It’ll be funny watching hispanics lasso in black bad behavior. They get the tough dirty jobs but that’ll be the toughest yet.

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BAA8DF/mexican-charro-with-rope-BAA8DF.jpg

Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Bill, @jtgw

Trouble with this narrative is that overdoses skyrocketed only after prescriptions started declining (see ic1000’s graph above).
 

Replies: @Jtgw

our border-patrol heroes—the last of the He-Men—were doing the work of the Lord! And, what on earth is wrong with the whip, in this context?
 

Were the Cossacks of Russia and Ukraine who rode into jewish villages on horseback during pogroms "doing the work of the Lord" when they whipped the jews from atop their horses before the eventual slaughter?

And thousands of years earlier, were the Africans of Kemet guilty of NOT "doing the work of the Lord" when they allowed the Israelites escaping famine in Canaan into their prosperous civilization on the banks of the Nile River?

Your "natural morality" is a perversion. Your "Lord" is not the God Jesus called Abba.

Replies: @Jtgw

As a white resident of Baltimore I’m very excited about seeing our city’s blacks move out at last.
 

Replies: @Jtgw

You can tell Biden actually did the right thing by the way the usual MSM suspects are so outraged by our withdrawal.

Replies: @Jtgw

Replies: @Peter Akuleyev, @Pericles

Replies: @Jtgw

Replies: @Ed Case, @The Alarmist, @Steve Sailer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Tony massey, @AndrewR, @nebulafox, @Morton's toes, @Alden, @Mr. Anon, @Jtgw

Conquest is no good without displacing the native population. Only place Europeans could do that was the America’s and Australia since disease wiped out most locals. Elsewhere only possible by deliberate genocide and Christian whites too hampered by ethics.

Replies: @Don't Look at Me

Replies: @Goddard, @Jtgw, @WJ, @Alfa158, @AnotherDad, @Whataboutery2020

The Soviets used to do stuff like that in Afghanistan but it still didn't gain them victory. You don't win a war by terrorizing the population unless you kill or displace the entire local male population and replace them with your own. You especially can't do that in a place where it's possible for the enemy to have a refuge and receive support across some border.

Replies: @donut, @jtgw

“It’s not a secret that many Jews are their own worst enemy and apply the same suicidal ideas to their own country.“

We are own worst enemy when making sweeping generalizations based on confirmation bias.

Replies: @Jtgw

We? There’s no we for that. You’re on your own there Col. Jessup. We just cut off your trust fund.

You can’t build your own nation you’ve got no business messing with anyone else’s.

Replies: @jtgw

Where exactly is the outrage here?
 

The Horrible Death of a Jewess

Replies: @jtgw

Some seem to have a knack for IT work. Half of our IT staff are black, and they know their stuff. The guy who usually handles our department is a big Mr. Robot fan (a show about hackers).

Replies: @jtgw, @dindunuffins

Replies: @Anon, @Corn, @Gordo, @Jack D, @Jtgw, @Paperback Writer, @Anonymous, @Ancient Briton

Zero effs given. This is an intra-Democratic problem. Much like NYC Jews who do not like the black anti-Semitic attacks, they have placed their bets on the Democrats. Ya pays ya money and ya takes ya chances. They don’t like the behavior of the other constituencies on their side? Well…
 

But for the record: While the Jew bashing in NYC is of a piece with minoritarianism and "diversity!" that Jews have relentlessly pushed and propagandized, the actual Jews being bashed tend to be the visible Orthodox, generally conservative and sane voters. I.e. it's unfortunately some guy running a plumbing business for a living, not the NYU sociology professor lying for living, who could use a good diverse head bashing.

In contrast, while perhaps not the elderly Asians themselves, but their children and grandchildren have mostly thrown in with the Democrat's minoritarianism, "diversity!" and anti-white rhetoric, shakedowns and grift. They've ditched their own nations to come to America and a generation in are giving the finger to precisely the people who made/make America nicer than wherever the hell they came from. Well ... this is what diversity looks like sucka.

