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Which horse film is your favorite? This poll is closed. |
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| Black Beauty |
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2 | 1.06% |
| A Talking Pony!?! |
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4 | 2.13% |
| Mr. Hands 2x Apple Flavor |
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117 | 62.23% |
| War Horse |
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11 | 5.85% |
| Mr. Hands |
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54 | 28.72% |
| Total: | 188 votes | ||
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Professor Beetus posted:Yeah, although even surgical masks are better than nothing and a lot of the anti-mask sentiment I've seen in the US is weird xenophobic poo poo where people think mask wearing is some weird Asian thing because it's so common in Japan, for instance. I don't know why mask wearing ending up being politicized so much but it's possibly one of the dumbest things wrt Covid that could have made a huge difference with spread. I can't speak to America, but as an Australian from Melbourne (which I believe leads the world in time spent in lockdown and the country in number of active cases - 918 today!) I can offer at least one semi-anecdotal explanation. Wearing a mask prior to COVID was never standard practice. Even if you're sick, you likely stayed home, and if you had to go outside you did your best not to cough on anyone. Wearing a mask once COVID hits inextricably ties the act with the event; wearing the mask acknowledges that this virus is running rampant. This is enforced by the state, but it is only enforced in the context of COVID - this is why mask mandates are removed in the first big lockdown once cases got back down to 0 for days, and in the second lockdown once we hit 80% citizens vaccinated. So I would say that, at least here, mask-wearing is political because it was enforced by political actors. It likely won't become a cultural habit because it is so closely associated with COVID - wearing a mask means it's around and you're only wearing a mask until it's not around anymore. It's also why I saw mask compliance, and just compliance in general, start to deteriorate in the second big lockdown when cases kept increasing even after more and more restrictions were added. If we're trying to do the right thing but none of it seems to be working, then what are we getting out of this? More generally, I suppose that mask-wearing is political because they are usually mandated by the state. These decisions aren't being made by a majority decision, it's not like this is being determined by a public conversation, it's the state telling you to do this. How is that not political?
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Nov 30, 2021 06:10
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I predict there will be a new covid strain in a month You'll all see I'll be right and that means the world is flat!
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Nov 30, 2021 06:42
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Sierra Madre posted:Even if you're sick, you likely stayed home, and if you had to go outside you did your best not to cough on anyone. In America, you are encouraged to "tough it out" because unless you live in a state or municipality that has mandated sick leave, you might not even be able to take time off with pay. And even if you do, if you call in sick "too much" you can be fired at will by your employer. And lovely managers will give you a hard time for it even if you are legally given the right to take paid leave. So many fuckin colds because in America people just can't bother to wear a mask when sick or stay the gently caress home for various economic and societal reasons. Thanks for that perspective though, I wish I lived in a place where staying home when you're sick was a normal thing and not some failure of character. 
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Nov 30, 2021 07:09
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Foxfire_ posted:It's less designed for white people and more that physics screws more pigmented people over. They do have to get tested on dark skin, but it's fundamentally always going to be a less accurate number than measuring on a more transparent person (and they're not that accurate of measurements to begin with). There's not really any good alternatives though since the only other way we have to continuously monitor blood oxygenation is putting in an arterial catheter in for an ABG and that's a much bigger risk/invasiveness deal than clipping an oximeter over your finger. Eh I don't think this is true. The issue with pulse oximetry and dark skin isn't worse SNR / higher shot noise on the 660 nm channel due to higher attenuation in dark skin (a problem that, in any case, is easy to overcome from an engineering standpoint), it's that there tends to be a systematic bias to overestimating SpO2 on dark skin. That this wasn't even a widely known issue until like 2005, doesn't appear in many textbooks, and still isn't always taken into account in clinical practice, kind of all point to the real nature of the problem.
