Tophattingson
No bio...
User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The effect of both smoking and obesity on COVID mortality are inconclusive and therefore, at worst, small compared to the effect of age. This is true for pretty much every "comorbidity". It's just hard to do anything to make it more likely you will die of covid that won't get drowned out by being a few years old.
Not a rightist, don't have a daughter. Way more concerned about the British regime fucking up their life with lockdowns 2 when the next spicy cold comes around than anyone not taking birth control or covid vaccines.
Hananiaism will always run aground on the problem that for every low human capital right-wing fad, there's something just as bad on offer from the left, with the added danger that it will also be state-mandated.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
If the region got Under the Dome'd and external support no longer existed, Israel would not only still win, but they'd win even more than otherwise.
Metropolitan Borough refers to the type of local government, not that Rotherham is a large metropolis with Rotherham Town at it's centre. And the map you linked randomly includes Swinton (population 15k) and Wath upon Dearne (population 16k) with Rotherham. You are otherwise right to question whether this is the best number to use. The Rotherham Grooming Gang seems to have been specifically based in the town proper, but this doesn't necessarily mean their victims were limited just to the town, or even to the Metropolitan Borough. Sheffield is the likely alternative target. But it's also possible Sheffield has it's own separate grooming gang.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
The exact moment is the Six Day War, so 1967. A consequence of Israel embarrassing the reds by absolutely crushing Arab countries which were primarily armed by Moscow.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
How likely is it that Trump will do something about the Houthis.
How likely is it that the Houthi shipping attacks will stop because they expect Trump retaliation without Trump having to do anything?
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The governments were doing all this while using standard propaganda channels to force public opinion to be in it's favour. That these efforts would grow weaker over time as the disconnect between the government line about the properties of covid and the real-world properties of covid was increasingly noticed by a public that knew more and more people who got covid and then didn't die is unsurprising.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
Dying? Once again I have to beat my usual drum. It's not dying. It was murdered in 2020 with the totalitarian response to covid.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
Under Lockdownism, the benevolence of COVID restrictions is treated as an axiom, not a conclusion. Everything else will get redefined and rearranged to conform to that axiom, rather than the conclusions being changed as new facts emerge. Therefore those responsible for creating, implementing and enforcing those restrictions are always good people regardless of their personal failings. If that means suddenly discovering that technically his restrictions didn't criminalize his actions, then so be it. The alternative, acknowledging that the hypocrisy of those imposing the restrictions is evidence they didn't really believe in them, opens the way for ulterior motives, and once you think those responsible for restrictions have ulterior motives, you're already half-way to being one of us evil conspiracy theorist granny murderering freedumb-loving fascists.
I don't know the specifics of the regulations across every little subdivision of the US at every point in time. So I don't know if he technically broke the law. In the UK, we de facto criminalized all casual sex, because we criminalized the act of meeting up with members of another household indoors (prostitution might have fallen under a work-related exception loophole, and dogging is technically illegal but generally treated as less illegal than violating lockdowns). The thing is, I don't particularly care about that. If anything, flagrantly violating COVID restrictions elevates my view of your moral character, and the more trivial the motive for violation, the better. Breaking the law because you were kept from visiting a dying relative? Meh, doesn't indicate any particular attachment to human liberty, just a willingness to bend the rules in extreme circumstances. Violating lockdowns just to get your dick wet? Hell yes, we need more people who think like you in charge. But that's a +1 to Jay Varma's score of -100 for being responsible for the restrictions. There's little difference between wanting to see Varma fired into the sun, and me wanting to see Varma fired into the sun but I'll put him a few people further back in the queue for the sun cannon.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
No. But an easy way to go after NGOs that assist illegal immigrants is to treat them as what they effectively are: organized crime.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
If Boris Johnson was not capable of escaping responsibility for his actions during 2020 and 2021, he'd be rotting in a damp concrete box for ~200,000,000 counts of false imprisonment, not just merely no longer be PM.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
and is part of the reason that we don't have a substantial libertarian movement trying to relitigate COVID.
Reform UK wants to relitigate COVID and just won 14.3% of the vote. If anything the movement would be stronger if the state did not violently suppress it.
But that can't have been the group the mandates were originally intended to target, because that group only exists post the mandates! Its not even a meaningful thing without them.
Opponents of lockdowns predate the introduction of vaccine mandates.
But that can't have been WHY they imposed lockdowns or the like because that group was created by their lockdown actions in the first place.
The vaccine mandates target this group, not the lockdowns.
The Tories didn't lose the recent election because of Covid response, they lost it due to a soggy economy and having been in power for 14 years.
The disastrous state of the economy is due to the Covid response, so yes, that's why they lost the election as badly as they did.
Whether you want to believe it or not, the vast majority of MPs only pressured Boris to change course, because they individually were under pressure from their constituents. They aren't cartoon villains who were secretly wanting to take over.
Which only shifts the question to why constituents wanted lockdowns in the supposedly government-not-wanting-lockdown UK, while those in Sweden didn't want lockdowns. If the answer is the media, then why did the media not push Sweden into lockdowns? At some point, there needs to be some explanation for why the UK did this policy while some of our peers did not, and the most credible explanation is that the government wanted to do it. Maybe not all MPs, maybe not all in government, but a large enough proportion were able to use their powers to ramp up fear and then offer to resolve that fear with lockdowns.
The alternative explanation is that everyone just woke up one day in mid-March after dreaming up an entirely new suite of policies that they wanted, for no reason, and therefore the government had to do these policies, because there's no proposed mechanism here for why the public would organically desire this policy after never even suggesting it for Hong Kong Flu, Asian Flu, HIV, Swine Flu, and countless other smaller epidemics.
And if they don't want to be seen as cartoon villains, all they had to do was not do lockdowns.
