Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

I can't speak to Canada, but not here in America. Temporary disruptions back in April/May were common in hard hit areas (but not most places), temporary being the operative word.

Edit: I live in the county just north of El Paso. Even in this acknowledged "hot spot", right now today elective's are moving forward as normal. I know this because we run a physiatry practice...

 

Friends (mostly nurses and one doctor) working to take care of patients with Covid are complaining about the workload and being emotionally/physically burned out. Being exposed daily to patients with Covid, then have to come home and make sure they are not infecting their family. Self isolating. It doesn't help that patients are coming in with infections because they were at a large gathering, or not properly wearing masks, or not washing their hands.

My aunt was intubated and Covid made a mess of her lungs. She's lucky to have had great care from her doctors that she came out alive but her body is wrecked. I've been working with a consultant and his father recently passed away from Covid. What got me was my high school assistant principle that I really looked up to. When I saw his Facebook post that wearing masks was going against his religious freedom I didn't know what to say.

Disinformation is really making things harder.

 

Will drop a like but also be pedantic— the Philippines is in Asia but the number of idiots who refuse to abide by reason is gobsmackingly large.

 

What exactly does it mean? If people start dying from lack of the care that they received before, it does not affect data stability? It does, if the numbers happen to be large, and we do not know what they are. We just know that the number of non-COVID related deaths during COVID increased.

If the variation in the death from deprivation in Scotland jumps from + or - 20% to 70% in April May, and it way exceeds the data for 2019, that was predicted by statisticians in a year or two years before? If this trend was not present?
How?

 

Yes. From the link above:

"...In fact, the number of excess deaths in the U.S. currently exceeds the number attributable to COVID-19 by at least 23,674 and likely up to 79,201. What’s behind those additional deaths is not yet clear. It could be that COVID-19 deaths are being undercounted, or the pandemic could also be causing an increasing number of deaths due to other causes. What we are starting to learn is that it is probably some of both..."​

There is almost always human cost to any action or non-action at this level. In other words, its a prudential judgement, one that involves a "lessor of two evils" sort of choice.

Unfortunately here in America we have a serious mistrust of authority, which when combined with ignorance leads to conspiratorial thinking and behavior (i.e. non compliance).

Again, yes there are no doubt serious consequences to "lockdowns" (variously defined/implemented). Just two days ago my wife, our children and I agreed to meet with some friends of ours who have 4 children (ages 9,7,4,1) for the first time since April. Their stress and anxiety level are very very high for various reasons (lets call it homeschool/lockdown fever). We did the best we could with masks, distancing, but technically we were violating health directives but I felt they needed the human contact. Risk either way.

As to your socialized healthcare in Canada, well it was what it was before Covid and will be what it is after. You voted for it and now you own it. This sounds harsh no doubt but Americans need to understand what the future is for them when the non-affordable healthcare act and the Dem's have their way with our system.

 

Gavin Newsom is a part of the club, we are witnessing the largest transfer of wealth transfer from the people who own nothing or very little to the people who own everything. And they love it, call it a great reset. Canada's PM called COVID "a great opportunity". He is too stupid to even comprehend what his words mean, so he tells the truth every now and then.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-cov...icks-to-no-statewide-restrictions-11605625421

As expected, no new lock downs or restrictions in FL for now. When the state fully reopened in Sep, the Governor did forbid the majority of local governments from doing local restrictions. In the FL Senate today the new Majority Leader stated that he agreed with the Governor about no lockdowns due to "personal freedoms."

Two things to keep in mind:

• Minor: Winters are not bad in FL, which perhaps the FL government is thinking it won't make the FL numbers that bad.
• Major: Since FL don't assessed an income tax on personal income, they get a major chunk of their revenue from sales tax. Lockdown the state and the state budget goes to shit (which happened back in March). It is already reported about a possible $5 Billion revenue loss. Even if the GOP is the party of "limited government," the FL GOP in my experience love to spend my tax money on crap that is useless ("earmarks" are popular way to throw my money down the drain). If you want my real opinion on the biggest reason why FL don't want to go into any lockdown mode, it's the budget. It is IMO not trying to get more people to move from Blue States to FL and be Pro-Trump and that shit, it's all about da revenue. Fun fact: Number 1 goal of the Florida Legislature in its yearly session (about 60-70 days per year) is to pass an yearly government budget. Laws are second important thing.

