How did face masks become so political?
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Uncle Paul
Bittereinder
It's no worse than "shut up" in English.
We don't do that here.
Uncle Paul
Bittereinder
I know that actual cursing is banned here, but I thought stuff like "shut up" was okay...
Moderator Action: We don't do foreign languages here without translation. ~Arakhor
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Well, I wouldn't expect you to get banned, perhaps warned.. but typically we try to keep things friendlier than that.
Narz
keeping it real
Ftfy
TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
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you haven't specified what this looks like. nobody has 100% absolute freedom w/o any restrictions in any country. there are numerous things you cannot do on pain of prohibitive fines or jail time, even in "democratic" countries. the question is what degree of authoritarianism is acceptable, and why it should be accepted.
present countries that are technically democratic vary significantly in what they allow as it is anyway.
people live how they want. i don't think there's a legitimate complaint about women (or men) choosing to do this. they usually regret it later in life (though some do not), but that's true for a lot of decisions. at some point, you nevertheless have to stop treating people like children and if they want to make mistakes, they make them.
people should be free to have onlyfans accounts, and other people should be free to rule them out as partners because they have or had such accounts. in contrast, people should not expect a multiple year difference in sentence for otherwise identically knifing someone.
i do think there are legit complaints about people being treated unequally by the law (in both racial and gender terms, where it happens). interestingly, examples of this were particularly evidenct with the covid measures you advocate being more authoritarian. "rules for thee but not for me" was a prevalent thing during 2020/2021. even via direct hypocrisy from the politicians championing the practices.
not if you kill two lives for each one saved, no. or even killing 1.05 lives for each one saved.
no kidding. this forum spams both implied and direct ad hominem. it's not supposed to, but it does. it's kind of funny that someone would think of such an environment as a friendly/civil place, or that the implication of ad hominem spam is anything other than "shut up" with a few extra steps.
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Uncle Paul
Bittereinder
A little bit stricter/more authoritarian than modern Hungary.
True
Not if their mistakes are bad for society...if someone wants to become an alcoholic and stay shut in their room all day, who cares? If a bus driver wants to become an alcoholic, then that's not okay.
If certain groups are violating the law at a higher rate, it's only natural members of those groups will come under greater suspicion.
OnlyFans is degenerate in the extreme, but, since it's something that you have to pay to access, I wouldn't ban it. A fool and his money are soon parted.
Obviously, that's not what I meant, but, for example, the life of a senior citizen who has contributed to society for decades matters more than the life of some toddler who can't even use the toilet.
TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
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this handwaves a lot of the difficulty in creating policy, in general:
- one must come up with a basis on what constitutes "good", "bad", and "neither" for society
- someone, likely someone different from above over time, must then decide whether each example fits that category.
- one must also come up with a means to measure whether a particular policy that is ostensibly "good" for society actually has the intended outcome of "good" when people attempt to implement it. and define which outcomes would be considered successful vs not.
note that on average, tightening authoritarianism has a good chance of compelling workers to pay for that sort of behavior, through corruption/deception or just the people in power operating policy on own self interest more openly. quite a few fraudulent claims even during covid, because policies incentivized them.
the ultimate minority is the individual. the law is (usually) written in the context of individuals, and that's especially true of criminal law. there is no subgroup of any meaningful size whereby the error bar is so small that you can make useful conclusions using only knowledge that a person is in that subgroup.
it's one thing to make estimates. it's another to literally give one person 1 year and the other person 9 years for the exact same crime with the exact same number of offenses in the exact same context. the latter is a travesty of justice, and that does not change no matter what properties you assign to the people in question.
you pay for clubs too. women less so, but then men have the option to walk away from that deal at any time they wish. but in the strict sense, there are costs for this activity for everyone. these seem different in how extreme they are as mistakes, but imo are still on the same spectrum. i am also not so keen to point fingers at "degenerate", as that by itself is also a matter of preference/norms/etc and a different society could turn that on you or i instead.
