Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Your hysteria is costing us too much money. What we need is a Republican to decide things.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

OK, I'll put you down for "loudest asshole"

That's one person for someone who knows shit, one for the loudest asshole.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

O.K., I’ll break the tie. I vote for the decision to be made by the loudest asshole. All the screaming and wailing about how fucking hard it is to put on a mask is giving me a headache, so maybe this will shut them the fuck up.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Damn, I hate losing.

Especially since I know the loudest asshole isn't going to shut up, he's just going to go back to complaining about how teachers should be replaced by Trumpers and how the hippies want to take away their guns.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I love masks! Take it up with this guy: https://mobile.twitter.com/GavinNews...-refuses-do-so

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Or a non-Republican…. https://abc7ny.com/amp/mask-mandate-...chul/11548122/

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Yes. Metrics from experts would be great. The problem is there is disagreement over who is a truly qualified expert, and those who are trotted out as experts often say conflicting things from day to day.

Having Fauci and WHO and CDC people speaking day in/day out destroyed the messaging from the outset. Fauci should have done written releases each week, a brief conference every two weeks, and otherwise stayed off the air.

There were too many voices speaking too frequently and they were wrong an awful lot. Trust was destroyed early and never regained.

Ty wrote, effectively, one should blindly trust the “experts.” But this was a novel virus, and the experts frequently seemed anything but. I think it’s madness to trust anybody claiming know how to handle a novel virus 100%. It’s more prudent to assess where they appear correct and where they’re wrong, or acting politically, or just lying.

Adults soberly assessing situations can and will agree on metrics as guides. But we can’t have that. Because we have a partially dishonest media, a social media establishment that is happy to engage in pushing narratives it prefers, and a lunatic reactive alt-media/social media that traffics in outright fantasy and conspiracy theories.

So no. Don’t just “trust the experts.” If you’ve a brain, you have to research where they’re full of shit, or flawed, and make some decisions for yourself.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

So I guess he's hysterical only when he disagrees with you? I mean, duh.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

A friend of mine died last week from cancer. The surgery to put a shunt in her brain was delayed quite a few times because of the Covid related staffing issues at the hospital. She probably would have died anyways--it was a bitch of a cancer--but that certainly didn't help. We're getting better here in Houston in terms of capacity, but it has definitely been a dicey thing, and the Omicron surge was just as bad, and worse in some ways, than any of the others. Sheer number of total cases meant that there were going to be a higher number of really sick ones.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Is it any surprise to you that when there's a pandemic of a brand new diseases, maybe the experts don't have all the answers right away? Adults soberly assessing the situation are going to have a hard time -- it was literally a brand new disease. The idea that an ordinary person is going to "research" (research what?) and make a better decision is silly in those circumstances.

You have a separate set of complaints about how the government lost trust in the first months of the pandemic. Noted. It would be all too easy for me to point to the clowns running the federal government back then, so I won't. The point you make about the media & social media giving people terrible information is exactly right -- but that's where you want people doing their "research" instead of letting public-health officials set policy.

There have always been anti-vaccer kooks, and we did pretty well in spite of them. What's changed in this pandemic, as I was saying the other day, is that conservatives have decided to oppose reasonable public-health measures, not only of any deep principle, but out of oppositional behavior. (Not everyone who doesn't want to get vaccinated is reflecting this, but some of them are surely deciding that the vaccine isn't to be trusted at least in part because there is an organized campaign to push those views.)

The choices are pretty simple: We either let government experts decide, or the government abdicates that role and lets everyone decide on their own what to do based on what their lunatic cousin says on Facebook.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I actually DO have a degree in public health. Plus have been working in a large academic health center throughout the pandemic, standing up telemedicine practices in weeks that should have taken years, dealing with massive staffing shortages due to illness, opening a vaccination center, yo-yoing with regs regarding vaccination mandates, and doing the daily work of supporting a practice with well over 1500 providers with hundreds of daily patient encounters in clinical and hospital settings.

The interventions that work in public health are the interventions that most people actually will follow. And with respiratory diseases, they always go back to the same thing well over 100 years: wash your hands, stay home when you're sick, wear a goddamned mask, get vaccinated if one comes out. It's been pretty consistent this entire time, aside from the initial masking confusion.

Human beings can be selfish assholes who are terrible at assessing risk, which goes both ways. There are the overly cautious that are practically agoraphobic at this point making visitors quarantine for three days (It used to be a 10!) take a PRC test and verify vaccination before agreeing to an outside lunch of no more than 30 minutes at distance of ten feet. They twitch the entire time. Then, there are the cavalier idiots who have had Covid 3 times and probably killed their grandmother back during Delta, but it could have been church, so why feel guilty? and surely Omicron gave them natural immunity so blathering on about the vaccine makes no sense now. They go to funeral after parties.

Most people are somewhere in the middle. They follow the rules that make sense, ignore the ones that are ridiculous, and seek guidance from trusted sources when they're not sure.

The problem, of course, is "trusted source" has become for some people a perversion. For better or worse, the internet has totally destroyed universal messaging, and public health people were caught off guard because it never occurred to them that there'd be active sabotage of their efforts. They should have known better, because this anti-vax bullshit has been bubbling up for years. OTOH, who the hell would have thought that the White House, would be actively working against public health?

So we end up with dipshits like Joe Rogan becoming "trusted sources", and well regarded researchers like Dr. Hotez having to repel the internet mob because somehow he's supposedly underpants gnome-ing himself rich through vaccine development in the third world.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Well, in fairness, I know the hippies, and they do in fact want to take away the loud assholes’ guns. But let’s just keep that on the DL for now.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Here's a thought, let's train the loud assholes to be social workers. Then we send them out to deal with active shooter situations- that way they'd have to give up their guns.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Universal messaging is almost dead, but there is a Hail Mary out there which might save it: Being honest, concise, and circumspect.

I see two villains in the Covid messaging/policy debacle:

1. The zero tolerance “treat people like children” voices. People saw thru them easily and registered that they were issuing draconian directives assuming people would follow 50% of what was demanded.

2. The “everything is a lie until proven true” voices. They attacked every directive, however reasonable. Wearing a mask and leaving packages outside for three days to allow surface Covid to die were treated with the same level of skepticism. No laddering of quality and saneness of protective measures was allowed.

These two voices feed off each other. They create a vicious whirlpool of dumbness in which people grasp at tribalism as life preservers. (Pathetically, when overwhelmed, they cling to the comfort of groupthink.)

Instead of doing that, the govt could have been honest with the American people about what policies made sense and what ones were overkill, and spoken curtly, officially, with a single voice (as opposed to a legion of them in all sorts of outlets, 24/7). We could do that. We used to do things like that. And it helped create national unity.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

That’s cute. I think you forget that, when this whole thing started, the possibility of honest, unified messaging about Covid was undercut by, for example, people going around insisting with no factual basis whatsoever that Covid was no worse than a mild case of the flu and that we would see, at most, 2-3000 deaths in this country. And those same people, whether for political reasons or self interest, refused to take issue with the intentionally dishonest messaging about Covid that was coming from the executive branch. All of which made the job of the experts being honest with the American public in a unified voice about the best policies (already difficult in an extremely fluid environment) virtually impossible. Is any of this ringing any bells?