Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

I post them because I do not like wearing masks (I quit my job over it) and the isolation policies are killing exponentially more people than the disease.

 

Thats a bold claim, with deaths already over 250k. Over 2m dead from "isolation policies"? I doubt that.

 

Jeez, what would you do if your boss asked you to do something that is more than a minor annoyance (and an unthinking habit in a few days)? Move to an deserted Island and form your own libertarian utopia!? When you pull up to a red light do you shake your fist at The Man and drive on through it? Rhetorical questions of course.

My 1st grader has a mask on all day long, but then I guess it's time to cue up some Roger Waters lyrics about walls and cages, meat and puddin...

edit: @wormcycle hard to believe that Covid is a non-risk in the Canadian population...you folks must be made of different stuff. Your graph link is broken and I would love to see the data.

 

I hope I fixed the link, the graph is from Canadian Gov site, reproduced by every major newspaper. Do not have the data behind it. But is starting to be reported that the current wave in Canada does not look in any way as what was happening in March/April. Of course the governments are reacting exactly the same way, killing the same population in retirement homes, and destroying lives of many more.

 

I see it now. Looking at the numbers generally available, mortality in Canada for a 'normal' 2020 was going to be about 290,000. 13,000 excess deaths due to Covid for 2020 means an excess mortality of only about 4.4%. You guys are made of sterner stuff! Seriously, makes me wonder about your reporting mechanism(s), or if you society is better at isolation/compliance than America.

 

Could it be something as simple as lower population density in Canada (I haven't looked at numbers)?

 

Found a new job yet?

 

Probably Obesity/Diabetes as major contributing factor.

Curious why this is barely talked about.

 

LOL, a couple of hours after writing this I floated a stop sign, got pulled over, and was handed an $82 ticket by The Man Go ahead @squishware, rub it in

 

Selling that Eikon was a good idea after all.

 

It (i.e. comorbidity) is talked about rightly some, but more often it's talked about wrongly by the right wing conspiratorialist. To determine the clinical relevancy of things like obesity and diabetes, you have to have good methodology, good data, and time...unless you are a right wing keyboard warrior, in which case you can come to any conclusion that your facebook friends put in your head.

 

It took some time to bring the discussion to this level, but once it is done, there is really no reason to continue. Particularly for someone who is not on facebook.
And I disagree that we do not have a good methodology to deal with the question of comorbidity. Here it is:
1. We base public policy decisions on the assumption that anyone who died with COVID died of COVID.
2. We dismiss anyone who is even asking questions about the factor of comorbidity as a right wing facebook conspiracy theorist.

Of course it takes just a minute to realize that by not taking into account comorbidity, instead using a blanket policies, we actually do increase the risk of dying for the people with comorbidity factors who, potentially, should be better protected than the rest of the population.

 

But "we" do. It's clinical medicine 101, taught to every doctor/epidemiologist from their first semester in Med school on. When the attending physician (most likely a pulmonologist) declares a Covid death, they really do know what they are saying. They are not "confused" that this person died of Covid as opposed from something else, say obesity or diabetes or "general organ failure" or any other such thing. They are also not part of a conspiracy driven by governments/insurance companies/The Man to say this when really that happened.

What is your basic clinical understanding of "comorbidity", and on what basis do you question it or any other basic aspect of clinical medicine? To be frank, I don't believe you understand it at all .

Except all this is taken into account. Any policy has consequences, and people will die either way. What the libertarian critique wants is there to be another set of consequences. Those who are "better protected" to go on and do what they normally do personally and economically, and those who are not as "protected" to bear the consequences more. The medical, practical, and moral problematics of this philosophy are myriad and yes I do dismiss it. I am thankful that most others do as well, as I don't want to live in such a society. It is right wing, and it is full of conspiratorial thinkers and keyboard commentators talking about things they don't have a clue about.

 

Nike Japan ad that is against racism in Japan, and the Japanese don't like the ganjin telling them what to do if going by the comments on the video. Nice.....

 

Chrome did not do the "you want to translate" with the comments, so I'm stuck What do they say? Also, "ganjin" googles as an historic Buddhist monk but I assume it has another meaning.

It would be nice if there is some pushback by, well everyone, against this woke capitalism which is nothing less than cultural colonialism dressed up as touchy feely morality...

