American Politics Discussion Thread

[Bobchillingworth]

What deadly airborne virus? If the mortality rate for under 70 years old is less than 1%, that is not deadly. Ebola has a ~70% mortality rate. I would say Ebola is deadly.

Not sure, but guessing the one that has killed around 700,000 people in the U.S. in less than two years, and who knows how many millions globally. How many hundreds of thousands of people need to die before you consider something "deadly"? Is terrorism deadly? Are mass shootings, or gun violence of any kind? Hurricanes? Wildfires? Car crashes? You could combine all of those and I'm sure they'd be less than 1% of the total population of the United States. You're talking about an absurd metric, and one which is frankly kind of obscene.

[T-hawk]

And for that the country has been wracked with wave after wave of virus, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of worker nodes and consumer nodes.

So has absolutely everywhere else in the entire world regardless of any amount of lockdowns or other policies. Lockdowns don't, can't, never did, and never will stop it. If they do anything at all, they can only ever delay it until you aren't locked down and then the exponential curve starts right back up again. The last few previously-smug holdouts of Australia and NZ and Singapore are now having this truth fed to them.

We puny hubristic humans are delusional to think we ever had any chance of stopping this thing, at least after those first few weeks when we saw the curve wasn't getting flattened, and certainly once we saw that the vaccines don't come anywhere near immunity.

Virus gonna virus. It showed up in Antarctica in an isolated research base. It showed up on a cruise ship where everyone tested negative beforehand. It spreads through animals, both domestic and wild. We aren't stopping this by any amount of changes to human behavior and anyone that thinks we are just isn't living in reality.

And where the hell did you get "maiming"? The respiratory virus doesn't hack off limbs. Trying to say that just makes your argument look silly, that you're buying and repeating the hysterical fear instead of actually advancing fact and reason.

So in the absence of the political will to implement robust non-pharmaceutical interventions

This is what I was talking about with the left, how they immediately jump to governmental coercion to forcibly impose everything they want. The position that this should never have been any governmental issue at all is so far out of the left's consciousness that they don't even realize that could be a position.

It is written as clear as could possibly be in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. No law abridging the right of the people to peaceably assemble.

Every restriction on every business conducting its affairs and hosting who it wanted to host was completely unconstitutional from minute one. No government (at least in the US) ever had any business imposing any pandemic restrictions at all. But just ignored that when people decided they were frightened enough.

That's not to say the government couldn't help. It would be fine to issue warnings and analytical data like case counts. That would be reasonable acting in the public good, like the government does for hurricanes or other such adverse phenomena. But the left didn't even think about that as the proper role for government here, to simply advise and let people make their own risk management decisions.

As far as gun control, as Jowy said your position and the Democrats' aren't that far off. The idea that they want to take away everyone's guns in America is a hysterical falsehood, peddled in bad faith by Republicans.

I think they would if they could, but they've figured out they can't use it as a platform or implement it as actual policy, they'll lose more swing votes than they gain. Really the situation is that pro-gun voters are single-issue voters, while for anti-gun voters it's on average much farther down the list. Second Amendment defenders will swear they will die to defend it, but nobody says they would die to repeal it.

(For a converse example of that with the sides reversed, look at LGBT issues. For LGBT people, support for that is their #1 concern. For people against it, it's much less of a priority since it doesn't affect them personally. Democrats peddle in bad faith the hysteria that Republicans want to ban same-sex marriage or impose conversion therapy or whatever. Republicans mostly recognize they can't really implement any such policy, it would turn more hatred against them than it would help, same as Dems banning guns.)

I'm anti-gun but pro-2A. Guns have no place in a civilized society and do more harm than good. The power fantasies of defending your home Rambo style just don't happen in reality, compared to the much more likely scenario of hurting yourself or someone on your side. The militia envisioned by the founders is an outdated relic compared to modern military technology. Nobody is going to use their hunting rifle to depose some imagined tyrant in this millennium.

But -- it's not my place or the government's to forcibly impose that viewpoint on anyone else. And the Second Amendment is written to recognize and codify that.

More generally, the rights codified in those amendments are there to protect the rights of a minority against the mob rule of a majority. In a democracy, if 51% of people vote to forcibly disarm or mask or inject the other 49%, the other 49% are fucked. It feels great when you get to make everyone else follow your opinion -- until the time when you find your opinion is the one on the unpopular side, and you're the one in need of the rights and protections that you just burned down.

