CntOutSmrtCrazy wrote:pancakes3 wrote:imagine being a self-styled 34 year old libertarian in the year of our lord 2023.
The lib argument against going full open during pandemic was always that while most people will survive, (1) it would kill many elderly and those with comorbidities, (2) we didn't know what the long term impact of Covid is (long term impacts for no-vax full covid is a lot different than post-vax omicron), and (3) we didn't know the impact it would have on children (opening you're saying you're ok with risking 50 Million+ children growing up and living the rest of their lives with diminished lung capacity).
The republican stance on Covid took advantage of those with a narrower, more selfish world view by harping on the fact that most people will survive, and then burying their heads in the sand re: the unknown long term consequences of surviving covid. Yeah, sure, Nate may have been ok. Nate's parents wouldn't have. My parents would not have. Millions of older people would not have.
And re: the Cochrane Library study - the takeaway of the study isn't that masks don't work. The takeaway is that the network effect of masks matter more than the actual mask itself. The point of putting a mask on isn't to put up a force field that filters out Covid. The point is to catch sneezes and limit carriers from expelling it to others. When you sneeze, the mask catches your spit and keeps it from being aerosolized. An unmasked sneezer's spit gets out into the air and is aerosolized, is floating out there, and there are lots of ways to get around a recipient's mask that's not airtight around the wearer's nose/mouth. What I mean by network effect is that on an individual level, putting on a mask vs. not is not a measurable independent variable to measure. The value of putting on a mask vs. not contributes to the overall compliance rate for the population, which is a much more difficult model and one that the Cochrane Library declined to roll their sleeves up on. My personal infection rate of putting on a mask or not is affected by how many people around me also choose to put on a mask vs. not. That's why the result of mask efficacy (for an individual) returns the null hypothesis in the Cochrane study. To which I say, uh doi, Cochrane. What's your point?
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014564118
The pushback from credible non-maskers is that "if 99% of the population is healthy, why mandate it?" Well ok, if it's May 2020 and we had only a few dozen cases, no, we don't need mask mandates. But we need testing to find out who has it, so we can quarantine them, and everyone else can go about their lives. But without testing and without masks, a soft lockdown isn't going to do squat re: containing the disease.
it's weird that you remember it as just libs dumping on Nate's "even keeled, fact-based reasoning."
Obviously externalities mean nothing to you because the residual harm caused by lockdowns whether you talk about learning setbacks across young age groups, depression across all age groups, rise in homeless populations, crime going up, and inflation has been palpable and have been exacerbated by said lockdowns and other poor policies. As they say, the path to hell was paved with good intentions. You seem okay with that, because "we didn't know", that is was okay to undertake massive social engineering for a virus that you seem to want to act as if it is a modern day plague when it simply isn't. With that said, I'm also not saying one shouldn't be diligent with preventing said spread of Covid, but when it captures the entirety of society and peoples lives and causes catastrophic externalities, then you have a problem with your policy.
One of the biggest measurements of the pandemic from various organizations, institutions, and media were deaths attributed to Covid and even the methodology behind how those deaths were/are counted is shaky (i.e., someone already being very sick and also having Covid, but the death definitively being attributed to Covid).
But go ahead, continue opening your arguments with attacks on folks political philosophies like you did with me. Lest us no forget how enlightened you are with your tribalism and virtue signaling. You can't stand the fact that someone who has admittedly had long history of supporting Democrats, that they wouldn't subscribe to your group-think, foaming at the mouth mentality. I think the real illness we should be concerned with is the mental one which you so perfectly encapsulate, that those dissenting are bad or stupid and that being wrong, in your case, is some form of a psychic death to you, which it isn't. This exact mentality has part of the reason for my own personal political shifts, because your arguments and attitudes are scary looking at the long-term.
If you can't take a step back, and say hey, Democrats and their policies didn't handle this great either, and that maybe that the knee-jerk reactions to the pandemic were in part politically motivated to get Trump out of office, then you are living in a dream world. Again I voted against Trump twice, and would do so again, but don't sit here and act like Dems haven't been baited into doing the exact opposite of what Trump wants/says, even when it is probably isn't the best idea.
