Hopwin wrote:
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Of greater concern is economic collapse. particularly the danger to the food supply chain, and the available medical resources. The point of all this is the spread the curve out (lower it), not reduce the area underneath, which is much harder.
This is what everyone in favor of lockdowns has lost sight of or misunderstood imho. They think if we all stay locked up long enough then science will magic up a potion that will cure everyone without any further deaths, despite every credible medical professional stating 12-18 months in the very best scenario.
I'm going to coin here, for purposes of discussion, a term: Person Of Significant Understanding, or POSU. This is so I can type less words, because as we all know, DE already types too many words. POSU, as I'm defining it, is a person who ranges from "advanced level of layman's understanding" all the way to Dr. Fauci. This is because "expert" is largely meaningless; Dr. Fauci is an an expert at the forefront of the medical side; he is no more than a very advanced layman on the economic side.
Now, insofar as people below this floor - for whatever reason; they may be stupid, or just looking at wrong information, or just terrified and unable to really take in new information effectively - are demanding lockdowns, I agree. You can go on Twitter or YouTube and find plenty of angry Caitlins, Emmas, Abigails, and whatever the trendy boy names are (I only had girls, so I didn't learn them) loudly demanding this sort of thing in between tweeting about their vegan lunch during lockdown or revisiting their coming-out video.
You can also find POSUs doing so, and for a variety of reasons.
One of the most prominent is that they're a medical person and this is their professional opinion, which, of course, they are entitled to, although I do take it as questionable when some random nurse is selected to be on TV when she's been awake for 20 hours and wonders when the nightmare is going to be over. Other medical people, such as doctors, I'm sure mostly understand the consequences of the lockdown; they just don't consider those problems to be their job. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx both appear to be in this area. The side effect of this, though, is that when other considerations that aren't their job are considered by the decision-makers, people run screaming to the "SCIENCE!" and "IGNORING THE DOCTORS!" battlements, which brings me to the nest type of POSU.
The second type simply doesn't care. These people are the reverse of the positions Taskiss is apparently taking; although they may have a good grasp of the facts they simply don't grasp the implications. This is why I use the general term POSU - there are definitely prominent people who are scientists advocating that we must remain in full lockdown until there is a vaccine. This is simply impossible; it is not merely politically impossible; it is literally impossible. No amount of government money can make it possible; there has to be stuff to buy with the money. This sort of person either does not understand, or has forgotten, that the economy is not plug-and-play; it cannot be disassembled into component parts that can be run independently of each other. We've tried to do precisely that for a little over a month and the limit is very clearly in sight - and it's sooner than May 30th, although those states that
are starting to open may stave off disaster for the whole country a little longer.
The other type is basically Democratic politicians, most notably AOC, but also quite a few others who clearly actively want the economy to fail so that they can institute "structural change". Note that the President isn't really relevant here; if it were Hillary they'd just have an easier time trying to do it. Some of this is whackjobbery (basically anything AOC says) and some of it is blatant vote-buying efforts (Pelosi's **** on the stimulus bill and idea to just give out $2,000 a month to everyone until employment reaches "pre-COVID levels" at which point that money is going nowhere.) Some of it is also the Press, who are generally more focused on simply ***** about the President and want the lockdown to last only because he wants people (generally) to open up, with the "but not too quickly" part carefully left unmentioned. The press seems not to realize that the economy is a danger to them too; when they start running out of ad revenue they'll figure it out pretty fast, though.
Which category, though, is ultimately irrelevant, because this is not really a political question. Ultimately, the economic shutdown is starting to endanger basic services, and if allowed to go past a certain point will ALSO result in mass COVID deaths, AND will result in large numbers of deaths (and all kinds of other hardships) from other sources. The problem is really not people being stupid or ill-educated; the problem lies heavily with people who are neither but who are simply not capable or not willing to look at all of the picture at once, or else who are turning what is a distinctly apolitical equation into a political one out of sheer habit or partisan cussedness.
