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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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Charles 2 of Spain posted:No idea what that post means but Chinese food is good and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. The fact that no Chinese restaurants in my city no matter how authentic seem to have Peking duck on their menus any more has been one of the most irritating results of the pandemic for me personally.
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May 20, 2022 01:02
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NoDamage posted:I'm not sure there's any point to lamenting the lack of China-style lockdowns in the United States, the reality is such measures would have been impossible to enforce when half the country believed Covid was a hoax from the start and chuds were shooting up security guards for being asked to put on a mask. At that point you might as well be lamenting the fact that Paxlovid didn't exist in March 2020 if you're trying to think up fantasy scenarios that would have saved a million lives. The broken nature of various western nations is not equivalent to the nature of scientific research and equating the two is simply a coping technique.
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May 20, 2022 01:03
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Interestingly, lockdowns are actually two separate things happening that the government's lobs into the same lockdown bucket: 1. The government stops compelling workers to come to work for fear of losing jobs / pay, and tells them "things are really dangerous right now, please stay home so you can stay safe while we get the pandemic under control", and provides urgent funding and resources to get covid mitilgation up to speed. 2. The government says "break lockdown and we will arrest you", and sends unmasked police officers to ominously roam the neighbourhood looking to knock on the doors of any houses that are playing music, at which point people get thrown into jail for the night and possibly catch COVID from the interaction. Australia's lockdowns sucked rear end because they did tons of (2) with barely any (1). Casual workers weren't been paid to stay home, meaning that a bunch of poor people were been plunged into poverty without any compensation, a catch-22 of "YOU MUST WORK TO MAKE MONEY - YOU CAN'T WORK THEIR IS A PLAGUE". Australia needed to lockdown because COVID zero got broken when the government didn't provide taxi drivers with adequate PPE while they ferried quarantining travellers to quarantine, leading to a breakout. They also put those travellers in hotels where air condition transmission / hallway transmission was possible, instead of motels with open air corridors. Literally just pure incompetence, with a possible corruption side-dash of "paying my mates who own hotels and aren't making money to use their facilities for quarantine". The Australian government has repeatedly been saying "we can't lockdown, freedom" to pretend that anyone asking for increased health funding / infrastructure funding / worker safety funding is instead asking for police interventions. nomad2020 posted:The reason everyone gets stuck on ‘China food, no actually it’s bad’ arguments is to claim China is good admits that personal liberty isn’t the highest priority in life and to claim that it’s bad, actually, admits that the millions died to preserve that personal liberty, not because it was somehow inevitable. Rob Filter fucked around with this message at 02:14 on May 20, 2022 |
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May 20, 2022 01:05
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Solkanar512 posted:If China is doing so great, why did they let this disease escape their boarders in the first place? Maybe if they hadn't been telling doctors to shut the gently caress up the rest of the world wouldn't have had to suffer through this in the first place. They've given the world a guide on how to beat it. While I don't condone the lack of transparency, it is pretty obvious in retrospect that it would've made zero difference in how the rest of the world handled their own initial outbreaks. Said outbreaks were not preventable, because you can't really stop a virus with a long incubation time from "escaping the borders" of a nation during a busy travel period.
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May 20, 2022 02:13
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Jaxyon posted:The broken nature of various western nations is not equivalent to the nature of scientific research and equating the two is simply a coping technique. Where's that Jaxyon poster to come in and yell about strawmen?
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May 20, 2022 02:34
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Tiny Timbs posted:Where's that Jaxyon poster to come in and yell about strawmen? Feel free to find the strawman in me describing the post I quoted accurately.
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May 20, 2022 03:27
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Jaxyon posted:Do you think it's nice as a immunocompromised person to live under an unending reign of death? For literal years? Or do those folks count for less? My partner is immunocompromised, which is why both of us are still living extremely limited lives. Neither I nor she expects the rest of our city and our state to continue living under rolling house arrest - as they did throughout 2020 and 2021 - chasing an impossible fantasy, forever. Does it suck? Of course it loving sucks. Sometimes history throws things at you which loving suck. quote:Well, You have ignored the second half of this post, namely, the state of constant fear HazCat posted:This is the exact same thing as Australia, except our federal government didn't step in to fix things. You can say 'people stopped supporting lockdowns because cases kept rising', but cases kept rising because NSW was allowed to keep half-assing it. Cases kept rising because Delta was more infectious and got into the essential worker chain. If you think otherwise you again need to demonstrate why Victoria, the ACT and New Zealand - all of which had total control over their own borders and their own jurisdictions - also found that immediate and harsh lockdowns failed to drive cases back to zero. I'll also point out that that federal government and all the states agreed to and released their joint transition plan out of COVID on July 2, 2021, long before it became clear that Sydney's outbreak would prove unmanageable. COVID-zero was never intended as a long-term plan beyond vaccination in this country, because it was clearly both unsustainable and undesirable, whether you were Gladys Berejiklian or Mark McGowan.
