Then you are feeling secure without any justification. Donât you worry that your seatmate is carrying bubonic plague? Or a novel variant of COVID-19 for which the vaccine is useless? Or that theyâre one of the 10%+ for whom the vaccine didnât even work? Or that the mechanic didnât replace the widget in the engine that will save you from a fiery death on the side of a mountain? Or that, because the planet is obsessed with COVID-19 and is ignoring absolutely every other threat to humanity, there are three terrorists flying the plane?
Thereâs no such thing as absolute safety. Your lifetime odds of âdeath by doctorâ (drug overdose, misprescribing, failed surgery, etc) is about 1 in 60. Your lifetime odds of death by car is about 1 in 100. For a 50-year-old man, lifetime odds of dying of heart disease is 1 in 2. Your lifetime odds of death by COVID-19 is virtually zero if 50%+ of the global population have already had the disease and/or are vaccinated.
If you want to put your faith in magic potions thatâs up to you, but itâs not reasonable to expect everyone elseâs life to revolve around your personal phobias.
I believe you have a very good point about people focusing too much on one problem at the expense of every other problem that exists in the world.
What puzzles me about your viewpoint is, when you speak of western culture/civilization being dead and its archrival having âwonâ, itâs like⌠a man staggers into an emergency room mumbling something about getting bopped on the head, and the doctor instantly pronounces him dead and calls the organ people. Dr. Evil down the street would at least wait for the patient to pass out first. Not even waiting? Thatâs just beyond.
My point here is that once you destroy something culturally valuable, itâs very hard to get it back. It is, for all practical purposes, dead. You are aware, Iâm sure, of the Hundredth monkey effect - Wikipedia? The UK specifically has destroyed three things:
its economy, and the small-business spirit that supported it
the mental health of its people, which was in pretty bad shape to begin with
its democratic principles.
These are not minor injuries. The patient is in the ICU, in a coma, with half his limbs missing and tubes shoved up every orifice. You canât just switch businesses on and off. Depression and paranoia canât be restored by decree.
We have mindlessly accepted governments taking near-dictatorical powers upon themselves in a manner which is almost certainly illegal. Where the law imposed hard limits on what they could do, theyâve actually lied to people or misrepresented the nature of statute in order to achieve compliance; for example Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock implied, during press briefings about the COVID-19 emergency legislation, that it was far more prescriptive about what people could and couldnât do than it actually was, and told the police that they have powers that they actually donât.
We now have a large number of people supporting this subversion, and even with the long-awaited magic vaccines on the scene, theyâre still calling for completely irrational enhancements to government power. As per the contents of these various COVID-19 threads.
You might say, meh, the circumstances demand it - which is arguably true - but thereâs a reason we avoid demolishing hard-won freedoms: you have to win them all over again.
Iâm not sure what you think Democracyâs arch-rival is, so Iâll be specific about my belief : the opposite of Democracy is chaos. Itâs what you get in those crappy countries where governance is a hobby for the well-placed, the mean-minded, and the stupid. Westerners think it can never happen to them because Westerners are inherently superior to (say) Liberians. But they are not superior. They are the same. And it can happen to them.
While Republican governors like Floridaâs DeSantis and Texasâs Abbott are denouncing having to carry documentation of proof of vaccination as tyranny, the Republican National Committee is making documentation of proof of vaccination as mandatory to attend its convention.
I should have expected you to miss my point. I shouldnât have expected you to miss your own point, though.
You have an awfully strange concept of victory.
So, what now? Westerners are going to flee to China as refugees? NATO will be dissolved? The UN will move its headquarters to Beijing? I really donât see a coherent argument here.
To be clear, Iâm not saying your lockdowns-are-bad argument is in any way incoherent. Iâm just saying your itâs-all-over argument (or your the-west-is-the-worst-and-Chinaâs-the-king-of-the-castle argument to be precise) makes no sense to me. Itâs âstill on the ascendantâ and so what? Economic growth =/= victory.
It seems to me that you were suggesting, with your man-bopped-on-the-head metaphor, that nobody is dead and nor is anybody likely to be dead. If Iâve missed your point then it wasnât a very good metaphor.
Itâs not me fighting the war. Iâm just sitting here eating my popcorn and waving my crappy little flag from the sidelines.
Obviously, in war, one side has a concept of victory thatâs completely unfathomable to the other. Otherwise theyâd both be trying to find a win-win scenario instead of fighting.
