Funny Events of the "Woke" world

[Bedinsis]

Sorry for mentioning the Y word but why didn't Yahtzee mention the pronouns controversy on the Starfield episode of ZP?

What pronoun controversy?

 

[Casual Shinji]

Sorry for mentioning the Y word but why didn't Yahtzee mention the pronouns controversy on the Starfield episode of ZP?

Because there was no controversy - There was a pathetic right-wing reactionary who cried about it and was then ridiculed by everyone with half a brain.

 

[tstorm823]

And what's your rationale for that? Because unless you have a good one, that's the sorriest of wet farts of a claim.

We counted "covid deaths" in a completely novel way that invalidates all comparisons to other causes of deaths. In a broad sense, being infected with covid can certainly contribute to dying in a number of ways, but that's not unique to that virus. Imagine if they tested every person who dies and/or is hospitalized for whether they're infected with rhinovirus, and kept a running tally of all the positives, and called them rhinovirus deaths, no matter what was ruled the cause of death. Or imagine a chart that tallied up all the people who died with hypertension as a comorbidity and slapped the tag "hypertension deaths" to all of them. The numbers would be insane and terrifying, they'd outpace covid by a factor of 10. For better of worse, that isn't how we count deaths by certain causes.

For a few years, covid was ripping through like 10% of the population at a time. If it didn't contribute to death at all (to be clear, I'm not making that argument), you'd still expect like 10% of people dying to be infected (or more, since you can catch it in the hospital). If a 90 year old dies of heart failure outside of a pandemic, they're not going to test for viruses to see if it was caused by an infection, they'd call it a natural death. During the pandemic, we were testing people like that for covid infections and calling them a covid fatality. Even if you philosophically think that they should be tallied like that, you have to recognize that counting that way makes all statistical comparisons to other viruses invalid.

 

[Baffle]

What pronoun controversy?

A bald guy recorded himself emotionally shitting his pants and then, upon reviewing the footage, thought yeah that's how I want the world to see me and just went ahead and uploaded it. An extremely humdrum nontroversy of epically everyday proportions.

 

[Trunkage]

We counted "covid deaths" in a completely novel way that invalidates all comparisons to other causes of deaths. In a broad sense, being infected with covid can certainly contribute to dying in a number of ways, but that's not unique to that virus. Imagine if they tested every person who dies and/or is hospitalized for whether they're infected with rhinovirus, and kept a running tally of all the positives, and called them rhinovirus deaths, no matter what was ruled the cause of death. Or imagine a chart that tallied up all the people who died with hypertension as a comorbidity and slapped the tag "hypertension deaths" to all of them. The numbers would be insane and terrifying, they'd outpace covid by a factor of 10. For better of worse, that isn't how we count deaths by certain causes.

For a few years, covid was ripping through like 10% of the population at a time. If it didn't contribute to death at all (to be clear, I'm not making that argument), you'd still expect like 10% of people dying to be infected (or more, since you can catch it in the hospital). If a 90 year old dies of heart failure outside of a pandemic, they're not going to test for viruses to see if it was caused by an infection, they'd call it a natural death. During the pandemic, we were testing people like that for covid infections and calling them a covid fatality. Even if you philosophically think that they should be tallied like that, you have to recognize that counting that way makes all statistical comparisons to other viruses invalid.

I dont know how to tell you this, but this is not novel. It's how we get number for other diseases like the flu, dementia, heart disease or AIDS. It's not new, it's not changed. It's how it's always been tallied. Otherwise, no one has ever died from heart disease or AIDS.

Note: They only tally up those deaths where COVID was a contributing factor, so no, dying in a car crash isn't counted
Note 2: This was known in February 2020.

 

[tstorm823]

I dont know how to tell you this, but this is not novel. It's how we get number for other diseases like the flu, dementia, heart disease or AIDS. It's not new, it's not changed. It's how it's always been tallied. Otherwise, no one has ever died from heart disease or AIDS.

Note: They only tally up those deaths where COVID was a contributing factor, so no, dying in a car crash isn't counted
Note 2: This was known in February 2020.

You don't know how to tell me that because you are incorrect. And you think I'm making an argument that I'm not.

Google what percent of people have diabetes. Google what percent of people die from diabetes. If someone has diabetes, diabetes could contribute to almost any health-related issue leading to death. Why is diabetes only counted as a cause of death in only a small fraction of diabetics who die?

 

[Ag3ma]

We counted "covid deaths" in a completely novel way that invalidates all comparisons to other causes of deaths. In a broad sense, being infected with covid can certainly contribute to dying in a number of ways, but that's not unique to that virus. Imagine if they tested every person who dies and/or is hospitalized for whether they're infected with rhinovirus, and kept a running tally of all the positives, and called them rhinovirus deaths, no matter what was ruled the cause of death. Or imagine a chart that tallied up all the people who died with hypertension as a comorbidity and slapped the tag "hypertension deaths" to all of them. The numbers would be insane and terrifying, they'd outpace covid by a factor of 10. For better of worse, that isn't how we count deaths by certain causes.

