internet URL for it and site you can use but I'd be willing to bet few people use the site in comparison to those who just use the app to access stuff. The app gets banned and stops working then yeh it could seriously hammer the sites revenue.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Ah, the old cities have more gun violence than rural areas trick....

Until you get a different table where you look at counties with the most gun violence as a proportion of the population. And then 2 cities appear in the top ten on the table, with most being rural counties

Big different between Cletus the Yokel shooting some-one who walked across his land and Mugger mike who shot some-one to steal their wallet though.

Also gun violence by population only matter so much because if there's 99 shootings but more people in the smaller area there was still 99 shooting in the area so you're still more likely to see those shootings to to the density of the area the shootings are occurring in.

Or to use an analogy just because there's more water in a river doesn't mean I'm more concerned about getting wet walking home past one than I am getting wet walking home in the rain.

 

[Seanchaidh]

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Ya gotta read the whole article, drippy

Where's the evidence? It's not in the article, drippy...

1) Lockdowns and masks aren't medical interventions, though, are they? Masks are part public health policy and part personal protection equipment, lockdowns are public health policy.

2) Asking for "proof" in this area of policy is, bluntly, fucking stupid. It's beyond stupid. It is a demand for total paralysis.

What you are in effect arguing here is that if a respiratory disease arrives that is as infectious as covid but kills 50% of people infected, neither lockdowns nor masks should be mandated because they are not proven. This is not an absurd example: it is genuinely the inevitable result of the logic you are pushing of 'no proof, no policy.'

Your logic can also be applied to literally anything in policy. Raise interest rates 0.5%? Prove it works. Spend another $500 per pupil on education? Prove it works. Cut benefits 5%? Prove it works. All these policies have potentially serious long-term effects, from quality of life up to life itself for millions of people. "Prove it". The only result is a demand for zero governance, because no such proof exists, nor possibly could ever be revealed (after all, once a choice is made, no counterfactual exists to demonstrate what the alternative was), at least certainly not within the timeframe required for the policy to be enacted.

It's a way of looking at the world which is either incredibly stupid or deliberately fraudulent.

Yeah they are.

I guess any mask study is stupid then, why even do them?

When doing something has known MASSIVE costs, you have to have some kind of evidence that it's worth the benefits. Covid killed under 0.2% of infected people, we knew this pretty early, this was not a virus that killed even close to 1% let alone 50%. When something is done whether masks or interest rates, there has to be at least a solid reason to do so. There was no reason for lockdowns or masks or vaccines to be forced on anyone. For a vaccine to be forced, it has to show community benefit, the covid vaccine never showed community benefit in actual trials and it was then shown to provide no community benefit once it was actually out there, yet it was forced on everyone... (and not everyone even benefited on a personal level from the vaccine either).

The population of the USA is ~330 million.
It has had ~1.2 million covid deaths to date.

(1.2 / 330) * 100 = 0.36%

Just to put into context your claims about us "knowing" the IFR was below 0.2%.

Fucking, fucking hell...

Yup, there was no reinfections and everyone just got covid the one time only!!!

That's a form of lockdown.

Lockdowns don't suddenly become not lockdowns whenever it's convenient to you.

Locking down an entire nation was never a thing that was ever done before to try to stop a virus.

It wasn't like a policy. It was a 'helpful suggestion' with ads and everything. Not a government policy, just some busy bodies who thought they had a good idea. It was about 10 years ago so details are now fuzzy in my memory

It was only aimed at parents. They were saying something like: it was the teacher job, and you're just giving your child advantages

It feels like Sam Bankman-Fried twisted ideology of altruism. He wanted to get all the money so he could help others. Sounds rather counterproductive to me. Like, let the others get money so they can help themselves instead of taking money from them

It was all very stupid

Yeah, I'm saying that anyone that thinks they can tell other parents that reading to their kids is unfair is coming from a place that's just beyond ridiculous and should not even be acknowledged or respected, it should be shot down as crazy immediately by any sane person.