Chinaâs concept of victory is, and has been since 1842, very consistent: the humiliation of Western powers, and particularly the British. It has been spoken out loud in various âunguardedâ moments. A fair fraction of ordinary Chinese people have been brainwashed with the same goals. It has now been achieved. By the UKâs own admission, theyâre facing the worst recession (and also the worst political upheavals) in living memory. Possibly since 1842. And they did that to themselves. The CCP must be laughing themselves sick. How are the mighty fallen!
Iâm tempted to do another fred smith here (âhahahahaahhhaaaaaaâ), but Iâll give this a shot. It absolutely does mean victory if you make everything that your enemy depends upon, and if your enemy has systematically dismantled his own capacity for making those things. I think Russia demonstrated this principle, in a fairly minor way, in 2006.
Post-Brexit, the British have realised that hubris alone isnât sufficient to secure supplies of food, energy, and consumer goods. You need to be at least marginally competent, you need to have some functioning farmland, some (say) North Sea oil and gas - oops! - and some industry that isnât owned and operated by foreigners.
Dark and grey, an English film, the Wednesday Play
We always watch the Queen on Christmas Day
Wonât you stay?
Though your eyes see shipwrecked sailors youâre still dry
The outlookâs fine though Wales might have some rain
Saved again
Letâs skip the news boy, Iâll make some tea
The Arabs and the Jews boy, too much for me
They get me confused boy, puts me off to sleep
And the thing I hate, oh Lord
Is staying up late, to watch some debate on some nationâs fate
Hypnotized by Batman, Tarzan, still surprised
Youâve won the West in time to be our guest
Name your prize
Drop of wine, glass of beer dear whatâs the time?
The grime on the Tyne is mine, all mine, all mine
Five past nine
Blood on the rooftops, Venice in the Spring
Streets of San Francisco, word from Peking
The trouble was started by a young Errol Flynn
Better in my day, oh Lord
For when we got bored weâd have a World War, happy but poor
So letâs skip the news boy, Iâll go make that tea
Blood on the rooftops, too much for me
When old Mother Goose stops and theyâre out for twenty-three
Then the rain at Lords stopped play
Seems Helen of Troy has found a new face again
But thatâs just a goalpost shift to Britain is dying/dead. People have been saying that since WWII, even since WWI, and if Britain = the British Empire, then yes they had and still have a point.
I was using the UK as an example because itâs the country Iâm most familiar with, but I donât see anything remarkably different happening in the US, or (say) France. Do you?
They switched off the gas. China could do the same thing with food or widgets - should they feel so inclined - and cause a similar level of pain.
Someone has delusions of grandeur. I donât think the Chinese think about Britain that much.
And forced European countries to do what they wanted to do anyway. Any Russian switching off of gas supplies would hurt Russia much more than western Europe
Iâm not sure how either of these comments relates to my original argument. Youâve quoted me, but you seem to be having a conversation with someone else on a different topic.
I made it 37 seconds into this. This dude in the video is a tin foil hat wearing loon. The neckline on dudeâs sweater is too low as well, really. Someone should have said something.
Heâs made a very successful career out of being a loon while wearing clothes that make you go âeewâ.
EDIT: if youâd bothered to watch beyond 37 seconds, he does go through the various reasons people object to vaccine passports - some of those reasons are valid, IMO, some not so valid. For example I donât have a problem with ID cards: mostly, they are useful, and theyâre only problematic when the state has the power to force you to carry them at all times and to order you to produce them on demand.
The biggest problem with vaccine passports is that the vaccines have not been properly tested for widespread use and are therefore experimental. International agreements on medical experiments guarantee informed consent to participants, and the right not to participate. Compelling people to take the vaccine, by whatever method, is in clear violation of ethical standards. AFAIK it doesnât violate any laws, which is why They can get away with it, but this does support the point in the video that we have little reason to trust people who have spent the last year skirting the grey edges of the law, or flouting it.
I think RB is completely right that this will create divisiveness. We already saw that happen with COVID itself, with society split down the middle between true believers on on side and the its-all-a-scam brigade on the other. Those who refuse passports on principle will no doubt feel unjustly excluded from life and some of them will probably start causing trouble (it would be pretty easy for people without passports to clog the gates of passport-only events). This may result in the whole system being scrapped ⌠or it may result in TPTB doubling down on a big mistake.
Oh yeah, that. Big deal in the news at the time, I do recall, but not big enough to be a major historical event. At the end of the day, life would go on as it had always gone on â that is, badlyâŚ
âŚbut still less badly overall in the West than in the East.
If I didnât already speak Mandarin, I would not be rushing out to learn it and burning my English and French literature, if thatâs what you mean. No, I still do not see any âend of historyâ here, despite Covid being a bitch (which it also is in the East btw).