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May 20, 2022 09:36
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Dasar posted:They've given the world a guide on how to Fixed that for you.
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May 20, 2022 21:12
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Jaxyon posted:The broken nature of various western nations is not equivalent to the nature of scientific research and equating the two is simply a coping technique. Besides, there's a lot of middle ground between China-style lockdowns and what the US did.
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May 21, 2022 00:05
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NoDamage posted:Meh, pointing out that both are incredibly unrealistic does not mean that I am equating them. Does it really matter that one is unrealistic for political reasons and the other is for scientific reasons? I mean, yes? Like I said, saying a thing is politically impossible is on the level with "thing that literally has to happen after something due to causality" is a coping technique. No amount of effort is going to change the latter but it could change the former, even if it's unlikely to happen.
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May 21, 2022 02:29
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freebooter posted:
If delta makes zero-Covid unviable, how did the 98% of China outside of Shanghai manage to fend off delta and omicron? I can see that things broke down in multiple places under the pressure of the variants, but I don't know how we can separate the eroding political will from the decrease in policy effectiveness due to entirely material factors. Just for context, I think the Shanghai lockdown sounds like it was inhumane, but people are saying it was the result of people loving up and not following the actual policy. I don't know if that's true, but there are a lot of places in China that are, to my knowledge, fine. I also think that the importance of zero-covid is proportionate to the deaths covid would cause without it, and abandoning it in a well-vaccinated country isn't as inhumane as it would be for, say, China to abandon it at this point. I don't know that Australia and New Zealand were wrong to abandon it, but I think that's something we might be able to figure with the benefit of hindsight and information from China.
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May 21, 2022 07:08
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Jaxyon posted:I mean, yes? Like I said, saying a thing is politically impossible is on the level with "thing that literally has to happen after something due to causality" is a coping technique. No amount of effort is going to change the latter but it could change the former, even if it's unlikely to happen. *Such as: - Sending out N95s on day one instead of year two. - Ramping up testing infrastructure more quickly. - Keeping mask mandates around for much longer. - Cracking down on anti-vaxx bullshit on social media. Like I said, there's a lot of middle ground between China-style Covid-zero policies and the US's massive failure of a pandemic response. vvvv - Thanks for sharing your experience, it is helpful to get first-hand insight into what maintaining Covid-zero actually requires. NoDamage fucked around with this message at 08:51 on May 21, 2022 |
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May 21, 2022 08:38
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A good chunk of Chinese zero-covid policy seems impossible to mirror anywhere West, and not just because of political or societal resistance, or privacy issues in the case of contact tracing. The way Chinese society is structured makes it a lot easier to enforce harsh control measures. Your apartment building is part of a 小区, a community or compound of about 100-1000 households run by a neighbourhood committee. These are generally enclosed, with gates and guards that, during normal times, are more like parking attendants and janitors, but in case of emergencies the gates can be closed. Usually my compound has 5 or so open gates, now there's only one place you can enter/exit with a special pass. Currently, deliveries are also dropped off at that one gate, disinfected, and then carted to the front door of your building by volunteers. On a lower level, every building often has its own representative or attendant. The guy in my building keeps everyone informed with regard to testing times, current regulations, delivers new anti-gen self-tests, etc. This whole structure existed before the pandemic as well but just didn't interfere much with life. When things just started in Shanghai, the government experimented with local lockdowns aimed at specific buildings and communities with cases. After that didn't work we ended up with the city-wide lockdown. Unless you're instituting martial law in the West, it's going to be very difficult to put a stop to movement this thoroughly. Then there's logistics. To supply 25 million people with daily food and necessities, you need an army of suppliers and distributors. For the last mile problem, a lockdown like this would be unsustainable if you didn't have access to the mass amount of delivery drivers that's so common in China. Usually they would deliver lunch to work, packages to your home, etc. During the first week of the lockdown, they locked these guys up as well which meant nobody was able to get anything. After they released them with passes and (multiple) daily tests, things improved. There’s also security theatre you don’t want to copy because it's pointless or dangerous. Yesterday I was able to walk outside for a few hours. All bridges across districts have checkpoints for motorized vehicles and require authorization. Foot traffic across those bridges is blocked. Random tiny parks that are little more than paths are blocked by walls and fences. Some roads between districts are fenced off. There’s video of fire trucks having to stop and remove those barriers on their way to an emergency. It's pretty typical for China to put huge efforts into measures that look like something is being done even if they're practically a waste of time and resources, like disinfecting walkways and streets.
