So what you're saying is that you personally hold Trump to a different standard than everyone else. I understand. You hate the man, and are insistent on seeing the worst of all things within him, and it frustrates you that I won't play that game.
Food for thought: COVID up, flu WAY down
- Thread starter Eacaraxe
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That's a spectacular logical non-sequitur to what I just wrote.
By which I wonder whether you are telling us that you can't really dispute the evidence about what Trump has done and is like, and you're just so unwilling to back down you've flung a random ad hominem instead.
You've put me in the position where it's my only recourse, not because you've made an argument so good I can't dispute it, but because you've made an argument based entirely on your own subjective interpretations of Trump's character. That's not something I can dispute with evidence. There is nothing I could possibly say that you can't respond with "yes, but I believe he did that thing with this bad motive." I can't tell you Trump's words, because those are all lies to you. I can't tell you the words of others with personal knowledge, because they're all being manipulated in your mind. I have no recourse but to point out that your perspective on all Trump-related situations begins with a dogmatic stance that Trump is evil, and anything that contradicts that must be false.
Dude: there's 70 years of evidence on Trump's character, including from plenty of people who have known him well.
How else are we to characterise his history of lying, grotesque self-aggrandisement, fraud, abuse, corruption, self-interest, etc.? Surely at some point you have to accept that many decades of consistent behaviour comprehensively testified on by so many people isn't just some media traducement of a misunderstood, benevolent, stable genius. The thing that people like you and Houseman constantly overlook about Trump's conduct as president is that all those many stories are completely consistent with his conduct before he became president.
I mean, your idea of "evidence" is to take 50 incidents typical of the behaviour of a bully, give Trump the benefit of the doubt with the kindliest interpretation or exculpation on all 50, and declare there's no evidence he's a bully. Unfortunately, that is not evidence-based thinking, it's the annihilation of it.
In other words, "exercise common fucking sense" -- from a personal and public policy standpoint.
Straight up, do you believe the US has had "challenges" keeping COVID spread under control unique to it, being the only country in the developed world that lacks mandatory paid leave and any form of universal health care? Having decades-old and degrading public health and sanitation infrastructure? Severely degrading educational standards?
Where 40% of the population prior to COVID couldn't afford a $1,000 emergency expense and didn't have a positive net worth? You wanna take a wild stab at where that economic KPI might've gone in the last year considering what we already know about US job, food, and housing insecurity mid-pandemic?
Flu season happens every year. That's why it's called flu season. God forbid we expect governments to mandate paid sick leave and livable wages of employers so sick employees can, you know, stay home and not spread infectious diseases without worrying about their next pay check or getting sacked. God forbid we expect people to practice basic fucking hygiene, wear masks, and limit contact for a whopping month out of the year.
For someone who's been riding high on "orange man bad" for years, your "opinions" here are starting to sound real Trumpian.
"Personal freedom", huh? Now, where else might I have heard that canard? Certainly not from the same group of millions who consider the exercise of even an iota of social awareness or civic responsibility intolerable.
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In situations where those a reasonable explanations of behavior, I can agree with you, but you can't just apply that to everything without reason.
Consider: Trump compared covid to the flu. He did so after the media compared it to the flu. He did so after medical experts around the world compared it to the flu. And all those people made that comparison because it's an apt comparison, outside of the then lack of vaccine. What part of "repeating what other people said to him" has any reliance on lying, fraud, and abuse? If I gave you a list of people who made that comparison, would you condemn any other person on the list?
And like, do you not see the logical misstep you're making? Because Trump has done bad things, everything he does must therefore be bad? Like, I'm not appealing to his good character in the cases I defend his motives, I have no expectation that he won't be a sleaze in any given situation, but that's not the same as assuming he's a sleaze in every situation. That's irrational.
I don't think people consider Trump handled Covid horribly and acted out of self interest because at beginning of the outbreak he made the same mistake as many other experts and world leader. However it is what happened afterwards which made people angry:
First he showed a certain realisation that the pandemic was actually worse than he initially thought and closed the borders for people from China and Europe. He even went further than some would have advocated back than. And you know what, with hindsight that measure was a good one. However, when after some weeks of partial lockdowns left and right he noticed that the economy was going down the drain (and this was the only thing he had going for his re-election) he decided to go back to step 1 and marginalise the threat of Covid to justify reopening of the economy. Suddenly Covid would magically dissapear by itself, Hydroxi was a miracle drug, and so on. At that point it became clear the opinions of his experts became meaningless. And that is what people judge him for.
Regardless of your end point, this current debate is dredging up the things I said about his behavior at that first part where you suggest he handled it on par with other places.
Going full Cuomo, are we? Those of limited utility are no genuine concern and if they die, they die, so long as the gears of civilization continue unabated?
Well now at least we have all the cards on the table. I mean that's what, one or two steps removed from declaring the elderly, chronically ill, and immunocompromised der lebensunwertes leben?
