Coronavirus Pandemic

[Niall_Quinn]

Throughout most of human history, for all but a few, life has been a miserable existence. Then you’d die - if you were lucky, death came quickly. It’s much easier now, well certainly in western civilisations.

Most people want what we have now - a vanilla, comfortable existence with food on the table and beer or whatever your tipple on tap.

Who knows where it all ends up but as long as life is easy, and its never been easier, who gives a fuck?

That comfort was won and defended, not awarded and untended. Complacency is no sort of gratitude for the hard fought concessions squeezed (sometimes as blood) from the non-working classes.

[Niall_Quinn]

Uh oh! They've let real science escape into the news cycle with this one. Careless. Though it will fly straight over most heads, so no harm done. For those paying attention though - interesting. Yes?

[Letters]

Right. As promised...

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
The source that was used to fire the propaganda from Day 1.

OK. That's a source I've been looking at. So that gives a CFR of about 2%. The science I was reading about a year ago said that it was about 1%.
So where are you getting your 99.85% figure from? Are you dividing the number of deaths by the population of the entire planet to get your figure? I mean, for a start there are still ~9,000 Covid deaths a day worldwide so we don't know what that final figure will be. But also, given all the steps taken to reduce the spread of Covid that's not a very sensible way of doing it. Not everyone's had Covid. If your argument is that a tiny fraction of the world's population will die from this so it isn't something which required this level of disruption to our lives and our economy then I'd agree.
But the data on hospitalisations and deaths over the last winter tells me that this was a situation which demanded a response. Whether the response was correct and proportionate is a different debate.

And you KNOW I have provided these sources before.

I remember you quoting the survival rate figure before, I remember asking multiple times what your source is, I don't remember you ever supplying one before. You can call me a liar if you like, and that's fine, but there's no further scope for conversation. if you're going to call me a liar about what I remember then I don't know what else to do with that other than shrug and say "OK".
You said elsewhere that honest debate isn't possible - you are correct IF you insist on thinking the absolute worst of me.

We also had that "debate" about armies, curfews, checkpoints which you have used ever since to deceptively attempt to discredit anything and everything.

I used it as an example of something you are declaring yourself right about when in fact the exact opposite happened. You were clearly talking about what would happen in this country. I went through the quote in some detail showing that was your clear meaning. The opposite happened, right now almost all the restrictions have been lifted.
And I'm not picking you up for being wrong, I'm picking you up for being wrong and then declaring yourself right. You have an unshakable confidence in your 20:20 foresight, but that confidence is not justified when you look at things you predict vs what actually happens.
If you are now saying "it's happened in other countries, it could happen here" then OK, I guess it could. I happen to think it won't because I don't think we have an authoritarian government. In fact early in the pandemic you commended the government for not being too authoritarian and not taking the more Draconian approach that some other countries did.

You don't fool me. But I don't think it's me you are so keen to fool. Maybe you need little drips like your on-demand lackey following you around and literally bowing by avatar? Maybe that's a thing. Maybe I'm in the minority in not requiring such low quality validation.

Or maybe I'm just wasting time during down time at work? Could be that.
See, this is the root of your problem - or our problem. You said a while back you think that most people are decent, yet you cast suspicion and clearly think poorly of most people you encounter or talk about. You seem to think a lot of people are out to get you or deceive you, my included. I'm not trying to fool you, or anyone else. How strange to go through life thinking that so many people have an ulterior motive.

Control, wealth, passive profit (without labour), guaranteed security, inheritance, assured continuity, ownership of the decision making process. The obvious stuff.

I see. And sure, there are certainly haves and have nots, always have been, always will be.
But as for the "steps" which you say are being taken, I'm sceptical about that or about the effect it will have on my day to day life. The last 18 months have seen unprecedented restrictions on our freedoms, I'm not convinced those restrictions were all necessary (although some were). But I am convinced those restrictions were temporary. My evidence for that is that they have almost all been removed now. You said early on in the pandemic that they'd shut down my church. Well even if that was true temporarily, it's not true now. We're meeting as usual, pretty much all our usual activities are running without restrictions again. Because the measures were temporary and designed to deal with "a situation". Again, we can debate about whether they were the right measures, but there's no debate about their temporary nature. You just have to look in a football stadium or theatre to see that things are more or less normal again. Will it stay that way? That depends on the data. My gut feel is some restrictions may be imposed this winter but I don't believe in 5 years we will still be in cycles of lockdown and freedom. If this was a slide into authoritarianism then why keep changing the restrictions?
You're right that the technology now exists to facilitate control of us in an unprecedented way. But we don't have a government who care about a high level of control of our lives and I personally think it unlikely we will have. Comparisons with China are spurious, our regime is not comparable with theirs.

We've always suffered demons like these. Kings, queens, dictators, other thugs in fancy dress. But I can't recall a period in history where the masses so welcomed their enslavement. Or fought so bitterly against those who dare to suggest the balance could be a little more equitable.