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May 21, 2022 08:43
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Eiba posted:If delta makes zero-Covid unviable, how did the 98% of China outside of Shanghai manage to fend off delta and omicron? It makes it unviable for places that don't have the resources/political environment of a police state like the PRC. (Give or take a bit. Taiwan managed to hold onto COVID-zero until Omicron, while Vietnam also fell to Delta despite being as much of a police state as China.) This is before you even get to the question of whether COVID-zero is worth the cost/benefit after mass vaccination. Whatever you think of that, Australia had already outlined its plans to reopen the borders and begin living with COVID after hitting a certain vaccination threshold - the only difference the Delta outbreak made was that half of us then had to spend the rest of that period under lockdown rather than living COVID-free. I don't know whether NZ had officially announced anything but I very much doubt they were planning to carry on with zero tolerance and closed borders after everyone had been vaccinated.
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May 22, 2022 00:23
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killer_robot posted:Fixed that for you. The fact that you'd think Americans, for example, would riot over this is hilarious. Even their protests during that year, which had minor rioting, were successfully co-opted and smothered.
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May 22, 2022 03:33
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So you're saying you paid zero attention to riots in the US and Canada that .weren't. BLM. That were committed by people who were merely inconvenienced by Covid 'restrictions', and not driven by the outrage that would come from completely losing their poo poo on a city/state/nationwide basis after being locked up in their house/apartments for weeks on end and the various indignities against human rights China imposes with impunity in their lockdown protocols. You also seem to think that the police would have the manpower/ability/desire to enforce dictatorial edicts from above about how people should move around. Do you have any idea how many county sheriffs counties refused to enforce mask mandates calling them unconstitutional on the face of it? Then this would be enforced by the national guard or US Army or some other force. That would be amusing to see! Gotcha. Thank you for your input. Please offer more after you've had a chance to review the activities linked to Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, (and the results of the trial afterwards) and the accidents on the Windsor Bridge in February of this year, and various other 'easily squashed protests' and base the effectiveness of squashing them in comparison to China's ability to squash 4/15/89 and how Shanghai was neatly shut down the moment they got angsty. Hell, compare that to how we 'shut down' BLM, for that matter if you're so inclined. For further reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_anti-lockdown_protests_in_the_United_States#Midwest These were the protests the US had when the US population still had the right to go out and protest and the streets weren't lined with security booths monitoring the few essential delivery personnel who still had the right to breath fresh air at the cost of being constantly engaged with over-bearing authority invading their bodily autonomy. Yes we would riot. There would be blood in the streets the day the reports of police locking people into their apartments broke. killer_robot fucked around with this message at 06:31 on May 22, 2022 |
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May 22, 2022 05:58
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killer_robot posted:Please offer more after you've had a chance to review the activities linked to Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, (and the results of the trial afterwards) I'm not sure that this is the best example given that the FBI was so obvious in their entrapment that it ended with most of the guys getting off.
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May 22, 2022 11:20
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Rochallor posted:I'm not sure that this is the best example given that the FBI was so obvious in their entrapment that it ended with most of the guys getting off. This might be outside the boundaries of this thread, but the obviousness of the entrapment is not why they got off. The fbi did exactly what they’ve done countless times to nab muslims, but for—some reason—it didn’t work this time.
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May 22, 2022 15:03
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So I spied some random article about North Korea "having its first COVID case". So, what's the general theory and scuttlebutt for how bad it REALLY is in that poor damned place? Are we looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths, or millions?
