Are you sure? I mean, maybe not that exact rhetorical scenario I used, but from where I sit it just looks like the bog-standard slippery slope argument that surrendering one freedom equals surrendering them all, which equals literal slavery. “If they can make us do XXX then they can make us do ANYTHING”. It’s absolutely fear-based.
It’s something that makes you feel good about, because you don’t have stupid fears like that other guy, but it isn’t useful for understanding what’s going on.
You don’t know me from Eve, so don’t tell me what makes me feel good. It doesn’t matter to me if antimaskers are concerned, afraid, angry, or apathetic. The outcome of their behavior is the same. Shitty people doing shitty things will never make feel good.
Relax. It was a general statement about why “people”, not you specifically, like to ascribe bad or pitiable emotions to the motivations of their opponents.
Since I never attributed fear to anyone’s motivations, you should not have addressed that general statement to me.
Well, sorry. My first paragraph was addressing you directly and the second was meant generally.
Yes, I’m sure. Calling a slippery slope argument a fear based argument is pretty much exactly what I meant in my response to Monstro.
What is a slippery slope argument based upon if not fear? Whatever is waiting at the bottom of the slope, it ain’t a plate of cookies and a big hug. It’s a thing you fear.
Ok, then everything is based on fear. Always bring an umbrella? Fear. Save a percentage of your income so you can ride out unemployment?. Fear.
Apparently some things are also based on purposeful misunderstanding. This is also a very powerful messaging strategy, as you are showing us.
No, that’s you. Fear of harm and pursuit of happiness drives us all at the base level. Normally that’s modified by higher emotions and rationality. You want to drop all nuance so things you don’t agree with are “fear based”.
Not looking to continue a fight or anything but you made me think of something I wanted to talk about:
You seem really sure that this is always cut and dried. There seems to be a whole lot of reason to believe it’s not.
Again, just zero out all the deaths of people over 75. We still have 100k dead. The only reason that number isn’t devastating is some weird psychological quirk that makes it look small next to 250k.
When we are at 500k dead, will the 250k under 75 will also be treated as insignificant, so long as “most” of the dead are still old?
We’re not getting the alarms of NYC in March because people aren’t dying at the rate they were in NYC in March. Yes it’s spooled up to the predicted second wave but it’s still nowhere near the localized disaster of NYC.
What people HAVE experienced since March is unemployment, depression, delayed medical care, loss of education, suicide…
These are not trivial matters and are not sustainable in a binary system of deaths versus social collapse. There has to be balance between both sides of the pandemic. IMO rubbing people’s noses in it will at some point create the opposite effect.
At Thanksgiving my brother, an anti-masker and anti-vaxxer was going off on the big family Zoom call about how vulnerable people need to either hide away or die and the rest of us need to go on with life. He then tried to explain that he doesn’t mean to dismiss my parents’ concerns. My mother told him that she was not an idiot. She understands what he means is that he’s prepared to sacrifice a few years of my father’s life so he can “get on with life”. My father has serious respiratory issues.
He managed bro restrain himself for one hour and twenty minutes before dropping this steaming turd into the conversation.
No guess about what stance your mother would take on it, but I wonder if your father expects his entire community to stop down their lives because of his respiratory issues. Or even his son.
You know, some of this stuff might cut both ways, a lot more so than many people have stopped to think about.
I will gladly stop going to bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and house parties if it means that hundreds of thousands of people–teachers, doctors, nurses, bus drivers, college students, AND old folks–get to live and live well.
If someone expects me to literally stop living just so a 75-year-old person can fart around another day, they are sadly mistaken. I’m not dying for anyone. But I will shop online and order takeout. I will wear a mask when I know I’ll be in close proximity to people. These measures don’t deprive me of life. They make me appreciative of life.
There are a lot of people who believe it’s not. That’s not the same thing as a reason it’s not.
My understanding is that assigning a cause of death often requires much in the way of judgment and perhaps some in the way of probabilities, and that’s if it gets to be carefully done at all. Someone here on this board wrote a detailed and very helpful post explaining what the process is often like. Your understanding that it’s sort of self-evidently binary does not seem to comport with those opinions.
What about the 50k deaths of people under 65? It seems to me that that number alone would be enough from radical action. That’s an absolutely shocking number.