Covid-19 Politics

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Not irrational, given his reply to you in the other thread-

“We will never see eye-to-eye because you consider 800,000 deaths to be a lot of deaths. 800,000 is a gift, with a big bow on it.”

Hitler, Stalin and Mao would be proud to associate themselves with such views. One wonders if the admiration is mutual.

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What's 800,000, Stavros? It's a number. What if I tell you something cost $800,000 and asked you if that was cheap, or expensive? Your instinctive reaction would be to say "Expensive" because $800,000 is a lot of money to you, probably way more than you've ever had, based on some things you've said about your finances. You couldn't buy something for $800,000 no matter what it was, and I don't say that as an insult, simply for illustrative purposes.

But if you were Jeff Bezos you'd say that's cheap. Because you make $800,000 every 4 and a half minutes. It wouldn't matter to you what it was, it could be a paper clip, it still only represents 4 and a half minutes of sitting around on your yacht.

But in full context, whether $800,000 is cheap or expensive depends on what you're buying with it, yes?

So you start throwing a number like 800,000 around, it sounds like a big number to most people. But it's a very, very tiny number to Mother Earth because Mother Earth cranks out 800,000 brand new people approximately every 2 days. We could sacrifice 800,000 people a week to the Volcano God and still end up with way more people by the weekend than we had on Monday.

Those numbers are pure propaganda. They absolutely do not represent a health emergency of any kind, this is the least deadly pandemic in the history of the planet.

And it's funny that you act as if our measures are saving lives. Are they? Or would this whole debacle have been over 2 years ago with fewer deaths if we had just let the thing happen instead of dragging it out, injecting ourselves with experimental vaccines, and watching it mutate time after time after time? Can't answer that, can you. Nobody wants to pick that ball up and run with it, it would mean politicians admitting shit-tier decision-making and failure. Trump had it right from the very start - let it run its course. Now it's too late.

You're a puppet, Stavros. Don't walk under any low overpasses or you'll go limp and get run over. And they'll probably count you as a Covid death.

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Originally Posted by Nick Danger

I hate to say it, but I think there’s going to have to be some murderous rampaging before we regain our freedom from these people. There will have to be a high-profile assassination, or a mass shooting that’s easily traced to Covid madness, or multiples of those, before our power-mad overlords will relinquish their unprecedented control over the lives of their fellow humans.

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Originally Posted by Nick Danger

Mask nazis are relentless and everywhere. Some getting knocked the fuck out, and rightfully so. Probably end up tagging me one or two before it's all over.

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Originally Posted by Nick Danger

I swear to Christ if I thought I could get away with it, I'd put a bullet in Anthony Fauci for the good of all mankind.

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Your willingness to rationalise violence that serves your political cause is very revealing. As I said before, you are well on the way to becoming a fascist.

Here's one prediction I will make without fear of contradiction - no matter what people on your side of politics do over the coming years, you will be willing to rationalise or minimise it.

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Originally Posted by Nick Danger

Interesting that your cases are at an all-time high but your deaths are at an all-time low. It's almost as if the current mutation of this virus isn't dangerous at all to anyone who isn't a bag of bones on a respirator and could easily be quarantined for their own safety so the rest of us could get on with our lives.

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No idiot, deaths are not at an all-time low. They are not the highest ever, but they are approaching those levels. Why the fuck is it so hard for you to check simple facts?
https://www.worldometers.info/corona...try/australia/

I know maths is not your strong suit, but even if a variant is less deadly it can still be big problem if enough people are getting infected.

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Originally Posted by broncofan

The costs you've born during the pandemic have been virtually nil. You sound like a crybaby...to think you've previously said racism is a thing of the past...imagine if you actually had a legitimate gripe.

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Our grandparents' generation lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. This guy is whining and threatening violent revolution because he has to wear a mask sometimes or get a needle in his arm. Talk about spoiled and entitled.

Who's the fascist, Flighty? The guy who wants to be left alone to do what he wants? Or the guy who wants to tell that guy what to do? Liberals calling conservatives fascists is the most consistent and laughable irony of the current era. When they throw the occasional Orwell reference in as well it's just icing on the cake.

We are at war, Flighty. Just because we're not shooting at each other, never think you aren't my enemy. You want my obedience. You want to take my money and give it to the lazy masses. You want to seize and use the social currency of middle-class American conservatives, but without accepting the social responsibility that put us in that position in the first place. Liberals are parasites, plain and simple. Doesn't mean you personally are a parasite, Flighty, I'm fairly sure you have a job and pay your own way. It just means you've chosen to align yourself with a passenger philosophy. Only you know how you fell into that trap. Most likely it's some kind of savior complex combined with a low capacity for abstract thought, but you'd know better than me.

You won't win. For one thing, we've got all the money. Yeah, Flighty, that's right - while your liberals have been crying in their pillows and working out their pronouns, we conservatives have just kept doing what we always do. Banking all the money. In November we are going to take back the House AND the Senate. In 2024 we are going to take back the White House. We already own the Supreme Court for the next 30 years. It's over. "Violent revolution" won't be necessary. But it sure would be fun, I'll be damned if I've ever seen a group who could use a good old-fashioned all-afternoon country ass-whupping more than the current crop of fatherless Democrats.

Meanwhile though, it's all about damage control. I'm actually quite disappointed. I thought we were going to see some real social change from this administration. Turns out though, that they were just as full of shit as their constituents all along.