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Nov 30, 2021 09:13
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Honj Steak posted:We’ve been having a universal FFP2 mandate in Bavaria since October 2020. Cases are still super high since everyone just gets infected in private settings. Yeah I feel like masks (of any kind) have kind of minimal impact if you're not in a lockdown. If the bars and restaurants are open and people can have private gatherings, obviously nobody is going to wear a mask there - is it really making much of a difference, then, whether they're wearing one or not on the bus or in the supermarket? (Obviously it makes some difference, but is it making a massive difference?) Professor Beetus posted:In America, you are encouraged to "tough it out" because unless you live in a state or municipality that has mandated sick leave, you might not even be able to take time off with pay. And even if you do, if you call in sick "too much" you can be fired at will by your employer. And lovely managers will give you a hard time for it even if you are legally given the right to take paid leave. So many fuckin colds because in America people just can't bother to wear a mask when sick or stay the gently caress home for various economic and societal reasons. I reckon Australia is more receptive to "take a sick day if you're sick" than the US is, but I have absolutely tried to tough it out in the past and I also remember a well known cold and flu drug brand having a motto and jingle of "Soldier On" in which the sick person just takes some tablets and goes on their merry way to the office to infect everyone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KT6lVzMsto A lot of people are still working from home and obviously we're all still hyper sensitive to "get tested and isolate at the slightest of symptoms!" but I reckon we probably will see a cultural shift in the long term about not being around other people when you're sick even after COVID eventually dissipates/gets normalised. It blows my mind how blase I was in the past about having the flu - even after my coworkers ordered me home I was still just hanging out in the living room with my housemates.
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Nov 30, 2021 09:14
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Morbus posted:Eh I don't think this is true. The issue with pulse oximetry and dark skin isn't worse SNR / higher shot noise on the 660 nm channel due to higher attenuation in dark skin (a problem that, in any case, is easy to overcome from an engineering standpoint), it's that there tends to be a systematic bias to overestimating SpO2 on dark skin.
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Nov 30, 2021 09:32
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freebooter posted:Yeah I feel like masks (of any kind) have kind of minimal impact if you're not in a lockdown. If the bars and restaurants are open and people can have private gatherings, obviously nobody is going to wear a mask there - is it really making much of a difference, then, whether they're wearing one or not on the bus or in the supermarket? (Obviously it makes some difference, but is it making a massive difference?) There was a good RCT on mask use in Bangladesh that suggested something like 33% reduction in Covid if everyone masked up with surgical masks. However like most academic papers a lot of the "so what" of the findings require a close and informed reading. (I saw that 33% implication cited elsewhere, with significant caveats, so don't hold me to it.) https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_Second_Stage_Paper_20211108.pdf.pdf
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Nov 30, 2021 09:55
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Smeef posted:There was a good RCT on mask use in Bangladesh that suggested something like 33% reduction in Covid if everyone masked up with surgical masks. However like most academic papers a lot of the "so what" of the findings require a close and informed reading. (I saw that 33% implication cited elsewhere, with significant caveats, so don't hold me to it.) I've come across this before and (it doesn't mention in the abstract and I CBF digging through the actual study) I'd be curious when it took place and whether Delta had been well-established in Bangladesh yet. My guess is probably yes but I have no idea how long the peer review process takes so for all I know the study happened in mid-2020. I think that whatever degree of difference masks make, large or small (and they obviously do something so don't get me wrong, anyone who whines about masking is a dickhead), people have developed an obsession with them because they're an immediately visible signifier of other people's willingness to participate in public health measures (even on a spectrum - full mask, dicknose, around the chin, no mask) and on the flipside, because they also give a person a feeling of personal protection/armouring/control. That in turn ties into what I think is a distinctly American phenomenon of getting really into different types of mask, mask studies, YouTube mask reviews etc, the idea that being an Informed Consumer will enable you to Purchase A Quality Product to protect yourself. (But I also kinda sympathise with that because I have no idea what it's like to be so totally and thoroughly abandoned by your own government in this situation, and what else can you really fall back on?)
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Nov 30, 2021 10:25
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freebooter posted:Yeah I feel like masks (of any kind) have kind of minimal impact if you're not in a lockdown. If the bars and restaurants are open and people can have private gatherings, obviously nobody is going to wear a mask there - is it really making much of a difference, then, whether they're wearing one or not on the bus or in the supermarket? (Obviously it makes some difference, but is it making a massive difference?) This completely ignores the fact that those same people share the bus with a bunch of other people who aren't going to bars and restaurants without masks on.