And you're conflating my suggestion people ought to wash their damn hands, wear masks, and don't go out acting the damn fool in the middle of flu season, and for the US government to join the rest of the developed world by instituting a livable minimum wage and mandatory sick leave, with nationwide lockdowns...how, precisely?
Funny that reductio ad absurdum seems to be a perfectly legitimate tactic for you, but how dare I ever call others out for employing it or returning fire.
I'm honestly unsure how you read my post without figuring out that's what it was in part about. Especially for one with such a...storied...history of reading my posts.
And yet, the US is the only country in the developed world with a years- or decades-long chain of precipitating policy decisions that all converged to create the perfect storm for catastrophic failure in the event of a global pandemic.
Case in point, remember this little nugget of information that popped out, to be quickly ignored and doublethought around during the mass media's initial rush to blame every aspect of the US's improper COVID response on Trump, as part of a larger push to exceptionalize and pillory him for decades' worth of US policy failure? But silly me, thinking there was an entire presidential administration between Bush and Trump that made a very big deal to the public about pandemic preparedness...while apparently doing fuck-all to make sure US strategic stockpiles of actual equipment that would have to be used during one were up to date.
It sure as shit becomes a problem with your argument when you link that particular flavor of garbage with pushback against sanitation, infrastructure, and public health policy the rest of the developed world enjoys. Which is entirely in lockstep with the typical MAGA bullshit.
No, I didn't say he ran the studies, I said he read the studies. I meant by not needing experts to run the studies is that the studies aren't difficult in methodology to do. Both of us can do these studies just fine (with needed resources of course) and have someone double-check the method and math basically. Now someone to explain the results and why it's happening (e.g. kids not transmitting) would take an expert in the field. He doesn't care about the why because it doesn't matter as to how to make policy. People need to know if something is safe or not, they don't need to know nuts and bolts of it all. Learning about why kids don't transmit could very well be important and lead to more knowledge of viruses and the immune system, but that's not currently needed at this moment. You find out what works now, then later, when you have the time, you figure out the why.
What has made you believe I feel every single kid is 100% safe from covid? You can't have 100% safe, you never have, and you never will. What you can have is that A is safer than B and we're already fine with the risk from B so why are we concerned about A? People can make, you know, general statements that are true 99.9% of the time, there's always the exception. Like saying the sun rises every morning and then someone going, "well actually, if you go high enough north you don't see the sun for months".
The whole model was based on the fact that kids transmit at 50% relative to older ages (20 years and older). That was probably their best guess at the time according to available knowledge, but we now know that isn't true. The study wasn't aiming to determine the rate of transmission by kids, but what would happen IF kids did transmit at this assumed rate.
Here's an excerpt from their study:
"Our analyses have some limitations... Second, as with any modelling study, we have made a series of assumptions within the modelling framework. In particular, we made assumptions about the proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections that are symptomatic, as evidence in the literature is mixed. WHO suggests that 80% of people with infections show mild symptoms and a study from the Italian city of Vo' Euganeo at the epicentre of the European pandemic confirms that a large proportion, 30–50%, of people with infections do not have symptoms; however, other studies suggest that this number is smaller—eg, 10% among children, 18% among passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and 42% among Japanese people returning from Wuhan. There is currently a high degree of uncertainty around the proportion of asymptomatic infection, with evidence suggesting that asymptomatic incidence ranges from 2% to 57%."
If scientists were coming out saying something's not safe, people wouldn't do it. It's not like the government "owns" the scientific community and they can't speak out about it. There were plenty of scientists saying that covid wasn't just the flu when Trump said "it's just the flu". You don't need to be well-versed in scientific literature to know the general leaning of the scientific community. Everyone knows the scientific community is in agreement about global warming without reading any studies or science books. Everyone knows our carbon emission regulations aren't what scientists think they should be.
In early Feb '20, Trump told Woodward that covid was much more lethal than 'flu: he'd been briefed. So he's really not some doddering old grandpa who can't tell the difference between official government briefings and what he's seen on Fox & Friends. Trump also told Woodward "he wanted to always play [covid-19] down".
So, lying. Even by his own admission. I can accept that his intent may have been good (avoiding panic), but I'm not clear the outcome did any good.
I think you're mislabelling "identifying ways in which Trump was a bad president" as "thinks everything Trump did was bad".
Exactly this.
Saving a few years of life for the maybe 10 million that have a few years left is robbing the other 320 million of at least a year of life if you were to full lockdown for the whole year. You're losing more "life" by locking down. That's not to say don't put things in place to protect those vulnerable, but what's the point in protecting everyone when only a small amount need protection?
I can't help but point out there's a lot of difference between a year "lost" to being dead and a year "lost" to sub-optimal living conditions. The latter can still get a lot of enjoyment out of that year, where dead people get precisely nothing.
OK, so he just read the studies and offered opinion. So why are you taking his opinion to be so authoritative? You say above we need an expert. But he's not an expert in the relevant fields.