 

[Ag3ma]

Yeah they are.

Which is just bullshit, because you really have no idea at all.

"Medical intervention" is essentially synonymous with "medical treatment", encompassing diagnoses, tests, therapies, etc. See for instance in terms of legal defintions: https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/medical-intervention

I guess any mask study is stupid then, why even do them?

Could you logically flail around more?

When doing something has known MASSIVE costs, you have to have some kind of evidence that it's worth the benefits.

Slightly correct. Decisions should be evidence-based wherever possible - hence why we might do mask studies to see what sort of impact they might have. However, there's a substantial difference between "evidence" and "proof". In crisis, we might do things that are plausible or reasonable, with partial evidential basis, because it's almost certainly better to try something reasonable than sit around and wait for things to possibly go horribly wrong.

This is also really funny because there was equally no "proof" of "massive costs" either. There was a potential massive cost of letting covid run rampant and a potential massive cost of a public health policy to prevent it. How big any of those were going to be is only something that can be discovered after the fact, and even then, only the one of them that was actually done.

Covid killed under 0.2% of infected people, we knew this pretty early, this was not a virus that killed even close to 1% let alone 50%.

It's amazing you're still pumping this utter bullshit after all this time and all this debate. It's in ignorance of the body of scientific literature.

Yup, there was no reinfections and everyone just got covid the one time only!!!

Okay, but think about your own arguments here that "natural immunity" (from catching the virus) was better than vaccines, and last an incredibly long time (for instance, all that time you spent dissing boosters). In order to be consistent with your own arguments, you should believe that reinfections have barely any mortality. Just to give you and idea of what you're talking about here, if we take the data that prior infection or being vaccinated reduces mortality chance 90%, this would mean that if a naive immune system had IFR 0.2%, everyone has been infected with covid 8 times.

But the bottom line is that you aren't remotely consistent. You're basically saying whatever you need to be right at the time on individual points with no coherence and no grasp whatsoever of the bigger picture. It's just a load of hot air to pretend things should have been done the way you wanted and to pretend you're never wrong.

As ever, you are totally full of shit on this topic.

 

[Dreiko]

I think all this arguing about covid makes little sense if you don't specify which variant you're actually talking about, and bunching it all together is fallacious either way you argue. Basically, the early strains that caused lockdowns and a drive for the vaccine were most deadly, but the later ones were more contagious but less deadly, so yeah obviously when most people caught the more contagious variants that were less lethal that will bring the average down but that doesn't mean the Alpha or Beta variants were equally innocuous.

Same thing with the vaccines, yeah, you do need boosters to not catch variants, but that also means that when a newer new variant arises the booster will be not enough and you're still likely to catch the virus, like how you need a new flue shot each winter cause it's a different strain of the flue. And while a vaccine to the deadly varians is more useful, now that variants are less deadly the utility of the vaccine is also gonna go down proportional to how less deadly the virus is, so acting as if the vaccine is perma-locked to the utility it had when the variants were deadly is just as wrong as counting the deathtoll of each variant as a single "covid" deathtoll and not breaking it down on a variant by variant basis.


I got 2 vaccines back during the heavy lethality era and caught I think the omicron strain about a year after that, back like a year and a half ago, when it was so weak a strain that I was back to 100 %in 2 days and did not take any medicine at all to heal myself, and all it did was cause a cough and light fever. It was literally the lightest cold I've ever had, and the closest thing to it I've felt was the reaction to taking the second shot of the vaccine, where I was a little feverish for like a day. Since then I just decided to rely on natural immunity and I've not been sick, with anything, for the last year and a half. Not even had a headache for that matter. Hurray for eating good and getting enough sleep and water.

 

[BrawlMan]

got 2 vaccines back during the heavy lethality era and caught I think the omicron strain about a year after that, back like a year and a half ago, when it was so weak a strain that I was back to 100 %in 2 days and did not take any medicine at all to heal myself, and all it did was cause a cough and light fever. It was literally the lightest cold I've ever had, and the closest thing to it I've felt was the reaction to taking the second shot of the vaccine, where I was a little feverish for like a day. Since then I just decided to rely on natural immunity and I've not been sick, with anything, for the last year and a half. Not even had a headache for that matter. Hurray for eating good and getting enough sleep and water.

