COVID-19 thread

[Ares Land]

Governments have been way too soft and understanding with respect to vaccines.
An actual vaccine mandate, as in, no excuses, no way out, no getting your nose picked twice a week would have spared everyone a lot of whining.

[Travis B.]

Governments have been way too soft and understanding with respect to vaccines.
An actual vaccine mandate, as in, no excuses, no way out, no getting your nose picked twice a week would have spared everyone a lot of whining.

The correct approach would have been for everyone to get vacccinated, no ifs or buts, or be physically confined to one's home indefinitely on pain of forcible vaccination. (Maybe have a true medical exception, but require something like three separate doctors to sign off on it, with the penalty for lying being the loss of their medical licenses.) Maybe if they'd done that as soon as we had a vaccine not so many people would be dead. And, yes, you can whine all you want about this approach being authoritarian, but at least if they'd've done it we wouldn't've been where we are now.

[Travis B.]

And yes, Nortaneous's political posts make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

[rotting bones]

How many poliucymakers have been demoted to McDonald's over the year and a half of atrocious COVID-related misrule we've already had? Or, you know, the rest of the misrule?

His handling of Covid was a major reason why Trump lost.

But the wonders of meritocracy have given us a regime ruled by... people who've spent their whole lives reshaping themselves to please authority. If you're too much of an ornery bastard to get the Harvard admissions people to like you, you don't go to Harvard. Competition is fierce. Any deviation from the norm will be punished. And you end up with a class of ultra-conformists who've spent their whole lives in ultra-conformist bubbles and don't realize most people aren't like them.

I'm not the ruling class, asshole. I'm one of the poorest workers on the planet. You're facing an alliance of the masses and royalty against the insane selfishness of the squabbling nobility and the illiterate peasantry they've conscripted.

I must admit to finding most of your political posts incomprehensible, and this one is no exception. What, exactly, is your point here?

He's saying The People enjoy dying of blood sausages up the nostrils, and we're snobs for plotting to rob them of such heavenly pleasures.

Obviously, his words mean nothing. They only signify violent intent: https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/im-a- ... afd11109dd He's doing the equivalent of charging us with a pointy stick and a war cry: "Glaba baba hubu haba baa!" The less sense the words make, the better!

Governments have been way too soft and understanding with respect to vaccines.
An actual vaccine mandate, as in, no excuses, no way out, no getting your nose picked twice a week would have spared everyone a lot of whining.

Too bad letting these people die out won't lower the population for long. Most deaths are past the typical reproductive age.

[Travis B.]

Obviously, his words mean nothing. They only signify violent intent: https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/im-a- ... afd11109dd He's doing the equivalent of charging us with a pointy stick and a war cry: "Glaba baba hubu haba baa!" The less sense the words make, the better!

Even though I am a parent, and do not hate any particular parents, this sort of thing is why I've always hated parents, especially the reactionary, school board meeting-attending kind and whatnot.

[bradrn]

And yes, Nortaneous's political posts make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

He's saying The People enjoy dying of blood sausages up the nostrils, and we're snobs for plotting to rob them of such heavenly pleasures.

Obviously, his words mean nothing. They only signify violent intent: https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/im-a- ... afd11109dd He's doing the equivalent of charging us with a pointy stick and a war cry: "Glaba baba hubu haba baa!" The less sense the words make, the better!

Well, this is something I find very difficult to believe. Because Nortaneous is obviously a sane person — his phonetic posts alone would prove that — so I find it easier to assume that his political posts are just as sane, and I’m misinterpreting them.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I've actually learnt this weekend that my otherwise witty, intelligent stepsister is a conspiracy theorist who believes 5G causes health problems.

[Nortaneous]

Unfortunately, Nortaneous is correct here. Ivermectin is a horse dewormer and a human dewormer. It is, however, not an effective antiviral, since the dose required for that simultaneously makes it an effective anti-human as well.

(I say ‘unfortunately’ here because ‘don’t take horse dewormer!’ would really be an excellent advertisement, were it true. Unfortunately, it isn’t, and claiming othewise just gives more ammunition to the committed lunatic, especially those of the big-gub’ment-is-lyin’-to-us type.)

Big gubmint literally is lying to us. "If we lie, people we don't like will be able to point out that we're lying" is not the most morally upstanding reasoning in the world, but it's still not as bad as the actual PR strategy of the actual regime.

But the wonders of meritocracy have given us a regime ruled by... people who've spent their whole lives reshaping themselves to please authority. If you're too much of an ornery bastard to get the Harvard admissions people to like you, you don't go to Harvard. Competition is fierce. Any deviation from the norm will be punished. And you end up with a class of ultra-conformists who've spent their whole lives in ultra-conformist bubbles and don't realize most people aren't like them.

I must admit to finding most of your political posts incomprehensible, and this one is no exception. What, exactly, is your point here?

For whatever reason, people started promoting ivermectin as a treatment for COVID. In response, everyone started hearing about how people shouldn't take ivermectin because it's a "horse dewormer", for reasons that include "the Responsible Authorities [in the typical DC progressives sense] said so".

