2024 ELECTION THREAD

Seem a woman can be responsible for her entire life of another human being for at least 18 years .

While a vaccine u just have to stay home a couple months while saving life .

I guess the implication for you it’s the same but it clearly isn’t .

And we aren’t even talking the financial imoact of having a vaccine that cost 0 and a force baby costing hundreds of thousands of dollar over many years ….

Comparing the 2 is laughable.
Just the monetary cost is absurdly different .

I was just aiming at the clear top 2 but yes surely other places got miserable too with some nonsense policies too .

Sweden ended up at the end of the cycle (that's when you count winners and losers) with one of the lowest excess death amounts worldwide, 2020-23.

UK did more lockdowns than most countries in the world and fared worse than most as expected.

but again please stop the OT, try to explain how you are pro choice in matters of healthcare given you are willing to mandate medical procedures on people who don't need them, to (try to) help others

And which of those vaccines introduced in the last few decades were for pandemics that killed over a million people in the USA alone?

That frustration you're demonstrating is because you have clearly have passionate feelings about this subject yet lack the commensurate basis to feel those feelings. In other words, you have no rational argument to support your case. All you have is the intense emotion behind it. That's a clue to reevaluate where you are with this.

And you keep throwing around mandates. There was no general-population COVID-19 vaccine mandate, so it's not just that your argument has no basis but the underlying point you're arguing is moot anyway.

Isn't Lucioms own libertarianism best, democrats dumb, no exceptions thread long overdue so he can post all his gottem fallacy fallacies there instead

I disagree with how you’re flattening everything down. First of all, we had a novel disease that in the early going was killing people at an astonishingly rapid rate. People were getting sick and we had absolutely no idea exactly how bad it was going to get. Lockdowns were one in a bevy of public health measures that were used in the early going to try to stop the spread of what seemed like a very deadly disease.

It wasn’t until a year later when we actually were able to get the vaccine in one of the only good policies of the Trump handling of Covid, operation warpspeed. The pressure to get the vaccine came extremely early in its implementation, when we still didn’t know exactly how strong of a vaccine it was, because it was tested primarily on the more deadly early variants. Mind you, this disease also comes with neurological issues that plagued many people.

So part of the argument of “oh it never mattered when you got the disease because we all get it anyway” is betrayed by the vaccine itself and how it saved many peoples lives. The more that covid spread through vulnerable populations before the vaccine could come, the more damage public health officials thought there would be.

And remember, if this was such a dogma, you wouldn’t constantly having people question stuff like the public health officials saying it was broadly ok for kids to go back to school, or saying that it was not that severe for kids to get covid despite skepticism on the left. And yeah, wanting to go Leroy Jenkins on public health orders in the middle of a pandemic is going to make more collectively minded people look at you like a freak, just like taking covid seriously was looked at as freakish by dogmatic individualists.

At the end of the day, just like the woke vs anti-woke wars, I think that conservatives vastly underestimate their own political influence. I mean the party in power in many states, the senate, the white house, and the supreme court was challenging mask mandates, social distancing requirements, lockdowns, and had a whole host of advocates for them in right-wing media, including fox news. The idea that only the left politicized the vaccines and public health measures is ludicrous. There are a host of public health measures recommended that seem like even in retrospect they worked, like hand washing, masking, and social distancing. And these things helped to stop the spread of covid until we could get a vaccine.

Luciom is clearly the most successful troll in this thread. Even while I have him blocked, I seem to see everything he posts in quotes.

Cmon guys, he's making this thread dumber and dumber.

Man the topic was vaccine mandates as proof you aren't pro body autonomy.

There are 2 main reasons to mandate vaccines, paternalism (protection of the person you mandate the vaccine to, the state substitutes the individual because the states "chooses better", for the individual gain at least according to the state opinion) and "the greater good" (the person you mandate the vaccine to doesn't risk much if anything from the disease, but for other reasons TM you mandate the vaccine, because your models say other people will gain).

Vaccine mandates happened after every single vulnerable person had a chance to get the vaccine. So the "greater good" part didn't exist at all at the time of vaccine mandate implementation.

There was absolutely no hospital overload risk after vulnerable people had been vaccinated. And there were no "innocent vulnerable people" the unvaccinated could have increased risks to. And there was no herd immunity achievable with a vaccine whose protection decayed in time (yes in July 2021 we already knew the protection conferred by vaccination against covid wasn't close to 100% against infection and decayed in time).