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May 23, 2022 05:54
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If Covid gets a firm footing in North Korea? It's either going to be China style lockdowns with more people starving or dying of having to use coca-cola bottles as IV bags than usual in the normal day to day case of events and have what little remains of their economy come to a screaming halt, or it's going to be a 'let her rip, die in the spirit of Juchte' style body count in a country that has so far refused to accept any form of pharmaceutical treatment/prevention with a health system that started out broken in every way imaginable and probably doesn't even have the resources to store and distribute said remedies. They'll have to get any sort of help with this from China. They are probably going to deny the full spread of the damned thing until entire industries are /forced/ to shut down because all the 3 generation slave camps resemble something out of the Stand and the Elite have sealed themselves into something not too far removed from Masque of the Red Death. It's going to be gross. killer_robot fucked around with this message at 06:41 on May 23, 2022 |
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May 23, 2022 06:38
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Could North Korea really have avoided exposure until now? That seems unlikely even with their closed borders.
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May 23, 2022 12:39
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Cornwind Evil posted:So I spied some random article about North Korea "having its first COVID case".
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May 23, 2022 15:21
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didnt the World War Z book or movie say "N. Korea has zero zombies because they ordered ALL THE CITIZENS to remove their teeth." or some other dumb throw away line. lol at author god logic.
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May 23, 2022 18:57
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IIRC, World War Z (the book) suggested the entire population of North Korea just ... disappeared. Like, they took to the underground tunnels and bunkers and there wasn't a soul to be found in the whole country, leaving it up to everybody else to speculate whether they'd just rebuilt their civilization anew down there or if one person who'd already been bit was among the evacuees and thus turned the entire underground complex into one enormous mess of trapped zombies.
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May 23, 2022 19:30
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Toaster Beef posted:IIRC, World War Z (the book) suggested the entire population of North Korea just ... disappeared. Like, they took to the underground tunnels and bunkers and there wasn't a soul to be found in the whole country, leaving it up to everybody else to speculate whether they'd just rebuilt their civilization anew down there or if one person who'd already been bit was among the evacuees and thus turned the entire underground complex into one enormous mess of trapped zombies. which no one wants to open and find out.
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May 23, 2022 19:35
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I AM GRANDO posted:Could North Korea really have avoided exposure until now? That seems unlikely even with their closed borders. Given the only place they have remotely any level of uncontrolled border traffic is with China, which is also COVID-zero, it doesn't seem impossible
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May 23, 2022 21:29
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freebooter posted:Given the only place they have remotely any level of uncontrolled border traffic is with China, which is also COVID-zero, it doesn't seem impossible I have bad news for you about where the rest of the world got Covid from.
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May 23, 2022 21:41
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Xombie posted:I have bad news for you about where the rest of the world got Covid from.
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May 24, 2022 01:37
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cat botherer posted:And have since maintained much lower Covid rates than almost anywhere else. Are you trying to resurrect the 2020 “wet market” discourse? What’s your point? I think they're just pointing out that it's very unlikely that North Korea just had their first COVID case given the circumstances. The disease originated in China and spread from there and that has nothing to do with "wet market discourse" or whatever strawman you are trying to project here.
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May 24, 2022 02:21
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Professor Beetus posted:I think they're just pointing out that it's very unlikely that North Korea just had their first COVID case given the circumstances. The disease originated in China and spread from there and that has nothing to do with "wet market discourse" or whatever strawman you are trying to project here.
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May 24, 2022 02:25
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cat botherer posted:So that was a strawman, but bringing up the fact that this particular zoonotic disease came from China, in contrast, not a strawman, but is germane to this topic in 2022? The topic of whether or not North Korea avoided covid until now? Yes its very germane.
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May 24, 2022 03:05
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cat botherer posted:So that was a strawman, but bringing up the fact that this particular zoonotic disease came from China, in contrast, not a strawman, but is germane to this topic in 2022? Yes, it does make sense when discussing whether or not it is likely that North Korea has remained COVID free until now, sorry you had trouble following that particular aspect of the conversation. Let me spell it out for you a bit more clearly: that poster was saying that, due to North Korea having a fairly open border with China, they are unlikely to have avoided COVID until 2022. Please let me know if you have any further trouble with this.
