Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Clay
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

Post by Clay »

Tantrum wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 4:26 am Clay, I didn't see anything in your link about the effigy being burned. Plus, it said the effigy was hung outside the Capitol after protesters walked there from the governor's mansion. So, it's not as bad as you thought. It's just really, really bad.
Thank you, I needed that chuckle.

As for you, how does changing an air filter result in five stitches? Was it feral?
Warcry wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 5:10 am I just had to stop for a minute and really emphasize this.

This man is a pastor. A leader in the church. The Christian church. You know, the one that's supposed to be all about emulating Jesus Christ? And he's talking, on the record, like a 14 year old internet tough guy on Reddit. I'm not a fan of the church by any means, but the state of it in America never ceases to blow my mind.
What's sad is that I read right over that without blinking.
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Tantrum
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Not all religious folks are dismissing coronavirus. This priest used a squirt gun full of holy water to baptize while social distancing.
Warcry wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 5:10 amAlso, and more to the point...haven't nearly 100,000 people died in the US? Do nutjobs really think that their government is faking it? And more to the point, wouldn't the nutbars who'd be inclined to think that love the current government in spite of Trump being the literal embodiment of everything they hate and fear?
I don't think the nutjobs are capable of believing in coronavirus. My dad watches Fox News and I hear some when I visit my parents. They tell their viewers that anyone telling them anything they don't want to hear can't possibly have a point, or even just be wrong, but is a bad faith actor looking to destroy your way of life.

For example, during the gay marriage debate, gay people wanting to get married weren't people with a legitimate request for equality. They weren't even misguided sinners who needed to be saved from their own impulses. They were out to destroy the American family. That gay marriage is legal and the American family isn't destroyed doesn't seem to get brought up.

The coronavirus scientists are even worse. They aren't just asking you to rethink your prejudices. They're asking you to make material changes to your life, like wearing masks and not getting professional haircuts. Can you really risk trusting "experts" if what they say inconveniences you? After all, if the coronavirus scientists are right, maybe the climate change scientists are, too. Better to just assume they're all bad actors.

This provides the benefit of never having to worry that you might be wrong. These people who've dedicated their lives to studying an issue don't know more than you. They know you're right, but are saying something else to advance their own agenda. You aren't wrong, and definitely don't need to reflect on your own faults, because you don't have any.
Clay wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 9:25 pmAs for you, how does changing an air filter result in five stitches? Was it feral?
No, I was. I'd been having a bad week and not getting enough sleep, so I was in a bad mood to begin with. The poorly filtered air in my house wasn't helping.
Then, the furnace wouldn't shut off even though I turned the thermostat off, and I had to use the kill switch. Then, the old air filter was a pain to get out. Then, the new filter was a pain to get in. Then, I had to fit the old filter into my nearly full trash can.

So, I decided to fold the old filter and vent my frustrations at the same time by grabbing the ends of the filter and stomping through it. That was when some of the wire in the old filter made a flap in my middle finger. It didn't hurt, but bled a lot.
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Denyer
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Tantrum wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 4:26 amThen there's this pastor: “This has been one of the biggest shams in world history,” Christman said. “Grown men have been hiding in (their) homes nearly wetting their pants over this invisible enemy that nobody sees. Where is it at?" That doesn't just show disbelief in coronavirus. It shows disbelief in viruses in general.
Mmm, man who believes in invisible stuff can't understand concept of other invisible stuff.

This one might as well be titled "overweight moron kills wife" --

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-52731624
Tantrum wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 11:41 pmThis provides the benefit of never having to worry that you might be wrong. These people who've dedicated their lives to studying an issue don't know more than you. They know you're right, but are saying something else to advance their own agenda. You aren't wrong, and definitely don't need to reflect on your own faults, because you don't have any.
And if it still goes wrong it's all those other people's fault for not praying hard enough.

As Bill Hicks put it, "Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever."
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Clay
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Denyer wrote: Wed May 27, 2020 11:25 am And if it still goes wrong it's all those other people's fault for not praying hard enough.

As Bill Hicks put it, "Hitler had the right idea, he was just an underachiever."
Hmm.

