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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   3090 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 29, 2024

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I can’t speak to most people, but I remember how bad it was. It was so bad that New York City had to bring in emergency 1,000-bed hospital ships in order to handle the overflow of cases. Of course, those ships sat virtually empty and unused, and their large crew of medical workers basically got to enjoy a free holiday, but still, they had to bring in ships! It was so bad, Covid-positive patients had to be rehoused away from the hospitals and into empty schools nursing homes, for some reason. It was so bad that nurses were so exhausted, they barely had the time and energy to make TikTok videos to help keep people’s spirits up as they were imprisoned in their homes. It was bad.

Well, I guess thank you for appearing on command and making my point for me.

And what is your point? COVID was over-sold. Wildly over-sold, and that's the enduring legacy of the pandemic.

It was never that bad, because it was over-sold so completely that nothing short of civilization-ending pandemic could have been that bad.

It was never that bad, because it was over-sold so completely that nothing short of civilization-ending pandemic could have been that bad.

It was oversold, it was also worse than the people complaining about it being oversold think it was.

"It also was looking more like a wolf than you think it was" is not very useful when you cried wolf for 2 years. That account is overdrawn so deeply that it doesn't matter anymore how much was in it initially.

Public health officials and the government keeping things gong too long is not the problem here, the problem is that lockdown skeptics have become COVID deniers. Yes shit was bad initially. Yes it was a near thing for quiet problems. No it was not just another flu. Etc. etc.

Saying that the lockdowns were a messaging and public health fuck up is totally fine, but from having these arguments in the past a lot of people are going too far.

Just because the vaccine doesn't make sense for healthy 18 year olds doesn't mean it's not a good idea, but you'd never get that from how people in these space over reacted.

I think the problem is exactly the officials that lied, cheated, stole, oppressed and brutalized the public for several years, with zero consequences, zero accountability and not even as much as mealy-mouthed apology. They keep claiming they did everything right, and the public was the ones too stupid to understand why it's all for their own good. I completely and totally understand people not believing a word that comes out of the mouths of anybody who is in any way connected to this establishment ever again. They didn't just use up their credibility, they piled it up, made a huge bonfire, and when that burned, they borrowed some, and set it on fire too. Their credibility is essentially in the same position as US Treasury now - trillions in debt and keeping digging down without any possible hope of ever reversing not even the value, not even the first, but all the higher level derivatives - they are all trending down. It's the exponential credibility collapse and still, you claim some rural dude that is now hesitant to get the 13th booster is the main problem that should be addressed. Nope, he is not. The fuckers who led us to this point are, and they are still largely in charge.

You have to separate these two things. COVID is a big deal. Public health officials are retarded. These can both be true at the same time.

Yes you are mad about rights abuses and everything else, and so am I. But COVID was still a big deal.

Maybe it is "big deal", maybe not. That can be debated. But certainly the guys who lied to us for years lost the right to be a source in the decision how exactly big. Their informational quality is negative now.

And sure, "public health officials" bear the majority of the blame. But I don't remember a mass movement of rank-and-file to protest the abuses either. I do remember a lot of "racism is a national health issue" but not a lot of "lying, fraud and tyranny is a national health issue". I'm not saying there weren't dissidents - there were - but most of the lower levels enthusiastically enforced whatever they were told to enforce and pushed whatever they were told to push. So, it's not just some lone officials on top that need to account for that.

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