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

Like I said, there are so many degrees of risk mitigation between total lockdown and pub crawls.

And here, we are a hawk-free zone, or at least I pay the crows enough in organic grapes to keep the hawks busy.

Big war going on outside today from 4:30-8:30 AM. Asshole Cooper showed up, looking to tag a few squirrels or birds but the crows were on his ass. They sit right next to each other like The Kurgan does to Macloud. Then once they run him off, they show up on my lawn looking for peanuts and grapes.

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

I'm a big fan of the cooper hawk nesting in the field next to us, really keeps the mice and voles down. I also got to see it snag a song-bird midflight, which was kind of cool.

We have a cooper fledging now that spends a lot of time hopping around our yard and climbing the trees one hop at a time. I know it will be flying away soon, but right now it's pretty cool.

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

That's a facile assessment for a respected Times reporter. It is true that a mandate short of locking everyone up will not preclude spread. But it will decrease and slow spread. It will also knock down viral load being spread. If one is infected with a smaller viral load, he has a better chance of not acquiring or being able to fight off covid. If he gets hit with a faceful of virus from a pack of non-maskers on an elevator or in a subway, he's going to have a more intense infection.

TL;DR: What looks revelatory is upon closer inspection making the perfect the enemy of the good. Or otherwise rotated, an argument in the absolute on an issue entirely of degree.

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

On this point, I agree with you. One has to weigh costs and benefits. And the extremists (people who'd defend China's Monty Pythonesque response to the disease, even at this late stage) are as guilty of making the perfect the enemy of the good as are those who'd argue mask mandates didn't work.

It's a little different, but I think I've made the point here before. Some people believe all must be done no matter the costs to preserve even a statistically small number of lives that might be lost if certain risks are not avoided. Others believe that such risk avoidance should be weighed against the burden it puts on the rest of us.

The safety standard for products is never "Must not under even the most unusual circumstances ever contribute to a death or injury." Rather, its always based on what's reasonable. What can a manufacturer do without making production impossibly expensive, thus precluding everyone else from enjoying a product that will not harm the overwhelming majority of users?

There's also an element of virtue-seeking in the extreme risk avoidance crowd. (Not virtue signalling, which is a different thing.) People like the idea that they are on the side of saving lives damn the costs. Who doesn't agree with that notion... in a vacuum? But we don't live in a vacuum. So trying to be the most virtuous causes people like Adder to take laughable positions, like defending China. It's not wrong. It's actually quite decent. It's also wildly unrealistic. And a product of addiction. Once one starts on the continuum of virtue-seeking, there's nowhere to go but up. What can one do? Settle for being less virtuous than he might be? Nope. Can't do that. There's always another peak of virtuousness to be ascended. (I guess sainthood is the top.)

The virtue seeking also become the sworn enemies of the Defiant (the Trump mobs of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, for whom the ever unrealized peak of self-actualization is refusing to cooperate with any effort to protect others, no mater how reasonable). When the two groups meet, you get an idiot wind hurricane (yes, that's a nod to Dylan) that spins around the sane of us in its center.

Ignore it. Live your life respectfully and sanely. If it doesn't get your eyes, it disappears.

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

You are wordier than I, but of course it is a classic example of security v. liberty, with the cost-benefit-analysis that goes with that, with Adder being a totalitarian whom Pol Pot would have been glad to call friend. He is wrong; it is not decent.

LessinLeeds

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

I think the rule that seeking comfort over liberty entitles one to neither without can be violated without being indecent. A person can fall into that sort of dangerous thinking for the best of reasons. Road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

"We must do something!" "We can control this!" Mania sets in, and then hubris, and all sanity goes out the window. We're idiots. Everything's a fucking pendulum. I guess it's a bug in our system. Politicians and policymakers get slammed more for not having done something than for having done too much.

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

When we weigh costs and benefits, let's remember two things. The first is, having to wear a mask just isn't that much of a cost, no matter how much some people bitch about it, and no matter how much some people become emotionally committed to the idea that it's intolerable. Certainly not compared to the costs of dying of COVID, or getting long COVID, or having a friend or relative die of COVID, or having to work in a hospital caring for COVID, etc. The second is, when you don't wear a mask, you not only expose yourself to some additional risk, you also expose other people. Many people seem incapable of acknowledging or weighing that risk, in some cases because they're ignorant but in many cases because they are assholes. Not wearing a mask is a little like dumping garbage on your own lawn and saying, "it's my property so I'll decide whether it looks good," but it's also like dumping garbage on your neighbors' lawns and saying, "fuck all of you."

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

So close, you just missed the analogy. It's not about dumping garbage on your neighbor's lawn, it's about tossing your bed pan's contents out the window in a crowded city. I mean, it's inconvenient to do anything else, but one thing you can be sure of, is the shit will land on someone else, not you, so fuck 'em.

The conflation of mask mandates and lockdowns shows us where we are in this. Are we really comparing Pol Pot to wearing a little mask?

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

I think we are comparing pol pot to the Shanghai lockdowns.

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

A better analogy is farting in an elevator. Which I am more inclined to do when I am wearing an N95 on the elevator and others aren't.

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

Why won't my image load?

https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/item/65051

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

Ah, yes, that Mass Genocide everyone survived.

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

Umm, you described your life now in the country. Icky posted a Twitter feed of a man in Shanghai. There are differences. I can’t imagine living under the Shanghai restrictions- can you?

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

Is Adder actually defending the Chinese approach, or is the board unanimously against it?

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

I’ll let adder answer.