I understand Hicks' point (both the joke and the frustration behind it, the release of which makes it funny), but I can't agree. For starters, you have the fact that social purification will always, always backfire and include the people advocating it (the Terror period following the french revolution comes to mind). Additionally, while you could probably find enough people to agree that "X needs to happen to Y" that it gains social traction, X and Y are always relative, meaning no one has the authority to decide that group X needs to be extirpated, nevermind it backfiring later.

The only remedy for any of that is to agree on a passive, entirely self-selecting system of stupid-purging. If you're an adult that drinks bleach because "the pres'dent said it'd help beat the 'rona," then maybe the rest of us shouldn't rush to help. The problem with that is that it presumes that self-inflected pwning would be self-contained, but as we're seeing with this current pandemic, people not wanting to wear a simple mask when out in public are actually a vector for a virus that will cause collateral deaths in other people who trying earnestly to not get infected.

And of course, the problem with that is that it's a fundamentally human trait to make mistakes, and if people die from something that's easy to remedy, then they're not really going to learn. This reveals that the problem, both individually and socially, isn't making mistakes so much as repeating them over and over.

It reminds me of a passage toward the end of The Lost World (the Crichton one, not the Doyle one). Malcom's talking about the raptors leaving their young to starve and observes that physical characteristics and instinctual behaviors only get you so far. Anything that's a learned behavior, actively taught by adults to offspring, is completely lost when performing genetic alchemy to resurrect an extinct animal, or even when its offspring is raised while completely separated. Learned behavior then, as an adaptation, is a double edged sword. Organisms can adapt their behavior in astronomically fewer generations (think of writing down knowledge so it gets passed on, or the advancement of the scientific understanding of the physical world, like say, viral pathogens), but all that adaptation can all be lost in one generation. For example, the number of people that can invent calculus from scratch (one Isaac Newton) are few and far between, but the number of people that can be taught calculus (high school students) are basically everywhere. But if for some reason we stop teaching calculus to subsequent generations, it'll be lost for a long time, if not forever.

When I see remarks like Hicks' (which again I see the humor in the frustration), or allusions to Idiocracy and the "full reproductive capacity of morons", I actively temper my attraction to that kind of world assessment. Humans are more than just our biological makeup. We are what we teach each other. If we're in crisis because we've reached critical mass of stupid because we've been too passive about teaching scientific subjects like viral pathogenics, then it's all of our own fault for either failing to teach them or to limit the damage they can do. There's far more to it than that ("my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge, after all"), but it's an aspect that I don't see articulated as often as I'd like. A failure in education isn't just a matter of poor economic prospects for a student at the micro level, but also human civilization in the macro. So, even if we purge all the ignorant people without fixing the systemic problems that led to ignorance, we'd end up right back where we are now within a generation.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Clay wrote:as we're seeing with this current pandemic, people not wanting to wear a simple mask when out in public are actually a vector for a virus that will cause collateral deaths in other people who trying earnestly to not get infected.
One reason why authoritarian models work -- including measures that alienate such as splitting family units, enforcing quarantines, socially or legally sanctioning non-conformity etc. And that includes countries such as Japan that appear to have been successful but don't need armed patrols on the street to achieve it.

I think a retirement-age favourite author captured it;
About three weeks ago, just before mask-wearing became mandatory in RI, Bill and I donned fabric masks and went for a walk on the bike path. It was...sobering. I doubt 10% of the people on the path were wearing masks, and most were making little attempt to maintain distance.

After a few minutes, this guy on a bike, no mask, cell phone in hand, rides toward us. As he passes, he angrily shouts, "Yeah, I'm texting and driving. Ya gonna write me a ticket?"

I can only speculate what prompted that sort of ire against two strangers who were only trying to be socially responsible and to, you know, NOT DIE. Apparently the wearing of masks is interpreted as judgement, perhaps even an attack, against those who do not want to wear them, and against him in particular. (Yeah, that's right, buddy; I am wearing this mask AT YOU. Everything is all about you. Whoever you are.)

The narcissism in that stance is staggering, but not surprising. Even pre-Trump, a disturbing number of Americans seemed to believe that the Bill of Rights grants carte blanc to do whatever they damn well please, without consequences and with no regard for the wellbeing or the rights of others.

Demanding rights without accepting responsibility is not Freedom, it's adolescence. We've become a nation of angry, entitled 7th graders.