[T-hawk]

You are anti-mandate but not anti-vaxx, so I take it you took the vaccine?

That's my private medical information. I don't care either way if anyone got the vaccine, and nobody else has a right to know or care if I did.

(What I mean is that I don't care, medically speaking. Make your own decisions about the risk factors of Covid and of the vaccines. Politically speaking, I do like when people choose not to take it, because that will mean support against mandates.)

[Jowy]

You are anti-mandate but not anti-vaxx, so I take it you took the vaccine?

That's my private medical information.  I don't care either way if anyone got the vaccine, and nobody else has a right to know or care if I did.

(What I mean is that I don't care, medically speaking.  Make your own decisions about the risk factors of Covid and of the vaccines.  Politically speaking, I do like when people choose not to take it, because that will mean support against mandates.)

Well that answers the question regardless.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

When someone leaves the hospital but can no longer work, has long term health issues, require an oxygen mask at home, has had limbs amputated due to gangrene, they have been maimed by the virus. Death isn't the only outcome. The inability of dipshits to see this is why everyone obsesses over only the case fatality rate.

Society wants to avoid this outcome. No matter the political economy, whether it's a completely free market capitalism, liberal capitalism, state capitalism, market socialism, centrally planned socialism, you do not want a deadly airborne respiratory virus running rampant. When your political economy is built around lots of market transactions, a deadly airborne virus kills workers and consumers, and makes a sizable portion of workers and consumers try and avoid catching the deadly airborne virus. NPIs are not an either/or, governments that have allowed the virus to rip through the population, like Brazil or India, see both massive death rates AND economic contraction as people make private decisions to not catch a deadly airborne virus.

But there is only a limited amount of gas in the tank to sustain NPIs. And pharmaceuticals exist, and they are almost miraculously effective. But when there is a political movement over refusing to take that vaccine and getting back in line at Starbucks, governments have no choice but to enforce vaccinations with mandate so that you no longer hack your lungs out and occupy valuable hospital space. Collective action alone has failed. You fucking morons bought this on yourself.





BTW no one here's going to be impressed by you doing the Tucker Carlson virtue signal of refusing to disclose whether or not you've taken the vaccine (he has btw, Fox News has a strict vaccine and mask mandate because the barely motile ghoul who runs the organization would drop dead the instant it gets into his lung).

[CFCJesterFool]

What deadly airborne virus? If the mortality rate for under 70 years old is less than 1%, that is not deadly. Ebola has a ~70% mortality rate. I would say Ebola is deadly.

Not sure, but guessing the one that has killed around 700,000 people in the U.S. in less than two years, and who knows how many millions globally.  How many hundreds of thousands of people need to die before you consider something "deadly"?  Is terrorism deadly?  Are mass shootings, or gun violence of any kind?  Hurricanes?  Wildfires?  Car crashes?  You could combine all of those and I'm sure they'd be less than 1% of the total population of the United States.  You're talking about an absurd metric, and one which is frankly kind of obscene.

There is a difference between dangerous and deadly when talking about viruses. We don't call the seasonal flu deadly and it kills tens of thousands (too lazy to look up the exact numbers) every flu season (period of several months.) The mortality rate is what determines whether a virus is deadly or not and less than one percent only qualifies for dangerous. I don't panic when the odds are in my favor since it isn't productive. Also, historically, there have been events that qualified as deadly, the black plague being one that immediately comes to mind. The Spanish flu iirc had about 10-12% mortality rate and that is in a range where I find the term deadly applicable.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I'm glad that you have zero say in epidemiological policy defining what is and isn't dangerous but I regret that your garbage opinions pollute the public discourse.

[Jowy]

If Covid isn't deadly, I have to wonder what is. Diabetes? Alzheimers? Strokes? Accidents? Cancer? Apparently none of them are that deadly then, because last month in the US, more people died from Covid than from any of those causes. Only heart disease is ahead of Covid, and only by a little. Covid actually peaked at clear #1 cause of death back in January before the vaccines started rolling out. The only reason it is at all in manageable numbers (and still the second leading cause of deaths!) is because of the vaccines. For middle-aged people 35-54, Covid last month was the leading cause of death, beating everything else. Btw Covid has surpassed the Spanish Flu in death count in the US, even though back then they had no vaccines and no antibiotics. It is the deadliest pandemic in US history. But I guess it's not The Black Death so I guess it's not that bad then!

