Sure, I wasn’t criticizing. I meant what I said: if someone believes that they’re being led down the garden path in an improper manner, then they can say so … but then explain their alternative position. “I don’t like where you’re going with this argument” without any further qualification implies that, well, you just don’t like where it’s going, not that it’s actually invalid.
If you’re referring to the masks thing, you can ponder on “nuance” all you like, but (a) you still seem to misunderstand what I said and (b) if something terrible has gone down, bringing up “nuance” looks far too much like making excuses for the perpetrators. A defense lawyer might reasonably bring up his client’s troubled background in defending him from a murder charge. We shouldn’t have to do this with our “representatives”. They should be held to much higher standards than a criminal trying to shave some years off his sentence.
There was a time in British politics where a politician could be reasonably expected to resign - and would actually do so - if there had been even a hint of impropriety in his behaviour. Whatever happened to that sort of attitude?
Here we have a fine example of yyy bringing up a metaphor for something which really doesn’t need a metaphor. Let’s look at the thing as it was, not as a roughly-comparable scenario. But if you want to use that particular metaphor, you might want to consider a big building surrounded by all the trappings of a fire response, and policemen in riot gear keeping the public away so nobody can see what’s going on (“there are dangerous chemicals in there!”) and no apparent sign of a fire except for a bunch of suspicious-looking guys setting fire to a bunch of old rags in an oil barrel, shouting and screaming, “fire! fire! The whole city is going to burn down!”.
Let’s be clear about this: there was no “lack of knowledge”. I was attempting to keep on top of the medical conversations at the time. The doctors had a reasonable war plan in place and were a bit bothered, but not panicking. They’ve been treating respiratory diseases since forever and there was nothing truly remarkable about this one - the slightly-remarkable things had been characterized (the Italian meltdown had provided a lot of information), and it was obvious that COVID was not a risk to the majority, and was treatable for the minority.
The problem was that doctors were being shouted down. They were not listened to; instead, “modellers” were listened to. If doctors refused to accept bizarre orders from on high, they would lose their jobs, simple as. Thus we had Andrew Cuomo ordering everyone to be transitioned onto invasive ventilation ASAP (the result is clear to see in NY death records) and Anthony Fauci ordering that Remdesivir should be used as a first-line treatment, despite the fact that there was zero evidence of it being of any use; simultaneously, we had doctors using other drugs that did appear useful being … uh, fired again. Or at least told to cease and desist.
If we bunch of idiots - the denizens of the Humbug thread - could look at the information available and say, “hang on, this doesn’t look like a big problem, and this response makes no sense”, why couldn’t the politicians?
But let’s say you’re right. The politicians and the experts were such a bunch of utter mouthbreathers that every decision they made was the exact opposite of the correct one. What does that suggest to you?
Let’s say there was “real danger from the fire”. The point here is that there are real dangers from all sorts of things, all the time. What we don’t do, generally, is enact massive restrictions on the whole of society that makes it difficult or impossible to deal with those dangers.
Nor do we start enacting expensive and intrusive measures that have nothing whatsoever to do with the danger at hand. Do you remember when the main task of the police force was to stop people taking their dogs for a walk or going to the beach?
If there’s a fire, and a big building is burning down, everyone lets the fire department do their job. We don’t expect the government to come around setting fire to everyone’s house in a show of solidarity.
Crikey, @yyy. You’re going all around the houses to argue that something that has happened on multiple occasions couldn’t possibly happen.
Look, I don’t find the “the vaccines are designed to cull the human race!” position very compelling, but if that were their intent, it’s entirely possible to make it work despite (a) the presence of a significant “resistance” and (b) you’ve given the kool-aid to only the compliant subset.
- Resistance is futile. You’ve seen how this works. The point is that people with genocidal intent are prepared to do things that the average person is not. They will therefore win, simply because they are more psychopathic. They have no conscience. The average person recoils from the idea of rebellion; it won’t cross his mind until he is literally being corralled into a mass execution, and by then it’s too late. I’ll quote Solzhenitsyn again:
“At what point, then, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one’s home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually…and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.”
- Violent men often have deep contempt for the compliant, and at least a measure of respect for those who refuse to take the knee - even if they intend to kill them all. If the vaccinated went willingly to their doom, they’ll laugh about that and think no more of it. They do not need ‘sheeple’ for what follows because at the end of the day, they have guns and chains.
I think nice genteel people often have real trouble figuring out what goes on in the minds of truly evil people, or even accepting that there might be a lot of such people around.
Good grief man. Can you honestly not see that medical experiments were carried out? Of course they were not as in-your-face as phenol injections and freezing people to death. Oddly, some of the Nazi experiments did actually have a purpose, were meticulously documented, and have subsequently saved lives. In this instance, people were - for example - compelled under various threats to inject an untested substance, which had no demonstrable medical value, and which appears to have injured millions. The outcome was not merely undocumented, you’ll be called a conspiracy theorist for asking “what was the benefit of all this, and what was the harm?”. Hand on heart, are you really prepared to dismiss this as nothing more than an honest mistake?
You think mask mandates (or vaccine mandates) fall into the same category as PT and eating vegetables? “Same difference”? Really?
I realise you don’t have any medical background, yyy, but it’s really hard for me to see how anybody can compare forcibly masking children with telling them to eat their vegetables or run around in the sunshine.
The application was experimental. Nobody knew what mass masking would do. This was one of those instances where the experts genuinely couldn’t predict the outcome with any certainty or detail - although it soon became clear.
Chef’s knives don’t kill people. It’s the way you use the knife that results either in freedom fries, or a corpse.
At least we can acknowledge that it applies to the vaccines. So now what do we do about that?
How do you know this?
It is entirely possible that making people wear a mask for hours at a time, for months on end, could shorten their lives. It might not kill them outright, but it may damage them in such a manner that their longevity is reduced by a year or two, particularly in context (people being confined to their homes etc).
In any case, do we really have to excuse absolutely any imposition on the basis that nobody died? People were harmed. They were harmed for absolutely no good reason. Why are we even debating this?
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