In related news, we've only been on the bike path a couple of times since, and only very early in the morning.
We're on more or less the same page. Education is entirely vital. Bringing people along with being able to justify extreme actions in extreme situations is education/culture. In emergency-type situations, it'll still fail with a proportion of people and fining/jailing/shooting and "an example to others" is a necessary part of the toolkit. Most avowed survivalists don't actually have the wherewithal to sustain armed protest.

The US and UK have seen (and will probably continue to see) higher death tolls because they fail on all points; education/culture, authority and will.

edit:
It reminds me of a passage toward the end of The Lost World (the Crichton one, not the Doyle one). Malcom's talking about the raptors leaving their young to starve and observes that physical characteristics and instinctual behaviors only get you so far.
Been ages since I read it (can only remember the bit about prions, new generations having new truths and feeling the air on your face) but descended birds bond and it's likely raptors would too, notwithstanding the jiggery-pokery that the JP/JW franchise has gotten into with sticking with featherless dinos.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Interesting if substantiated, reactions not being the only wildcard --

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... l-covid-19
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Also interesting and goes a long way towards explaining why age, obesity and bad living (basically things that affect vascular systems) increase vulnerability so much --

https://elemental.medium.com/coronaviru ... 4032481ab2

edit: Explains rare bad reactions in kids too, Kawasaki disease is a vascular disorder -- https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanc ... 6/fulltext
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Clay
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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All yall actually still on about that pandemic thing? Here in the USA, we've got the president having protesters shot with rubber bullets and gassed to clear them out of the way so that he can have a photo op with an upside-down bible. After they threw the priest out of the church, of course.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Yeah, that was brilliant. I swear Trump had a hard on announcing deploying the military to quell social unrest.

We are still on about the pandemic over here. The government's in a mad rush to get everyone back to work and all the shops open (largely to distract from the row over Dominic Cummings travelling 250 miles and back to put his family and the local population at risk of CV-19 so he could 'get better child care' at the other end of the country), so from the 15th of June everyone has to wear a mask on public transport. Presumably because they've released limited capacity is really impractical on public transport. Leads to scenes like you see even with the recent easement - loads of people having to stand waiting every morning for a bus / train they're allowed to get on. Trains are especially silly with 3 people to a carriage on the lines I use. Hilariously, the disabled and those with breathing difficulties are exempt from wearing a mask!
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Why worry about covid choking you to death over the course of two weeks when the police will do it in (slightly) less time than it takes to listen to the album version of November Rain?

The current portion of Rhode Islanders who've tested positive for covid is 1 out of 69. Nice.

Rhode Islanders who travel out of state to an area under a stay-at-home order must self-quarantine for 14 days upon returning. The only states/territories still with them are New Hampshire (where my parents live), Virginia, and Puerto Rico. VA's expires June 10th. NH and PR's expire June 15th. So, I should be able to visit my parents for either Father's Day or my dad's birthday the following weekend. I don't know why NH is the last state to lift their stay-at-home. They haven't been hit that hard, and I don't think they've even made masks mandatory in public.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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What level of Jumanji are we on now? Hard to keep track.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Good: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53061281 -- inexpensive steroid treatment improves survival rates

Bad: https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21251899/c ... s-symptoms / https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland- ... d-53056785 -- evidence of lung damage in asymptomatic cases, as well as a laundry list of severe side effects in some young/healthy people

Ugly: https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/ ... 2107457536 -- "only" (this guy is the secretary of state for health, with no better bedside manner than a corpse cart loader)
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Sades wrote: Sun Jun 07, 2020 8:52 am What level of Jumanji are we on now? Hard to keep track.
We're still trying to figure out who goes first
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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To stop COVID-19 we need to completely change almost everything in our life: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. We all want things go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized - some things never will be like before.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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That's basically why it won't be stopped. There aren't that many diseases that have been completely eradicated. The best-case scenario is a fairly effective vaccine that reduces the severity even in cohorts that don't usually get maximum benefit from vaccines, and it's new territory.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Aye, we still don't have vaccines for Ebola, HIV and earlier strains of SARS, so it's going to be treating the symptoms more than anything else.