So whatever happened to the idea that if you don't like certain policies you persuade a majority of voters to agree with you at the next election? Whether you agree with that or whether you are willing to resort to violence or non-democratic manipulation to get your way is the fundamental criterion for whether you are a fascist or not.

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Originally Posted by filghy2

Our grandparents' generation lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. This guy is whining and threatening violent revolution because he has to wear a mask sometimes or get a needle in his arm. Talk about spoiled and entitled.

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You say ‘grandparents’ but for me it is my parents, both of whom were born before the First World War, both of whom suffered because of those wars, of which I am a direct consequence. My parents’ story is not unique but is of no concern to Nigel who translates 800,000 human beings into dollars to strip them of, indeed, deny them their humanity, which suggests that in the broad scheme of things, six million was and is, just a number. The context in which six million died, or 800,000 is decreed to be either irrelevant or misleading, because the details that illuminate that context to make it relevant to us today, are an obstacle to his individual needs and desires.

One can also attempt to unravel the contradictions in language that enable him to describe me as a Liberal, which I have never been because I believe a moral economy is superior to a market economy, and that the State plays a crucial role in protecting my liberty, and that international co-operation is superior to international conflict.

Fascists thrive on conflict by engaging in a form of identity politics where one single identity does not subordinate all others in the State, but seeks to eliminate them as threats, it is the existential dilemma posed by a multi-cultural society,but one where for centuries, reality has collided with an ideal, the consequence measured in deaths. Not 800,000 but say, in the case of the Americas, 100 million.

The tragic irony of the so-called Conservative today, is that it bases its ideology not on the 1776 Revolution and its Constitution, but the fact that for approx 250 years after Jamestown, the European settlers who we are told made the America they are exclusively entitled to own were a minority. Thus as immigration changes the complexion of America, Conservatives intend to use whatever means they have to ‘conserve’ minority rule, but do so with Fascist language, such as ‘America First’, ‘Drain the Swamp’, and by elevating ‘Patriots’ over citizens they don’t approve of.

What Covid has done on one level is beg the question: is the life of that person worth more than my own? But as soon as a process of selection enters the frame, the edifice indeed the process of the democratic state is shaken, because if everyone in a democracy has the equal right to vote, a sense of equality must inform that system, but for Nigel and people like him, equality is neither a reality, nor a desired outcome if it means Black and other Minority people are not just Americans but Americans with the same rights he has.

He once challenged me and others to prove the existence of Institutional Racism, as if the laws that were passed in the defeated, anti-American Confederacy between 1865 and 1918 that created segregation on the basis of race, did not still exist, which they do. But why should I have to tell an American his own history when it is of no interest to him when it so obviously details the flaws in American democracy, flaws that demand to be repaired?

Covid is a reality, it compels Americans to find a collective, as well as an individual response, to save lives. To make lives impacted by the virus durable in terms of the quality and the length of life left to live. We can stand together or fall, it is that simple.

This might be another apocryphal quote, but it has been attributed to Joseph Stalin: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is just a statistic."

This seems like Nick Danger's version: "If someone like me dies at the hands of a black/brown person that is a crisis justifying strong measures against black/brown people; if a million people die of some other cause that is a mere statistic that cannot justify any sacrifice by me at all."

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Originally Posted by Stavros

(Passive-Aggressive, Virtue-Signaling, Nonsensical Rant Featuring Attempt To Play Off His Inability To Produce Factual Sources As Being Due To My Inability To Understand Why He Shouldn't Have To)

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It's called Natural Selection, Stavros. The people who have died were weak homo sapiens - weak immune systems, weak lungs. Now they're out of the gene pool and mankind is stronger for it. It's been happening for hundreds of thousands of years and it's going to keep happening until we blow ourselves up.

I'm quite aware that behind each of those 800,000 deaths there is a personal story of tragedy. Someone else's personal story of tragedy. Tell me those stories one by one and I'll shed 800,000 tears for you. Give me fair warning though, I'm gonna need to drink a lot of water and stock up on Kleenex.

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Originally Posted by filghy2

So whatever happened to the idea that if you don't like certain policies you persuade a majority of voters to agree with you at the next election? Whether you agree with that or whether you are willing to resort to violence or non-democratic manipulation to get your way is the fundamental criterion for whether you are a fascist or not.

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It's Covid Fatigue, Flighty. Covid Fatigue and Progressive Fatigue. There's not a drawn-out explanation for why I'm feeling these days like I might actually encounter or initiate violence after more than 30 years since the last time I even considered it. That evil impulse just keeps building and building the longer the liberal media and Big Tech maintain control over my life against my will. I am 100% in favor of Democracy. And I never disputed the election, did I, Flighty. I held out hope that we would get something worthwhile from this administration, especially considering it looks like their 2-year window to do something positive for social change was their last opportunity for a long, long time, almost certainly this decade. I honestly never expected that they would take the low road right out of the gate and make complete fools of themselves.

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Originally Posted by Nick Danger

There's not a drawn-out explanation for why I'm feeling these days like I might actually encounter or initiate violence after more than 30 years since the last time I even considered it. That evil impulse just keeps building and building the longer the liberal media and Big Tech maintain control over my life against my will.

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I haven't shared this but I've worked a lot on myself in the last five years and one thing I've worked on is my emotional reactions to things and trying to be less self-righteous or worked up over things other people say.

Still...can you not say stuff like this? It's not just that I don't think your reasons for being upset are legit, it's that this talk about considering violent acts of terrorism or murder if you could get away with it is unbelievably creepy and as you say evil.

We have too many instances of people working themselves into a violent frenzy and thinking they can justify anything. Get control of yourself.