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Nov 30, 2021 10:47
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freebooter posted:I also remember a well known cold and flu drug brand having a motto and jingle of "Soldier On" in which the sick person just takes some tablets and goes on their merry way to the office to infect everyone:
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Nov 30, 2021 11:07
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DR FRASIER KRANG posted:This completely ignores the fact that those same people share the bus with a bunch of other people who aren't going to bars and restaurants without masks on. I'm talking about a public health perspective, not a personal risk perspective. Bars and restaurants are either allowed to open or they're not. If you're a CHO observing case numbers in their hundreds or thousands in your jurisdiction, your priority concern is going to be about whether or not to shut down the hospitality industry, not whether people sitting quietly on buses are correctly wearing the right kind of mask.
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Nov 30, 2021 12:46
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Charles 2 of Spain posted:Haha I knew exactly what this jingle was before I clicked it. I found a newer one - this was still being pushed in 2010! Possibly even more recently if nobody bothered to upload it to Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-qQhi5xzUI edit - here's Youtube now recommending me an ad about the wonders of Strepsils for somebody showing up to SING IN A loving CHOIR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIMA6cI2vVM This is what I mean when I say that however long COVID goes for - maybe it gets magically cured next week, maybe we straggle through restrictions for another 20 years - this surely has to have a lasting effect on this generation and how they respond to cold and flu symptoms in the same way that the Great Depression generation would keep their life savings in cash in a sock under the mattress freebooter fucked around with this message at 12:53 on Nov 30, 2021 |
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Nov 30, 2021 12:48
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Smeef posted:There was a good RCT on mask use in Bangladesh that suggested something like 33% reduction in Covid if everyone masked up with surgical masks. However like most academic papers a lot of the "so what" of the findings require a close and informed reading. (I saw that 33% implication cited elsewhere, with significant caveats, so don't hold me to it.) I've written this up for some friends before but never posted it here, but this isn't really what the study says at all and I wish people would stop mentioning it. Why the Bangladesh mask study is not saying what Twitter and the news says it is This study is not a study of the effect of wearing a mask on COVID. This is a study of specific strategies to increase mask wearing in populations with low rates of masking. Their primary research question is focused on evaluating the particularly strategy to increase mask-wearing. As the authors state in the introduction: "We conducted a randomized controlled trial to identify the most effective mask promotion strategies for low-resource, rural settings and determine whether mask distribution and promotion is an effective tool to combat COVID-19." But that sentence mentions masks multiple times doesn't it? How is that different from a study of masks? It's in fact very different. Let's say I invent a new type of toilet paper. I then launch a big ad campaign to promote my new toilet paper. I then commission a market research firm to study this ad campaign to see if it worked in getting people to buy my new toilet paper. Perhaps as a result of this work they may be able to incidentally conclude something about my toilet paper like that people think it's itchy or that it's too expensive, but that's not what was really being studied. The research question was specifically about the ad campaign. That's what the Bangladesh mask study was concerned with--whether a specific health promotion strategy worked to increase mask usage. Incidentally, they were able to make some measurements of the effect of masks on preventing COVID, but that's not what they set out to do. Why is this distinction important? Because you design a study to answer your research question. In this case, they designed a randomized control trial where they randomly assigned villages and households to receive various mask promotion strategies (mask distribution, text reminders, monetary incentives, verbal pledges, outdoor signage, etc.). They examined village-level mask compliance assessed using direct observation of public spaces. This design makes perfect sense for answering their research question. It allows them to test multiple household and village level promotion strategies in a single trial. Their summary in the concluding paragraph emphasizes what they did and what it shows: "In summary, we found that mask distribution, role modeling, and promotion in a LMIC setting increased mask-wearing and physical distancing, leading to lower illness, particularly in older adults." They are focused on their prevention strategies, not on examining mask wearing itself. But even if that is their focus, shouldn't their results for masks on prevention of COVID be useful? Yes and no. Since the study was not focused on answering the question of the protective effect of masks, it was not designed in a way that makes it uniquely valuable in answering that question. Even among the intervention arm, they had low mask-wearing (42.3% compared to 13.3% in the control arm). The units of study were villages and households making conclusions about the effect on an individual's risk of COVID based on mask-wearing impossible to assess. Most damningly, since the randomization assigned promotion strategies to increase mask wearing, there is still significant risk of confounding by many lifestyle, political, and socioeconomic variables when examining the relationship between mask wearing and disease outcomes. It's not a bad study. In fact, it seems to be a really good study. It's just not the study people seem to think it is.
