Sure, in fact there are more than two sides. There are in fact a wide range of estimates, approaches, interpretations and experiences, including dying. But none of that in any way defends your terrible read of his op nor your nonsensical response. Which I presume you know since you opted not to interact with what I wrote either.
That does it! You’re Curly now. Phyllo is Moe and Felix is Larry. 
No substance. No ability to concede. But, God, the wit…with humor this good, your lack of courage is almost outweighed.
Lack of courage? Here, at ILP?!
What the fuck does that – can that – even mean?!!
Note to others:
A little help with this one please. What do you make of his reaction to me? 
Brazen.
Someone points out that you misrepresented the post you were responding to: strawmanning. Instead of actually looking at the OP and your own response, in terms of what is pointed out to you, you make innane comments and don’t focus on the topic nor do you try to argue that actually you did fairly represent his post. When faced with a pretty obvious misrepresentation on your part, you head off into drivel and focus on the one part of my second response that you can voice ‘confusion’ over rather than the two obvious comments on your post. That all seems cowardly to me and part of a pattern. An inability to consider you made a mistake. You know, that part of intellectual discussion. A crucial one.
I consider this polemical
posting.php?mode=quote&f=48&p=2766113#pr2766066
and parts are not how I would frame the issue. But other parts are simply the case…
but you misrepresented it. I responded here…
posting.php?mode=quote&f=48&p=2766113#pr2766089
and you came with what you seem to think is amusing and was without substance. My response was specific, concrete, in terms of what was in his post, and not up in the clouds.
And I appreciate the binary thinking, as always, in you saying, like it is so obvious, that there are two ways of looking at what is happening. I mean, how could someone be paying so little attention, yet commenting with regularity, even regularly linking to news. There is a wide range of viewpoints even on the deaths, not just two. Even on what it means if you test positive for Covid and die, there are a number of positions, let alone
the
issues
brought up
in the OP:
But that would make your schema problematic. No, it’s left vs right. Two objectivist teams.
In any case, I am sure you’ll focus on whatever part of this post is easiest for you and never go back and admit you misrepresented the OP.
And since you, as usual, start to hijack, by shifting off substrance and/or by demanding people use the topic to demonstrate their solution for conflicting goods or some other pet issue of yours, I will drop this here so as not to contribute to potentially triggering more of your noise.
Bro this sounds like something someone would say after being programmed with propaganda just sayin.
What am I…a hussy?
Hey! No offence intended.
In its literal sense, this word can mean “made of or resembling brass,” as in a brazen drinking cup from a medieval castle. It can also mean overly or disrespectfully bold…language itself has hidden within it a multitude of germs and suggestions for the … though they are [insubstantial and without indwelling, conscious will, they are capable, …
Wow! To think I’m doing all this stuff…and I don’t even know it!!!
Maybe… just maybe, that because so many die of the flu each year, that it needs killing off to become an ancient disease.
Containing the spread, through containing ourselves (self-isolation) and the germs (disinfecting), kinda hints at that required outcome… to me.
A few weeks back, they had said that there were zero, yes… zero deaths, from heart attacks, diabetes, cancer, and any other illnesses, apart from, from the coronavirus.
Perhaps poetic justice not only absolves the sick from being ostracized, but becomes a metaphor for future romantic notions as the 19th century dealt to consumption.
Lesson: the weak ostracise themselves, knowing that their sickness unto death signifies a strength that the strong wished they had.
Van Gogh and other sick ones died as miserable paupers, and now the rich are vieving for their works.
Ironic, isn’t it?
None taken, or at least, taken with a smile. That adjective could go a bunch of ways, but it brought up that phrase ‘brazen hussy’. It was an attempt at a rhetoric trick on my part. If ‘brazen’ was meant as critique of me, well, I brought up a common phrase it was used in, where someone was considered shameless for being sexual, basically, a position on that person that would now be considered sexist in many circles. So, it was a sneaky jest on my part, mostly funny to myself, I am sure. But speaking of categories, like ‘brazen’ and ‘hussy’…
With categories, we have to be careful with them once we are going to use force (re, the op). Without that force in the picture, it’s a different ballgame.
Radical shifts in government power coupled with categorizing people, reduction of privacy, increase in law enforcement roles, reduction of freedom, all at the same time
is something to be very cautious about.
Think about other moments in history when those kinds of changes happened all at once. I am not sure I can think of a postive example, and the negative examples are amongst the worst: the rise of fascism pre-ww2 included just such a constellation of changes, for example, with dire consequences. Of course, this could be the exception. That’s where caution and discussion comes in. For example, I see no public debate about how the governments will give back their newly acquired powers, what political (representational?) body will determine the process, timing, necessity. No wider public debate by the mainstream liberals and conservatives about how much those who stand to benefit are influencing the information we are receiving that informs what measures are taken.
Skepticism, caution, exploratory investigations. There has been a systematic overlabeling of deaths as Covid - when I say systematic, I mean that in many nations generalized policies labeled deaths Corona, when we don’t know if it was Corona. But how much, we don’t know yet. It might not be significant. Perhaps only a small % were, in the end, false conclusions. But since the effects are enormous, this needs to be looked at. There are reasonable questions about the until recently official version of the disease. Vaccine criticism is actively marginalized by a very concentrated media and there is vast sums of money to be earned there. Why is an amateur in public health like Bill Gates so closely intertwined with policy? Why is it ok for someone who stands to gain financially from public health policies allowed to have so much influence over WHO which guides countries’ policies? There are anomolies in past responses to potential pandemics and also in vaccine production. The person who is representing the pessimistic end of speculations on the disease (how long lockdowns will be in place, how much society must forever remain changed…and more) is the highest official advisor to the president and the country, is also the person who deliberately funded research into then illegal gain of effect research, by shifting it to China since it was illegal in the states, on corona viruses in the specific species of bat that became the source of the disease in the city with the lab he funded.