For a few years, covid was ripping through like 10% of the population at a time. If it didn't contribute to death at all (to be clear, I'm not making that argument), you'd still expect like 10% of people dying to be infected (or more, since you can catch it in the hospital). If a 90 year old dies of heart failure outside of a pandemic, they're not going to test for viruses to see if it was caused by an infection, they'd call it a natural death. During the pandemic, we were testing people like that for covid infections and calling them a covid fatality. Even if you philosophically think that they should be tallied like that, you have to recognize that counting that way makes all statistical comparisons to other viruses invalid.

Yes, I've seen this one do the rounds. It is one of those nifty arguments that gains traction by superficially making sense, but in truth is kind of pseudoscience designed more to mislead than enlighten.

It's interesting you note hypertension, because there really are statistics on how many people hypertension is responsible for killing - and pretty reasonable ones. Smoking is another one you could have picked, and yet we have good estimates for how many people die because of that, too. So by the same logic, you could be arguing that no-one really dies of high blood pressure or smoking either... good luck with that. One could also take influenza: pre-covid, if someone died of pneumonia, unless there was a clear alternative cause it would effectively be recorded as an influenza death. So when you say it's "novel", it's really not.

One can accept that the measures of covid could overcount with inclusion of false positives. One should also be responsible and consider all the ways that have been pointed out that the criteria could also undercount by missing real cases. I just think it's interesting when someone only notes the potential error in one direction.

Finally, it is accepted that recorded covid deaths are an estimate. But then, that's why people also look at things like excess death. When we do, we see that overall, recorded covid deaths and excess deaths tally reasonably well. (Excess deaths, generally across the globe, were higher recorded covid deaths.) The USA, for instance, had an estimated 1.16 million excess deaths between March 2020 and March 2022, with only around 1 milllion recorded covid deaths. So, I think it's incumbent on you to then explain what else you think caused people to die in those sorts of numbers if it wasn't covid.

I would also note that the criteria for covid are publicly available, open for scrutiny by public health, medical and other experts. So if it was that bad, you'd expect a great deal of expert criticism... but there isn't any, outside a fringe. The criteria vary from country to country, although are broadly consistent, and regarded as reliable enough by people in the field. Any argument that has an underlying argument "All those experts in the field are as thick as pigshit" needs to be treated with considerable caution.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I would also note that the criteria for covid are publicly available, open for scrutiny by public health, medical and other experts. So if it was that bad, you'd expect a great deal of expert criticism... but there isn't any, outside a fringe. The criteria vary from country to country, although are broadly consistent, and regarded as reliable enough by people in the field. Any argument that has an underlying argument "All those experts in the field are as thick as pigshit" needs to be treated with considerable caution.

The conspiracy theorists prefer to believe that every last health expert who doesn't tell them what they want to hear is "on the take" or "just looking for grant money" (because apparently there's just scads of it to be had), with not a single one of them breaking ranks to blow the lid off a story that would make them a household name for generations.

 

[tstorm823]

One can accept that the measures of covid could overcount with inclusion of false positives. One should also be responsible and consider all the ways that have been pointed out that the criteria could also undercount by missing real cases. I just think it's interesting when someone only notes the potential error in one direction.

If you think I'm talking about error in either direction, you've thoroughly missed the point. No reasonable person is seriously trying to count every single case of covid or every single death attributable to covid accurately. That's not a reasonable goal, it can't be achieved. So to call an over or under count an error isn't correct when a precise count was never the intention. The goal in keeping and analyzing statistics is always to be useful. Which is why I have a problem with these covid stats.

Your use of influenza as an example actually exemplifies the issue. The word "influenza" originally just meant epidemic. It predates even the idea of germ theory, let alone wide acceptance of it. There are many historical epidemics that we just call flu epidemics because they were before people even knew viruses existed, so that's just what you called them. Is that useful? No. Might people still do that sometimes with pneumonia cases, especially in the winter? Sure. Is that useful? No. And as such, it's a diminishing trend. Now you want to justify more of that sort of behavior with covid, and apply the numbers to calculation of infection fatality ratios. You're lending the credibility of modern medical science and epidemiology to imprecise thinking and acting as though the things are comparable.

 

[Ag3ma]

If you think I'm talking about error in either direction, you've thoroughly missed the point. No reasonable person is seriously trying to count every single case of covid or every single death attributable to covid accurately. That's not a reasonable goal, it can't be achieved. So to call an over or under count an error isn't correct when a precise count was never the intention. The goal in keeping and analyzing statistics is always to be useful. Which is why I have a problem with these covid stats.