[Bobchillingworth]

There is a difference between dangerous and deadly when talking about viruses. We don't call the seasonal flu deadly and it kills tens of thousands (too lazy to look up the exact numbers) every flu season (period of several months.) The mortality rate is what determines whether a virus is deadly or not and less than one percent only qualifies for dangerous. I don't panic when the odds are in my favor since it isn't productive. Also, historically, there have been events that qualified as deadly, the black plague being one that immediately comes to mind. The Spanish flu iirc had about 10-12% mortality rate and that is in a range where I find the term deadly applicable.

Okay, I see where the disconnect is. You're basing your assessment on whether Covid is "deadly" on two factors: first, you don't consider anything with a mortality rate under double digits to be "deadly", but merely "dangerous", and second you're assuming your personal risk factor is under 1%, and therefore the virus is not a deadly threat.

This is flawed reasoning, and would make for catastrophic public health policy. For one, public health officials have to take a more holistic approach when weighing risk than only considering whether a virus is likely to kill CFCJesterFool. Additionally, while a virus which spread as easily and rapidly as Covid but killed at least 10% of the people it infected (under 70 even, as my understanding is that those who are older don't count for much in your estimation of virus lethality) would indeed be more deadly (and also almost certainly cause the collapse of the global economy and catastrophic societal disruptions, as hundreds of millions died), that doesn't mean the virus which "only" kills around 2% of those it infects isn't.

And again, this really isn't about you personally. Like, I could not care less whether you live or die; we've never met, I know almost nothing about you, and your personal risk factors are irrelevant for how dangerous Covid is to myself and those who actually do matter to me. It's fine I guess if you don't believe Covid is a deadly threat to your well-being, so long as you don't walk around unvaccinated, potentially infecting others or incubating new variants, but it's not reasonable for you to then declare that it's therefore not deadly to humans in general.

[DaveV]

I'm against guns ... but I'd buy a gun if I lived in the US.

Again, your gun is far more likely to be used against someone in your family than against the PCP-addled predator in the NRA commercials. And in the event of such a home invasion, would you be able to use the gun? I don't think I, personally, could shoot someone in cold blood; in an emergency, my hand  would probably be shaking so much I'd be more likely to shoot my dog than the intruder. If you hear a noise in another part of your house (or your front door being broken down, like Breonna Taylor's boyfriend), will you just start blazing away? If you yell, "I have a gun," the intruder is alerted that he needs to shoot first.

You should not purchase a firearm if you are suicidal, live in a household with persons who pose a threat to your physical well-being, suffer from psychosis, have criminally violent ideation, and/or cannot be trusted to secure your weapons properly in the presence of children and guests.  You should also seek professional help if dealing with any of the aforementioned. 

This is disingenuous at best. You need not be suicidal at the time of purchase to become suicidal later (or to have another potentially suicidal individual in the household); the person who is inflicting the violence is likely to be the one to buy the gun (and will believe he is entirely justified in doing so), and someone with criminal ideation is going to want a firearm to carry out that ideation. Side note: as gun laws become more lax with respect to red flags, criminal or mentally unstable history, and training (bullet goes in this hole, comes out this hole, good luck!), it becomes the sole responsibility of the purchaser to determine his own qualification. The more potentially dangerous he is, the less likely he is to be able to make a good judgement of that danger.

As I've mentioned before, I own several firearms.  Primarily they're for target shooting, which I'll happily argue is as legitimate a recreational activity as any sport or game of skill.  I also find them mechanically interesting and just overall cool.  Self-defense is a part of it too, of course, and it extends past the desire to protect myself in a home invasion scenario; some of my ancestors were forced to flee their homeland for fear of pogroms and eventually genocide, and I refuse to intentionally deprive myself of the means to resist that sort of violence.  Those who think it can't happen here are fooling themselves, and I suspect more than a little privileged. 

Are you one of those militia guys that wants an arsenal so he can overthrow the government if it starts to infringe on his rights? If so, yikes; if not, that's where this reasoning inevitably leads.