It's been eleven days since I posted that, and no one's answered it.
Not one single swinging Richard out there has even made even the lamest attempt.
Pussies.
Pussies as far as the eye can see.
Then comes the soopergenius corollary:
"Nobody in my state is dead. Let the healthy people go back to work!"
So riddle me the answer to this follow-up:
C'mon, now, I keep seeing metric fucktons of people yammering that this evil, fascist lockdown must end, because reasons.
Okay.
Name them.
If you can answer either question above, you can show your work on how and why we should end the lockdowns.
How many people are you willing to kill?
Where's the line in the sand where we finally hit too many dead?
Is it one?
Or shall we just leap straight to mass murder?
(Why should abortionists have all the fun, amirite?)
We've already equaled flu deaths for an average flu season and a half, in six weeks.
We did the deaths in an average flu season in just the last week.
So, do we admit re-opening without widespread testing is a major fuck-up at 50K dead?
100K?
500K?
Never??
New York was driving the bus on the last peak, and they're the ones that ignored this until it bit their asses off.
So we should do 10, or 49, or 100 more peaks now, because people are getting antsy?
There's no question jackholes have abused and exceeded both lawful authority and common sense, but is it okay to throw out not just the baby with the bathwater, but thousands to tens of thousands - or more - of grandmas and grandpas too? What about the people under 60 you'll kill too? They don't count either?
And who's going to step up and say, "Hey, you had a good run, but I've got to be getting back to work, so fuck off and die."?
You?
POTUS?
Who?
Where in the Constitution is that power enumerated?
To whom?
"He shall, from time to time, write off vast swaths of the population, because their continued existence is inconvenient for their children and grandchildren..." appears in which Article?
My Declaration of Independence reads that the reason for any government is to secure the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
When did we make that first part optional, purely at the whim of the whiny?
When you're willing to push people into the crematorium, where does that slippery slope end?
How did that work out with Madame Guillotine?
Are we just going to start calling these "240th trimester abortions"?
Asking for 5-10M friends and neighbors.
Personally, I think the tsunami of ass-headedness is going to guarantee this explodes again (and again, and again), and kills a metric fuckton more people, and the "End the lockdowns now!" crowd still won't give a f**k.
Sociopathy is like that.
Time will tell if I've got that right too, but a wise man once said "It isn't possible to underestimate the average intelligence of Americans."
Change my mind.
Try something better than this, for starters:
I'm pretty widely-read, and well educated. So explain to me, with footnotes and proof-texts, where in blistering fuck you derive the right to push any number from one to potentially millions of your fellow citizens into an early grave, because you're being inconvenienced.
That's what you're asking to do, so stop beating around the bush, and tell me who the fuck gave YOU (for any value of that word) the right to start killing other people?
And if YOU have that right, doesn't that mean those threatened have the right to shoot your ass right back, in self defense?
Tell me the point at which you realize you're now taking this discussion from merely academic, to germane, and thence into tomorrow's headlines.
I'll wait right over here why you explain in chapter and verse where and how you derive the right to begin an open-ended pogrom on anybody else, and why you think that the people in your crosshairs shouldn't start shooting you in the face as justifiable homicide for your expressing that malice aforethought, and possessed of the means to carry it out.
Everybody wants to be gangster, until it's time to do gangster shit.
So come on, Gilligans.
Stop ducking the question, or trying to palm responsibility for this off onto others.
Own up to the genocide you're lusting to unleash.
And explain why you think you've unlocked the rationale for riding your pogo stick through the minefield.
This should be epic.
Or crickets.
But keep dicking around with this.
It's not going to turn out the way you thought it would, when you started playing with it.
Far too many people dependent on the medical system anyway. People that should have died years ago shuffling in to a clinic twice weekly for dialysis etc . Obese monsters barely recognizable as humans cruising through Walmart with a hundred bucks worth of Little Debbies in the cart . Quality of life ? Me thinks not . Merely a burden on society . Better off to let them go .
ReplyDelete"Far too many people dependent on the medical system anyway. People that should have died years ago shuffling in to a clinic twice weekly for dialysis etc . Obese monsters barely recognizable as humans cruising through Walmart with a hundred bucks worth of Little Debbies in the cart . Quality of life ? Me thinks not . Merely a burden on society . Better off to let them go ."
ReplyDeleteZu befehl, Herr Gauleiter!
To quote Booger's sensei, Edgar Poe Wong, AKA "Snotty", in Revenge of the Nerds,
"Fuck you. Who died and made you God?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_gV2cWntg
@O.C.,
There are 39,000 dead, right this minute, from not taking this serious enough already.
Call me when there are 39,000 dead from the lockdowns, and you might have an equivalent argument.
You're still waiting for one, so your point would appear to be a wee bit premature.
Welp.
ReplyDeleteSingapore took their foot off the brake, because things were looking up. Whoops.
Page takes a moment to load. Looks like a lot of young workers (center and bottom right fields to scroll for more detail than you'll find on a site referencing M&M stateside.
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/7e30edc490a5441a874f9efe67bd8b89
I see that you are widely-read and pretty intelligent.
ReplyDeleteWhen exactly would you advocate for ending the lock down and getting people back to work?
Appreciate you opening the comments and it appears for the most part it hasn't resulted in a mass influx of idiots.
ReplyDeleteMy opinion here is that you are misweighing the trade offs rather seriously.
At most according to the most pessimistic outcomes COVID 19 could possibly kill 3% of the infected population (stats re: Lancet) mainly older people in poor health, Black folks and Asians along with a few other younger people. It may also fuck the livers of some folks that make through. This is really bad.
The Hospital system would certainly be overwhelmed in that case.