Your use of influenza as an example actually exemplifies the issue. The word "influenza" originally just meant epidemic. It predates even the idea of germ theory, let alone wide acceptance of it. There are many historical epidemics that we just call flu epidemics because they were before people even knew viruses existed, so that's just what you called them. Is that useful? No. Might people still do that sometimes with pneumonia cases, especially in the winter? Sure. Is that useful? No. And as such, it's a diminishing trend. Now you want to justify more of that sort of behavior with covid, and apply the numbers to calculation of infection fatality ratios. You're lending the credibility of modern medical science and epidemiology to imprecise thinking and acting as though the things are comparable.

This is, to put it kindly, waffle. It's a lot of words without a substantial point.

You have addressed precisely nothing whatsoever of substance that has been asked of you. Instead you've just made a new accusation dressed up in a lot of very vague talk somewhat undermined by the fact it suggests you really know very little about how IFRs are estimated, or the use of such estimations in general.

 

[tstorm823]

This is, to put it kindly, waffle. It's a lot of words without a substantial point.

You have addressed precisely nothing whatsoever of substance that has been asked of you. Instead you've just made a new accusation dressed up in a lot of very vague talk somewhat undermined by the fact it suggests you really know very little about how IFRs are estimated, or the use of such estimations in general.

Honestly, it's not that many words and it's only making the substantial point.

You know I could go through you point by point and tear your response to pieces. We do have statistics for how many people die from hypertension and smoking. They are a tiny fraction of the number of people who have hypertension or smoke. Do you think that smoking only contributes to the death of like 1% of smokers? I don't believe that. I'm sure smoking is a compounding factor in the deaths of a large percentage of smokers dying, since breathing better is going to help you survive other possible causes of death, but those other things are ultimately going to be listed as cause of death, not smoking, which is why the number of deaths caused by smoking is so much lower than the number of smokers.

The excess deaths estimate is itself often a silly estimate. The US has an aging and notoriously unhealthy population that was increasing the rate of death by about 2.5% each year. I'm aware that can't just be treated as an infinite linear trend, but the estimates of excess mortality all seem to assume lower than average increases in deaths, if they even account for that at all. But lets just take that to be accurate for the sake of argument. Do you think there was no impact of economic difficulties, overburdened health systems, rescheduled or cancelled procedures, loss of social networks, isolation, food shortages, etc? I'm sure you are aware the pandemic had secondary effects that might lead to dying. And to see those as covid deaths is genuinely fair if your goal is to try to capture the scale of the pandemic's impact. That's why there's not a great deal of expert criticism of numbers: they aren't wrong, per se. They are an attempt to capture the scale of the pandemic, not meant to give precise measurements for estimating how deadly the virus is. Actual studies estimating covid ifr use localized data over controlled timelines, they aren't going to include the "just throw it in the pile" places or periods in their data sample.

Let's go back for a moment to your math:

Okay, you are proposing that the IFR of covid on a naive population was under 0.2%. That means if everyone in a population were infected with covid, under 0.2% of the population would die. However, infection then provides immunity. If immunity is 90% effective at preventing infection, then were the entire population infected a second time, under 0.02% would die.

So with this IFR you propose, if 0.36% of the population has died of covid, this equates to everyone in the population being infected with covid multiple times. 0.2% die in the first wave, and 0.02% in each wave thereafter. Of course, I will admit an error in a previous post - this is actually 9 infections per person, not 8. Cumulative deaths by wave with an initial IFR of 0.2 are: 1) 0.2, 2) 0.22, 3) 0.24, 4) 0.26, 5) 0.28, 6) 0.30, 7) 0.32, 8) 0.34, 9) 0.36%.

So, is it plausible the entire population has been infected with covid 9 times? Quick answer, no. Therefore, it is deeply implausible the initial IFR of covid on the naive population was under 0.2%.

Let's imagine for a moment an IFR of 0.2%. I guarantee we've had more covid infections than the total population at this point. If the whole US got covid just once, that's 660 thousand deaths. When you ask me to justify where all those deaths came from if not covid, I want you to remember it's only like 1/3rd of the death count that's even in dispute here, and the remaining third represents about a 10% increase in death rate over normal years.

If we want to do simple math, they estimate 1.17 million excess deaths in the US over 2020 and 2021, but if you subtract total 2019 deaths from 2020 and 2021, you only get 1.14 million excess deaths. This isn't a lie, their estimates go two years from March to February, not January to December, but if we just take out the 150,000 additional deaths one could reasonably expect by just continuing the trend of increasing death rate each year, suddenly the "excess deaths are greater than reported!" disappears completely. At which point, to say that all excess deaths are caused by covid is to deny that anyone may have died from secondary effects. But we know a lot of people died of other causes that increased in rate during the pandemic.