Good for you. Not everybody is built like you and I though. I never had COVID yet, but I still wouldn't want to even if or when barely affects me. I got people around me where they get hit with covid, it's so much worse for them than it would be for me. That includes coworkers and especially family.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

I think all this arguing about covid makes little sense if you don't specify which variant you're actually talking about, and bunching it all together is fallacious either way you argue. Basically, the early strains that caused lockdowns and a drive for the vaccine were most deadly, but the later ones were more contagious but less deadly, so yeah obviously when most people caught the more contagious variants that were less lethal that will bring the average down but that doesn't mean the Alpha or Beta variants were equally innocuous.

Same thing with the vaccines, yeah, you do need boosters to not catch variants, but that also means that when a newer new variant arises the booster will be not enough and you're still likely to catch the virus, like how you need a new flue shot each winter cause it's a different strain of the flue. And while a vaccine to the deadly varians is more useful, now that variants are less deadly the utility of the vaccine is also gonna go down proportional to how less deadly the virus is, so acting as if the vaccine is perma-locked to the utility it had when the variants were deadly is just as wrong as counting the deathtoll of each variant as a single "covid" deathtoll and not breaking it down on a variant by variant basis.


I got 2 vaccines back during the heavy lethality era and caught I think the omicron strain about a year after that, back like a year and a half ago, when it was so weak a strain that I was back to 100 %in 2 days and did not take any medicine at all to heal myself, and all it did was cause a cough and light fever. It was literally the lightest cold I've ever had, and the closest thing to it I've felt was the reaction to taking the second shot of the vaccine, where I was a little feverish for like a day. Since then I just decided to rely on natural immunity and I've not been sick, with anything, for the last year and a half. Not even had a headache for that matter. Hurray for eating good and getting enough sleep and water.

Eventually Covid will most likely just be rolled into the Flu Virus. Like how I think it's Swine flu presently is too.

 

[Dreiko]

Good for you. Not everybody is built like you and I though. I never had COVID yet, but I still wouldn't want to even if or when barely affects me. I got people around me where they get hit with covid, it's so much worse for them than it would be for me. That includes coworkers and especially family.

Yeah that's for sure, prior to covid I hadn't had any illness at all for approximately 7 years. And when I did get it, it was because a family member got it first and brought it home, so at that point we had been living in a contagious environment for a few days before realizing they had it so by that point I prolly had already gotten it too. The main point is I guess that this isn't the same thing that it was back 3 years ago, and that it's more like the flue, which yes also kills people every year and you wouldn't want your sickly family members to get either. I think some people are just in an overly-heightened state of alarm, and to say to lower the alarm a bit isn't the same as saying there's nothing at all to worry about, but people react as if that's what you're saying.

 

[BrawlMan]

Yeah that's for sure, prior to covid I hadn't had any illness at all for approximately 7 years. And when I did get it, it was because a family member got it first and brought it home, so at that point we had been living in a contagious environment for a few days before realizing they had it so by that point I prolly had already gotten it too. The main point is I guess that this isn't the same thing that it was back 3 years ago, and that it's more like the flue, which yes also kills people every year and you wouldn't want your sickly family members to get either. I think some people are just in an overly-heightened state of alarm, and to say to lower the alarm a bit isn't the same as saying there's nothing at all to worry about, but people react as if that's what you're saying.

Some people yes, most others are within reason with the state of alarm. Especially if they have a weak immune system or a bad condition in their body. It doesn't matter if it's 3 years ago or now. My stance stays the same. I'll do whatever I can to prevent myself from getting covid and actually being sensible with my choices. It doesn't matter how strong or weak the variations of it are (they will get affected by if badly if they're ever hit with it), I will not harm my family or those closest to me that have a more sensitive health risk. I know you got friends and family, so I suggest you do the same and still be on the up and up. That way you won't regret it, if something does happen. That's all left I have to say on the matter. Either you get it or you don't.

