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United States News Title: We Are Not “All In This Together” - But Perhaps “We” Should Be There are two questions that deserve answers as the new normal is imposed on the rest of us by some of us. The first is: At what point does an asserted risk to some no longer justify the imposition of certain harm on everyone? At least 33 million Americans have been forced out of their jobs and into the poorhouse; every American has had his life diminished, basic freedoms curtailed his peace of mind assaulted. Well, not every American. Which brings up the second question: Why arent the some who have imposed open-ended harm on the many required to share in the harm they insist is necessary? We are told that people are dying and indeed they are. But how did this suddenly become a blank check claim on the lives of everyone else? It is considered unfeeling to make cost-benefit calculations when human lives are at risk but this is nonetheless something we do all the time without insisting on a zero-risk result, no matter the cost. Suddenly, a virus with a mortality rate similar to that of seasonal flus thats less a threat than medical malpractice has become an intolerable risk that justifies unlimited harm inflicted on almost everyone. But not everyone. Because we are not as the treacly phrase has it all in this together. Some of us the people whove imposed the harm on the rest of us are very much out of this. Some go about their business uninhibited and unscathed; these some having the power to declare their business (and their paychecks) essential while simultaneously declaring ours not. Why is this tolerated? If, in fact, we are all in this together? There is a glib congruency between those who urge harm on all for the sake of some. The people so urging are almost axiomatically people who arent being harmed, which explains their position nicely. The politicians and bureaucrats; the fulsomely essential workers who continue to get paid while the rest of us continue to bleed. The big box stores and large corporate retailers. Their businesses are open. The Essential People are not falling behind on their mortgages, watching their savings disappear, the work of a lifetime evaporating with each passing day of enforced idleness. They arent suffering the humiliation of having to beg for government alms and staring at a future of poverty and want. It is certainly is easier for The Essential People to demand that others suffer. Because they arent suffering. They have the luxury of averring all risk because it imposes no costs . . . on them. But they have the gall or is it simply moral deafness? to tell the rest of us that we are all in this together. Meaning, we bleed while they preen. They have achieved this by shaming us on the one hand and virtue-signaling on the other. If we complain about being bankrupted we are putting dollars over lives. If we question Fear Masking mandates, anti-social distancing edicts and Soviet-style bread lines to get into stores we are indifferent to the health of our fellow man. People are dying! Indeed, they are. About the same number as have died in the past from or more accurately because of complications developed from various other forms of Corona, such as pneumonia in the elderly and already very sick and so already very susceptible. This is normal. It was accepted as part of life until all of a sudden it wasnt because of a concerted propaganda campaign unparalleled in the history of the world that has succeeded in terrorizing the population into a state of paralytic obeisance, using per Dr. Goebbels instructions a kernel of truth: There is a virus; it does present a real danger to some. None of that is new. But by creating the impression of newness and by greatly exaggerating the threat, one can generate new hysteria. Note that the media organs have in concerted fashion as if on cue recently begun calling Corona COVID-19, in order to get the public using that term, too. And the public has begun to use it, reflexively unconsciously like a flock of ducks quacking on cue. Like 911. This is linguistic conditioning intended to get the public to think of this Corona as a wildly different and wildly more threatening Corona, which it isnt in order to terrify the public into believing it must accept a new normal more linguistic conditioning of greatly restricted personal freedom and practically unlimited government authority. The public is also being conditioned to regard infections styled cases, to give it weight as something abnormal. Which, again, it isnt. Well, it wasnt. Millions of cases normally occur each year; i.e., almost everyone gets infected with various colds and flus over the course of their lives. All of a sudden, these are terrifying cases reported ominously, every day. Thereby making them seem ominous. It is much more threatening to hear about 230,000 new cases than a few thousand deaths. The latter sad but not abnormal. More than 100,000 Americans died in 1968 of or with the Hong Kong Flu. Why wasnt the country locked down then? Because the country wasnt yet in the grip of a consolidated media and pervasive instilled fear of risk such that a bad flu season could be turned into a simulacrum of the Black Death in the minds of the population. America was a sane country back then. It is becoming insane. The Goebbelsian kernel of truth about the novel Corona virus hyped to an extinction level threat terrorizes the suggestible and emotional and makes it very difficult for the thoughtful and rational to be heard amid the manufactured hysteria. People are dying! Weapons of mass destruction! It worked 20 years ago, when the kernel of truth was Islamic terrorism, though the actual threat to most of us of an ululating jihadi making off with our freedom was in the same ballpark as the threat to almost all of us of being killed by the novel Millions of people who arent sick are walking around wearing surgical masks and gloves to avoid giving something they havent got but dread they may have. This is the very definition of neurosis. Four months ago, people so afflicted would have been pitied and treated, psychiatrically. Not emulated. Millions of people who have little to fear from Corona have accepted house arrest, business arrest and are practically begging the government to treat the entire population as a leper colony in perpetuity using whatever means necessary and no matter what it costs. Perhaps those costs should be spread around some more. It might do something to curtail the hysteria and just maybe, well be able to re-establish normalcy. . . . Got a question about cars, Libertarian politics or anything else? Click on the ask Eric link and send em in! Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 7.
#1. To: Deckard (#0)
We know that NOW, jerkoff. But in the beginning everyone was told there would be 2 million U.S. deaths from Covid-19. As reported by the New York Times, a 20‐page report from Neil Fergusons team at Imperial College London projected up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States from such a spread. So what are we supposed to do -- treat that like a seasonal flu? Asshole.
The group has also shared its fatality estimates with the C.D.C., Dr. Ferguson said, including that eight to nine percent of people in the most vulnerable age group, 80 and older, could die if infected. After Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci sat with the president the US went into lockdown and since that time over 30 MILLION Americans have lost their jobs and thousands of companies have gone bankrupt. In late March, Neil Ferguson, who was behind the Imperial College coronavirus study, backtracked and said 20,000 Brits may die from the coronavirus instead of his original estimates of 500,000. Neil Ferguson resigned from his government post as researcher a week ago after he was caught breaking his own lockdown rules by meeting with his married mistress at his home. Sue Denim, a software engineer for 30 years, studied the Dr. Fergusons model and concluded it is complete garbage and cannot be scientifically replicated. In her concluding remarks Denim says the Imperial College model should be retracted immediately. Conclusions. All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperials modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isnt under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one. On a personal level, Id go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts dont have these people, and the results speak for themselves. And now two leading international computer software engineers write that Fergusons model was, on its face, incompetent and would not have been accepted by anyone well-versed in computer technology.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Shouldn't the question be, "Will Neil Ferguson Serve Time in Prison for Destroying US Economy Based on His Ridiculous Imperial College Model Now Proven as Complete Trash?"
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