But while low on sympathy, i'm definitely interested in how this plays out. And not just black-Asian conflict over crime or AA.

The Democrats program depends on "diversity", urban living, b.s. makework jobs for BAs and suppressed white fertility. But urban living gets a lot less appealing when diversity changes from "restaurants!" to getting mugged or bashed. Crime particularly turns off young women. But how are you going to suppress their fertility and keep 'em as lifelong virtue signaling Democrat voters, if they stay out in the suburbs and exurbs where there are conservative white people and yards? They might just get married and have babies!

Replies: @Paperback Writer, @xxxeliss, @Jtgw

Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Paleo Liberal, @Jtgw

family? or mama with youths?

Replies: @Jtgw

They ALL have shithead relatives, even if they seem decent enough when they move in. Those relatives always seem to end up "staying" with them at some point. Then the "fun" starts for all the White neighbors.

Replies: @Jtgw, @AnalogMan

Actually, it's the other way around. A surprising number of traditional Irish nationalists and republicans are now voting DUP. They reason - correctly - that they and their views would be offered some protection by a traditional protestant government. A fake Globohomo united Ireland, by contrast, guarantees their harassment and, later, full-blown legal persecution.

You don't seem to realise who much Irish nationalism and republicanism, at the political level, has gone full Globohomo. For traditional supporters, the options are few and stark. The same can be said for all traditionalists in the West.

Replies: @Jtgw

That is a uselessly abstract.

Replies: @Jtgw

I am not going to hypothesize on any potential activities that occur on that corner but I doubt it’s a lot of Salvation Army donations.

Replies: @Boy the way Glenn Miller played, @dindunuffins, @dixonsyder, @PO'd in PG County, @VETCON, @aldasfail770, @Jtgw

Indeed, Fischer’s Puritans (or more specifically, their modern-day heirs) with their “ordered liberty” are the bane of our existence. While Fischer’s Borderers with their love of individualism and decentralized government are the only thing standing between us and a socialist dystopia.

Replies: @Jtgw

Why would you paint Colin Flaherty as a supremacist, when all he has done is document the extreme violence many blacks are involved in when the so called legitimate media does not, or hardly does? Even if he were some kind of supremacist, it's got nothing to do with the truth of the stuff he investigated. What is true, is self evident, right on the video's and pictures, no matter who posts them. Does one really need an explanation of how evil the murders of those two people were?

Replies: @Jtgw

Wow quite a story. But I can why that kind of commitment to debt-free living won’t go anywhere politically. Given choice between a mortgage and running water or no mortgage and no running water, I think vast majority will choose former. And of course when the debt comes due and the couple can’t pay, it’s too easy politically to force your creditors to swallow the loss - and once you remove the moral qualms that really is the rational thing to do. Why make yourself a martyr?

Replies: @Barbarossa

Found it. I went to the "Forum" button first which was dead end, until I saw the "Open Thread" link on the main page sidebar.

My personal best hope for smaller political entities in the near term is a de-facto localism. I have found that in my rural, marginally poor area it's possible to live a pretty reasonable life and not get hassled.

As a case in point, when my wife and I were in our early 20's we bought 30 acres on a dirt road and moved an hour south to where we are today (the area my Dad's side of the family came to when they immigrated from Ireland in the 1880's, incidentally) . We had a small amount of money saved and wanted no debt, so we undertook to build a little 20'x20' cabin. We scrounged for cheap material, used a chainsaw mill to saw beams from the property, etc. and got it built, but we had no money for electric, a well, septic and all the rest of those creature comforts. We used oil lamps, a wood stove, propane fridge, hauled water in, and used a bucket toilet. This was all with our newly born first child.

We were somewhat terrified that someone was going to blow us in to the authorities who would tell us we couldn't live there or some similar fate. Being a small town, people figured it out pretty quickly anyhow, but the response was not at all what I had expected. I lost count of how many people related how they hadn't had electric for X number of years after they built their own place or a similar anecdote, while they expressed a faith that we'd get it all figured out in good time. The town board and the rest of the local government were in the know too, figured we were just starting out, and left us alone.

