Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

That must have been a combination of deep understanding and amazing communication skills. And it's an amazing analysis.

 

I am so much not an antivaxxer that I never even thought about it. It has always simply made sense to me that a workout for the immune system is what we English like to spell a Good Thing. Somewhere in recent history was born the idea that our immune systems are all week and wimpy and must be protected from all and everything, whereas the reality is the opposite: they are the fighting thugs of our body and pretty damn tough. I don't deny that they are not unbeatable, but they are not the delicate things that many would have us believe. So yes, I may be loathe to give my muscles a workout, but I'm happy to give my immune system one.

Having said that, I am not (yet) wholeheartedly convinced that (assuming I even had the chance) I want to be an early adopter. And, when it comes to the Pfizer vaccine, which sounds very promising, there are problems of not trusting the infrastructure of the country I live in to achieve this -80C thing, reliability and infallibly. I don't think I'd want to even eat a frozen fish that had travelled from Calcutta to Mumbai.

 

It's a dice roll. Trust is the biggest thing, really. With people who are in a paranoid psychosis, you can easily be integrated into it without meaning to... like you're in on it. You can neither encourage nor attack. Sometimes you really are just powerless. It's a lot of feeling things out, and abandoning any expectations of how things should go. The biggest thing people like him are missing are emotional connections to people. It's very difficult when your trust is prodded by failing mental faculties and your own feelings are put into compartments by uncontrollable delusions. Just an incredibly lonely place.

Sometimes, you DO sort of play into it. I might've asked him if there was someone else there. Ask him if I can know what it's saying, what it looks like, what it sounds like, if it has a name, so on. Demeanor is key when doing so. You have to be very positive and gentle, take on an inflection similar to one you'd use on a child, without insulting intelligence. You don't want to poke. If he doesn't want to say, he won't and all you can do is change the subject. If he does indulge, I may ask him to ask the hallucination for it's thoughts on things. I realized that many times, these voices are actually their own inner monologue, just abstracted out of their own sense of self. So often what the voice is telling him to do, or what it's telling him about situations or people, are actually his own feelings. And if you open that door, the scattered parts start to reintegrate and you could see him start to calm down and begin to speak for himself a little more. All of these voices can be like proxies.

He was a serious case. Never managed to take care of himself in his entire life. Meds worked for mood... but not so much for the hallucinations. He had a big heart and that big picture wisdom that only children tend to have. Just stricken with waning lucidity. I enjoyed speaking with him, but I can't imagine what things really must've been like for him.

I definitely learned a lot about people by talking to him. In some ways it is exactly the same as talking to anyone else with different experiences, only much more extreme.

That's understandable. And the storage needs may indeed be the biggest obstacle to getting it going in the projected time-frame, especially in countries with less-advanced infrastructure.

 

What I like about what you are relating @robot zombie , is how it reveals that reason is not really the issue. Folks like Neil de Grasse tend (but not always) to point to a problem in reason and logic, when both "sides" are in fact just as reasonable as the other. The difference is at the beginning, with what they start with as facts or reality, and then go on to reason from there. All reason starts with something that is unexaminable by reason/ratio itself.

 

Just getting this off my chest here. I'm 42, so by most sociologists/demographers opinion I fall into the late Gen-X/early Millennial if you consider the onslaught of "digital culture" as something that muddies the Gen-X/Millennial switch. Anyhow.

I've been keeping in touch with about 10-12 close friends of similar age (before!) and during the pandemic. What's absolutely shocking is the fact that all (I mean I'm not bullshitting, all of us...) of these friends of mine in my age cohort have stopped communicating with their parents due to the growing divide between factual awareness and hearsay influencing day-to-day activities.

I'm evermore just sad. These are people we love. I haven't spoken to my parents in more than 6 months because they think this is still a hoax. The last time we spoke, they tried to convince me that masks were more dangerous than COVID because I'd be re-breathing C02. And for whatever reason, nothing I can say will convince them they should just trust something (or simply just consider) other than One America NN.

 

Well if we’re talking GOP and Democrats then I disagree. There is a huge amount of branding done by the GOP making it easy for people to get emotionally attached/convinced. Democrats are absolutely clueless about communication techniques and there is absolutely no liberal/Democratic party brand except that which has been generated by the GOP.

So it follows that there are way more emotion based GOP voters and way more reason based Democratic Party voters. You almost have to use reason to vote for Democrsts because they offer no emotional pull. All they talk about is barely discernible policy details. The GOP talk about ideas and feelings etc.

I know you will all disagree with this. Go ahead.

Go headphones!

 

I need to stop posting here I’m just going to create animosity and that could kind of ruin what’s so great about SBAF.

 

You can’t find anything else to talk about? If your parents are wrong about the virus or Trump or alien artifacts... so what? Talk about the weather or what they’ve been doing in the last six months. Not to pick on you but this seems related to the purity spirals we see on social media where people are isolated in their own safe space bubbles and increasingly intolerant of any dissent.

Seriously? The entirety of the election campaign by the Dems and associated orgs was emotionally driven orange man bad narratives and anyone who supports him is a racist nazi. The disconnect between the reality (incompetence and isolationism mostly) and what people see from the mainstream media is what causes them to believe conspiracies, etc.