 

[Eacaraxe]

...The main point is I guess that this isn't the same thing that it was back 3 years ago, and that it's more like the flue...I think some people are just in an overly-heightened state of alarm, and to say to lower the alarm a bit isn't the same as saying there's nothing at all to worry about, but people react as if that's what you're saying.

Given long Covid, incidence of long-term organ damage leading to eventual organ failure, and the new research about how Covid affects mitochrondia throughout the body, no it absolutely is not "more like the flu", however acutely mute Omicron-family strains are. The flu doesn't cause mitochondrial dysfunction and die-off.

Covid is still a killer, and we won't know the true impact of the pandemic until the 5-10 year mark when people suffering chronic post-infection symptoms start keeling over. And, that's accounting for the real immediate- and short-term impact we know it had but simply choose to ignore, deciding to ignore excess mortality rates altogether in favor of the neater, more convenient, and more comfortable "mortalities caused exclusively from Covid-related respiratory distress" number. This is like counting AIDS fatalities simply by the number of people who died from complications related to Kaposi's sarcoma.

 

[Dreiko]

Given long Covid, incidence of long-term organ damage leading to eventual organ failure, and the new research about how Covid affects mitochrondia throughout the body, no it absolutely is not "more like the flu", however acutely mute Omicron-family strains are. The flu doesn't cause mitochondrial dysfunction and die-off.

Covid is still a killer, and we won't know the true impact of the pandemic until the 5-10 year mark when people suffering chronic post-infection symptoms start keeling over. And, that's accounting for the real immediate- and short-term impact we know it had but simply choose to ignore, deciding to ignore excess mortality rates altogether in favor of the neater, more convenient, and more comfortable "mortalities caused exclusively from Covid-related respiratory distress" number. This is like counting AIDS fatalities simply by the number of people who died from complications related to Kaposi's sarcoma.

Isn't the way aids gets you that it kills off your immune system though so you get hit by other ills? In that case you would count things that it doesn't make sense to count in a virus that mainly kills people by affecting their breathing.

As for long covid and those things, aren't those specific to particular variants? Can all variants produce long covid or was it just the early ones? I've never heard anyone specify that sort of thing.

 

[Ag3ma]

Isn't the way aids gets you that it kills off your immune system though so you get hit by other ills? In that case you would count things that it doesn't make sense to count in a virus that mainly kills people by affecting their breathing.

There is a long list of conditions that don't kill people per se, but make them vulnerable to early death (high blood pressure, obesity, smoking, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's & Parkinson's, etc.) We can estimate the toll on human life and quality of life for any of them, we can do so for covid too.

 

[Eacaraxe]

Isn't the way aids gets you that it kills off your immune system though so you get hit by other ills? In that case you would count things that it doesn't make sense to count in a virus that mainly kills people by affecting their breathing.

That's the point. One could argue AIDS isn't a fatal disease because it doesn't directly kill anyone, or argue AIDS is less-fatal than advertised, so long as they're ignoring what AIDS actually does and how it kills. That's actually what we are, and have, been doing with regards to Covid -- cooking the books by restricting the definition of "Covid fatality" to basically only those who died of acute respiratory and cardiovascular failure while infected. The general public and governments aren't looking at excess mortality rates, which is what we should. And depending on source, those numbers are anywhere between two to three times higher than what's presented.

And like I said, we're not looking at mortalities directly attributable to chronic symptoms caused by Covid...because they haven't really started yet, and won't for at least another couple years.

As for long covid and those things, aren't those specific to particular variants? Can all variants produce long covid or was it just the early ones? I've never heard anyone specify that sort of thing.

No, yes. You haven't heard about it because the mainstream media hasn't really acknowledged long Covid in anything approaching a serious way yet. Understanding of it's severely hampered by lack of public concern, which means there's little to no funding to research it compared to the potential threat it actually poses over the long term.