If in say june 2021 mandates had happened exclusively for the portion of the vulnerable who chose not to vaccinate, we wouldn't have this conversation. Vaccine mandates for paternalistic reasons had precedent. They directly, proven, clearly save lives, they don't violate any ethic other than libertarian ethic. They are predicated on a direct intervention that helps the mandated person. It's like seatbelts. I can dislike the mandate but it's not even comparable.

The complete fraud, with no precedent, was to claim a "greater good" consideration applied when it absolutely didn't, to people you *didn't* have the paternalistic reasons to justify the mandates for. And one of the reasons for the fraud was that it would have required to admit that covid wasn't particularly risky not only for kids, but for many adults as well. And most pro vaccine mandate people came from "covid is the plague!!!!" and months of completly absurd claims (which they used to justify lockdowns) about the dangers of covid for everyone.

Mandating the vaccine only to the people actually at significant risk would have meant admitting they lied to justify lockdowns.

And no the disease wasn't killing all people at "astonishngly rapid rates" in the "early going". It was killing very old, sick , fragile people at very quick rates, and almost no one else. Less than 1 in 100 deaths had no severe , chronic, comorbidity. The median number of comorbidities was over 3.

As i said in Bergamo & Madrid in march-april 2020 there were no under40 excess deaths.

Democrats and others elsewhere who supported vaccine mandates, even after everyone vulnerable could have been vaccinated himself, even to people who had nothing to fear from the disease, including people who had already got covid (!!!), and in multiple doses at that, committed the worst mass violation of medical ethics in western peacetime history, and displayed an utter and complete disregard for any notion of bodily autonomy.

Those people lost the possibility of claiming they are in favor of choice in healthcare for the rest of their lives. And that includes democrats

Vance is vapid, and is a placeholder for whatever ideology sells in a given moment rather than a man of principle. So it is fairly irrelevant if he is smart or not, because it is not like said intelligence is going to yield substance.

Now, American politics has its share of empty suits (I mean, all countries do, but it is more profitable in the US), but I'll still hold that Vance seems to take it to extreme levels. This also leads to a distinct disparity between him and Walz, which seems like the anti-thesis to this type of politician.

Being an empty suit is a problematic in any candidate for vice-president, but it is especially problematic when the presidential candidate is the oldest in American history and leads a very unhealthy life. In a hypothetical Trump win, it is not unlikely Vance will end up as president.

UK had that policy for about a month or so before common sense and scientific knowledge stepped in and forced the government's hand.

People should stop broadcasting their ignore lists because it's little more than bullying.

I don't disagree with your last sentence and it's a pity the ignore feature doesn't work better (as it does on Discourse forums eg) but we are stuck (not unstuck thankfully) with it and it's not reasonable to expect people to stop using the quote feature.

yes and ended with one of the worst results worldwide in terms of excess death, among developed countries.

Source is the famous MAGA journal "the Lancet" europe

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanep...

Sweden close to 0 excess deaths overall 2020-2023 (ie the only thing that happened was that some people died a little sooner, in 2020), UK and Italy massive excess deaths (more people died in 2020, then more people kept dying), among the worst in the developed world.

I know you guys don't care at all about reality but this proves that what you call "common sense" (against the totality of previously accumulated knowledge, which never hinted at doing what UK and Italy did) was one of the most disastrous set of public policies in human history.

It didn't save lives, it almost certainly caused more deaths than necessary, all while annihilating the economy and violating basic freedoms of millions for months/years.

In a normal, sane world a lot of people would go to jail for life for this, in this world, even when looking at one of the most glaring proof of unmitigated disaster in the response, people keep claiming it made sense.

Sweden best in the group in age adjusted excess deaths and in relative excess death. Literally as if covid never happened.

The UK had the now infamous Eat Out To Help Out initiative dreamt up by Sunak, encouraging people at the height of a pandemic to eat out in restaurants.

No, I am not making this up.

From your source.

STOP LYING

Who even cares about their sources when they declare it irrelevant that some people just died a little sooner (years), they're also shifting goalposts from mandated vaccines to mandated lockdowns and beyond if someone is dumb enough to dispute that, but again, who cares.

I would much more enjoy reading the different takes from both sides and especially from the people I couldn't quite gauge, than this infinite selfcentred logosgymnastics

by jalfrezi P

From your source.

STOP LYING

I am not sure why you think this disproved what i wrote. Sweden did better than the UK every year lol

Some people just died sooner than they would have anyway is one of the most ridiculous arguments that I've ever heard on this topic. You could literally say that about someone you just shot in the head. Unbelievable that anyone would say that with a straight face.