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Nov 30, 2021 12:49
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Rosalind posted:I've written this up for some friends before but never posted it here, but this isn't really what the study says at all and I wish people would stop mentioning it. I don't really have a strong position on this, and as noted in my post, my exposure to that finding/implication of the paper was secondhand. Your argument seems sound to me. However, I just did a quick search, and for what it's worth, even one of the authors of the study appears to be comfortable with making the assertion: (this pastes really messy) quote:As a regular reader of your blog and one of the PIs of the Bangladesh Mask RCT (now in press at Science), I was surprised to see your claim that, “With more data transparency, it does not seem to be holding up very well”:
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Nov 30, 2021 13:02
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Masks are good and useful, but whenever this come up I can't help but remember somebody I saw in early 2020 comparing them to a cargo cult, i.e. Americans looking at Japanese and South Koreans and Chinese having a cultural norm of mask wearing and thinking that if only they could mimic that it might magic up a comparative Japanese/South Korean/Chinese institutional public health response. Masks are quite literally the last line of defence. (Though as I said earlier, I can't really blame Americans for this fixation when your government/s more or less waved the white flag for the preceding four or five lines of defence.)
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Nov 30, 2021 13:46
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Smeef posted:I don't really have a strong position on this, and as noted in my post, my exposure to that finding/implication of the paper was secondhand. Your argument seems sound to me. However, I just did a quick search, and for what it's worth, even one of the authors of the study appears to be comfortable with making the assertion: (this pastes really messy) I think the author is being deceptive in making representations that this study was a "real-world RCT evaluating masks." It is an RCT evaluating mask promotions strategies with an instrumental variable analysis conducted as part of it. There's nothing wrong with doing that and in many ways even a modestly well-conducted IV analysis is likely better than many of the observational studies in reducing possible sources of bias. However, representing an IV analysis as an RCT is misleading. It is a quasi-experimental method and comes with many assumptions that an RCT does not. There's also an entire argument to be had about the transportability of the findings to other populations given that there may be many socioeconomic and cultural differences that affect mask wearing practices that vary from population to population.
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Nov 30, 2021 14:40
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Morbus posted:Eh I don't think this is true. The issue with pulse oximetry and dark skin isn't worse SNR / higher shot noise on the 660 nm channel due to higher attenuation in dark skin (a problem that, in any case, is easy to overcome from an engineering standpoint), it's that there tends to be a systematic bias to overestimating SpO2 on dark skin. Imo it’s not the biggest issue because pulse ox is just one of many data points used to assess a patients respiratory status. Treat the patient, not the number, as we were taught. Furthermore, an individual data point is useless - trending it over time is what tells you what is going on. Is the number going up, down or staying the same in response to treatments, that’s the real utility of any test The biggest risk it poses is that someone at home who is spot checking their o2 status might be fooled into thinking they’re ok when they’re not. In a clinical setting, cared for by experienced professionals, not as much. Anecdotally in my experience, the pulse oximeters never really returned false information on dark skinned patients when compared to ABG data - they were just less likely to work consistently.
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Nov 30, 2021 14:52
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freebooter posted:Masks are good and useful, but whenever this come up I can't help but remember somebody I saw in early 2020 comparing them to a cargo cult, i.e. Americans looking at Japanese and South Koreans and Chinese having a cultural norm of mask wearing and thinking that if only they could mimic that it might magic up a comparative Japanese/South Korean/Chinese institutional public health response. Masks are quite literally the last line of defence. (Though as I said earlier, I can't really blame Americans for this fixation when your government/s more or less waved the white flag for the preceding four or five lines of defence.) Ironically, in 2019, pre-covid I was starting to see like, middle school kids starting to just wear surgical masks as a fashion thing. Like the kind of kids that would wear a naruto headband to school starting to just have masks on just for the look, seemingly unconnected to illness.
