At least I'm not as late this week. So, last week's numbers:
annatar1914 wrote:[usermention=26636]So again, it comes back to two rather different views of what constitutes the ''common good'', social responsibility, and the role of government in the lives of individuals.
I suspect most of our disagreement isn't over what constitutes the "common good" but whether it should be mandated by the government.
Even noting ''variations from city to city'' and ''state to state'', you are as much affirming that entire swaths of the ''United States of America'' are not particularly very ''United'' at all. And yet, you and I are of the sort that believe in universal doctrines that apply to all men everywhere without question, right? But where is this universality?
There's a difference between recognizing universal principles and requiring that those principles be applied the same way in all cases. Murder is always the unjustified deliberate ending of a human life, but the circumstances can cause what is considered murder to vary wildly.
But what if people have the wrong idea at the heart of the wild chaos that is the notion of ''Liberty''? What if people have perverted the idea of Liberty in dealing with it as a philosophical concept. Am I somehow a obnoxious renegade if I want to reduce this insanity of vaccine refusal to ''thou shalt not kill''? Or ''you shall love your neighbor as yourself''?
No, in insisting on that, on bringing the discussion down to that (or HIM, I should say...) that would probably expose the other tremendous fraud of American political ideology, that somehow It comes from Monotheism, has Christian roots. They say Communism of modern times is a Christian Heresy. I would say that American political philosophy is not even that.
SO we come back to a simple question: if someone can avoid serious risk of dying by being vaccinated and chooses not to, why am I obligated to alter my own behavior in order to protect them? Why am I morally required to be more concerned about their health than they are?
XogGyux wrote:So you are cool if the surgeon doing your hip, or your coronary artery bypass graft skips the mask right? I mean, the surgeon already has to deal with having to be standing up, if the mask don't do shit why inconvenience him/her? What about gloves, can we skip those as well? Perhaps we can have some snacks in the OR as well, that would make sure their energies are topped off.
This is what happens when you politize stupidity, you are forced into defending quite stupid positions.
You do understand the difference between droplet- and aerosol-spread disease, right? The difference is why all those plastic shields businesses have put up might be worse than useless--while they protect against droplets just fine, they also interfere with air circulation and so can cause exposure to the aerosol-carried virus to be increased. And guess what is the the primary means of spread for the Wuhan virus is?
Pants-of-dog wrote:Argument from authority.
Unless you can show that natural immunity has a lasting and useful immunity, this is speculation.
I'll remember that the next time you quote one of the government "scientists"--authority means nothing. Of course, it helps if you actually read the article to find out
why this prominent immunologist regrets voting for Biden:
If you scroll through his Twitter feed, you'll see how he points out over and over that those that have already come down with the Wuhan virus are at least as well protected as those that have been vaccinated, if not better.
Godstud wrote:They [Sweden] have suffered for it, suffering rates of infection and death almost as high as that of the USA. 15,000+ deaths in 10 million people is nothing to brag about.
Actually, Sweden's deaths per million is only 69.8% that of the US, and 81.7% that of France--and 84.1% that of California. So yes, for number of deaths, Sweden isn't doing badly.
boomerintown wrote:I got no idea what the avarege number in Europe is or where to find that number, but Ive provided the source and gave you the number for some countries.
Using the numbers reported (as you point out, there's variation in how they are counted), the European Union has a death total of 1,714.2 per million, 120% of Sweden's. Mind, that includes the Eastern European countries, some of which have gotten hammered--at 3,127.9, Hungary currently has the highest total deaths per million count of all EU countries and US states.
And for just how seriously we should take the mask mandates pushed by Biden and the CDC, our elites have shown us the way! Of course, they believe that masks or for the peons, not them, but this is America where equality rules! Right?
The Masking of the Servant Class: Ugly COVID Images From the Met Gala Are Now CommonplaceFrom the start of the pandemic, political elites have been repeatedly caught exempting themselves from the restrictive rules they impose on the lives of those over whom they rule. Governors, mayors, ministers and Speakers of the House have been filmed violating their own COVID protocols in order to dine with their closest lobbyist-friends, enjoy a coddled hair styling in chic salons, or unwind after signing new lockdown and quarantine orders by sneaking away for a weekend getaway with the family. The trend became so widespread that ABC News gathered all the examples under the headline “Elected officials slammed for hypocrisy for not following own COVID-19 advice,” while Business Insider in May updated the reporting with this: “14 prominent Democrats stand accused of hypocrisy for ignoring COVID-19 restrictions they're urging their constituents to obey."