Keep going gorgo, someone dying 1 year sooner than expected isn't the same as someone dying 20 years sooner than expected, and in sweden, only people who would have died soon anyway died in excess in 2020 because of covid, which is why OVERALL from 2020 to 2023, they had no excess deaths.

Instead elsewhere people who would have lived far longer died in excess during covid. So they ended 2020-2023 with more deaths overall than expected pre covid.

In sweden that didn't happen.

What's insane and unbelievable if for people to deny data which is cristal clear.

To die A LITTLE SOONER isn't the same as to die with 20+ years of life expectancy in front of you. Denying this , the fact that not all deaths are equal, is the insanity. Demented 83y old with 3 other comorbidities with a chance PER MONTH to day of more than 10%, immediatly dies with covid.

Not the same as the 66y old who misses cancer screening because of your blessed lockdowns and dies, when he could have lived 15+ years if he had screened and removed it when very small.

And keep going with the OT, when the only claim is that everyone who mandated vaccines and other health procedures simply is against body autonomy, and can never claim to be in favour of body autonomy as a principle, for the rest of his life.

I don't understand why some people call Luciom a troll. I don't think he is posting primarily to get a rise out of people. I have no reason to doubt that his posts reflect his actual views.

I am guessing that Luciom is exactly who he appears to be. He went to a university but his income has never depended on a job that required a university degree. He used to play poker seriously. Now he makes whatever money he has off a variety of side hustles, investments, etc.

He thinks of himself as part of the European intellectual right, mostly because of the reading he has done on his own, not because of his formal education. He would LOVE to be regarded as a prominent public intellectual. He thinks that most (but not all) people who disagree with him do so because they are dumber than he is, less intellectually courageous than he is, or hopelessly addicted to modern virtue signalling. He doesn't see much intrinsic value in democracy.

In the United States, this personality type historically has been very attracted to libertarianism, Ayn Rand, Mises, etc.

That's my soul read, fwiw. Not a troll. Something else.

aye aye aye, this covid discussion. Makes my head hurt.

Jeebus, just move on. It was a once in a lifetime pandemic. Nobody knew anything about it when it hit. People WERE dying. Hospitals were full. Officials had to work with limited information. There was no perfect solution. Geez.

You know, whenever the subject comes up with literally anyone I know, the phrase is always "during covid". Nobody talks about the evil government taking away our freedoms or subjecting children to the suffocation masks EEK!

JUST
MOVE
ON
WITH
YOUR
LIFE

What you write was that the UK did worse than most of the developed world, and to prove this you posted charts all showing it in the middle.

Yeah, this is a good read.

He quite obviously doesn’t have a 9 to 5 but denies the most obvious explanation ie that he’s a trust fund kid. I don’t believe him.

No i think that most people who disagree with me on core value claims do so because they ... have different core values for real.

There are disagreements linked to capacity of understanding reality as it is so i occasionally agree with someone on what we want to accomplish in society, and we disagree about the how, and in those cases when it's me vs amateur like me i usually think it's about people being less obsessed than me about various topics so they researched and argued and thought about it less, and less analytically. Sometimes it's about people being dumber but those don't usually like to discuss things in detail so you rarely reach that point.

But i'd say 80, 90% of the disagreements on this forum are about core values. People here really consider important and good, stuff that i either consider not very relevant or actually really bad, and viceversa.

Like i truly think that inequality in society is a significant moral good. That alone would put me at odds with many/most people in this forum about many topics. I also truly think that the state should not be used as a tool to direct society toward outcomes you prefer, rather exclusively as a referee for the game of life, which we all play. This again puts me at odds with many/most people about most things state-related.

And most of all i think freedom is more important than everything else including life, that life without freedom is worse than death, and the many corollaries that follow from that. Which... again... put me at odds my many/most people, who have very different value scales.

Maybe what makes people angry at me in particular is the fact that i have 0 shame of my values, of their corollaries, of what they entail in terms of claims and policy proposals. Maybe the idea is that most people STILL think that political disagreement , even when ferocious, is among people who at the end deep inside truly share some common goal, they just vehemently disagree on the solutions to achieve that goal, or get "manipulated" by "evil forces" to become convinced of things against them.

Instead i am here claiming that no, i actually do not share your goals at all in most cases, i really want society to be very different than what you want because what i value in human life is very different from what you value. And that shattering of a deeply held belief (that people share a common core of goals and disagreement is about something else, otherwise a person is a psychopath) gets people angry.

Ofc given this is a political forum we end up with disagreement given i know my value propositions are minoritarian in society in general, and very minoritarian here in particular.