or to put it another way, i'm no more a fan of "cancelling" clubbing or onlyfans than i am of canceling as a practice in general. people have different preferences and that's fine, if they can a) handle the consequences and b) are not harming others directly/meaningfully.
blanket statement like that can't be accurate. for one, it depends on the current health of the senior citizen. you can and should weight someone who is already in hospice and no longer mentally aware person catching covid differently from an otherwise healthy 75 year old who will probably live 10+ more years. the concept of adjusted life years is a real thing.
similarly, in terms of "good for society", you now have to define your terms. we should expect significantly more *future* productive output from a toddler than a senior citizen, on average. you can somewhat offset this by pointing out that if you don't incentivize people enjoying their retirement/being appreciated for what they've done, then future people won't be inclined to take the deal of being as productive. but only partially. even after adjusting for % chance the toddler turns into a criminal or freeloader etc, *on average* that person is likely to throw decades of work experience of some kind into the pile. is deprioritizing that really for the "good of society"? what evidence gets used for that, and who gets to make that call ultimately?
there is known data for how much gdp decline/wealth decline translates to excess deaths. as for covid specifically:
Non-Covid Excess Deaths, 2020-21: Collateral Damage of Policy Choices?
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
just one example. i'm not sure how good our data is. but it's not easy to make conclusions:
- in any one country, we don't have a "baseline for if the country instead did nothing". thus, we don't a "this policy saved x number of lives" measure
- similarly, we can't easily measure how many of those 97000 estimated excess deaths per were directly attributable to covid measures, as opposed to other factors.
- long-term effects of both covid itself and especially of covid policy on people have not yet been fully felt (and thus can't be fully measured yet, even in principle)
- even among measures taken, it's non-trivial to fully partition impact of lockdown vs vaccine vs mask vs other things (such as average age or living conditions or health care quality) between regions/countries.
i do question whether being "more authoritarian" in this context is useful though. usually, what that amounts to is someone similarly informed to you or i picking something, often making such a choice with a motivation to stay in office/not get thrown out by own military rather than optimizing for the good of the average person in that nation.
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Uncle Paul
Bittereinder
That's a price I'm willing to pay.
It's completely fair for a first-time offender to get a lighter sentence.
No clubbing = less COVID = less unnecessary excess deaths
Yes, but the loss of a 80-year-old with a lot of knowledge and wisdom is a greater loss to society than a toddler, especially since you can't ever get another grandparent, but you can always just have another child.
The economy is nothing compared to the virus. I'd rather be poor than be dead of COVID.there is known data for how much gdp decline/wealth decline translates to excess deaths. as for covid specifically:
Non-Covid Excess Deaths, 2020-21: Collateral Damage of Policy Choices?
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.www.nber.org
just one example. i'm not sure how good our data is. but it's not easy to make conclusions:
in the real world, it is therefore challenging to optimize policy to minimize harm, let alone prevent harm from external factors. there will continue to be excess deaths arising from policies that damaged economies for many years, and some fraction of that can reasonably be attributed to covid policy rather than covid itself. where does it net out? i don't know, and i don't think anybody else here does either.
- in any one country, we don't have a "baseline for if the country instead did nothing". thus, we don't a "this policy saved x number of lives" measure
- similarly, we can't easily measure how many of those 97000 estimated excess deaths per were directly attributable to covid measures, as opposed to other factors.
- long-term effects of both covid itself and especially of covid policy on people have not yet been fully felt (and thus can't be fully measured yet, even in principle)
- even among measures taken, it's non-trivial to fully partition impact of lockdown vs vaccine vs mask vs other things (such as average age or living conditions or health care quality) between regions/countries.
There is no average person in most countries...just a mess of competing interest groups.
Narz
keeping it real
An 80yo is expected to die soon, a toddler has their whole life ahead of them.
An 80yo is unlikely to contribute much more to society, toddlers will be innovating and solving the crises (if we're lucky) of the future world in 30 years time.
Theoretically 80yo's are wise, in practice... it depends on who.
Economic insecurity kills more people than covid.
Uncle Paul
Bittereinder
An 80 year old is irreplaceable, all toddlers and babies are pretty much interchangeable.