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May 24, 2022 03:18
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cat botherer posted:So that was a strawman, but bringing up the fact that this particular zoonotic disease came from China, in contrast, not a strawman, but is germane to this topic in 2022? Of course the fact that Covid likely originated in China is relevant to whether or not it spread to North Korea prior to 2022 q2; what even is the claim you are trying to put forward here? ETA: sorry, beaten badly. Beaten badly by a mod no less. Castaign fucked around with this message at 03:34 on May 24, 2022 |
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May 24, 2022 03:32
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Only Madagascar, Antartica, and maybe some space stations had decent chances of being zero or still being zero imo
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May 24, 2022 04:03
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PhazonLink posted:Only Madagascar, Antartica, and maybe some space stations had decent chances of being zero or still being zero imo https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59848160
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May 24, 2022 05:20
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I should have been clearer. I have no doubt North Korea had COVID around the same time the world was catching it, but they denied it until recently. I wonder what the truth is in terms of just how many people have actually died and if there are any rumours.Mooseontheloose posted:which no one wants to open and find out. I read an actually well done fanwork, "The Way Is Shut", written in the style of the book that theorized an answer for it. Everything is indeed abandoned, they find big sealed doors, use ground radar to determine there are large chambers underground, and also test samples of water that they theorize could have come from said underground caverns which somehow ending up being flooded due to some geological reason or another (it's under the sea level?). The water is full of the zombie virus, so they conclude that between shoddy North Korean work and the almost certain incompetence and corruption of the government, the whole place is likely flooded and filled with millions of waterlogged zombies. They fuse the doors shut and conclude that more or less, that spot on the Earth is damned. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 08:13 on May 24, 2022 |
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May 24, 2022 07:28
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They've had community transmission all this time, it's only just now gotten bad enough for them to ask for help. This is their way of asking for help.
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May 24, 2022 07:30
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Xombie posted:I have bad news for you about where the rest of the world got Covid from. Has there at any point been significant community transmission in Jilin or Liaoning provinces? How much illegal cross-border traffic was there between North Korea and China up to 2019, let alone after 2020, when both countries increased their already harsh (by Western standards) impositions on both international and domestic movement? There are still countries in the South Pacific which have never recorded a COVID death because they've either never recorded a case or have quickly quashed their outbreaks. Obviously they're comparatively tiny but I'm not sure I'd argue they're comparatively more isolated. North Korea, while a medium-sized country, is a full-on Orwellian autarky which drew the drawbridge even tighter after March 2020. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd either never had an outbreak until now, or violently clamped down on any outbreaks before they could spread.
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May 24, 2022 10:22
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cat botherer posted:And have since maintained much lower Covid rates than almost anywhere else. Are you trying to resurrect the 2020 “wet market” discourse? What’s your point? That North Korea's only open border being with China doesn't mean its less likely for them to have gotten a Covid outbreak, when Covid originated in China. No one in their right mind would believe that that they actually didn't have Covid in North Korea until now. freebooter posted:Has there at any point been significant community transmission in Jilin or Liaoning provinces? How much illegal cross-border traffic was there between North Korea and China up to 2019, let alone after 2020, when both countries increased their already harsh (by Western standards) impositions on both international and domestic movement? You're the one who stated that they had "uncontrolled border traffic with China." quote:There are still countries in the South Pacific which have never recorded a COVID death because they've either never recorded a case or have quickly quashed their outbreaks. Obviously they're comparatively tiny but I'm not sure I'd argue they're comparatively more isolated. North Korea, while a medium-sized country, is a full-on Orwellian autarky which drew the drawbridge even tighter after March 2020. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd either never had an outbreak until now, or violently clamped down on any outbreaks before they could spread. Just because they have an insane level of social control doesn't mean they can actually control a disease outbreak. Isolation doesn't matter once the disease is present. China's success at attempting covid zero has come from the fact that it's a highly advanced nation acting with planning, intent, and rationality. I have extreme doubts that North Korea, who can barely manage to feed its citizens in the best of times, has enacted some successful covid zero policy that doesn't resemble how we "treat" outbreaks of bird flu. Xombie fucked around with this message at 13:17 on May 24, 2022 |
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May 24, 2022 13:14
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I'm hoping that my smallpox vaccination will help protect me from the next scourge. Looking forward to Republicans gathering naked in mud pits to rub against one another in a show of support for the monkey pox.
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May 24, 2022 13:48
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