How many actual casualties would occur would depending on infection rate and how many would be lost do the now fragged health care system . Let's say a 50% infection rate plus more losses do to a messed up health care system. So total losses of let us say around 9 million.
We can't calculate loses in 1918 to other causes but a fair if overly pessimistic estimate of COVID's effects would be around 2.75x that of the 1918 Flu. Ouch.
However the question I pose is, what are the downwind consequences of our reaction? Less people die and our half ass hospital system kind of makes it. All good.
Now though you've created a depression of unparalleled scale, risking hyperinflation and created a relationship between people and the state that feeds the worse impulses of petty totalitarians pushing the bugaloo needle way into the Red Zone.
And note, nothing will be fixed, those trillions will go int banker hands and ASAP it will be pushed under the rug just to make sure the oh so profitable China trade goes on.
So we'll save lives now at the cost of vast poverty, social instability and shortened life spans for everyone. Oh yes and while there might be a baby bump do to quarantine, it will only be small as so many people of reproductive age do not live with spouses. Whatever comes of that will be washed out the decline in TFR as people won't be able to afford kids.
And sure there is all the happy talk about "the economy will come roaring back" Not very likely.
Unless the US makes all the right choices in its recovery, basically it doesn't get one for a very long time. I'll caveat a hypothetical fast recovery but that is unlikely.
The loses there are hard to calculate but making the best moral calculus we can, I don't think it adds up.
1st off, this "lockdown" hasn't been a lockdown you wanted at all throughout any of this. So stop calling it that, it's more of a suggested recommendation in which the government is basically using "death panels" for businesses.
ReplyDeleteAKA the livelihood pogrom.
Otherwise gun stores wouldn't have to have been protected from tyrant assholes.
Point 2 of this lockdown not being an actual lockdown is NO ONE knows basic PPE use. I did as a teen, and I considered most things in basic training to be basic shit you already know. K-12 should start making this crap be tested once a month. Proper donning of mask, gloves on and off, decontaminated after an "infected" shower. Use something like coolant that smells and shows up under a dark light and they'll learn. Nothing has been done about this. No one is sealed off. Everyone goes to the same limited number of stores to get out of the house, the essentials and there families are no different.No ppe training. Just a stupid pointless, and might I add , completely arbitrary, requirement.
3rd point NYFC subway. Nuff said there.
No social distancing, improper ppe use, dont see them getting pulled out in cuffs, like that lonely dude in a kayak.
You start taking people and arresting them for being in their backyards because they busted their ass and provided before a crisis hit, you get pushback. Red areas especially have the means to make some spicy shit. It's the shit Mardi gras.
No one, not you, not the government, not a single state, has an ACTUAL REAL LIFE NUMBER OF INFECTED. No one can trust the number of dead either. (If you trust any number from anyone, again, they have reasons to make this number higher or lower based on politics, self interest, etc).
Hint: showing my work, a lady here at the VA had stage 4 cancer first round of therapies, caught this and died. Prognosis from cancer, she would have been dead around today. VA sent her info to Hopkins. The county didn't count it in their deaths, 1st person to die from this would be 4 days later, and she still isn't part of the county number.
She shouldnt be a number because 3 weeks is well within margin of error.
Not one actual large city has any form of ACTUAL LOCKDOWN. Just cops and mayors and governors being pretty tyrants. Closing a park next to an apartment building and actually forcing cops to arrest people LITERALLY TURNS THE APARTMENT COMPLEX INTO A CRUISE SHIP... on land of course. Again same facilities without catering staff.
Lockdowns, by any measure are not lock downs.
Gun control does not control guns.
This is behaviour modification.
This is a stupid, half baked half witted idea that is run by the same people (outside of trump) who said travel restrictions aren't necessary. 1-9 million people will die. (.3-3% of the population)
This will happen. Hospitals will get swamped again as soon as we lift numbers will go up. This is inevitable unless we get that magical real life number. And it is just that. Magically wished.
The economic damage will last much longer.
People in poor countries have been lifted beyond what anyone could have thought possible by our amazing economy. The poor of the world will pay.
So will your children.
Also, trying to confine this thing to only hospitals is GOING to make a superbug.
PS
Unless the government starts teaching people what they have to do for proper ppe, it's not a real lockdown. It's just larger cruise ships. Unless you're lucky and rural.Unless they are actually testing literally everyone whose been with 50 miles of a city over 15k, they'll never come close to the real number. And it's just all bullshit unless those 2 things get done.
Jiminy Christmas.
ReplyDeleteI don't really agree with Aesop on the likelihood of millions dying, or the need for mass lockdowns, but you don't respond to a post you don't like with profane rants calling the author a retard. You use these things called "facts."
Thanks a lot in advance if he just shuts down comments entirely.
Hi Aesop, appreciate your take on matters, but the economy must function in order to ultimately save lives, too. My wife is chemo, my mother is 80, I am responsible for taking the necessary precautions to protect them as best I can. We are not all New York City or NJ. Have already taken a major pay cut to keep working, and keeping the health insurance premiums intact. For every Covid death we are at 4 to 500 people out of work and dependent to on the tender mercies of Big Brother. Truly unsustainable. In my 2 counties of S. Oregon there are about 80 infected out of 260,000 with one death, an ailing 81 year old man. Meanwhile, tens of thousands here are out of work, supply chain strained, and many businesses crushed. Every choice has a cost, and the cost v benefit is getting thin in certain areas. There must be a life to eventually return to. Thanks for letting me weigh in, and be well.
ReplyDelete@Bill Meyer,
ReplyDeletehttps://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2020/04/so-you-want-out-of-lockdown.html