You are wrong, and always have been wrong.
Verbose
Deity
It's telling you have to back-track two years, to 2020, to find an opinion piece to support your assertion.
The Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster. It Shouldn’t Be A Model for the Rest of the World
Sweden's unique approach to the pandemic has drawn interest from other countries. But the data are clear: it's largely been a failure.time.com
By now the actual results are in. And what is shows is that Sweden is a normal European country, comparable to fx the Netherlands. While Finland and Norway are actual outliers – in the sense that residence patterns and population density are comparable in Sweden and say the Netherlands, but waaay lower in Finland and Norway. Epidemiological historical data also shows that everytime there has been a major pandemic, Sweden and Denmark have been harder hit than Finland and Norway. (This time Sweden is nr 8 or 9 out of 30 European nations, with the fewest deaths from Covid in Europe, mostly only outdone by the other Nordic countries.)
The reason is population is much more densely packed in Sweden and Denmark - more like the European average.
And population density has turned out to be a much better predictor of the outcome of Covid 19 than differences in mask-use.
The real story isn't that Sweden didn't use masks, and paid for it. That didn't happen. The real story is that the Danes very quickly got mass-testing set up and running, and so weren't fighting Covid quite as blind as everyone else in Europe already the first year – i.e. the Danes managed what many Asian countries who adapted measure to SARS already did – and the Danes have done MUCH better than would have been expected. That's a real success story. The one about Swedish failure is fake otoh.
But then it tells us that the mask thing isn't really that important, while testing and tracing is.
Both babble nonsense and wear nappies. The world would be better off if we had a mass cull of the elderly than children.
Uncle Paul
Bittereinder
Bro, is it really so hard to wear a mask when you go into a store?
Masks are very important, unlike the scientifically uninformed theories spouted by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers.
A mass cull of Covidiots would be better then either, though I would really rather not have any mass cull, seeing as a mass cull is barbaric and not befitting of civilized society. That's something cavemen did to rival caves, not something a civilized, modern man does.
The elderly and Covidiots had significant overlap in the venn diagram
Narz
keeping it real
You've clearly never spent much time around children.
No, you're just sheltered & don't know what poverty is. Go travel around your continent a bit & broaden your horizons beyond what you see on the news or from behind your computer screen.
Narz
keeping it real
You still wearing a mask around town?
You'll do this until there is zero covid worldwide I'm assuming?
Despite getting vaccinated I'm assuming & obviously being young. You do know you're more likely to trip over your shoelace while rage posting than die from covid right now?
Verbose
Deity
Not at all, but it has turned out to not make much of a difference for how the pandemic moves.
And Sweden suffered nothing perceptible from making it a voluntary thing – not least since loads of people still wore masks, or self-isolated etc. like all hell. At least the first year, until the vaccines came. After which things got a lot less hectic and anxty.
I was in Budapest a couple of weeks ago. No one gave a damn about masks. Am currently in Paris – preparing for flying in there was a very French experience: Lots of stern injunction about obligatory mask use, on the plane, in the airport etc. – the kind a Scandinavian will just unreflectingly heed (since our authorities rarely do anything not actually warranted) – and then it turned out I was the firkin' only mask-wearer for miles. Everyone else, les français surtout, simply did not give a damn anymore. The French authorities can insist on masks as much as they like, but we're not sheep anyway, hien.
If anything, by not overburdening people with super-regulated mandatory stuff Swedish authorities have actually mostly retained their credibility. We still assume that when they recommend something, it actually matters. Because they do not overdo this. (Unlike some governments who after breezing through the first wave declared that they had somehow "solved" Covid, only to get totally clobbered by wave two and three, masks or no.)
But it is interesting how in parts of the rest of the world Sweden really, really, really preferably should have died in great numbers gasping for air to prove a point that turns out to have rather little substance.
Narz
keeping it real
Exactly.
Absurd and inconsistent rules undermine people's already tenous faith in authority.
And surprise, people really don't like restrictions, hence the max exodus from places like NY and California to places like Florida in 2020/21.
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