 

Oh no, I am talking about what happens way before that. How do we know what we know? Reason, ratio, does not "know" anything - it takes place after you already habve data, first principles, and the like. Reason only puts things in order. Before reason is some "thing" that reason depends upon to even get started. Emotions are data, as are senses and unexaminable first principles.

There is that scene in the movie The Beautiful Mind where the main psychologist explains that mad men are as reasonable as everyone else, they just start with the unreal...

 

And where this confidence comes from that if everything is locked down for some time the virus will go away? I do no quiet understand what it means everything? Some people can stay in lockdown indefinitely because some other people never stopped working.
And what does it mean go away? No one will test positive? No one will get sick? People who get sick will recover?

In Canada they are starting to finally talk about how many people might have died because the healthcare system is being slowly dismantled, not overwhelmed but dismantled. My wife works for a large network of teaching hospitals. They are getting a COVID status report every morning. There were a number of positive tests among the hospital staff, but no one got seriously sick, no one died. Since March. From what I hear from her and what I see the number of positive tests is meaningless without the context of how many people are actually getting sick.
It does not mean that people are not dying of COVID 19 or that it is not dangerous but lockdown until " the virus goes away" means indefinitely or until something something is seriously damaged in the fabric of the society.

 

an intelligent post and idea @crenca and @YMO

I think there’s likely truth in both these points being made and the reality is a combination of he two.

 

Sorry about what's happening to your relations with your parents personally. I do think what you say here is true to a degree, though a society/culture built (first, second, and third) upon individualism and consumerism such as ours always has a central problem: Namely, who/what is an authority during times of crises (or any other time) and thus who/what can be trusted as true? We like to think we are a "reasonable" culture and society (and that all others before us were less than we are when it comes to 'the true'), but in fact we are a society built upon individualism, consumerism, and emotion....we just might be the least "reasonable" society ever.

 

In America the mortality right around 2 percent. So if around 1000 people a day are testing positive (I am just north of El Paso) then that's a death sentence upon about 20 of them. That works out an excess mortality of around 30%.

Lockdowns (variously defined) are short term solutions and necessary. An effective (variously defined) vaccine is the long term solution and this is not that far off.

What is the "fabric of society" in your book? Honest question, because as a conservative (as opposed to a libertarian, often itself just white wash over a "don't tread on me" scorched earth economics) I have no problem with contracting the economy, or wrecking whole sectors of it (such as airlines, or coffee shops) in the pursuit of saving 2%, 1%, or even just .01% of the population. People first.

 

I'm too busy smoking a pipe and on my phone for a thoughtful post ATM, but it is only a hoax until you or someone you love get it, because fear takes over you.....

 

Healthcare, that what I see almost first hand being wrecked: "elective procedures" are postponed, sick people who rely on regular doctors appointments are having difficulties, cancer screening.
I do not believe we have any experience of good understanding of what we actually wrecking when we say: airlines, coffee shops can just go away, people first. Nothing like that was ever tried. And I do not believe anyone has a grasp of life saved versus lives lost.
So the blank statement let's lockdown until the virus goes away, is unlikely the solution.
Lockdown is not going to save the folks in a retirement home two blocks from my house, 20 of them got infected because the staff stills works in multiple facilities because the government cannot get its shit in order. They die just the same plus they will die alone.
And we are not saving 2% of the population, or 1% or 0.1%. The 2% mortality rate is high but that applies to people who got the virus. In Ontario the number of case is raising, the mortality rate is decreasing.

And I know that WHO does not have a good reputation but they started discouraging lockdowns precisely because of the human cost. It is possible that they may change the guidance now.

 

In our area all these talking points are exaggerated. Our practice relies on elective surgeries for about 60% of its business, and back in May/June there was a small dip on this side, hardly worth talking about. Turns out governments/health systems can adapt and mitigate early mistakes, such as those around health screenings.

Before the post WWII vaccine revolution lockdown/quarantines/masks were a regular thing

As a conservative I appreciate the inherent warning around "unintended consequences". That said this virus is not an abstraction. We do understand quite well the what/who/how and how many will die if we do nothing or too little. Significant behavior changes that impact the economy and many other things are the only way to mitigate it until an effective vaccine is widely available. A perfect moral calculus (lives saved/lost vs. this or that economic/social impact) is neither possible nor even desirable.

This is not an exercise in comparative ethics, this is a real deal pandemic. Real consequences have occurred and will follow - there is a "human cost" either way, particularly for those right or left who too easily reduce humanity to an economic organism I suppose there will continue to be much lamenting...

 

Stuff like this rolls off my shoulders. I find it more funny than anything else. My wife’s father who originally called me a lazy Mexican at the end of the day said, “Thank god you’re a real man. I can now rest easy knowing my daughter will be taken care of”. After I proposed to her.

He did say a few weeks ago at a dinner, “I’ve always liked you”, which after that I had to stop him and call him out on his bullshit. My man, please.

 

There is one statistic that matters about Covid and that is number of dead compared to previous years adjusted for increased population. The narrative does not have the bodies to support the policies.
PS: Fun Fact- the CDC is not tracking the FLU this year (in other words the FLU is now Covid as well)