SubJeff on 17/12/2020 at 11:39
Yes, insults. Yes. Sidestep all the other stuff. Yes. Yes. Good. That's how you learn things.
Note: you're wrong.
heywood on 18/12/2020 at 17:53
Quote Posted by Thor
As a no-wing person
If I had a dollar for every closeted conservative pretending to be non-partisan on an internet forum, I'd be rich. You guys - and it's
always guys - are easy to spot because you all play the same game. Especially here in the US post-2016, if anybody says to me they hate both the parties, that's a tell. Most of the time, feigned impartiality is accompanied by parroting right wing talking points or posting memes. Some people are more subtle about it. They avoid making direct arguments
for the right, but they consistently argue
against the left while pleading their supposed non-partisanship. And then there are the Russia trolls; people who claim to be so far to the left that they can't support the Democratic/Labour/whatever party, and who are vocally against Western militarism and imperialism, but somehow they have an excuse for everything militarist or imperialist that Russia does. They all believe in deep state conspiracies, and sooner or later they eventually reveal their favoritism for Trump. But the people who annoy me the most are the faux Bernie Sanders supporters. Almost everybody who legitimately wanted Bernie for President has moved on. He tried, he did well, but he lost, and there's more important things right now than re-hashing the 2016 DNC. Anyone carrying his torch who is still stuck on the "rigging" of the 2016 Democratic nomination process is a wing nut in disguise.
I realize my view is pretty US-centric and you may not be from the US, but you fit a familiar pattern.
Quote:
why wouldn't I inquire opinions from various places including this left-wing den? To understand that world better. Sometimes I "bait" this place with "right wing myths" because I don't have a refutation to those points (or myths) myself and am curious to see what the left have to say about it.
And there we go.
This is why the 2020 election polls were garbage (again). Half of the right is so batshit crazy these days that the other half doesn't want to be associated with them. So the internet is full of stealth marketing from the right.
Quote Posted by Thor
I don't have a problem wearing the mask myself if I believe in it, e.g. when I'm in a crowded area, I do find it good to not breathe in everyone else's shit,
not when I'm in a store and nobody within 3+ meters is around me. But mainly I have sympathy for store & similar workers who are forced to wear them 8+ hrs a day. Some stores have more decency for their workers and give them viziers, but a lot don't, and I won't be so easily convinced that wearing a mask day-in, day-out 8 hours and more every day is good for you. What pissed me off the most is the government's decision to let the older kids work from home and the little kids smoke themselves in a mask. I don't know if other countries follow similar cretinous rules, but I find it just plain wrong. If I had kids that age, I would most likely pull them out of school and home-school them at this point.
You're being irrational. People in Asia have been wearing masks when sick to avoid spreading infectious disease for generations. Many doctors and nurses are accustomed to wearing them for long shifts. People who work in laboratories and clean rooms wear them all day. People who work with hazardous materials wear them all day. People who cut fiberglass. People who work in dusty construction sites. Miners. Et cetera.
My company has required all of us to wear masks 100% of the time on the premises since mid-March. I wear one all day, in the office, in the labs, only removing it to eat lunch by myself at my desk. It really doesn't hinder anything. Exercise and physical labor is a different story. When my heart rate is above 120 or so, I start to notice the effect of wearing a mask, especially if it has a PM 2.5 filter in it. You do have to breathe harder. People who are doing hard labor outdoors can remove the mask and keep their distance.
Visors are no substitute. They limit the radius of droplet spread when you exhale, but they don't capture anything. In an office environment, wearing a visor instead of a mask might be OK as long as you sanitize the work area around you before anyone else comes close. But in a store, if I see someone wearing a visor instead of a mask at the till, I'm outta there.
Also, "smoke themselves in a mask?" That's just stupid. Kids can breathe through a mask just as well as a healthy adult. My kids are 4 and 6 and have been wearing masks all day at school since the fall semester started. They and their classmates took to it with no problem at all, even when running around at recess. They only complain if the same mask has been worn for 3+ days without washing, because then it may smell a little musky when they first put it on. It is so
not a problem for them that my son sometimes wants to wear a mask with his favorite characters on it while at home. He did so most of yesterday, when we were stuck at home in a snow storm. A few of my coworkers and my sister-in-law have even younger kids in day cares that require anyone older than 2 to wear a mask. Again, no problem. It's no more of a burden than wearing underwear.
In areas where COVID-19 transmission is high, it makes lots of sense to keep the older kids home while letting the younger kids attend school. Older kids get infected at higher rates and transmit the virus at higher rates. Here in the US, most colleges and universities have had clusters of cases, including some large outbreaks. There have been some clusters of cases at high schools as well, but it's not as widespread. But there have been relatively few clusters of cases at elementary schools. In my area, none. Unlike the common cold and influenza, younger kids seem to be more resistant to SARS-CoV-2 than adults. Also, remote instruction is a lot more effective with older children. Younger kids really need the in-person instruction to not fall behind, especially if their parents are trying to work as well as supervise home learning.
Cipheron on 21/12/2020 at 06:27
If something, a "right wing myth" is said on right-wing twitter and then people use mainstream sources to debunk that, then the right acts like the two pieces of information are 50:50. But this idea of symmetry is not correct. The right wing exist in an echo chamber, which is effectively cult-like and they project that everyone outside their echo-chamber is equally cult-y, which is clearly not true.
Is anyone here pushing communism as the one true solution to all problems or anything? You can go to hard left web spaces and try and talk to the people there, they live in a similar ideological bubble to the right wing nuts ... but I can guarantee that nobody from here would be welcome in those spaces for very long.
Fact-checking isn't a cult. It's common sense that masks don't cut off oxygen or anything: we don't need proof. Many professions wear surgical masks all day with no ill effects, and in places like Japan and China the public has been used to wearing masks for years due to SARS and other fears.
It's common sense that if less people are around then you'll have more chance of getting/spreading a disease. If someone professes confusing at such simple ideas, is it up to "the left" to explain it to them, and the explanations of why those arguments from "the right" are just plain idiotic make us cultists which are a mirror image of the right wing?
Actually it's notably when someone brings up a bunch of what are in fact *silly* reasons to disbelieve in masks, and when those are debunked they grasp around for more reasons to not believe in masks. The reason this is BS is because it's called Motivated Reasoning - it's starting with the conclusion then working backwards to find the evidence, except especially in the right-wing sphere they don't even do the most basic of plausibility testing for their evidence or arguments.
A normal, more scientific argument starts from the *evidence* and then proposes multiple explanations to explain the evidence. However, this anti-mask stuff doesn't start with any proof that masks cause harm, it starts with the *assumption* that masks cause harm then proposes "explanations" to why this is so, but at no point does actual evidence of any harm being caused come into the picture. It's just "masks don't work - they steal your oxygen - therefore don't weak masks" rather than showing any evidence that anyone ever had their oxygen levels cut from mask wearing. We get it - they don't want to wear a mask and they're making up any old bullshit reasons to justify that. Calling that out for being an utterly moronic line of argument isn't "left wing" or being trapped in a sheeple thought bubble.
SubJeff on 21/12/2020 at 13:41
Quote Posted by Cipheron
If something, a "right wing myth" is said on right-wing twitter and then people use mainstream sources to debunk that, then the right acts like the two pieces of information are 50:50. But this idea of symmetry is not correct. The right wing exist in an echo chamber, which is effectively cult-like and they project that everyone outside their echo-chamber is equally cult-y, which is clearly not true.
Tbf, the extreme left wing are exactly the same.
You can see such wonderful lefty echo chambers on Reddit if you wish - just to to r/greenandpleasantland or r/BAME_Uk for perfect examples. Or if you want a real insight into how far left the left can get, go to r/israelexposed which is full of holocaust deniers and anti-semites but not from the right wing, from the extreme bleeding heart liberal left.
Cipheron on 21/12/2020 at 14:40
Quote Posted by SubJeff
Tbf, the extreme left wing are exactly the same.
You can see such wonderful lefty echo chambers on Reddit if you wish - just to to r/greenandpleasantland or r/BAME_Uk for perfect examples. Or if you want a real insight into how far left the left can get, go to r/israelexposed which is full of holocaust deniers and anti-semites but not from the right wing, from the extreme bleeding heart liberal left.
Well yeah, but I said as much in my next paragraph. Mind you I had a look at BAME and that put me on to something pretty funny:
(
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/arabic-numerals-survey-prejudice-bias-survey-research-civic-science-a8918256.html)
Quote:
Seventy-two per cent of Republican-supporting respondents said Arabic numerals should not be on the curriculum, compared with 40 per cent of Democrats. This was despite there being no significant difference in education between the two groups.
Pyrian on 21/12/2020 at 17:29
The left certainly has loonies, but we don't elect them president. It's not the same.
heywood on 21/12/2020 at 18:17
Exactly. Equivalencies and whataboutism went out the window in the Trump administration. The Democratic party has a loony left wing but it hasn't taken over the party.
zombe on 21/12/2020 at 22:56
So, the new covid (*) variant - has anyone encountered some murmurs why it is noticeably better at spreading?
*) in case you have lived under a rock somewhere in recent days: after thousands and thousands of identified strains - one has surfaced that seems to be much better at spreading (first identified in UK and now known to be already present in other countries also). Thankfully, its spiky shell seems to have not changed in any meaningful way and the developed vaccines seem to work just fine. Does not seem to be any more deadly either - besides from its ability to spread to more people.
heywood on 22/12/2020 at 01:07
Quote Posted by zombe
So, the new covid (*) variant - has anyone encountered some murmurs why it is noticeably better at spreading?
*) in case you have lived under a rock somewhere in recent days: after thousands and thousands of identified strains - one has surfaced that seems to be much better at spreading (first identified in UK and now known to be already present in other countries also). Thankfully, its spiky shell seems to have not changed in any meaningful way and the developed vaccines seem to work just fine. Does not seem to be any more deadly either - besides from its ability to spread to more people.
We've got a big enough COVID problem here locally that I haven't been paying as much attention to what's going on globally. But I'm not sure there's really enough statistical evidence to draw conclusions.
Community spreading accelerated rapidly this autumn over large parts of the world, seemingly all at once. Maybe not exactly all at once, but starting everywhere within a month or so. If it were due to a new strain with higher R0, I'd expect the resulting wave to progress from one place to another. Instead, we saw a nearly simultaneous resurgence in community spreading across many different countries and regions. It could be due to seasonal changes in behavior. It could be due to everyone getting complacent around the same time. And of course, I've wondered whether it was a due to a mutation in the virus that started spreading rapidly because people resumed normal patterns of travel and gathering.
In some countries, like my own, there are so many people getting COVID-19 now that you can only sample and sequence a small fraction of the cases. Also, most states have significantly exceeded their contact tracing capacity, so we don't even know what places and activities are driving the spread. It's basically like April all over again. Public health officials are kind of overwhelmed and flying mostly blind. They've lost the ability to identify and track the higher risk activities and target them for restrictions. And the vast majority of states won't consider any broad-based restrictions because of political blow-back. Sigh. I'm getting into a boozy rant.
Perhaps the only way we'll know for sure whether this new strain is really more virulent is if it emerges as the dominant strain in the coming weeks and months.