 

An interesting notion, and one, speaking as someone trained in philosophy, that many great thinkers over the ages have held.

There are also those who hold on the contrary, though, that there are certain constitutive principles of rationality - principles which are so inextricably tied to the very concept of rationality that one could not be rational or act rationally without employing them in one's daily epistemic practices. On this view, reason does not "know" anything on its own, it needs to be practiced in the world, but that doesn't mean that reason depends on some foundation that's outside of reason itself. Rather, it's in employing the principles constitutive of reason that we know things: and that, I think, accords with our intuitions. If our first principles and the like were, in fact, unexamined and unable to be rationally justified, I think many of us would find that deeply unsatisfactory, and would want to examine whether they had any rational basis.

Anyways, I'm sorry for the philosophical tangent, but I'm passionate about this stuff.

 

Me too! Many moons ago I was in graduate school and was going to teach Plato and Aristotle to young minds full of mush. I realized pretty quickly I was never going to fit into the modern academy so I dropped out and did other things. I think the Greeks had it right in that rationality is a characteristic of the nature of reality through time - teleology, beginnings and ends, etc. As such it's not that reality is irrational/nonrational, rather rationality itself is an aspect of the real (realism) and as such can not "explain" its ultimate epistemological basis on its own.

I don't have to tell you that the main current(s) of western thought followed nominalism and Descartes down a different road 500 or so years ago, and that various heroic attempts have been made (by Kant for example) to rescue reason and ground it on a Cartesian basis. In the end however I think the relativists have won that battle in our culture. Perhaps Justice Kennedy said it best:

"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

99 out of 100 people will agree with that. What's an old dinosaur Realist like me going to say

 

Fair enough. I just think we’ve had rules about things like not discussing religion or politics at holiday meals long before trump of covid-19. What has changed isn’t the volatile nature of some discussions but the reactions of people who have been reprogrammed to be less tolerant of people outside their bubble. That’s not anybody’s fault, it’s the nature of social media to divide us into bubbles, but once you recognize the effect you can act accordingly.

The great reset is what made me start giving the mainstream media the side eye. It’s not a conspiracy theory if they actually admit it. The media’s myopia means most people haven’t heard about it much less understood what they voted for when they elected Biden to “build back better”. Not that I think Trump was good, it’s just that four more years of doing basically nothing seemed better than trying to implement a system where a selling point is that by 2030 we’ll own nothing (but be happy).

 

Hi Merv

Have you heard the Stax SR-Ω, if so how does it compares to the HE90?

 

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/p...coronavirus-vaccine-01605702946?mod=home-page
It looks like I was completely wrong about Pfizer timing of announcing the vaccine three days after the election, and I owe an apology to the Pfizer CEO, not that he cares. It looks like they are moving as fast as they can.
Pfizer is saying the vaccine is very effective protecting older people. It will require some nerves to get vaccinated immediately after it is available, but at least it looks like we will have a choice.

 

India is not only in Asia, but conributes about 1/6th of the world's population. Lots of people taking this damn covid thing very seriously. But a festival or a silk-shop clearance sales sees thousands cramming into tiny market streets and shops.

But look at our death rate... for a population maybe four times that of USA. Does it makes sense? (Assuming the numbers are not complete crap, which they could be).

Did you ever do that thing where realise that the train you were on had been going in the wrong direction and you don't recognise anything around you?

But the person you had gone to meet was there anyway!

Only on SBAF.

 

I talk to my son almost daily, and meet his friends from time to time. And I am 69 and know a lot of people of that age. No one I know thinks COVID 19 is a hoax, but in the group I described there are at least three different opinions how we live with it. But no one stopped talking to their parents or children over different opinions how to handle COVID.
True, the opinion that is not represented in this group is " we have to lock down until the virus goes away".
But even if it was the case, I cannot imagine the situation you are describing.
That what is frightening about the US right now: that COVID and politics start dominating relations between people, even family connections.
EDIT: I do think that most people, not all, when they are saying it is a hoax, do not mean the virus but how political and chattering classes are using the pandemic to control the society and suppress any dissent or even discussion, with the help of so called experts.
That is not different than with climate change. People who recognize that their opinion about climate science is meaningless can clearly understand that the narrative around climate has political and social, not climate related, goals, and they do not like many of those goals.