Yet again, as I've pointed out twice already: it wasn't that kids transmit at half the rate. It was that the age group of <20 on average transmit at half the rate of the age group of >20. So including young adults and adolescents. And other research has suggested that the age at which the risk factor catches up is in adolescence.
You're consistently misrepresenting the study, then just giving that inaccurate description as grounds to dismiss its conclusions out of hand.
Oh, well shall we debate rationale?
Risky Driving | NHTSA
According to the NHTSA, over 90% of vehicle accident fatalities are due to human error. Nearly half of them are due to failure to use restraint devices, a quarter due to speeding, just over a quarter due to impaired (alcohol or drugs) driving, and another three thousand and some change due to distracted or drowsy driving.
All of which are criminal acts in nearly every US jurisdiction, punishable by fine, citation, jail time or revocation of license for serious or repeated offenses. So no, we're not "fine" with it. In fact, we have laws on the books specifically to prevent people from doing stupid shit and getting themselves, and uninvolved parties, killed. And stupid people do it anyways to entirely predictable results.
Just like we still have stupid motherfuckers in this country who won't practice hygiene, wear masks, and go out acting the goddamn fool, and evil motherfuckers in this country refusing to give the public the basic resources necessary to minimize risk through basic public health and economic policy.
Next time, make something of an effort to not trip over your own dick, tumble down a flight of stairs, and land face-first into a kiddie pool full of puppy diarrhea for good measure. Especially if you're going to whinge about others using, in your own words, "insane troll logic".
And it's funny how you ignore how I'm also addressing these points.
Well, I suppose now and here you're left with the conundrum of admitting your argument they have universal health care is either moot, or irrelevant. To say nothing that you've failed to account for the US's lack of mandatory sick leave.
Because the point of hygiene and masks isn't to stop spread, it's to slow it and reduce the chance of infection. Yeah, if your bar is "all or nothing" then you're gonna be disappointed...but it's not "all or nothing" in the first place.
...yeah? Flu season peaks for about a month every winter. So the public has to deal with mask mandates and occupancy limits on public facilities for two to three weeks, at the point coincident economic activity hits its lowest point, every year. While mandating paid sick days, mandating a livable wage, and implementing a real universal health care system, so employees aren't having to come to work sick (and needlessly spreading infectious disease) and can instead actually receive medical treatment if necessary (which would include annual flu vaccinations, just so we're clear).
This wouldn't be a sticking point if it weren't the case here in the US, "personal freedom" is the rallying cry of the stupid to justify reckless stupidity. Had the US a sufficient educational system to foster civic responsibility in the general public as opposed to idealize myopic, selfish, idiocy, you may rest assured this would be a very different conversation. But if we had that, we likely wouldn't have half a million dead of COVID, or a health care system impoverished countries in the economic South would be ashamed to have, in the first place.
Which is precisely why I "banged on" about basic hygiene and masks. The US is, as a country, well and truly that fucking stupid. We as a country have degenerated to a point where washing your goddamn hands is, somehow, controversial. The entire world watched as the wealthiest, supposedly most technologically-advanced, country on the planet struggled with the concept of practicing basic hygiene as a means to prevent infectious disease spread.
So in this regard, fuck "personal freedom". The correlative to "freedom" is "responsibility". If the average member of the American public is so personally and civically irresponsible they can't be trusted to wash their hands after taking a shit, they don't deserve the fucking freedom to run out acting the goddamn fool spreading preventable disease.
I can't help but point out that I said "protect those vulnerable".
Because he read all the studies (by the way, not literally ALL the studies). All the studies when looked at as a whole, show that school is safe. You don't need an expert in the field to extrapolate the data from these studies, they're simple studies. You don't need a flu expert to extrapolate that flu infections go down during school breaks and conclude schools spread the flu, anyone can do that. I said that you'd need an expert to explain the "why", but you don't need to know the why, you just need to know if X = false/true. He is not trying to explain the why, he's telling you whether X is true or false.
You're combining multiple articles into one (the 2nd article does reference the 1st article though). The one modeling study (that 1st Lancet link you posted) was modeled based on kids (whether a 3rd grader or high school senior) spreading the virus at 50% that of adults (that was their assumption). The 2nd Lancet article you posted was basically doing what my doctor did and reading through different types of studies and coalescing them basically. The 2nd article isn't a study. It took available information at the time (before August at least since it was published August 2nd) and said it looks like kids don't transmit the virus much from a few studies. It noted one high school study in France with high attack rates and said there may be an age where school children start spreading like adults. I responded saying "maybe high school isn't safe" but you'd need more than one study obviously. They used the 1st article as talking point about the options for opening schools (like full or partial openings). The point of the article was basically we need more information, and now we have that information since many places have opened schools and there's plenty of numbers that can be analyzed and have been analyzed. When you analyze all the numbers we have, the numbers say school is safe especially for K-8th grade. I (or anyone) would have to look specifically into high school studies to see what they say and whether the France high school study is an outlier or the norm.