There's a case to be made for lifting capacity restrictions to help struggling businesses, but why lift the mask mandate at this point? Seems to be playing with fire right now with no real benefitOriginally Posted by JaxRed
There's a case to be made for lifting capacity restrictions to help struggling businesses, but why lift the mask mandate at this point? Seems to be playing with fire right now with no real benefit
"In our sundown perambulations of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing 'base', a certain game of ball. Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms, the game of ball is glorious"
-Walt Whitman
Ummm...nah. Nope. Sorry, no. Those aren't the words that come to mind. In fact, it's mostly the opposite of those words.
"The problem with strikeouts isn't that they hurt your team, it's that they hurt your feelings..." --Rob Neyer
"The single most important thing for a hitter is to get a good pitch to hit. A good hitter can hit a pitch that’s over the plate three times better than a great hitter with a ball in a tough spot.”
--Ted Williams
I think we can agree that no one should be knowingly passing any disease to others. I can even say that everyone should follow their conscience always. I may disagree about reported numbers or the best way of moving forward, but I would still encourage everyone to follow their conscience. But I think what we may disagree on are what we assume to be facts, sources, etc. People disagree. Is it fair to accuse others of being devoid of empathy if they do not believe their actions are harming anyone?
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I get it. You don't like me. Can I suggest you place me on ignore?
Understand that there are already many states w/o a mask mandate, Florida being one of them, and their numbers are about in the middle in terms of cases and deaths. There are about 20 states that do not have a mask mandate. Do the math and you can see that we're getting very close to the point where a majority of the states will not have a mandate. If you drive down I-75, once you hit Jellico Mountain in northern Tennessee, you can keep driving to Miami and all the way to Key West and you'll not be in a state with a mask mandate
There's a lot of people that guy doesn't like. Join the club. He thinks differently than a lot of us. I do not dislike any poster here but I do sometimes dislike their posts. That's a key difference.
Are you kidding? When you first started posting, I thought you were trying to imitate Larry. Then I realized you were serious and it became twice as funny.
You don't get placed on ignore EVER.
LOL..."because Stalin"..."too academic or esoteric". Oh...my...God...oh...so good...
"The problem with strikeouts isn't that they hurt your team, it's that they hurt your feelings..." --Rob Neyer
"The single most important thing for a hitter is to get a good pitch to hit. A good hitter can hit a pitch that’s over the plate three times better than a great hitter with a ball in a tough spot.”
--Ted Williams
Wonderful Monds (03-02-2021)
Kind of depends on the amount of willful avoidance being employed to sustain that belief. This disease moves from a walk to a gallop real quick. We've seen it happen repeatedly. If anything, COVID has feasted on individual people doing a miserable job of assessing risk and following basic public health guidance.
However, your question was how are you supposed to assume empathy in others. And the answer is they've been demonstrating it in front of you.
I'm not a system player. I am a system.
"John Galt would have gotten the Rona"
~ Pauley Shore
M2 (03-02-2021),RFS62 (03-04-2021),Wonderful Monds (03-02-2021)
You do not need to be a psychologist to know that people have a very hard time changing their assumptions- especially after publicly advocating for them. "Eating crow" is difficult for everyone. "Covid alarmists," "covid deniers," and everyone in between. Covid19 is so complex and consuming, I am going out on a limb to say that everyone who has followed along has been wrong about some aspect of it. Lots of crow to be eaten by all. I am not claiming any special expertise in infectious diseases, but I still have some basic 'science 101 questions' that have never been answered. And moving beyond those questions we come to the meat of the matter. Who is qualified to decide quality versus quantity of life decisions? Who is qualified to decide when taking away experiences from one is okay to extend the life of another? I don't think it is an easy question to answer. I don't have one at the ready and I am quite suspicious of anyone who thinks the answer is obvious. I want to see the "algorithm" being applied.
I don't blame you for acting to protect others. It is a noble act. Please understand my problem is the evidence as it has been presented. Could I be wrong. Sure. I am fallible. But it goes against my conscience to accept premises which "do not add up." Someone has to ask "how did you come by your conclusion?" Scientists do this all the time, and I am a scientist. Maybe not a great one. And certainly not a medical researcher. But questions of data validity transfer across all the sciences just as 2+2 is 4 in biology and physics. So I do not think you are a bad person because you do not share my skepticism. But I also do not think my skepticism makes me heartless.
I am not sure I understood your point about empathy at the bottom.
There’s a lot of heavy lifting being done by glossing over the whole “questioning the facts and numbers” aspect of your beliefs here. What does that mean? Are we questioning that only, say half the reported number of people have died of COVID? Less than that? What supposed facts are we questioning here?
That’s what’s hard to take seriously, because it seems like the answer is kind of readily apparent, and it’s not a reasonable or good one.
Yes, you've amply demonstrated that.
I'm not a system player. I am a system.
Okay man. You are turning the corner toward creepy. Since you enjoy lecturing others about their lack of empathy, you may want to re-examine how well your gleeful mockery matches the emotional tone of a covid19 thread. I may question the official numbers, but we both agree that at least some real people are suffering somewhere, correct? Differences aside, this is no joke.
To address one of the shotgun scattered questions above - the average age of death vs life expectancy, the average covid victim had 16 years of life left:
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world...udy-finds.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s415...s%2016%20years.
That’s a peer reviewed study. I think any reasonable public health authority has the right to advocate for that.
757690 (03-03-2021),Larkin Fan (03-02-2021),M2 (03-02-2021),RFS62 (03-04-2021)
Please bear with me as a relate a personal experience. My aunt died this summer. I was not super close to my aunt but she was always good to me growing up. I will miss her. Her health had been failing for a long time. She suffered from diabetes and had several amputations over the years. When she last entered the hospital her health was rapidly deteriorating. No one expected her to go back home. While at the hospital she acquired covid and passed away. She was counted as a covid death. Due to covid restrictions, her funeral was up in the air for awhile. I, quite regretfully, missed it. My dad, who was able to make the trip on short notice described the masks and mandatory distancing. When I was sorting through all of this later I starting wondering how a person weighs the failure of business, closure of schools, parks, etc. with extending her life. This includes the funeral itself. Telling grieving family to separate seems... less than human. There is real price to the restrictions. You can't quantify all aspects of this price. Many people seem quite comfortable downplaying this price as a pittance compared the "lives saved." How do you reach this conclusion? How many lives did the funeral restrictions save? Does anyone really know? For all the talk of empathy, I do not see it. A person with real empathy would empathize with the pain caused by early death and the experiences, business, and human contact lost- not amplify one and minimize the other.
I do not claim that the circumstances surrounding my aunt's passing are representative. But I know they are not unique. There was a controversy about a payment disparity being made to hospitals. That would incentivize covid as the official cause of death. Was this changed? This would clearly amplify the number of deaths. By how much? I don't know. But I do know of at least one instance of it. I see a lot of uncertainty in all of this. I see no easy answers. It has been a hard time for many of us in many ways. I'd like to sort it out without the vitriol.
Just to restate what has been made clear numerous times on this board:
There was not a choice between opening the economy vs. saving lives. If we didn’t have the limited lockdown that we had, the economy would have been destroyed by all the deaths and hospitalizations that would have occurred, so we would have had far greater death and illness, and a cratered economy far worse than what we experienced.
The lockdown both saved lives and the economy.
Hoping to change my username to 75769024
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