The government wasn't the one driving the fear initially.
But the timeline of government action is just not consistent with the government being commited to making those decisions in advance to target some specific group.
Again, you're confusing me saying vaccine mandates were targeted at dissidents with me saying lockdowns were targeted at dissidents. They're two different policies, and I never claimed the latter.
In addition, you can take this or not, but I used to work in government and for both Labour and Tory parties, and I know quite a few MPs personally, including some very high up in the decision making tree. They were indeed pressured into making those decisions by the public. They were terrified of the amount of vitriol they were getting for not acting.
Committing monstrous crimes against humanity because you're scared that a public that despises you anyway will despise you is not a coherent explanation for their behaviour. If they are scared of being voted out, see my prior comments on how the government clearly isn't maximizing for popularity. Their position on immigration is enough to explain that. If they are scared of something more dramatic like being murdered, then their concern should be the growing number of Islamists in the country due to their immigration policy, not that Doreen, 72, retired civil servant is suddenly going to turn into a killer because she's scared of the spicy flu. And in terms of how they acted, the only group that ever seemed to scare them was anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters, judging by how violently they reacted towards them compared to e.g. BLM protesters.
Yes, the actual problem with the Confederacy was that they didn't enslave enough whites, and the actual problem with Nazis is that they didn't gas enough Germans. If only they did that, they'd have been goodies. Hurrah equality!
Rights can't work from a basis of equality. Was the solution to gay marriage was actually to prohibit all marriage, and sodomy to instead criminalise all sex? No. To be even more flippant, gay people were already legally allowed to have straight marriage, and straight people were already prohibited from gay marriage.
You do realise that I am a LGBT person who was pissed off at the government de facto recriminalizing homosexuality with lockdowns? The bracketed hello might have been too subtle... Leftists are okay with certain forms of bans on homosexuality, but that's because the aesthetics of LGBT rights takes priority over actually giving us any rights, because it turns out that they in fact do want the government to care about what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedroom. Hence it's okay to violate our rights as long as it "doesn't stem from decrying them", whatever that's supposed to mean (though really it still is decrying us because it's about reducing humans to disease vectors on a spreadsheet in general).
And to get out from the weeds and back to the point: It's trivially incorrect that nerdy political purges are based around some sort of propensity to make the lives of their friends worse, or damage the relevant hobby. The target prioritization is totally wrong for that to be the motive. Lockdowns actively criminalized in-person Boardgaming, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering (last I checked, lockdowns killed paper Standard), Wargaming, Conventions, and all other nerdy face-to-face activities. And politically, those were supported more by the left than the right. Therefore, if you're going to use attacking friends and their ability to participate in any particular nerdy activity to justify nerdy political purges, there's your actual target. Anything else would be ad-hoc excuses to disguise an ulterior motive for purges.
I'd be way more comfortable playing with a social conservative than a mask addict, even if because of demographics this is very unlikely to actually happen. At least I could trust they'd still be interested in playing when ligma 28 rolls around, and they wouldn't be motivated to call the police on me for suggesting it.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
Even though corruption will always exist to some degree, it's much better to live in a society where it's at least not blatant and generally seen as a bad thing that should be dealt with, as opposed to a country like Russia where it broadly runs rampant.
It depends. In the UK, I would vastly prefer the blatant corruption of money under the table to get construction contracts done over the stealth corruption of planning permission restrictions in favour of incumbent property-owning rentseekers.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Using a book that was not written by Popper, or referring to anything written by Popper, to figure out what Popper thinks is a bad idea. Adorno is not Popper.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
It doesn't hold because imposing them in the first place is, in my view, so bad that minor good deeds can't undo it. Not specifically because of hypocrisy.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
I considered making this an edit but I think it would better serve as a separate comment.
I disagree that vaccine mandate demands were the result of grassroot popular demand foisted upon politicians. I think the evidence for this is stronger than it is for lockdowns, because the explanation for why someone might wants them depends quite specifically on official statements about the properties of covid, vaccines, and those who refuse to take them. Official statements that frequently turned out to be wrong. All to set up the axioms required for popular support for vaccine mandates: That those who refuse to take the vaccines are not merely wrong, not merely evil, but instead are actively dangerous to you, because unlike the righteous vaccinated, they can still have and spread covid to you and murder you. This is not an organic belief. It cannot be an organic belief because the entire pro-restriction tale of lockdowns is that your organic beliefs about vaccines are all wrong and the only legitimate source of information about vaccines is from the government, which specifically lied about vaccines stopping transmission.
In the absence of government efforts to make people believe the axioms that lead to vaccine mandates, that randomly half-way through 2021 people would have a fever dream and subsequently believe the government should own their neighbours veins is even less coherent than the equivalent for lockdowns.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
Well, 2.5 times worse is still not exactly "about as bad as COVID".
No, but if your response to something as bad as X is nothing, then your response to something as bad as 2.5X should be somewhere between nothing and slightly more than nothing, not to go metaphorically nuclear.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
No, Popper's analysis is centred on critique of Plato and historicism, the idea that history is controlled by historical laws that can be used to predict the future. He links racialism to this as a theory of history that proposes that a certain race is destined to inherit the Earth, but it's not centred on this.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
A consequence of just copying over the original post and not any follow-ups.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
Reagan's invasion of Grenada did not sow the seed for the destruction of the Liberal order. It is probably the single most clear-cut win for the US (and everyone else involved) in it's history.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
I prefer to describe these as anxiety-like illnesses, since they're all co-morbid with each other and with anxiety, and share demographics. Yes, that includes hysteria.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
They are referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal
It's also easy to say 1+1=3, but this doesn't mean we should throw out all of maths. They are obviously wrong. European governments imprison people for hate speech. They do not imprison people for supporting hate speech laws.
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