As society potentially permanently changes its rules on surveillance, law enforcement powers, and government powers, we should go through extremely careful analysis of what is happening, who it benefits, how much influence they have on the changes, how much control of the media they have. Trusting Snopes is not enough. I see Snopes, a private organization, suddenly being taken as the authority, and Google channels people towards Snopes. Why does it get so much power and focus?
There’s a lot more.
One expert forensic doctor who agrees with the most controversial statement in the OP:
rairfoundation.com/renowned-for … ess-watch/
One won’t know if this is true until the statistics are in for 2020.
If there is not much difference between deaths in 2020 and other years, or if the general observed trend over the last few years remains the same(consistent rise or fall), then he is right.
If there is a noticeable spike in 2020 then he is wrong.
The decisions of politicians and public health officials have to be made in the present based on limited information.
Well one big statistic stands out to bring in at least some semblance of probability, to shift this discussion from the level of certainty to lower degrees of it-that comparatively with other notable plagues there is hardly much here.
The black plague was numerically as devastating or more so, then the 1918 Spanish flue , where millions{ upward 50 to 100 million) died. So the margin of error can not predict what qualifies categorically, and there are no certainties established yet. I do agree, albeit guardedly.
Also, the supposition that this whole issue of the origin of the inception of the infection has been either of a natural or a man made source, at this point. can not be categorically asserted.
It may , really, given the high stakes played with, be seen as a desperate effort of some kind , to ameliate fact and fiction, as to the source.
Several lines of reasoning can be brought up in conjunction with this.
The first one is the dubious reasoning that the New World Order’s process sans a viable ideological certainty, — a pattern begins to appear.
A showdown was unavoidable, given the stakes, and whether it would have been nuclear or biological or any other became a gossip.
The fact that conventional wars using unconventional means, were restricted to a minor key, exposing the fugitive diminishing effects that such wars through third parties effected - diminished returns , that coincided with the economic margins which , incidentally Marx held 100 years ago , implying the idea that an ideal/material synthesis presumed by the Republicans were a contrverted form of this line of logic.
Do not think for a minute that this struggle is over, and it only will set new parameters of reality, when the ideological struggle will subsist.
This argument, as suspect to the emerging conspiratorial reality that is useful to the synthetic, is a mode of operation , and it is the only way out of the paradoxical reality we seem to be sinking into.
In no way do I affirm either the factual or the simulated reality within the argument, as bizarre it appears , but in fact, it is a distinct possibility.
Like Karpel said, potentially sick, presumed sick and proven sick.
All of us fall under one of those three categories, and all of us lose some of our basic rights and freedoms, especially the latter two.
Currently there’s no way to prove to law enforcement you’re not sick, even if doctors test you and find antibodies, you have no way of passing this information onto law enforcement and they wouldn’t take it into account anyway.
This virus isn’t especially virulent, but even if it was, at the very least you should be able to prove to law enforcement you possess the antibodies (meaning you’ve already gotten over being sick and can no longer get sick and infect others, at least until the virus mutates next year, the year after or whenever) with say an exemption card or something (not talking about an RFID chip) and have your rights and freedoms restored.
Why aren’t antibodies good enough?
Why should the only way you can prove you’re not sick is to get a vaccine that supposedly doesn’t exist yet, may never exist and in all likelihood won’t be affective as natural antibodies if affective at all?
It makes no sense.
It’s just an excuse to subjugate, fleece and poison the population with aluminum, detergent, formaldehyde and mercury, is at all it is.
We should never accept a system that indiscriminately denies us basic human rights.
If this was a real plague, which it isn’t, then perhaps the untested should be partly quarantined, the tested and proven infected fully quarantined, and the tested and proven immune fully unquarantined, but under no circumstances should we all be partly or fully quarantined because some of us might be sick, anymore than we should all be partly or fully put on house arrest because some of us might be terrorists.
This is tangential to this thread, but I want to include it:
mintpressnews.com/study-cor … os/267604/
The rich are getting richer, even faster now. We don’t have to think of this as cui bono type evidence that there is a conspiracy, but we can acknowledge there is something wrong with a crisis benefiting the rich like this. A systemic problem, and also, now, if not already, a motive. Further, the rich now have increased wealth and a lot of businesses are dying or dead. This means these can be bought on the cheap and also that labor will be cheaper after the crisis, since there will be so many unemployed.
This is tangential to this thread, but I want to include it:
mintpressnews.com/study-cor … os/267604/
The rich are getting richer, even faster now. We don’t have to think of this as cui bono type evidence that there is a conspiracy, but we can acknowledge there is something wrong with a crisis benefiting the rich like this. A systemic problem, and also, now, if not already, a motive. Further, the rich now have increased wealth and a lot of businesses are dying or dead. This means these can be bought on the cheap and also that labor will be cheaper after the crisis, since there will be so many unemployed.
Can you cite a source for this?