 

[Dreiko]

That's the point. One could argue AIDS isn't a fatal disease because it doesn't directly kill anyone, or argue AIDS is less-fatal than advertised, so long as they're ignoring what AIDS actually does and how it kills. That's actually what we are, and have, been doing with regards to Covid -- cooking the books by restricting the definition of "Covid fatality" to basically only those who died of acute respiratory and cardiovascular failure while infected. The general public and governments aren't looking at excess mortality rates, which is what we should. And depending on source, those numbers are anywhere between two to three times higher than what's presented.

And like I said, we're not looking at mortalities directly attributable to chronic symptoms caused by Covid...because they haven't really started yet, and won't for at least another couple years.


No, yes. You haven't heard about it because the mainstream media hasn't really acknowledged long Covid in anything approaching a serious way yet. Understanding of it's severely hampered by lack of public concern, which means there's little to no funding to research it compared to the potential threat it actually poses over the long term.

Ok so again there's a middle ground here that I think everyone is swerving to avoid like it's a lava pit.


The issue people have is that, for example, if someone was hit by a truck, and died, and they also had covid, that could count as covid death in some places. As far as I know covid doesn't provide truck-exlcusive-magnetism to its victims, so in that case, counting deaths of folks "with" covid as if they're deaths caused "by" covid, or which were somehow helped along "due" to covid, is the thing people are actually mainly objecting to.


Nobody's saying don't include the instances of increased blood-clots causing strokes and the like, just, don't include the guy who was hit by a stray bowling ball to the dick and fell off a balcony to his death as a covid death, just because he happened to have covid.

The main difference here is that the primary way of covid getting you isn't like how aids did by making you more succeptible to other things. It's just that you having other things wrong with you made you more succeptible to die to covid. In this analogy, you being a fat smoker is the aids, and covid is the cold that finishes your weakened self off, covid is the random usually-innocuous illness, not aids.


And yeah as far as I understood it seems we just don't know on the matter regarding long covid, so acting as if it's the end of the world is equally as foolish as acting like it's totally harmless.


Ultimately, I just see a lot of confirmation bias here. People are going in trying to find how this and that death is caused by covid, ignoring all other potential explanations, instead of just trying to objectively analyze the situation and figure out what it was that caused it, irrespective of whether or not it was covid. To a lot of people, a death having a plausible covid link is enough to link it to covid, which is obviously incorrect, cause you're ignoring all the other just as plausible causes that could be there if you stop looking once you find covid as one of the options.

 

[Silvanus]

The issue people have is that, for example, if someone was hit by a truck, and died, and they also had covid, that could count as covid death in some places. As far as I know covid doesn't provide truck-exlcusive-magnetism to its victims, so in that case, counting deaths of folks "with" covid as if they're deaths caused "by" covid, or which were somehow helped along "due" to covid, is the thing people are actually mainly objecting to.

Doctors and statisticians have been at pains to point out that this really isn't happening. Fox news came up with the outrageous claim in order to insinuate that Covid was being exaggerated and thus wasn't worth a big public health response-- then a bunch of other Twitter randos contributed flimsy anecdotal evidence because fools love a conspiracy theory.

But it really wasn't happening to any significant degree at all. A tiny, tiny, tiny number of death certificates (<130) mentioned both covid and traffic collisions in the US as of last year, and most of those had the collision as the underlying cause of death. That leaves... a few dozen, out of hundreds of thousands.

And even in those few dozen... uhrm, its very possible they're all legitimate. A traffic collision could land someone in hospital with complications, but alive, where they contract covid. May well have otherwise survived the accident, but people can be very susceptible to infection when they're otherwise compromised-- breathing through a tube leaves your throat susceptible; physical wounds leave you more susceptible; and the immune system is weaker.

Accidents and other stuff just getting classified arbitrarily as covid deaths if they happened to have a positive test was not a thing.

Are Car Accidents Getting Labeled as “COVID Deaths”?