Went into Leeds yesterday (after a walk along the canal and some woods to get there) to do something relatively normal and have a look in some shops. Most were sticking to social distancing and following all the one-way signage and so-on. Can't say it's something I'm going to do again in a hurry, even with less than a third of the normal volume of people about. Ques were prevalent depending on peaks and flows of footfall. Places like Sports DIrect and Primark, who both decided a massive sale would be a good idea, were flooded out with the sort of queues normally reserved for getting into a nightclub*, gig or major sporting event. I can't say in this new normal that shopping is a leisure activity anymore, so if you're wanting to go to the shops you really need to have a reason to go to them. And to set aside a full day and expect to get to only 2 or 3 places.

I don't know how pubs, theatres, cinemas and music venues are going to function. There's talk of patrols in pubs and using apps to order, which makes it all sound like it's going to be a rather joyless affair. It's important to be safe, but in these sorts of social environments, I think it's rather going to blunt their purpose and their point.

All in all, my day out has left me feeling like I don't want to go out again. At least not to the shops for things I don't need or even for a look around. I'll be sticking to green spaces. At least until they get built on to solve our housing crisis.

*As I was wandering about it made me a bit sad to see how many nightclubs have gone. Leeds used to have loads of them. Now it is just bars. It's funny to see that in the space of 15 years, nightclubs are just things that people aren't interested in anymore. The ones that have survived seem like a curiosity or throwback to some bygone era. An irrelevant thought to have in this age of viruses, but one I mused on all the same.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Skyquake87 wrote: Sat Jun 20, 2020 11:15 am I don't know how pubs, theatres, cinemas and music venues are going to function. There's talk of patrols in pubs and using apps to order, which makes it all sound like it's going to be a rather joyless affair. It's important to be safe, but in these sorts of social environments, I think it's rather going to blunt their purpose and their point.
Restaurants and such are opening up here, but I feel about the same way as you seem to. I'm not going to a restaurant to EAT. I could make better food at home for less money. I'm going there to socialize! If I can't do that, what's the point of going? Rushing in and out as quickly as I can while trying not to catch COVID, being served by people in HASMAT suits, just doesn't sound like my idea of a good time.

To be honest, if the staff need to be done up in full PPE just to serve food, I'm definitely not going to feel comfortable eating there. If it's not safe for the staff then I wouldn't feel safe either, so I'm probably not going anywhere near a dine-in restaurant until the pandemic has passed. And I'm in a place where there's been maybe thirty cases in the last two months. When I see news stories about packed restaurants and bars in Florida or other places where COVID is stil running rampant, I can't even comprehend what's going through some people's heads.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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Clay wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2020 8:50 pm So, what are people's impressions in here?

In the US, I see people both under and over react.

Most problematically, the people that are under reacting are doing so based on the idea that the virus is a media hoax created to discredit Trump (somehow?), notwithstanding that at this moment Trump's on the tv declaring it a national emergency. Or they're dismissive because they think that coronavirus and covid-19 are interchangeable. Or some other mentally deranged reason.

I worry that, when it's all over, containment efforts will have sufficiently slowed the spread to the point that it's manageable and/or a treatment is developed, which will cause all the more people to completely dismiss the entire threat. And as I think of all the elderly people and people with fragile health that I know, I find myself that much more agitated.
Toronto asked residents to call the city’s 311 line because social distancing snitches were clogging 911 emergency lines with hundreds of calls. Just last Saturday, the city said it received 300 complaints involving people in parks.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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CharlizeBaker wrote: Thu Jun 18, 2020 8:48 am To stop COVID-19 we need to completely change almost everything in our life: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. We all want things go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized - some things never will be like before.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/0 ... 18-months/
CharlizeBaker wrote: Sun Jun 21, 2020 6:57 pm Toronto asked residents to call the city’s 311 line because social distancing snitches were clogging 911 emergency lines with hundreds of calls. Just last Saturday, the city said it received 300 complaints involving people in parks.
https://nationalpost.com/news/it-has-be ... f-snitches

Fascinating sort of bot (fairly on-topic) or manual spammer with limited vocab? Using articles to clip text in an attempt at relevant content, anyway. I think this is the one Dalek deleted something else by because it had a spam link edited in.
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Re: Covid 19 / everybody PANDEMIC

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#cleverbot :grin:
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