Leaving aside the issues with the implied distinction between human medicine and animal medicine (in a country where horse anesthetic is routinely used recreationally, by humans, and also shows widely publicized promise as an antidepressant), ivermectin is in fact human medicine, is in routine use for parasitic diseases like river blindness, and won its discoverers the Nobel Prize. (OK, it was actually for the drug class of avermectin derivatives, but ivermectin seems to be the most important one.)

However, it doesn't show promise as a human antiviral for entirely unrelated reasons.

There are some questions that seem reasonable, given all that.
- Why did people hear about this? Why did so many people hear about it, from so many sources, that it became common knowledge (among the sorts of people who follow news for DC progressives)? That seems to happen a lot - how? And who decides?
- Did the Responsible Authorities (and other figures with platforms) know they were lying, or were they all sincerely mistaken in the same way for a duration greater than a week?
- If the Responsible Authorities (and other figures with platforms) didn't know they were lying, did they ever correct themselves in a manner consistent with concern for not misleading the audience?
- If the Responsible Authorities (and other figures with platforms) knew they were lying, why did they tell such an obvious lie? Do they think their audience is stupid? Or is the thing they see themselves as doing not connected to truth at all?
- If the point was to get people to stop using ivermectin for legitimate medical reasons, why didn't they lead with the legitimate medical reasons?
- If the Responsible Authorities (and other figures with platforms) knew they were lying, what sorts of people would they have to be, with what sorts of characters and what sorts of influences, to think that plan would work?

And if you've ever met a Harvard student or a high-ranking manager, you might have some ideas about the last question. There are classes of people whose lives, from private preschool to tenure or retirement, revolve around things like admissions councils, graded essays, and letters of recommendation.

What gets you admitted? Being the sort of person the admissions council wants, and being OK at tests. What's the right answer on the essay? Whatever the professor agrees with. How do you form strategic relationships with people who outrank you and turn those relationships into career advancement? Well...

If you're the sort of person the admission council wants, you're more likely to get admitted. If you're not that sort of person, and getting admitted is important to you, you'd better to learn to appear to be that sort. And if one admissions council is important to you, there will probably be another, and another... at each step, to the extent that each admissions council, professor, or higher-up wants different things, distilling and concentrating the set of people best at deforming themselves to please authority... which is exactly the kind of mindset that could lead someone to just not care about the truth or their reputation in the eyes of people who care about, like, not blatantly lying. (Unless it would upset the higher-ups, but presumably the higher-ups got there by the same process.) And, since the admissions councils control whole social environments, the people subject to those process will mostly socialize with each other - and their models of how people behave will be models of people like them. People who are selected for their skill with political maneuvering in hierarchical social structures. People who can tell which way the wind is blowing.

If the wind blows toward "horse dewormer", you say "horse dewormer" - and if you only notice the wind when it hits you, what you notice is a lot of people, especially Responsible Authorities, saying "horse dewormer", at the same time, without any Illuminati making them do it.

[Karch]

Obviously, his words mean nothing. They only signify violent intent: https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/im-a- ... afd11109dd

I thought this type of borderline genocidal screeds about how the filthy rednecks deserve to die and/or be poor was unique to the Czech "elite", a haphazard coalition of vaguely progressive liberals, "classical liberals" (i.e. market fanatics) and conservatives, most of which more or less secretly think that anybody who isn't a part of the "elite" shouldn't get a say in the political matters and that the biggest threat to Czech politics is Andrej Babiš, a billionaire who has managed to get the vote of many people outside the big cities simply by telling them they matter and by proposing policies that actually helped them, and who's still very popular despite completely mishandling the pandemic (Czech Republic has the 5th or so highest COVID-19 death rate in the whole world!) But I guess Czech Republic and the US aren't that different, after all!

[zompist]

For whatever reason, people started promoting ivermectin as a treatment for COVID. In response, everyone started hearing about how people shouldn't take ivermectin because it's a "horse dewormer", for reasons that include "the Responsible Authorities [in the typical DC progressives sense] said so".

What is this nefarious lie supposed to be? That people aren't taking horse dewormer? But they are. A few minutes Googling:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... ers-covid/
https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/ ... 601496001/
https://abc13.com/ivermectin-horse-medi ... /10975483/
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/ph ... n-11909379
https://www.fox5vegas.com/coronavirus/l ... d9c73.html
https://kfor.com/news/local/do-not-take ... nsumption/
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronaviru ... ol-centers
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/fac ... 643254001/
https://upnorthnewswi.com/2021/08/31/17 ... moting-it/
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/n ... 649248001/
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/08/30/ ... n-control/
https://www.4029tv.com/article/arkansas ... n/37386224
https://fox59.com/news/national-world/f ... vermectin/
https://www.king5.com/article/news/heal ... 53e36dc23e
https://www.kfvs12.com/2021/08/26/misso ... nsumption/

If your point is that some people are taking human deworming medicine instead of horse deworming medicine... yes, of course. But if your point is that no one is really taking horse deworming medicine, you're misinformed. Also I guess Harvard is bad because telling people not to poison themselves is obviously an evil librul plot.

[Travis B.]

[snip]

Umm, sorry, but the problem is that people are taking horse dewormer. Yes, ivermectin is also a human dewormer, but in vastly different doses and formulations, and when people get their hands on formulations of ivermectin meant for horses, it means a whole lot of people going to the ER for ivermectin overdoses, at a time when hospital beds are few and far between. Of course you think people being told not to take horse dewormer because they'll inevitably overdose on it is some sort of "liberal elite" plot, but everything to you is a "liberal elite" plot. (From the quality of your political posts it is very hard to take you seriously.)

[Talskubilos]

Governments have been way too soft and understanding with respect to vaccines.
An actual vaccine mandate, as in, no excuses, no way out, no getting your nose picked twice a week would have spared everyone a lot of whining.

The correct approach would have been for everyone to get vacccinated, no ifs or buts, or be physically confined to one's home indefinitely on pain of forcible vaccination. (Maybe have a true medical exception, but require something like three separate doctors to sign off on it, with the penalty for lying being the loss of their medical licenses.) Maybe if they'd done that as soon as we had a vaccine not so many people would be dead. And, yes, you can whine all you want about this approach being authoritarian, but at least if they'd've done it we wouldn't've been where we are now.

Compulsory vaccination and domiciliary arrest are TOTALITARIAN measures.

[Ares Land]

We need something like 85% of the population to be vaccinated to see an end to the pandemic. What's your solution?

The 'asking people really nicely' approach is awfully slow. It's wasting money, everyone's time and causing unnecessary deaths.

[Talskubilos]

We need something like 85% of the population to be vaccinated to see an end to the pandemic. What's your solution?

WHO's "we", the Word Health Organization?

[Ares Land]

By "we" I mean of course Skulls & Bones, the Bilderberg group and of course, the Knight Templars.
We discussed the 85% figure at our last barbecue. It was fun. I really liked Melinda Gates' potato salad.

[Karch]

the problem is that people are taking horse dewormer.

No. The actual problem is that people don't trust the US healthcare system - I wouldn't either, if everything cost thousands of dollars and the doctors were trying to get me hooked on some dependency-producing drug!
Here in the Czech Republic the healthcare system is relatively okay, so the percentage of people who don't plan on getting vaccinated is way smaller, despite the country being extremely polarized - everybody knows that they have to get vaccinated, otherwise there's no way out of this situation.

[bradrn]

There are some questions that seem reasonable, given all that. …

This is an interesting argument, but I’m not sure it’s necessary to be quite this cynical. I personally suspect the root cause of this is basically a game of Telephone: maybe the reasonable people in the Department of Health (or whatever you Americans call it) started out by saying ‘people are overdosing on ivermectin packaged for horses’, but that was restated as ‘people are using dewormer intended for horses’ and then ‘people are eating horse dewormer’, and before you know it you have one more thing for both sides to get upset about. Thus is partisanship maintained in the world.

That being said, I do agree that a rather large number of politicians and assorted hangers-on make their living by pleasing the level above them and doing what benefits themselves (though linking it to Harvard specifically seems rather unfair), and this is the cause of many problems in the world. Just not this one. (After all, if you make a system which rewards selfishness, and you let it run for several generations, then…)

[Raholeun]

By "we" I mean of course Skulls & Bones, the Bilderberg group and of course, the Knight Templars.
We discussed the 85% figure at our last barbecue. It was fun. I really liked Melinda Gates' potato salad.

You are doing nobody a service by being condescending like this.

[Ares Land]

the problem is that people are taking horse dewormer.

No. The actual problem is that people don't trust the US healthcare system - I wouldn't either, if everything cost thousands of dollars and the doctors were trying to get me hooked on some dependency-producing drug!
Here in the Czech Republic the healthcare system is relatively okay, so the percentage of people who don't plan on getting vaccinated is way smaller, despite the country being extremely polarized - everybody knows that they have to get vaccinated, otherwise there's no way out of this situation.

Yes and no. I think it's a trust issue in general, but not necessarily trust in the healthcare system.
We have a decent healthcare system in France and yet our relative share of anti-vaxxers is comparable to the US.
But, just like the Americans, we tend to have very low trust in our institutions.

By "we" I mean of course Skulls & Bones, the Bilderberg group and of course, the Knight Templars.
We discussed the 85% figure at our last barbecue. It was fun. I really liked Melinda Gates' potato salad.

You are doing nobody a service by being condescending like this.

I suggest you go read the post I was answering to. I don't feel the need to give civil answers to condescension either.

[Vardelm]

Compulsory vaccination and domiciliary arrest are TOTALITARIAN measures.

May I suggest compulsory vaccination along with compulsory imprisonment for negligent homicide?

You are doing nobody a service by being condescending like this.

You're just jealous that Ares Land gets to hang with Melinda.