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Nov 30, 2021 14:55
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freebooter posted:Masks are good and useful, but whenever this come up I can't help but remember somebody I saw in early 2020 comparing them to a cargo cult, i.e. Americans looking at Japanese and South Koreans and Chinese having a cultural norm of mask wearing and thinking that if only they could mimic that it might magic up a comparative Japanese/South Korean/Chinese institutional public health response. Masks are quite literally the last line of defence. (Though as I said earlier, I can't really blame Americans for this fixation when your government/s more or less waved the white flag for the preceding four or five lines of defence.) Yeah, with environmental safety, PPE is always the LAST measure. Somehow we've taken that to mean "its okay to spit in each others mouths if you wear a mask on your way to the mouth spitting convention"
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Nov 30, 2021 14:59
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Masks were our last, best hope for peace. They failed. But in the year of the Variant War, they became something greater: our last, best hope for victory. The year is 2021. The place - the something awful forums.
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Nov 30, 2021 15:29
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Michigan hits new record for adult COVID-19 hospitalizations. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/n...ull/8786165002/ quote:Michigan reached a new record of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday with 4,181 hospitalized with confirmed cases of the virus, the most since the pandemic began. quote:About 23% of hospital inpatients statewide are COVID positive, according to the state's latest hospital data. There are regional differences with some facilities reporting that nearly 50% of inpatients are COVID positive.
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Nov 30, 2021 17:28
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Is a single policy authoritarian state really the only way to have a government not composed of people actively seeking my death? Like is that the only way to have one that represents my interests and looks out for me? That seems to be a pretty bleak take... But hey, if so, I say let's start picking which party. Obviously can't be the republicans, they want and have been quite successful at their pursuit of genocide(140k dead floridians by excess deaths! Woo!), which is ok, because there are enough of them to make this position "freedom." They also staged an insurrection. Just normal things a normal party that's allowed to operate does. Can't be democrats, they'll maybe say that's bad for fundraising, but at the end of the day they'll get just the best lawyers and marketers and media and what not people to explain why they just can't do anything and that they just need to compromise with everyone except the left. So they'll do a little light genocide as a treat, kill a buncha kids in concentration camps(but not on purpose!), etc. and half-rear end everything by trying to compromise with with physical forces.... Oh, and both will toss me in jail freely to the point that conversations are silenced on this forum, but this isn't authoritarianism. I can't speak freely, but hey. Gotta say, not liking what this not-authoritarian system is producing for me. Think we need big changes. Seeing so many functionally advocate mass death because of some weirdo set of beliefs vis a vis authoritarianism they don't articulate, certainly didn't reason their way into, etc. is loving my ability to care that humanity survives at all. After all, hey, that's just human nature. FFS public health measures aren't authoritarianism and those who oppose them SEEK YOUR DEATH. It's not a realm for civil disagreement.
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Nov 30, 2021 18:02
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For one thing as people have pointed out non single party authoritarian states (e.x. Taiwan) have managed to things exceptionally well and many others have done a hell of a lot better than the US so it's not like that's the only optionBuffer posted:Oh, and both will toss me in jail freely to the point that conversations are silenced on this forum, but this isn't authoritarianism. I can't speak freely, but hey. Gotta say, not liking what this not-authoritarian system is producing for me. Think we need big changes. I highly doubt either the Democratic or Republican parties are censoring you on a dead comedy forum.