Most of those transgressions were too flagrant to ignore and thus produced some degree of scandal and resentment for the political officials granting themselves such license. Dominant liberal culture is, if nothing else, fiercely rule-abiding: they get very upset when they see anyone defying decrees from authorities, even if the rule-breaker is the official who promulgated the directives for everyone else. Photos released last November of California Governor Gavin Newsom giggling maskless as he sat with other maskless state health officials celebrating the birthday of a powerful lobbyist — just one month after he told the public to “to keep your mask on in between bites” and while severe state-imposed restrictions were in place regarding leaving one's home — caused a drop in popularity and helped fueled a recall initiative against him. Newsom and these other officials broke their own rules, and even among liberals who venerate their leaders as celebrities, rule-breaking is frowned upon.
But as is so often the case, the most disturbing aspects of elite behavior are found not in what they have prohibited but rather in what they have decided is permissible. When it comes to mask mandates, it is now commonplace to see two distinct classes of people: those who remain maskless as they are served, and those they employ as their servants who must have their faces covered at all times. Prior to the COVID pandemic, it was difficult to imagine how the enormous chasm between the lives of cultural and political elites and everyone else could be made any larger, yet the pandemic generated a new form of crude cultural segregation: a series of protocols which ensure that maskless elites need not ever cast eyes upon the faces of their servant class.
Last month, a delightful event was hosted by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for wealthy Democratic donors in Napa — the same wine region of choice for Gov. Newsom's notorious dinner party — at which the cheapest tickets were $100 each and a "chair” designation was available for $29,000. Video of the outdoor festivities showed an overwhelmingly white crowd of rich Democratic donors sitting maskless virtually on top of one another — not an iota of social distancing to be found — as Pelosi imparted her deep wisdom about public policy.
Pelosi's donor gala took place as millions face eviction, ongoing joblessness, and ever-emerging mandates of various types. It was also held just five days after the liberal county government of Los Angeles, in the name of Delta, imposed a countywide mask requirement for "major outdoor events.” In nearby San Francisco, where Pelosi's mansion is found, the liberal-run city government has maintained a more restrictive outdoor mask policy than the CDC: though masks were not required for outdoor exercising (such as jogging) or while consuming food, the city's rules for outdoor events required “that at any gathering where there are more than 300 people, masks are still required for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.” Though Pelosi's fundraising lunch fell below the 10,000-person threshold for LA County's outdoor mask mandate, it may have fallen within San Francisco's mask mandate. Either way, it appears arbitrary at best: how would The Science™ of COVID risk have drastically changed for those sitting with no distancing, at densely packed tables, if there had been a few more tables of Pelosi donors? The CDC's latest guidelines for outdoor events urge people to “consider wearing a mask…for activities with close contact with others who are not fully vaccinated.”
Trying to find a cogent scientific rationale for any of this is, by design, virtually impossible. The rules are sufficiently convoluted and often arbitrary that one can easily mount arguments to legally justify the Versailles-like conduct of one's favorite liberal political leaders. Beyond the legalities, everything one does can be simultaneously declared to be responsible or reckless, depending on the political needs of the moment. But what was most striking about Pelosi's donor event was not the possibility of legal infractions but rather the two-tiered system that was so viscerally and uncomfortably obvious.
Even though many of the wealthy white donors had no food in front of them and were not yet eating, there was not a mask in sight — except on the faces of the overwhelmingly non-white people hired as servants, all of whom had their gratuitous faces covered. Servants, apparently, are much more pleasant when they are dehumanized. There is no need for noses or mouths or other identifiable facial features for those who are converted into servile robots.
Similar scenes were visible at the even more opulent birthday bash which former President Barack Obama threw for himself to commemorate his 60 years on the planet. Held at his sprawling $12 million weekend estate on Martha's Vineyard, Obama and 400 of his closest maskless friends spent hours in indoor tents dancing, chatting in close circles, and yelling in each other's ears over the live music. While custom-made masks engraved with Obama's renowned humility were provided to the guests (“44×60”), only the servants were reported to have worn masks. Who can throw a Hawaiian luau-themed party at one of the country's wealthiest retreats in the middle of a pandemic and joblessness crisis while wearing disfiguring masks, however chic and carefully hand-crafted they might be?
Discussing the controversy over Obama's lavish party on CNN, New York Times reporter Annie Karni explained that while some of the former president's neighbors found the party objectionable on the grounds of health and/or optics, many adamantly argued that such concerns were applicable only to ordinary people, not the more advanced and evolved species likely to be invited to such an extravagant and exclusive liberal party. Karni described this prevailing mentality with vivid accuracy:
[The controversy] is really being overblown. They’re following all the safety requirements. People are going to sporting events that are bigger than this. This is going to be safe. This is a sophisticated, vaccinated crowd and this is just about optics. It’s not about safety.