Gary has explained why. People don't feel downtrodden. Life is more comfortable now than it has been pretty much at any other time in our history. I have a decent quality of life, I'm going to guess you do too. You have a house, right? A car? Disposable income to go on holiday and do other leisure activities. You can feed and clothe your family, you can put food on the table. There are no restrictions on your day to day activities. What else is there?
There are some people who aren't so fortunate of course but I don't know what you do about that fact that some people simply have more marketable skills than others. I'd vaguely agree that there shouldn't be people under the poverty line and multi-billionaires, but in a capitalist system - which seems to be the only game in town - I don't know how you easily avoid that. Mrs L has been in shitty care jobs earning little more than the minimum wage. It's disgraceful, frankly, given how important her job is compared to mine. But what do you do? People who work in these jobs are 10 a penny, they don't have many other options carrer wise (which isn't to diss MrsL, she just isn't that academic and has never been interested in a career) so it's supply and demand. I don't think it's right, but I also don't think you can or should have complete equity in pay. Like in football, it would be nice if the gap between the have and have nots wasn't so stark but in a system ruled by supply and demand it's not trivial to avoid.

But I know you'll continue to sit there and say no, no, no, if we hit the ballot box and write a stiff letter of complaint things will change.

I won't say that. Every election now feels like simply trying to find the least crap option.
Our version of democracy is pretty bad. But I don't know how you realistically change it.

I've also failed to get through to you with the idea you should ALWAYS resist the enemy, even when their interests coincide with yours.

No. You have failed to convince me that there is an enemy.
I don't think that "they" are out to get me. I don't think they're bending over backwards to help me either, but there is a middle ground. One where they are pretty self serving and corrupt but not actually out to crush me.
I certainly don't feel crushed. I don't think I will be crushed because I don't think "they" are interested in doing so.

[Niall_Quinn]

LOL - FFS!



"A lot of eyes on the Taliban"?

They'll need to go some to catch up with the fascist bastards over here.

[Niall_Quinn]

OK. That's a source I've been looking at. So that gives a CFR of about 2%. The science I was reading about a year ago said that it was about 1%.
So where are you getting your 99.85% figure from? Are you dividing the number of deaths by the population of the entire planet to get your figure? I mean, for a start there are still ~9,000 Covid deaths a day worldwide so we don't know what that final figure will be. But also, given all the steps taken to reduce the spread of Covid that's not a very sensible way of doing it. Not everyone's had Covid. If your argument is that a tiny fraction of the world's population will die from this so it isn't something which required this level of disruption to our lives and our economy then I'd agree.
But the data on hospitalisations and deaths over the last winter tells me that this was a situation which demanded a response. Whether the response was correct and proportionate is a different debate.

Just look at the shit this guy is prepared to spread just to convince himself of a third party argument handed to him by the very people profiting from this scam. It's incredible.

The numbers are right there, not that they are in any way accurate (of course), but they are the accepted numbers the Covidians agree on. Even with this ridiculously inflated "data", and the new and unscientific methods of determining "cases", and the tests that don't even work, and the car crashes and heart attacks and alligator attack casualties that have been passed off as covid deaths - even after that, let's play along and assume this data is somehow accurate. So now sane people and Covodians have a common ground upon which they can discuss the scam.

But even then the Covidians need to add another layer of shit. When somebody states, based on the data they wank over, the chance of dying from this thing is infinitesimally small they say no, wait, you have to ignore those numbers and instead look at THESE numbers.

It would stand to reason that looking at the number of people per million who have died of this thing would give you the number of people per million who have died of this thing. Not so. First you have to ignore pretty much the entire population of the planet. Only then can you "follow the science". Well, despite the bullshit being pushed out by reality deniers, the calculation is elementary. If you are a person living on planet earth today there's a tiny, tiny, 0.06% chance of dying of this thing - according to the Covidian's own bible. It's time to panic - your chances of survival are a mere 99.94%

But if that's too inconvenient then look at the chances of actually catching it. 2.9% OMFG - we're ALL going to DIE! That seems pretty fucking low for such an infectious disease, but whatever.

But even that's too revealing so time to focus instead on something that looks a bit deadlier. Let's work out how many people died (including the ones with fake death certs) who had contracted the disease (according to the fake tests). That works out at 2.1% which is better but still not super scary. Useful though if you want to pretend the mortality rate is the same thing as the base chance of dying, which is what our good repeater is doing above. Using a trick like that we can amplify something infinitesimally small (the chance of dying) into something that's observable. In a bizarre twist that's an amplification factor of 35, pure coincidence (I think) but funny nonetheless.

Still not happy though. So there's a solution. If you take the number of deaths and divide by the number of deaths you will see there is a 100% chance of people who have died from covid dying from covid. Now that's genuinely terrifying. Not because it's a valid number but because it might give the propagandists down at the BBC a free headline.

Your chances of dying from covid are 0.06% baseline, no matter what the apologists say. You might want to remember that when you are under the bed mopping up your own piss. And I guess even if you could get them to accept their own data they'd still natter on about variations per country, rising trends and blah, blah. While carefully ignoring the bogus tests and the mock cases of course. Follow the science, they say. Follow the data! You have to laugh.