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Nov 30, 2021 18:15
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The closer your alignment to concepts of western individualism and capitalism are the worse you have done, with the leader, king poo poo of death mountain, being the United States. Within that, the more you possess that conservative identity in your body politic, the worse you have done. RE: non-authoritarian states - Africa has also done surprisingly well. Nigeria has been kicking rear end (only 3k deaths) and Lagos is dense as hell. Mr Luxury Yacht posted:I highly doubt either the Democratic or Republican parties are censoring you on a dead comedy forum. lmao, there are quite a few things I can't say or broach here(e.g. anything that might be seen as advocating destruction of property), and quite a few things it is illegal for me to speak about anywhere (mostly things about how to fly rockets). Epic High Five had a list at one point, why online organizing is for chumps and things you can only talk about with comrades around a table. The US government in all its forms loves to come down hard on the left or anyone advocating real change.
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Nov 30, 2021 18:31
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Probably has more to do with the governing ideology than the specific form of government. Plenty of single party authoritarian states made the same determination as the US: feed the people to the virus because the economic status quo can absorb the deaths of 0.5%-1% of the population. Turns out authoritarians can also use their authoritarian powers to suppress testing and information and retaliate against doctors who report the truth. Iran. Russia. Tanzania whose president died of it after saying it was fake and if it's real Jesus cured it anyway lol. Etc And yes while the last two aren't de jure single party states, they are arguably de facto single party states.
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Nov 30, 2021 18:39
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Buffer posted:RE: non-authoritarian states - Africa has also done surprisingly well. Nigeria has been kicking rear end (only 3k deaths) and Lagos is dense as hell. Lots of confounders here--Nigeria is an incredibly young country. Just look up the population pyramid for Nigeria and compare it to the US--like more than half their population is under the age of 25. Also public health data reporting systems just aren't very good in many lower-to-middle income countries meaning that it would be more informative to look at the excess deaths rather than confirmed deaths (which I was unable to find).
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Nov 30, 2021 18:50
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Lagos is kicking New Yorks rear end with literally zero resources. You could multiply it by a factor of 20 and that'd still be true. Let's give credit where it's due. In other confounding factors, Malaria may also protect against covid, oddly enough. VitalSigns posted:Probably has more to do with the governing ideology than the specific form of government. absolutely 100%. It's a set of worldviews you can broadly paint in certain strokes that will not tolerate controls placed on their elites. Authority has little to do with it(*some* is required for public health but not a dictatorship), but gets wheeled out as some boogeyman by the deeply indoctrinated. We can't do what *authoritarian* China did! We'd be authoritarian! (we already are fam, just in different ways) Anyway, you can kinda tie it together by the relative strength of reactionaries and hardliners. The general amount of oppositional defiance present to scream no at being told to wear pants. You can also, more comically use Elon Musk as a test - if Easy E feels free to poo poo on your leaders on twitter about half-assed restrictions on his businesses because what are consequences, you're gonna have a bad time with covid / climate change / any real crisis. Buffer fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Nov 30, 2021 |
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Nov 30, 2021 18:51
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Buffer posted:Lagos is kicking New Yorks rear end with literally zero resources. You could multiply it by a factor of 20 and that'd still be true. Let's give credit where it's due. What specific measures are the Nigerian government (or Lagos' civic government, or whoever else--I'm not familiar enough with Nigeria to even venture a guess at who would be making the public health decisions) taking?
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Nov 30, 2021 19:07
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Buffer posted:Epic High Five had a list at one point, why online organizing is for chumps and things you can only talk about with comrades around a table. The US government in all its forms loves to come down hard on the left or anyone advocating real change. It's a sentiment I've openly held as a broader point that social media should be destroyed and online organizing is entirely captured, but if I categorized a more point by point list than that on specific subjects it was long enough ago that I've forgotten it. What would even be the point really What I have said is that a single party authoritarian state isn't REQUIRED to defeat COVID, though it makes things easier if it finds itself inclined to do so, as the methods to defeat a respiratory virus have been known for centuries and the methods are emphatically authoritarian. It just comes down to the political will being on the side of crushing it or just pretending it isn't real. The flip side of the assumption that you need authoritarian states to crush COVID is that democratic ones are incapable of doing so, it's confusing national conceptions of politics with actual implementations of policy. So-called "authoritarian" measures are absolutely required, but where they are done they are also popular...so is it authoritarian still? Is a single party government that prioritizes my right to not be exposed to a virus worse for me still than a two party one that prioritizes someone else's freedom to expose me to it? I think when all the dust settles it will be interesting to see what correlates to COVID outcomes in terms of prevailing national priorities going into it. So far things aren't looking good for anybody who is in the financialized stages of capitalist development with a fully captured media ecosystem. If not for Brazil and India you could probably also toss "English speaking" onto the pile as well. Just as likely it comes down to who does and doesn't let Facebook do whatever they want
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Nov 30, 2021 19:32
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Epic High Five posted:Just as likely it comes down to who does and doesn't let Facebook do whatever they want it sucks how likely this is the case in so many issues.