 

I'm assuming he meant Gaijin, which is japanese for foreigner.

 

I think he must mean "gaijin" which would more translate to "outsider" or something similar.

I can fully admit that I'm more left than right, but I'm kinda tired of it myself. I feel like it takes real social issues and turns them into something much more droll. People get so used to seeing it they don't care anymore, and from then on none of it is real. Just makes a big show of all of it.

It's great to be able to get a message out. Democracy man! f**k yeahhh. In an ideal capitalist world, having someone with a lot of money take to an idea that's meant to make things better would be an abso-fuckin-lutely amazing thing, but in this world it tends not to go that way. Every good cause gets subverted by people who's core advocacy interest is in cash and recognition. It's comforting to see it, and if you see it enough, you think things are getting better. They must be! Everyone is talking about it. Even McDonalds and Wal-Mart are running billion dollar ad campaigns!

But on the ground nothing changes. People aren't more aware of anything. Just that much more sick of each other. By the time a revolution becomes commercially viable... well, it's been kinda dead for a minute, hasn't it?

Honestly, the competition to be the 'wokest' company really exemplifies the problems that I have with that whole side of politics. Lets say you're a legitimately woke person. You are educated, you have unique, first-hand insight into systemic problems, you are passionate, you care about everyone, and you have found something that you think can make the world a better place for everyone. The question then becomes how to spread the message... how do you show people what you see and get them working together on it? After all, the more people who understand the same thing, who are motivated to work at it, the quicker we can have that success in our world.

But man... for some reason the answer is always hyper competitive ideological posturing. I'll never understand it. For people who think the same, it's appealing, while the very people who would most need to hear the message are most likely to be directly turned away by the wokest of us. And if you're not willing to meet people wherever they happen to be with something and really try to nurture that understanding, you're basically just another jagoff claiming to know how the world works.

If I said that in the wrong place, I'd be chastised quite a bit. I find it interesting that the same people who ask not to be criticized are happy to criticize everyone else. Sometimes, you really have to talk to people like children. And I don't mean that in a condescending way. I mean, really try to meet people where they're at instead of "Alalalala, I'm more woke than you. Why can't you be more like the Nike commercial?"

I feel like that alone has the most caring people that we have in this country running straight into the arms of the very people who will see the cycle of stagnation continue, every single time. I'll never understand why people really believe that politicians and corporations are ever really on their side. It's still 'us vs them' in the end. No deeper understanding of one another's struggles. Just a carefully-placed projection. That's America in a nutshell, though. Always has to (at least appear) be on the right side of everything.

I say "Stick to your guns, but hold no heroes." As in, don't let others say for you, what you can say for yourself.


I gotta admit though... it was SUPER funny seeing all of those people burning their brand new shoes after Nike ran that one ad with Colin Kaepernick. I guess this is what our politics are now, in this budding corpratocracy.

 

I don't know much about the word "woke." It's come into being since I left the western world. Seems that it means something like being aware of things that any decent person person would be aware of and making an effort accordingly. But it has been turned into a sneer by the not-so-decent.

I was heartened by something in UK, that I read about recently. One of the supermarket giants put out a multi-racial ad, and (yep, we can be open about this now in post-Brexit Britain) got a heap of racist comment. The British supermarkets are normally highly competitive, but a group of biggies actually got together and produced a whole commercial break of back to back f**k you racists, we don't need your custom that much ads.

Whether such a one-off is anything to crow about or not I really don't know, but I do just like that it happened at all

 

Oh that would be really nice. And maybe at some point it meant what you said. These days "making your effort accordingly" means censorship, means mobilizing the Twitter mob, or forcing your employer, to get a person who is not woke enough fired from his or her job. It means attempts to cancel J.K. Rawlings for saying things that any sane person would consider obvious. That is mainstream woke. On the far side of the spectrum it means discussing what 2+2 should be in a just society.
So I do not think at this point there is a away of going back to this nice, benevolent meaning of woke.
Giving the voice in the media to decent woke people would be a good step but sadly some very woke, by your definition, but still decent and intellectually honest journalists were recently fired from their jobs or were forced to resign because of censorship. And @robot zombie put it very well: these days woke means "hyper competitive ideological posturing".