Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

And the voters shall be punished. If a state/city votes to turn itself into a shithole, then by all means please let them do it. Don't expect the Federal Government to bail your ass out, since that's not their job.

It's a shit situation, but voters choose to vote idiots into office.

 

I've played the empathy card, I've played the "agree to disagree" card, but in terms of keeping my own metal health together I realized I needed to 1) change the way I react to their behavior, i.e., I'm not allowing myself to be angry with their choices or their opinions of my behavior, and 2) know that keeping a certain distance does better at making small talk less important, i.e., distancing over pursuing.

The bigger point I was trying to make is how (among my limited cohort) these times are negatively affecting the social relations between two large demographic groups, namely, boomers and their kids. I just hope it's not irreparable. I'm hopeful the news over the last couple days with regards to the early vaccine trial response can offer both groups a means for focusing on an exit from the bad-news-weariness.

 

How?

 

Like this.

 

Are you proposing politics should be a punitive endeavor?

 

Oh boy...with all these lawsuits from political figures on an annual basis....we are already there.

 

Yes, many of them with significant comorbidities would "have died anyways" (and we all die eventually), but that was expected and accounted for in the 2.8 mil average yearly. The "excess" is what is over and above that, and there is only one reasonable explanation. Various comorbidity (e.g. cancer, cardiac, etc.), flu, and the like are being wrongly used in the typical (most often right wing) "theories", such as they are.

 

aside from tort litigation between individual citizens, I'm asking if you think that the purpose of the formation or support of a political party to enact legislative change should be to inflict punitive damage against those deemed "against" it or the "others" with affiliation to a different political party, or even just specific policy prescriptions? I appreciate your honest answer.

 

Yes. Stupid should hurt.

 

So, when someone raises their hand for voting for a particular politician, can I recommend we just put them in jail for a bit to think about their bad decision and just skip the protracted local policy debate with the grade school PTA?

 

If you want my honest opinion: I really don't care about that viewpoint enough to be hard yes/no on it.

I'll say this: As long as any bill that becomes a law doesn't conflict with it State's Constitution and the US Constitution, it's fair game.

FL Flashback: Back in the 90s when the FL GOP taken over the State House, they successfully pushed to get Term Limits for the State Senators/House to be passed by voters via the State Constitution. As they later admitted in this wonderful book: The goal for the Term Limits is to push the Conservatives Democrats out of their seats from both cambers of the FL Legislature, which gave the GOP a nice edge when they taken over the FL Legislature from the Conservatives Dems back in the late 90s.

 

So that's a mild yes? Politics is a punitive endeavor?

 

If you want to interpret that way, be my guess.

 

Frederic Bastiat in The Law equated law with use of force, since to break the law risks loss of your freedom.

In another sense, not politics per se, but legislation at the federal level is punitive: since the Constitution reserves all power, except for the powers it enumerates, "to the states or the people", that means that enactment of any new legislation is a restriction of one's freedom that didn't exist prior.

 

Never woulda guest it!

I guess in a very real sense order isn't really peaceful. Laws are inherently 'violent' in that breaking them means you will be met with force by the acting bodies making them real. Many choices are taken away by force just to keep a semblance of order in a society.

The other side of that is anarchy, where the violence is simply distributed differently.

Raises some interesting questions about what freedom is and isn't. In some ways, laws protect people's freedoms. Ideally they lead to a setting that is conducive to people exerting their wills without fear of undue harm or hardship. But at the same time, other freedoms must be taken away in order to make that possible. We have to agree on which freedoms are worth having and submit to a force that designates them.

Imagine a world with no crime. Not in the sense that nobody breaks laws, but rather a primal world where people do whatever suits them with no oversight or actively enforced system of passed-down consequences. This could actually be very restrictive in the sense that you would be looking over your shoulder. You would have to fight, hide away, etc. And if your desire is to say, raise children, you may have the choice to try, but perhaps not the freedom of action to truly devote the energies needed to that. You have the will. Nothing is stopping you. But due to clashes with others who's intentions contradict those outcomes completely, you do not have nearly as much extension with which to make it your true reality. Begs the question of how free one would really be.