We eventually incrementally did get electric, water, and septic done, but it was done as we could afford to pay for it out of pocket. I still have to plow my 2.5 mile road in the winter though since it's a seasonal road, but as the Building Inspector pointed out a Town Board meeting where were were discussing my plowing, "There isn't any law that you can't live in a seasonal property all year long."

My point with this long meandering story is that this kind of accommodation is possible because my local government sees me as a human, not a managerial abstraction, and relates to me that way. The people that make those decisions also see my kids at the playground and us shopping around town. We live in NYS to boot, which proves to me it's less about the laws that are on the books but how and by whom they are applied. I'm quite active in the community and am on the town Planning Board, since I want to ensure that this area stays humane and reasonable and that another young couple could get started without a crushing debt load and mortgage. I know that an hour North in the more suburban areas, we could have never gotten away with what we did.

I'm convinced that the national political scene is a lost cause and only useful for entertainment value. If we are going to change reality it's going to have to start in our homes and radiate out to our neighbors and local communities. Anything else is wasted effort. The Federal Government's influence is in great part only dependent on how much people allow it to dominate their minds and behavior.

I don't worry to much about declining birth rates either, though I worry about many of the underlying causes of the same. I have 5 kids so far though, so it's not like I'm willing to be a part of that declining birth rate! As long as I (and other like minded people) can keep our kids from being indoctrinated by the State and media, that dynamic could all work out fairly well in the moderate term.

The fundamental problem seems to me that all the big issues are way out of my control, your control, or any other individual's control so that all we can do is keep our little flotillas afloat in the storm. If we can find a little haven of sanity and goodness, we can build it up.

Replies: @iffen, @Jtgw

Replies: @Prester John, @MEH 0910

Thing is I can believe it. As AE has shown, “justice and equality” is more important to American Jews than Israel or religious observance.
 

So, when such Jews say, “justice and equality,” they mean only that they have identified an instance in which a white gentile's sacrifice for justice and equality will harm white gentiles. They literally do not mean anything else.

I do not credit the Nation of Islam and do not recommend that you do, either, but the slave trade is a special interest of theirs and I suppose that, despite their general lack of lucidity, they might know more about that particular topic than most of us do. Their report on the subject (with numerous citations of what appear to be white sources contemporaneous with the events reported) finds that Jews in the American South were at least twice as likely to own slaves as other whites were. This question would hardly interest me except that, once denied the dubious benefit of slave ownership by the 13th Amendment, Jews seem to have reversed position to the opposite extreme, scapegoating their own deeds upon the rest of us.

The report is more persuasive on some points than on others but I have never read a credible refutation of its main findings.

The report's assertion that Jews played a heavy role in the negro slave trade is less well documented than the finding regarding slave ownership, but of course the assertion is plausible on its face. I do not really even have a firm opinion regarding the justice of negro slavery (except that I would neither like to own a slave nor to be one), but one dislikes being accused of something actually done by the accuser's ancestors rather than one's own.

In short, the putative Jewish concern for justice and equality is a crock. It has no bearing on justice and equality as the two words are understood in ordinary speech. Decent Jews (of whom there are many yet all too few) thus usually know better than to talk of such things in gentile company.

Replies: @Jtgw, @Liberty Mike

Good assessment overall. Regarding

You can’t guarantee good behavior, that’s for sure.
 

Replies: @Jtgw

The countervailing point is low barriers to entry combined with a focus on price competition gives an edge to anyone with an antisocial advantage which translates to lower prices.

It's not a simple problem. Social norms are one way to deal with it (ideally combined with a relatively high trust population). That seems to be gone. I'm not sure the regulatory regime is proving to be an adequate replacement. Too easy to game given the amount of money at stake.

Replies: @Jtgw

so personal profit necessarily leads to social benefit.
 