An avalanche of similarly repugnant imagery poured forth on Monday night at the most gluttonous and opulent royal court spectacle of them all: the annual Met Gala held by long-time Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Town and Country has lamented that the once-elevated-and-dignified event has become quite gauche ever since it became overrun by cultural celebrities and nouveau riche tycoons -- “these days, the gala is a highly commercialized, celebrity-driven media circus that celebrates sensationalist preening by individuals who couldn’t be less interested in the museum.” Yet despite this degradation, the magazine nonetheless still regards the affair as “the fashion and society event of the year.” In 2014, Wintour complained that the event was insufficiently exclusive and raised the ticket prices to $25,000 per person in order to keep out the riff-raff who had been able to get in the prior year for the middling price of $15,000 per ticket. Tickets this year cost as much as $35,000 per person. It is, pronounced Wintour's Vogue this week, “the fashion world equivalent of the Oscars.”
While event organizers, in an act of noble self-sacrifice and social duty, sadly cancelled the gala in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, Wintour was determined this year not to let unpleasant matters like overflowing ICU wards, ongoing school closures, looming mass evictions, and pervasive mask mandates ruin the immense enjoyment bequeathed to the world's serfs as they watch their beloved bejeweled class pose in designer gowns. Following Pelosi and Obama's examples, a long list of America's most glittering stars bravely risked exposure to a deadly virus by appearing without masks, all to ensure that Americans would never again be deprived of such a richly gratifying moment for them. Co-chaired by Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka, honorary chairs included Tom Ford, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, and Wintour herself.
[Greenwald goes on at length about AOC's appearance.]
Worse, Monday night's traumatic bullying of AOC obscured the far more important fact that, yet again, we saw elites prancing around in the middle of a pandemic maskless, while those paid hourly wages to serve them or desperately try to snap a photo of them were required to keep their pointless faces covered with cloth at all times.
COVID rules are now so convoluted that liberals are able to defend their leaders’ actions while not even pretending to make sense from a scientific or rational perspective. Many defended Newsom and Obama's maskless partying on the ground that it was all “outdoors,” even though both were actually inside tents and people had been shamed for months for taking their kids to deserted beaches rather than keeping them locked away at home. Liberals argue that it is fine for elites at Obama's party and the Met Gala to remain maskless since they are vaccinated, even as they defend the CDC's new mask directives for vaccinated people based on the view that vaccinated people still dangerously transmit the Delta variant to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike. They will claim that it is fine for rich Democratic donors at Pelosi's party to sit on top of one other maskless because they are eating even though the video shows they have no food in front of them (they are waiting for the masked servants of color to bring their food) and even though shoveling food into one's open mouth does not actually create a wall of immunity against transmission of the virus from one's open-mouthed table neighbors. The Met Gala's red carpet is said to be “outdoors” even though it is surrounded by tent walls and other structures, and still leaving the question of why workers need to be masked in the same area.
But all of this stopped being about The Science™ long ago — ever since months of relentless messaging that it is our moral duty to Stay At Home unless we want to sociopathically kill Grandma was replaced overnight by dictates that we had a moral duty to leave our homes to attend densely packed street protests since the racism being protested was a more severe threat to the public health than the global COVID pandemic. One can locate in all of this jumbled and always-shifting rationale various forms of control, shaming, stigma and hierarchy, while The Science™ is nowhere to be found.
Even with all of this deceit and manipulation, there is something uniquely disturbing — creepy even — about becoming accustomed to seeing political and cultural elites wallowing in luxury without masks, while those paid small wages to serve them in various ways are forced to keep cloth over their faces. It is a powerful symbol of the growing rot at the core of America's cultural and social balkanization: a maskless elite attended to by a permanently faceless servant class. The country's workers have long been faceless in a figurative sense, and now, thanks to extremely selective application of decisively unscientific COVID restrictions, that condition has become literal.
And then there's this from the Emmys:
But of course, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, the Emmys was exempted from county's restrictions because "exceptions are made for film, television, and music productions, as additional safety modifications are made for these controlled interactions." All those guests weren't actually guests, they were performers! Though that status didn't apply to the servants, of course:
And then there's San Francisco's mayor, caught dancing maskless. Her defense of her violation of her city's rules? “
We don’t need the fun police to come in and micromanage and tell us what we should or shouldn’t be doing.”
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke