Who do you think loses more social capital due to their actions in office… The mayor of a city of 250,000, of which only a tiny percentage of folks even recognize him/her, or the full-time mayor of a town of 8000, who likely grew up with or around all of his/her constituents and have ongoing daily “normal” interactions with them?
Having grown up in Belle Fourche (twenty miles away from Sturgis), I can tell you that just as a matter of daily life in HIGH SCHOOL I interacted with the mayor of my town on many occasions (population around 6000).
You think the kind of assholes that refuse to wear masks and willingly decide to go to this rally when they know we are in a pandemic are going to care of the city says, “Hey, everybody, we canceled the rally, please don’t come,”? They are the ones storming State capitols with rifles in hand to protest shutdowns. They would just get stirred up, show up anyway, except now they get even more people who aren’t bikers but agree philosophically holding “protest” events, too.
Certainly not all of them, but it would have kept some of them out. Less people is less people, no matter how you look at it. Besides, it would show a good faith effort on the part of the city/state government to help deal with the pandemic.
I’d be surprised if more people showed up to protest a cancelled motorcycle rally than would show up to the actual rally.
60% (of the people that took whatever poll that was) doesn’t seem like it would be enough to help you get re-elected for doing something that goes opposite your political leanings. How many of those 60% are democratic voters? How many of them would cross the aisle at the next election over him cancelling the event vs voting for their own candidate? Maybe a few of them, but probably not a lot.
If Donald Trump decided he’s going to do an actual large scale shut down similar to what other countries have done, would you vote for him instead of Biden?
Take a look at that image and notice what else is missing beyond the mask. I ride a lot, both motorcycles and bicycles. You won’t catch me not wearing a helmet. These folks are morons, through and through.
Yeah, but helmets mostly affect only themselves. Don’t wear a helmet and a small crash can be a big result to you, but it won’t affect me in my car over here.
Whereas not wearing a mask and getting in my vicinity is risky to me.
What is it that you think there is to DO in the area if the Rally was officially closed? If the vendor spaces that are normally open weren’t there? Without all of the beer tents/souvenir stands/jumbo smoked turkey leg vendors/assorted kitsch merchants weren’t allowed to set up shop, there is just NOTHING to do. Sturgis is a soulless husk 50 weeks out of the year.
This assumes the governor’s office had ANY INTEREST AT ALL in coordinating a shutdown. She didn’t, and there was no chance in hell that the city could get any coordination with the state troopers or the national guard. A statement like you made is simply unrealistic. It would all fall on the city itself, with a fair chunk of the event actually held on state land where the city didn’t even have jurisdiction.
I can’t speak to the national guard portion, but the state troopers actually coordinate with the city of Sturgis for rally prep, planning, and security already- it’s built in to the underlying infrastructure of the rally. Early days (March/April) there was uncertainty on what the position was going to be, so my ex-brother-in-law (state trooper) wasn’t sure if his job at the time was going to actually be security (as usual) or possible quarantine enforcement, or something else entirely.
Okay, so this is the nth time I’ve seen this… and what the hell is it supposed to mean?
There are miscellaneous events tied to the Sturgis Rally, but the Rally proper takes place on the streets of Sturgis. The vending, the bike shows, the Sturgis EXPERIENCE is downtown. The entire city becomes just a sea of chrome and black leather. Things trickle out from there to the other random locations, but everything centers around Sturgis. You take that whole central experience out of the picture, and again, there is NOTHING tying it all together.
So the answer is to just give up and let the pandemic wash over us? Or, not even give up, but to actively encourage people to attend on the assumption, and it is just an assumption, that if they cancelled people would not only show up anyway, but actively protest. Did they have security and bathrooms and health stations for all the BLM protests?
Are the mayor’s hands really that tied if a group of people descends on their town and the county or state doesn’t want to help? Can they make a plea directly to the president? Can they declare a state of emergency and call the national guard directly? And, I don’t know the answers, I’m honestly asking.
Besides, if the city cancelled it and they had concerns for large scale protests, ISTM that a public plea to the governor for help maintaining peace may force their hand. I can’t imagine it would be a smart idea for the governor to abandon a small town, especially one that’s done so much for the state over the years.
We’re talking here, however, about coordination for shutting it down. By late July, Governor Noem was firmly in support of holding the rally, so suggesting she’d have been willing to use her office to facilitate coordination between the city and state troopers to block roads, close campgrounds, etc., is ludicrous.
The people attending the rally aren’t all staying within the city limits of Sturgis, are they?
No, the city can’t call out the national guard directly; that remains firmly within the governor’s control, until and unless the guard is federalized. They can make a plea to the president, but declaring an emergency and using federal resources over the objections of the state governor is difficult and rarely done (Eisenhower did it in Little Rock in '57, but I can’t think of an example since). That’s even when the president is on the city’s side; given that bikers strongly support the president, what would be his motivation to shut down what essentially became a huge Trump rally?
No, generally, they do not. They congregate in Sturgis, then filter to other events, like the Hulett Ham & Jam, the Buffalo Chip, et cetera; but the “main event”, so to speak, the glue that binds all of these yahoos together, is downtown Sturgis.
The actual study doesn’t claim a $46,000 TREATMENT price; it claims that figure based on this paper’s assessment [warning: PDF] of the total costs of a case, including things like lost wages due to self-isolation, quality of life issues, etc., which are public health costs but not direct expenses.
“the researchers assumed that new cases in areas where people went post-rally must have been spread by those rally attendees” is a false statement. The researchers looked at the rate of increase in new cases in areas where lots of rally attendees went, relative to the rate of increase in those same places pre-Sturgis and the rate of increase in areas where few or no attendees went.
The second paragraph doesn’t follow from the first. They absolutely are not attributing all new cases to the Sturgis rally; they are only attributing to the rally new cases incremental to established trend and peer cohorts without Sturgis visitors. It’s completely valid to take two different cohorts and try to isolate one variable - in this case, having a Sturgis visitor. It’s just difficult. If Reason has evidence that the cohorts are polluted by other variables, they can present that evidence. Otherwise, this sounds like a reasonable analysis - not the last word, necessarily, but a valid approach to understanding the impact from Sturgis.
Fair enough. I was planning on sitting down and reading the original study for myself tonight anyway, and now I have more motive to do that.
I’ll be interested to see how careful the report is about the certainty of its conclusions. I think one of the biggest problems with academic studies like this is often not the studies themselves, but the fact that the news media tend to summarize them in tendentious fashion, emphasize only the most dramatic possible conclusions, and also tend not to provide any of the qualifications or cautions that appear in the reports themselves.