Replies: @Jtgw

It was a rhetorical question. I worked as a student-worker at the admissions office of my Ivy undergrad in the late 80's. An admissions officer there (who was a male homosexual Jew) said loudly in a conversation with another Jewish admissions officer that "Jews get in, because we care about the world, but Asians don't, because they only think about themselves."

He didn't even care that I was right there in the office. Talk about hubris of his own importance and invincibility.

On another occasion, an older alum of my high school (Stuyvesant HS in NYC) who was also Jewish told me - face to face - that Stuyvesant had changed - that when the school was more Jewish, the students cared about the society at large, but that now it was filled with those (presumably Asians) who only cared about money.

On both occasions, I couldn't believe my ears and I thought I heard them wrong.

I didn't.

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @Jtgw

So morons are not "entitled" to democracy, but a self-selected elites are?

Replies: @Jtgw

That does not seem more severe than getting Covid.

Unless you are one of six.

Replies: @Jtgw

I don’t think there’s much evidence for permanent harm, however.

What would you consider "evidence for permanent harm"?

Replies: @Jtgw

Eventually, Joe Biden is going to declare that, because black criminals keep getting shot for violating gun control laws, we’re just going to have to decriminalize criminals owning guns. In the future, it will only be illegal for law-abiding citizens to have a gun.
 

However the law abiding gun owners, gun manufacturers, gun importers, and gun retailers are doing a piss-poor job of keeping guns out of the hands of gangsters and criminals.

There are more controls on the sale of insulin syringes than on guns.

I was once prescribed a course of vitamin B-12 injections that I had to administer myself. When I picked up the prescription from the Walmart pharmacy, I said "What about the needles and syringes?". And the pharmacist said "oh no we can't sell you that!" (But I was able to get them later by mail order from another source.) However if I had requested to purchase a gun to kill myself, that would have been just fine with Walmart.

Replies: @gandydancer, @anon, @Mr. Anon, @Jtgw

Saying that TPTB are lying flatters them since it sounds like they knew, last year, all the ins and outs of the disease. Is it not more plausible that they just did not know, gave what they thought was the best advice, and got some things wrong?
 

Replies: @Jtgw

Replies: @dfordoom, @Audacious Epigone

Replies: @Realist, @Ultrafart the Brave, @Dumbo

It looks like "the threshold for excess deaths" is a lot lower in the Covid time period than before. Shouldn't it be higher, as the population is getting bigger and older? Or am I not seeing it correctly?

It looks like the gap between the orange and the blue would be a lot smaller if the orange were a little raised rather than substantially lowered.

Replies: @Jtgw

I am convinced of what another blogger here on UR says: This is just a rebranding of the flu
 

Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Triteleia Laxa, @Kratoklastes

Replies: @dfordoom, @SFG, @Jtgw

Replies: @Mark Miller, @R.G. Camara, @Neil Templeton, @Hans, @Reg Cæsar, @obwandiyag, @Colin Wright, @Jtgw, @Rahan, @Liza

Replies: @Trevor Lynch, @Jtgw, @Alfred, @Avery, @anon, @SunBakedSuburb, @A Half Naked Fakir, @Guest6

Government of the last two decades in Russia, has been one of the most pro-Jewish (and to lesser extent also they are pro-Israel) states. And the view has been tilting more towards in the last decade, if the pro-Israel orientation of the television is an indication.

Two years ago, Putin even hosted the "United Israel Appeal" congress, with Sheldon Adelson and Ronald Lauder (the most powerful Jewish/Zionist philanthropists).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ackxPo0hbrw

An idea there is some conflict of Putin against global Zionists, is one of the more stranger and delusional views I have read in the Unz/Karlin forum, and this forum does not lack to provide them.

India, Russia and China are all de facto pro-Israel governments, that have "skin in the game" including financial investments in Israel.

From an Israeli selfish point of view, the situation that you would worry about is the rising anti-Israel public and official, as well as media positions, in North-West Europe and in the Democrat Party base of the USA (which represents a majority of voters in coastal America).

North-West Europe and coastal regions of the USA, are vastly more influential and powerful, in many ways, than China, Russia or India. And it's in these areas that the anti-Israel position is becoming the dominant view with the younger generations.