 

We are not talking about co-morbidity here, but the number of excess non-COVID deaths during COVID pandemic.
And that could not be accounted for, or estimated, before we had the pandemic. But there is enough data coming from Europe.
Here is just one, but very telling, coming from Scottish NHS, not exactly well known as a right wing organization:
https://www.opendata.nhs.scot/datas...resource/98648584-4a34-4374-832c-d3f50b6edd80
Take a look at the "Deaths from Deprivation" table, and sudden jump in the percentage variation in April May, the lockdown months in the UK. Draw your own conclusion what part of the population are the primary victims.
And it is just one of the data points that is available from government sources in various countries. So far mostly in Europe, But the data is increasingly available and finally acknowledged in Canada.

The data in the US will be eventually available, CDC attempts to compile those numbers are frustrated by the state level reporting. But we will know that, either published or leaked. In the meantime:
From the source that still calls itself the most trusted source of information , but that one is based on CDC data, and can be found on CDC website.:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/health/coronavirus-not-leading-cause-of-death-us-trnd/index.html
Even in the year to date.
Adding that to the data coming from other countries, the COVID is the only explanation of excess deaths in 2020 is not supported by any data, actually there are many data points directly contradicting this assumption.

The leading cause of death in the US is heart disease. Lives are saved primarily not by emergency intervention, although that is important as well, but mostly by ongoing monitoring and prevention, and that includes preventive surgeries. As non-essential, they are almost all cancelled. I know that first hand.
We will know the numbers eventually but it defies the imagination to assume that there were no excess deaths of cancer or heart disease caused by disruption, and in some cases dismantling, of healthcare.

In the society where public policies are supposed to support the politicians re-election, who gives a shit about the data or public health, many more [people will die because the numbers are becoming either "right wing" or "left wing".

 

That’s the double edge sword of covid. You stay home with a medical condition when maybe you should go to hospital, because you are scared to catch it, you may run in to trouble. You go out and catch covid,with these same comorbidities, you may run in to trouble. These are all deaths that reflect what we are dealing with, which is an easily passed virus that kills just enough people, and sometimes really healthy people, to make it more scary than the typical flu but maybe not scary enough.

However, the issue is that covid just isn’t deadly enough to get the gen pop to truly respect it but deadly enough that the sick amongst us could easily die from it.

Then there are the longer term issues that survivors may face re lung, heart and neurological damage...

There has been a lot of misdirection with stats so I don’t get worked up either way. I simply think covid is legit having dealt with it up close.

It will be interesting to read about this from a sociological reference once this has been resolved, hopefully soon given the vaccines on the horizon. I also hope we learn from this from a govt/societal standpoint but I’m not so sure seeing the response to these new waves.

Just my viewpoint.

 

Demographers and statisticians are way ahead of you. Mortality is a remarkably stable statistic through time, varying up or down 1.5 % from 1950 through 2019. This 11% blip is HUUGGGEEEE as Trump would say. Here is a primer:

https://theconversation.com/279-700-extra-deaths-in-the-us-so-far-in-this-pandemic-year-147887

This is just flat out wrong (maybe you are talking about Canada?). Here in America cardiologists, oncologists, pulmonologists, endocrinologists are as busy as ever, doing what they did last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. Depending upon location, there have been temporary disruptions (lasting a few weeks at most), but not enough to effect chronic diseases such as heart disease significantly. Actually, Pulmonologists are doing booming business with Covid on top of their regular load.

 

I would imagine surgical procedures have been postponed all over the place. Office based practices are probably more variable. I know some hospitals in and around Toronto put significant restrictions on elective cases, some of them never got back to regular practice even before this new wave. Some hospitals have had to recently, ie today, cancel elective surgeries again.

I work in a low endemic area so we’ve been going full tilt for a few months now and doing extra to catch up. We were shut down for a couple months when it first started outside of urgent life or limb surgeries or cancer surgeries. Hernia and knee replacements, for example, had to wait.

Big financial impact on hospitals as well, paying for staff, infrastructure improvements and a ton of PPE. Going to be interesting next few years with budgeting.