To illustrate, and I hope DFK! will forgive me for revealing this, but one point of agreement on our call was that we get very tired of defending the President, but we constantly find ourselves forced to because the criticisms tend to be even more outrageously stupid than anything he says. Take, for example, the hydroxychloroquine debate; the question of its efficacy is completely unrelated to what the President said. He is not a doctor, does not claim to be one, did not say it would necessarily work, and Dr. Fauci clearly explained that it was simply layman's aspirations and there was no daylight between them. On this, (and the same applies to the whole "disinfectant" thing), there is no excuse whatsoever for anyone taking what he said AS advice, much less taking his advice because he was giving none, and it is abundantly clear he is not qualified to do so.
Yet we get constant assertions that people might be taking the stuff or doctors might be over prescribing it, or people might be drinking bleach because of something he said, or else misrepresenting a spike in calls to the poison control center as people actually drinking bleach because the President said so (to date, I am aware of no PCC call for that actual reason). Anyone who did so is already so astoundingly stupid that it's amazing they survived
this long, was trying to commit suicide or murder (as it now appears the fish tank cleaner lady may have), or if they actually were a doctor, had no business being one and ought to be thrown in prison.
Donald Trump does not have mind control powers or magical persuasion abilities. He is not a sorcerer. This kind of argument, put forth seriously by our media every day, rests on
literal magical thinking, wherein the President's words compel both laypeople and medical professionals to abandon ALL judgement in a rush to heed him. This includes all the **** out there might respond "Well Trump's supporters listen to him that way..." or words to that effect. You're ascribing
literal magic powers to the President over 100-150 million people, right before or right after you whine about "listen to the scientists!"
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People are going to die and most of those deaths were unpreventable as soon as this became a pandemic. Flattening the curve just drags those deaths out over a longer period of time.
Literally the only deaths that flattening the curve prevent are people who could not get medical help because services would be overwhelmed otherwise, but now we are seeing that might be a fallacy as well since people have stopped seeking medical care for other ailments and most hospitals have stopped administering a lot of maintenance/preventative medicine during the lockdown.
Fundamentally, our politicians (on both sides), press, and medical establishment are more fearful of triage deaths than any other kind of death. There is an undertone when we talk about death in this country that we are somehow supposed to be living in a post-death society, and that there is an unlimited supply of medical care for everyone that, if only somehow they can get it, will always result in a long, happy life. We have an irresponsible press that was CLEARLY licking its chops in anticipation of the first person to die because we ran out of ventilators; forget where they would have placed the political blame. Our press establishment is positively ghoulish in its search for human suffering to lay blame for - and lives in terror of a lack of problems, and the accompanying viewership or readership, and revenue.
Now, once again, COVID deaths were not baked into society. This is an unassailable point; something CLEARLY had to be done, and the strongest defense of the lockdown measures
at the time they were implemented was that we had no time to plan much of anything else. This applies to everything; I would love to ***** about the shitty homeschooling program my kids are undergoing, but the school district cannot be blamed for throwing something together half-assed because they had no time to do better - certainly not at a task no one had ever attempted before. For all the fussing about how "this should have been seen in January!" (from people who were loudly denying its importance in January), even if we had started a month sooner it probably would not have been a lot better.
Even if, best-case scenario, we had immediately detected the Chinese deception and the government had correctly anticipated what was going to happen here and begun planning and working immediately, the amount of time was
wildly inadequate. The only real chance we ever had was if the Chinese had been honest, and they were not. There was no time for science to be done; research is not accomplished in a few weeks. There was no time to plan the shutdown of something like
70% of the consumer economy.Again, it comes back to our press. The press is mostly incompetent boobs whose job is to oversimplify things they don't understand in the first place, and who are attention-seekers. If they have accomplished one thing successfully, it is to disguise the enormity of A) the complexity of the problem we faced and B) the second-, third- and further-order effects of doing so, and they will continue doing so until the consequences literally club them across the face like a 2x4, at which point they will find a conveneint target (I have a feeling I know which) to blame it all on - assuming, at that point, they are not standing in food lines as well, or suddenly re-thinking whether all the gun control town halls were such a great idea.
Well, so much for fewer words.
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