British television is already in complete opposite position on Israel, from Russian television (hidden pro-Israel bias), if not Fox News (open pro-Israel bias). And some of the influential American television like Daily Show or CNN seemed to be moving to the British media's perspective. Israel will always be supported from the Republican Party in the USA, but the base of the Democrat Party is more of an open question, and the Democrat Party could be the more dominant party in America politics in the next years.

Replies: @Spisarevski, @Jtgw

It does seem strange at first that blue and red States with opposite policies have similar outcomes. But pandemic control requires a national policy because of our open borders. Many Asian countries, New Zealand and a few African countries have gained control quickly of the outbreak, when compared to the United States with harsh national policies. The only change that has improved outcomes here has been the vaccines. This is controversial, strangely because the same people that love Trump appear to hate his fast tracked vaccine and have almost certainly been vaccinated for polio, smallpox and other diseases, just to attend school.

DeSantis's policies are driven exclusively by what's best for business, not human health or pandemic control. The latest release of AARP’s Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard shows that Florida is trending higher than the national average for new reported cases of the virus. Vaccination rates among Florida’s long-term care workers remains very low at 38%,” said AARP Florida State Director Jeff Johnson. “With new AARP data indicating Florida is trending higher than the national average for new COVID-19 cases. So DeSantis’s policies are having a negative impact on the large elderly population in Florida. It is ridiculous to pretend that DeSantis is on to some higher level of data driven scientific thinking. Republican control of Florida is a long running tragedy based on gerrymandering, voter purging, software tampering and ballot invalidation.

Replies: @Yellowface Anon, @Jtgw

Libertarians' response to masking is psychotic in essence. Very similar to their response to the seat belts requirements in 1970s. Then a 'research' was done to demonstrate that seat belts would increase fatalities because drivers would be engaging in more risky behavior. The 'risk compensation' meme was entered into the debate:

The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation, Sam Peltzman, Journal of Political Economy
Vol. 83, No. 4 (Aug., 1975), pp. 677-726

“Technological studies imply that annual highway deaths would be 20 percent greater without legally mandated installation of various safety devices on automobiles. However, this literature ignores offsetting effects of nonregulatory demand for safety and driver response to the devices. This article indicates that these offsets are virtually complete, so that regulation has not decreased highway deaths.”

 

Risk compensation during COVID-19: The impact of face mask usage on social distancing
https://www.onmedica.com/documents/mask_compensation_manuscript

Consistent with risk compensation, we found that participants indicated they would stand, sit or walk closer to the stranger when either of them was wearing a mask. This form of risk compensation was stronger for those who believed masks were effective at preventing catching or spreading Covid-19,

 

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures (May 2020)

Although mechanistic studies support the potential effect of hand hygiene or face masks, evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.
 

CDC director Robert Redfield said face masks may be more effective than a vaccine in preventing individual coronavirus infections”
https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-masks-better-than-vaccines-at-stopping-coronavirus-2020-9

The World Health Organization’s senior official in Europe said Thursday that blanket national lockdowns to curb the spread of COVID-19 wouldn’t be necessary if governments could convince their citizens to wear masks.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-europe-who-masks-could-prevent-coronavirus-lockdowns-school-closures-dont-work/
 

Replies: @Jtgw, @Mark G.

but probably right the Szilagyi name itself is goyish

It is certainly a "traditional" Hungarian name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1gyi

On the other hand, it is also the Hungarian transliteration of the (largely) Jewish family name Schwarz

https://www.academia.edu/35718678/The_Origin_of_Jewish_Family_Names_Morphology_and_History

(see p. 113)

Replies: @Jtgw

Hungarian Jews as often have german surnames, but I doubt many are named Peter.

Replies: @Jtgw

Replies: @E. Harding

We only got 450,000 dead Americans by the end of 2020, only ninety-seven times as many as dead Chinese! Absolutely miniscule crisis!
 