Here's my question for you: if I told you in the absence of a pandemic the US was going to shutdown large amounts of the economy, tell people to stay inside their homes, and turn non-emergency cases away from the hospitals, leading to political upheaval and a summer of riots, and as a result 10% more people died during that time period than normal, would you find that implausible?

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Person who claims credit for debunking Pizzagate ( a conspiracy theory about a network of child abuse and rape happening and being done by prominent people and hidden and covered up)

is arrested for multiple child rapes

John Podesta's Friend, Who 'Debunked' Pizzagate, Arrested for Child Rape | EUTimes.NET ⚡ Hidden Story ⚡

A mainstream journalist and close friend of John Podesta, who bragged about ‘debunking’ Pizzagate, has been arrested on a sickening slew of child rape charges.

www.eutimes.net

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

What the holy fuck are you talking about?

When they record crimes, they record crimes. There is no distinction between "secondary hit", whatever that means. You are burgled or not burgled, and you are hit in dodgeball or not hit. You set the parameters for your analogy, just accept that you screwed up and it undermined your point.

To go back to the report it's Gun deaths not gun injuries. That's why I brought up being hit but not the target.

No, I'm not forgetting anything.

You're introducing an extremely spurious argument out of nowhere. It has relatively little relevance in the real world because people don't do generally stats on areas with 10 or fewer households where that sort of noise in the data would have such an outsize effect. Not least because the larger scale statistics of rural versus urban will often be national averages.

Yet comparatively to small midwestern towns to thriving metropolis cities the different is close to the same for number of people.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

He was an amateur MMA competitor, which puts him in the position as an army reservist. He'll know a little about a lot and a lot about a little but until he's been in the shit he's unproven and fate is a fickle mistress indeed. And there's a difference between a bout in a ring and a punch up in some random office.

Regardless of that its a fucking disgrace that it even got to this point. Like fucking Christ these people are supposed to be statesmen.

Well yes, the disgrace is the democrat senator feeling happy to basically attack and goad another senator essentially playing chicken and while I can say I admire Bernie for consistency on trying to keep decorum at this stage Bernie needs to realise decorum is kind of done and has been since Biden was on about taking Trump out behind the bike sheds (a euphemism for wanting to fight him). It's a new level of being a piece of shit by challenging people to a fight and calling them the coward understanding they will struggle to take up said challenge in any real capacity while also keeping decorum.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

A bald guy recorded himself emotionally shitting his pants and then, upon reviewing the footage, thought yeah that's how I want the world to see me and just went ahead and uploaded it. An extremely humdrum nontroversy of epically everyday proportions.

Context:

On a 3 hour long livestream for about 5 minutes of it a guy whose schtick in part if deliberately over-reactions yelled about pronouns being in everything being a stupid paradigm of the modern world. This was then clipped by a left wing slacktivist and posted on twitter and presented as a guy just having made this video on it rather that in the wider context of a long live steam with a person who deliberately over-reacts.

It would be like me saying this the entirety of Hasan Piker's content is whining that people just want him to die and him not understanding stuff

 

[Ag3ma]

Let's imagine for a moment an IFR of 0.2%. I guarantee we've had more covid infections than the total population at this point. If the whole US got covid just once, that's 66 million deaths.

You've made a very, very large mistake in that calculation.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Today in woke world. Davros the evil creator of the Daleks represents all disabled people

https://x.com/RadioFreeSkaro/status/1725640846413013337?s=20

 

[Satinavian]

You've made a very, very large mistake in that calculation.

Don't be mean, explain the mistake.

0.2% = 0.002. So 660 000 deaths not 66 million.

 

[Silvanus]

Person who claims credit for debunking Pizzagate ( a conspiracy theory about a network of child abuse and rape happening and being done by prominent people and hidden and covered up)

is arrested for multiple child rapes

John Podesta's Friend, Who 'Debunked' Pizzagate, Arrested for Child Rape | EUTimes.NET ⚡ Hidden Story ⚡

A mainstream journalist and close friend of John Podesta, who bragged about ‘debunking’ Pizzagate, has been arrested on a sickening slew of child rape charges.

www.eutimes.net

Jesus Christ, you're genuinely posting an article that pushes Pizzagate as genuine. What a fucking joke, get a grip.

 

[Ag3ma]

To go back to the report it's Gun deaths not gun injuries. That's why I brought up being hit but not the target.

Yes, that is correct. The problem is not that you didn't get to the right conclusion on gun homicides being more common in urban areas, but that you completely screwed up a lot of the reasoning on how to assess safety.

Yet comparatively to small midwestern towns to thriving metropolis cities the different is close to the same for number of people.

For a single small unit and single year, yes. But responsible statisticians are not going to make that kind of rookie error.