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Nov 30, 2021 19:39
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Buffer posted:The closer your alignment to concepts of western individualism and capitalism are the worse you have done, with the leader, king poo poo of death mountain, being the United States. Australia is almost always #2 pretty solidly on those cultural individualism rankings, are certainly not anti-capitalist (I think their federal government is considered pretty seriously conservative?) and did exceptionally well. I think this correlation only really holds if your only two data points are China and the U.S.
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Nov 30, 2021 19:46
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Epic High Five posted:So-called "authoritarian" measures are absolutely required, but where they are done they are also popular...so is it authoritarian still? Is a single party government that prioritizes my right to not be exposed to a virus worse for me still than a two party one that prioritizes someone else's freedom to expose me to it? Yeah you're kinda hinting at it, but the definition of 'authoritarian' is an unexamined assumption. Meatpacking plants forced workers to labor without NPI and took bets on the number of deaths that would occur, employers forced workers dying of covid to keep working with supplemental oxygen tanks until they collapsed, is that any less authoritarian than THE GUBBERMENT closing the plant and paying workers to stay home? We all live under the dictatorship of capital, for most Americans their employer has more direct control over their lives (and deaths) than all but the most authoritarian governments.
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Nov 30, 2021 19:53
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Life in China sounds pretty nice tbqh
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Nov 30, 2021 19:56
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Wang Commander posted:Life in China sounds pretty nice tbqh especially when you compare it to literally any time in the past! VitalSigns posted:Yeah you're kinda hinting at it, but the definition of 'authoritarian' is an unexamined assumption. Yeah, western culture for some reason doesn't perceive the employer-employee relationship through that lens when they absolutely should.
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Nov 30, 2021 20:01
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enki42 posted:Australia is almost always #2 pretty solidly on those cultural individualism rankings, are certainly not anti-capitalist (I think their federal government is considered pretty seriously conservative?) and did exceptionally well. And things in US would be better if the third of population who wants US to be a single party authoritarian state wasn't actively sabotaging the limited measures that were taken.
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Nov 30, 2021 20:04
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah you're kinda hinting at it, but the definition of 'authoritarian' is an unexamined assumption. THAT'S THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE MARKET THOUGH  Besides, the middle class dipshits who will defend that company could be a billionare someday too, and they also might want to abuse their ser-uhhh, employees American Capitalism is seriously just a form of Feudalism without the perks, complete with Divine Right (the Market chooses Winners and Losers!) It's disgusting
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Nov 30, 2021 20:05
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Buffer posted:Is a single policy authoritarian state really the only way to have a government not composed of people actively seeking my death? Like is that the only way to have one that represents my interests and looks out for me? That seems to be a pretty bleak take... Yes. Animals in captivity generally live longer, happier lives too.
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Nov 30, 2021 20:07
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TulliusCicero posted:American Capitalism is seriously just a form of Feudalism without the perks, complete with Divine Right (the Market chooses Winners and Losers!) David Graeber makes this exact argument in Bullshit Jobs, which you should read if you haven't
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Nov 30, 2021 20:12
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We could beat this thing in two months. Always could. But it would require measures all the broke brain libs and conservatives would bitch and moan about. They wouldn’t really do anything though, because most people are cowards. If the government treated this half as seriously as they treated the BLM protests, it would be done.
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Nov 30, 2021 20:20
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LionArcher posted:We could beat this thing in two months. Always could. I legitimately don't believe this.
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Nov 30, 2021 20:25
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