Replies: @Jtgw

“ Tokyo’s seropositivity rate of almost 50% – would the low mortality of the virus there be solid evidence that mask wearing reduces the severity of the disease?”

No. Some races have more natural immunity. It’s very obvious. Masks do nothing positive and cause a good deal of harm.

Replies: @Jtgw

Actually, Dr. Szilagyi's mother was born Eva Kupfer and was interned at the Revensbrück concentration camp. His paternal-side grandmother was born Ilona Kalman. I'm guessing the paternal-side grandfather was gentile.

Fun facts: he received all his professional schooling in my home town and lived there up until a half-dozen years ago. He had an appointment at the medical center where I used to work, but I draw a complete blank when I see his name in print. Evidently a pediatrician. I lived once upon a time within walking distance of the cemetery where his parents are buried.


Since Dr. Szilagyi and his wife work in the medical sector, they'll be exempt from the dysfunctional system they're intent on imposing on the rest of us. His children are under 40. His wife, btw, is president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. This is our nomenklatura.

Replies: @Desiderius, @Jtgw, @Paperback Writer

Szilagyi is a Hungarian name.

Replies: @Jtgw, @Reg Cæsar

Not disagreeing about gov't, but who should be deciding? Whoever got their hands on ventilators (last spring) or vaccines (now) first? Each hospital? Each doctor? "Congress shall make no law" libertarianism implies that someone else must be in charge.

Replies: @Jtgw

Yes, you correct on some points. Especially, I remember Ann Coulter's comments as extreme and, I thought probably not serious. You can't really force people to convert to anything. Even Communist Thought Reform in China was not permanent in its targets.

Anyway, I am guilty for just referencing "the War on Terror" and lumping war and the surveillance together. There was definitely leftist opposition to Iraq--"blood for oil" (which was a wrong analysis by the way--Iraq was a neocon missionary war) and all that. However, I think there was less opposition to the surveillance state measures than to the wars from the left and also less enthusiasm on the right.

The numbers Bill mentions suggest I am both right and wrong. Dissent from the Patriot Act occurred among Dems, but essentially the Patriot Act passed with support from the Dems. If there had been a more right/left split on the issue, perhaps there would have been more articulate opposition that would have changed some measures in the bill. Also instructive would be to see numbers on votes for Patriot Act renewal.

Maybe I am just wrong, but my impression is still that--with regard to internal control measures--the 9/11 usurpation of freedoms was more bipartisan and had less enthusiasm from its supporters than the COVID usurpations, making the usurpations more fundamentally leftist/Democrat rather than one from the right and one from the left.

Replies: @Jtgw

Replies: @Jtgw

Initially bipartisan. Okay. To bring it back to AE's comparison, would you say there was ever opposition from the left to the Bush-Cheney surveillance that paralleled in its extent the opposition to COVID restrictions going on now? COVID restrictions seem to be instituted over the opposition of (or, despite...) a fair number of Republican voters, but I don't recall any popular opposition to the Bush-Cheney surveillance--maybe there were just a few really radical leftists but I don't recall seeing any news about them.

Another way to look at this is, rather than looking at the political opposition, looking at the same-party support. My sense is that the left today not only don't oppose COVID restrictions, they actively support them. I'm not sure how true that was of the right and Bush-Cheney. Just going by myself and my family, I never spoke out against anything even though I commented on blogs at the time, but I was highly skeptical of Bush's strategies from the beginning even though I was a pretty cookie-cutter Republican in other ways at that time. The failure to find WMD caused me to change my voter registration. I certainly didn't feel that we needed the War on Terror in order to be safe.

Replies: @Chrisnonymous, @Jtgw, @Jay Fink

"The purpose of the restrictions was to prevent excess death."

Yes, and the stated purpose of an EMT is to save lives. The fact that he's really good at his job and saves more than the usual quota doesn't mean he's not going to get fired if he decides to slash a few throats for fun. Boneheaded moves get judged on their own merits, be it for EMT's or health officials. That's pretty much how it works and I don't believe you're so stupid that you can't see that so let's give it a rest.