Finally there's a better way to bypass all of this and see the reality for yourself. Walk out your front door. In the whole time since this farce began - how many bodies have you had to step over? I thought as much. Because if this was the Spanish flu or smallpox you'd bloody know about it personally. But it isn't. It's the scamdemic. Right before your eyes, once you open them.

Do the maths.

[Niall_Quinn]

You said early on in the pandemic that they'd shut down my church. Well even if that was true temporarily, it's not true now. We're meeting as usual, pretty much all our usual activities are running without restrictions again.

This, I think, is highly illustrative of the disconnect this person has with reality. Not a disconnect with what he can see and feel and hear and taste around him. But rather a total absence of understanding of the relationship between liberty and authoritarianism. I believe he's genuinely blind to it, like a lot of people.

Human rights are not granted, they can only be upheld or abused. The slave will wonder at such a notion because they can't conceive true liberty. If a right is not issued by an authoritarian then how can you have rights, they will wonder? Their dilemma is absurd but probably genuine. It is the very absence of the authoritarian that makes a right inalienable.

So translating our friend's confusion we might say he was previously free to practice his faith because that was previously a human right, but it has now been replaced with authoritarian decree, which currently grants the "right" to worship. Of course the two things are polar opposites but our poor friend freely admits he can't see beyond the practical application. Being ignorant to that degree is unfortunate. But boasting about such ignorance is unforgivable.

[WMUG]

What is true liberty, and what constitutes a violation?

[Letters]

What is true liberty, and what constitutes a violation?

The sort of liberty which I think NQ wants is not possible in the context of a society.
If you want to live on a desert island in a small commune of like minded people then you can probably pretty much do what you like if you don't harm other people.
In a big and complicated society there has to be some structure. There have to be some rules, you're never going to get everyone to agree on all of them so you end up with a government structure which might be a bit crap but it's generally thought to be less crap than a king or queen deciding everything unilaterally.
There's a value exchange in living in a society. We pay taxes, we get infrastructure.
You can argue about whether the government are spending the money well and the infrastructure is good, or whether the government is making good laws.
But I don't know how anything works without some structure. NQ has hinted that he has ideas about that but I don't think he elaborated.

I would note that basically every country in the world has ended up with the same solution to how to run a society.

[Mac76]

If you want to live on a desert island in a small commune of like minded people then you can probably pretty much do what you like if you don't harm other people.

what? that's a completely unacceptable authoritarian restriction surely

[Letters]

The numbers are right there, not that they are in any way accurate (of course)

Of course. Obviously you don't need to provide any evidence for that claim.

When somebody states, based on the data they wank over, the chance of dying from this thing is infinitesimally small they say no, wait, you have to ignore those numbers and instead look at THESE numbers.

No. What I'm saying is that dividing the number of deaths by the population of the entire planet or country is not the basis on which you would make a decision about whether Covid is a situation which requires a response.
The CFR is a more valid measure. If there's a virus spreading unchecked and the CFR is, say 10% then holy shit let's all hide under our beds. If you don't do something to get the spread of it in check then you're going to end up with a lot of dead people which is generally thought to be a bad thing. If the CFR is 0.1% then you probably wouldn't shut the country down over it. Covid is somewhere in the middle.
The CFR is high enough that I'd suggest some measures were needed - basically every country in the world did something - but was it worth the long shut down we had? Probably not.

Very few people die of Ebola but when there is an outbreak it is taken extremely seriously. No-one divides the number of people who die by the population of earth and says "Pff! There's virtually no chance of dying".
Obviously that's true, but Ebola has a very high CFR - something like 50% - which is a lot more relevant to how seriously outbreaks are treated. Thankfully it's not airborne in the same way Covid is so outbreaks are much easier to contain.
It's interesting that you accuse me of a trick when it's actually you who is using a trick to get a completely meaningless number.

Walk out your front door. In the whole time since this farce began - how many bodies have you had to step over?

So you hop effortlessly from one meaningless metric to another. It's not a pandemic because there aren't piles of bodies in the streets.
This is the data which shows that there was a situation which needed dealing with.
Hospitalisations over the last winter in London compared with other years (the grey lines)



Mortality over the last few years from the dominant respiratory disease:



And the data over the winter showing the excess deaths compared with the average. 30% above the average by Christmas Day, 44% above by February.



That's a lot of car crashes, heart attacks and alligator attacks.
So, yeah. There was clearly a situation going on which required a response. And if you don't believe the data then I related the conversation I had with a ICU Doctor where he talked about how full his hospital was and how often he was having to tell families bad news compared with other years. Is he a lying? Early in this pandemic you posted a video of a doctor saying the exact same thing. What's your stance now, that he was a "crisis actor"?

You only seem to be able to think in extremes. There's a perfectly sensible middle ground between "if this was real we'd be stepping over piles of bodies in the street" and "there isn't a pandemic, it's all a scam".