Of all the increases in mortality in 2020, one that is notable is motor vehicle accidents. There were 43,045 deaths from motor vehicle accidents, according to the final CDC data. This means motor v…

economistwritingeveryday.com

 

[Dreiko]

Doctors and statisticians have been at pains to point out that this really isn't happening. Fox news came up with the outrageous claim in order to insinuate that Covid was being exaggerated and thus wasn't worth a big public health response-- then a bunch of other Twitter randos contributed flimsy anecdotal evidence because fools love a conspiracy theory.

But it really wasn't happening to any significant degree at all. A tiny, tiny, tiny number of death certificates (<130) mentioned both covid and traffic collisions in the US as of last year, and most of those had the collision as the underlying cause of death. That leaves... a few dozen, out of hundreds of thousands.

And even in those few dozen... uhrm, its very possible they're all legitimate. A traffic collision could land someone in hospital with complications, but alive, where they contract covid. May well have otherwise survived the accident, but people can be very susceptible to infection when they're otherwise compromised-- breathing through a tube leaves your throat susceptible; physical wounds leave you more susceptible; and the immune system is weaker.

Accidents and other stuff just getting classified arbitrarily as covid deaths if they happened to have a positive test was not a thing.

Are Car Accidents Getting Labeled as “COVID Deaths”?

Of all the increases in mortality in 2020, one that is notable is motor vehicle accidents. There were 43,045 deaths from motor vehicle accidents, according to the final CDC data. This means motor v…

economistwritingeveryday.com

You're talking out of both ends of your mouth. First to say that it isn't happening, and then to say that it is, but not "significantly enough" (according to whom?).

The truck thing is an example of a clear misalignment of cause and effect, I coulda easily said gunshot or falling from a bridge, so on and so forth, my point wasn't that specifically car accidents are the entirety of the misreported covid deaths. That's pretty obvious and to pretend I wasn't including all conveivable forms of death in my point by overfocusing on just the car accident stats is dishonestly misinterpreting my point in bad faith, and hence, deceptive.



Again, you're working with the aim of finding a way to attribute a death to covid, so as soon as something is plausably attributable you cease looking further, because by it being plausably attributable you feel that's good enough to justify all the measures you have in mind that flow out of that potentiality, you don't actually care to find the truth, just reasonable doubt. That. Is. The. Problem.

 

[Eacaraxe]

The issue people have is that, for example, if someone was hit by a truck, and died, and they also had covid, that could count as covid death in some places. As far as I know covid doesn't provide truck-exlcusive-magnetism to its victims, so in that case, counting deaths of folks "with" covid as if they're deaths caused "by" covid, or which were somehow helped along "due" to covid, is the thing people are actually mainly objecting to.

That isn't happening, and never was.

What did happen, and is happening, is if someone has a life-threatening medical emergency, like for example a stroke or heart attack, or as you mentioned a car accident that results in life-threatening trauma, and an emergency room or intensive care unit has to triage that patient out because they're already over-capacity from Covid patients. Or, someone has a life-threatening chronic condition and has to be refused life-saving palliative care due to pharmaceutical, PPE, and labor-hour shortages because hospitals are over-capacity treating Covid patients. That person dies because they lacked access to life-saving medical treatment.

That is absolutely a Covid-related death; were it not for the intervening factor of Covid (as a phenomenon), their life could have been saved. Those deaths count as excess mortalities, but as what they don't count are Covid-related deaths. That's why Covid represented such an elderly die-off as it did, without every elder necessarily dying of Covid: they had other life-threatening medical problems which couldn't be treated, thanks to the strain Covid put on health care systems and national infrastructures.

I alluded to this in the other thread, but I'm not calling my mother a Covid-related death. There were way too many other variables at play between her sitting in my living room happily watching MSNBC and the urn in my bedroom. But had she been able to find a doctor taking patients and schedule a visit at practically any point in the year leading up to her death, they probably would have found and been able to treat the aneurysm that eventually killed her.