Instead, why don't you open up a restaurant or a taco stand where you post the following notice on the wall?:

Please remember that when it comes to botulism, listeria, salmonella, rat droppings, and rabies for that matter, each one of those is ultimately a natural threat and outside of deliberate infection no one is morally culpable if someone dies of it. Bon appetit!
 

Replies: @Jtgw

"Assuming that’s true, why don’t we copy the same policies every year to reduce those deaths?"

To the extent that every year there's a novel virus coming out of some wet market ready to wipe out large numbers of people that we're too feckless to try and prevent in the first place, maybe we should. It would be a fitting punishment after all. Regardless, you're still the fool who claims that as long as the excess mortality is zero, no one did anything wrong. Try and see if you can dig yourself out of that one before trying to change the subject and risking a fall into some even deeper pit.

"Covid is ultimately a natural threat and outside of deliberate infection no one is morally culpable if someone dies of it."

And the famine that wiped out those Irish potatoes was natural too and therefore no one was morally culpable regardless of what they did or didn't do. Same goes for the floods and earthquakes and tornadoes that rumble through now and again. Not my business. Not my brother's keeper. Vanity of vanities, saith Quoheleth, etc., etc.-- I think at this point we get it.

I don't know what to tell you except to put down your copy of The Fountainhead, go and slap it on a bumper sticker, and see how many votes you get.

Replies: @Jtgw

fter 9/11, Republican fears provided the pretense that allowed the surveillance state to greatly expand its power and scope at the expense of the citizenry’s civil liberties.
 

Replies: @Jtgw, @Bill, @Audacious Epigone

"What other benchmark for success is there?"

See my earlier 9/11 reference for a reductio ad absurdum of that. Please stop pretending it's too difficult for you to understand. I'd wager it isn't. The EMT who saves seven lives over the last week and then figures he's earned himself the right to go on a good old fashioned killing spree is going to get a multiple murder rap regardless of whether his contribution to the annual death toll is zero or whatever. And that's true even if the victims were all elderly. Imagine that.

I will do you the favor of assuming you're not really so dense that you can't understand what I'm saying. Unfortunately, unless you can plead autism or Aspergers or something to that effect, that implies a shadier motive for this con job you're trying to pull, but I'll leave it to others to decipher that.

Replies: @Jtgw, @J.Ross

Sweden apologists use the annual mortality argument to diminish the fact that Sweden had 7-10 times higher death rate per capita from covid than its Nordic neighbors. The sole motive is the wounded national pride. The argument is also used by the covid denialist that the annual mortality in Sweden is within normal so covid is a nothingburger.

By using the annual deaths the spikes of covid deaths from the first wave and the second wave are diluted. But if you plot weekly deaths the spikes are clearly visible in the sequence of weekly deaths of last 10 years. It is true however that in periods outside the spikes of 2020 deaths the values are somewhat lower. Why I do not know but they somewhat compensate covid deaths in the annual value.

So the Sweden apologist and the covid denialist will say that the covid deaths was a nothingburger because the people who died of covid were the ones who did not die in the weeks preceding covid, that actually they had audacity to live longer than necessary and covid mercifully exposed that audacity and terminated their excessively long lives.

These are just word games that use number games to obscure the facts and promote their a priori assumptions that Sweden is good because it must be good and that covid is a nothingburger that kills only those who had the audacity to live too long.

Replies: @Jtgw

"There is a reason we don’t habitually lock down society even if in the short run it prevents deaths from flu or drunk driving."

Ah yes, the old canard in which we're supposed to pretend that highly contagious diseases for which no vaccine is available are the same as car wrecks. If the new arguments don't work, you can always fall back on the classics.