But continue to peddle out that I'm a right winger, or some dummy in the year of our lord 2023, you can only attack because you have nothing else to tread on.
lol, ok buddy.
i never said that dems handled the pandemic perfectly, mostly because dems weren't the ones handling the pandmic, lest you forget that trump was president during pandemic. you're the one that's breaking this down along party lines. it's not cool to frame this as a political issue, and for all your talk of knee-jerk reactions to political affiliation, it's pretty obvious that with republicans calling it a fake pandemic, bleaching colons, and perpetuating anti-mask/vaccine pearlclutching, that they were the reactionaries to what they perceived and perpetuated as the "dem response." Dems, LEST YOU FORGET, did not have control of the presidency, House, or Senate. and now you have those same dummies tapdancing like crazy to reconcile the fact that (a) a republican government implemented operation warp speed, eviction moratorium, PPP, etc.; yet (b) it was a fake plague and we should have just ignored it. Nota bene, when I say tapdancing, i really mean gaslighting.
The pandemic response was never a partisan issue until the republicans made it one. nobody campaigned on pandemic response prior to it happening. neither party has a historical stance on what to do in the event of a pandemic. if anything, anti-vax was a a torch that rich coastal elite moms were carrying the torch for, and a thorn for the Dems. Pandemic response is as purple an issue as it gets, and the politicization of it is as pure an instance of one party artificially creating a wedge issue out of whole cloth against the status quo so as to accrue political capital. hint, it's the party that has staked its entire political strategy on eliciting an emotional response from fake grievances against the perceived "other."
i was simply trying to point out why your article doesn't say what you think it says. Fairview sat down and presented some cogent arguments as well. our posts aren't the work of a dem shadow cabal. it's two individuals who arrived at their opinions independently. Compare that to your straw-grasping post; you handwave a laundry list of society's ills as negative "externalities" of "lockdowns and other poor policies." How am I suppose to respond to that? How am I suppose to base a political opinion on that? At best, it's a tautological assertion that bad policies are bad.
But really, I dont know what the f you're trying to say. Did masks cause homelessness? Are vaccines causing depression? Was China's lockdown policy that led to a supply chain disruption somehow part of the Dem agenda to... increase crime? Do you even know what you're mad at? Or what Nate was right about? I'm here trying to map out what your point is, and I really don't get it. It seems to boil down to (1) republicans didn't want to do anything re: pandemic; (2) dems were the ones that pushed to do stuff re: pandemic; (3) a bunch of bad stuff happened during and after the pandemic; (4) because dem did stuff, their stuff must have caused the bad stuff; (5) if we didn't do stuff, we wouldn't have had bad stuff; (6) the dem stuff caused the bad stuff. Sorry, but that's just garbage logic. If that's not what you were trying to say, maybe say it clearer.
as for your libertarianism? sorry to say, that's dumb because you should know better. it's cute for a 24 year old to think that Econ 201 is the panacea for all that ails you but it's embarrassing at 34. classical economics teaches that the intersection of a supply and demand curve is the equilibrium point - the most efficient price point of a given good, determined by the market. everyone to the right of the equilibrium gets a discount because they're willing to pay more and are getting it at a lower price, and everyone to the left of the curve is priced out of the market. works great for widgets. doesn't work as great when it comes to gas, health care, and childcare. it is tantamount to institutionalized murder when applied to food/clothing/shelter. the fact that the model is built such that there will always be a segment of the population who cannot afford necessary goods in the name of efficiency is flawed. which is why the model has to introduce price ceilings, subsidies, and other mechanisms. politics, to me, is the discussion of what mechanisms should be implemented, and how. but libertarians argue for the removal of these mechanisms because they don't like the concept of implementing period? the inability to accept that these mechanisms as necessary to prevent the market from pricing people out of food/clothing/shelter, a/k/a libertarians, is dumb. or cruel. it's certainly bad. it's also consistent with your world view that pandemic is gonna kill who the pandemic is gonna kill. it's a f*cked way to conceptualize society, and you're a bad person for nodding your head along to it. i'd suggest you take a step back and reassess if you really think libertarianism is a good system, or if it's just a simple system.
to me, it's just a simple system. you don't have to think about anything. just go with the "freest" civic. anything that involves the government, bad. anything that restricts individual decisionmaking, bad. it's not like we live in a society that demands the cooperation of the participants, or that in the absence of governmental intervention, modern society devolves into a private plutocracy that results in fewer net freedoms for the individual.