Actually, we do encourage people massively to get the flu vaccine and to avoid drunk driving, in ways that civil libertarians would frown upon (look up the M.A.D.D. campaigns). We make them obey speed limits and buckle up and force them to buy airbags (even when we subsequently learn that they decapitate children and short people) despite tirades from the Sammy Hagars of the world. And at this point, both drunk driving and the seasonal flu are known quantities and can be easily avoided without lockdowns for those who choose to do so. Finally, if the next holiday season causes drunk driving deaths to explode worldwide by a factor of 10 (which is, by a rough estimate, how much worse COVID is than the regular flu) I suspect we'd see some massive campaigns for that, too. Though maybe not in parts of the world like Belarus where life is cheap, I guess. Maybe that's the real discrepancy we're dealing with.

Because again, if this place were more like the ACTUAL Sweden rather than the fantasy Jeff-Spicoli version the Sweden-bros around here would have us believe, more people would voluntarily go out of their way to listen to their authorities and make the effort to get a flu shot and be diligent about designated drivers and forcing people to call cabs (come to think of it, we've sort of managed to reach that point despite ourselves, at least when it comes to drunk driving -- maybe M.A.D.D. wasn't that bad after all).

Whereas the only way to make the Spicoli version of Sweden work is to couple it with outright psychopathy, as in "If all they do is drink, fight, make babies, and eat potatoes, what does it matter if a couple of thousand extra Irishmen are starving given that they were about to slam into the Malthus-limits anyway? If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. And, given everything else we had to deal with at the end of WWII, did we really need an extra couple of million Jews and gypsies to deal with on top of all that? Really? Really really? So in that sense, what happened was a kindness, on the whole, if you stop and think about it." You can fill in the rest.

Replies: @Jtgw

"Funny how Sweden had many times the deaths of its neighbors but also did not experience any excess mortality. "

Why is that funny? If you lock down a society, whether that be by voluntary measures or government mandated ones, you may well see a drop in death rates. In a place like Sweden, the fewer elective surgeries, fewer highway miles, fewer trips to bars and related drunken driving crashes, may well have been about equal to the COVID deaths plus any increase in suicides, drug overdoses, and women battered to death by frustrated husbands, etc., all of which were brought on by all that voluntary sequestering. (Clearly, in the US, the latter effects were still enough to swing the see-saw in the other direction.)

So in Sweden, the voluntary sequestering (which, again, wouldn't work in a low-trust society like America for reasons I've already noted) not only reduced the COVID deaths but brought the overall death rates down to average. Like I said, good for them. Do their health authorities still get a pass for the stupid things they did which caused people to die? Of course not. Early on, they lost thousands of old people because their third-world immigrant shift-workers in nursing homes decided to "get out and live life" regardless of whether they were feverish or sniffly, because they needed that paycheck, and weren't eligible for governmental sick-leave. Some people now want to give them a pass for that, or just "blame the immigrants". But that's like saying that aside from all the beheadings, the machete giveaways were a great success. No, they weren't -- you can't just blithely brush off what you don't like. The government should have foreseen that the shift-workers in nursing homes were going to be a problem. And if they had taken things slowly like their neighbors did, instead of leaning into the curve in order to build up that (much-anticipated but sadly never-attained) herd immunity as quickly as possible, they could have recognized the problem earlier on and done something about it. They chose not to do that. Instead, they played stupid games, and won stupid prizes, and yes, I knock them for that. Even THEY admitted that they bungled that part -- so why can't you? The fact that the reduction in other deaths managed to bring the overall death rates to normal doesn't absolve them of their stupidity.

So yeah, I'm able to see both the good and the bad of the Swedish approach and note that certain portions of it were peculiarly tailored to features the US lacks. You think I have to apologize for that? I don't care how strenuously Cuomo pats himself on the back for the smart things he claims he did in the last year, he's not going to get a pass from me for sending those old people to die in the nursing homes.

If the flu season of 2001 had been milder, or the vaccine officials had been extra efficient, to the extent that 3,000 people fewer than average had died of the flu, does that mean that the government (or those 19 conspirators) should have gotten a free pass for letting 9/11 happen? According to you, it would have all been a wash, so "s'all good, bros". Come on. That's not going to fool anyone who doesn't want to be fooled.

Replies: @Jtgw