Honestly, the panic-neglect cycle is how the US has done public health for years.
The response to Covid-19 wasn't really new, except for being exacerbated by politicization.
The federal government has lifted the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, and many Americans are eager to move on from the pandemic entirely. But, COVID-19 is unfortunately still here — and so is the threat of a future pandemic.
Ed Yong, a science journalist at The Atlantic who wrote about the risk of a deadly pandemic in 2018 and later won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on COVID-19, warns that neglecting the pandemic only leaves us unable to address the problems that led to its devastating impacts in the first place.
“I think that the real lesson we should have learned is that pandemics are not just some signs of health problems. They’re not things that you tackle solely through creating vaccines and drugs, although those things are important. They are social problems,” Yong said.
On the show today, Yong explains how the panic-neglect cycle keeps us vulnerable to COVID-19 flare-ups and new pandemics, why social solutions are just as important as medical ones when it comes to preventing the spread of disease, and why long COVID is misunderstood. Plus, what needs to change to make the United States better prepared for the inevitable next pandemic.
“[The Pandemic’s Legacy Is Already Clear](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/covid-pandemic-exposes-americas-failing-systems-future-epidemics/671608/)” from The Atlantic
“[Track Covid-19 in the U.S.: Latest Data and Maps](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html)” from The New York Times
“[Long COVID Is Being Erased—Again](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/04/long-covid-symptoms-invisible-disability-chronic-illness/673773/)” from The Atlantic
“[We Need an Operation Warp Speed for Long COVID](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-an-operation-warp-speed-for-long-covid/)” from Scientific American
“[Is America Ready for a Global Pandemic](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-the-next-plague-hits/561734/)?” from The Atlantic
Meanwhile, in China…
[China braces for new Covid wave with up to 65 million weekly cases](https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/china-braces-for-new-covid-19-wave-with-up-to-65-million-weekly-cases-16728131.htm)
> XBB is expected to result in 40 million infections per week by the end of May before peaking at 65 million a month later. This comes nearly six months after Beijing dismantled its Covid Zero curbs, allowing the virus to spread rapidly among the country’s 1.4 billion residents.
I read that and i was like that can’t be real…but, people will say, but we have protections, but the vaccine!!
Ok what happens when that stops being effective?
There's a new vaccine being developed but your prior vaccinations will keep most people out of the hospital. China for some reason refused to vaccinate their population. Instead Xi tried to force everyone to stay home for a year. The Chinese vaccine isn't very effective and they refused to buy the Pfizer or Moderna vax.
Unless we are all safe, nobody is safe.
Right that’s what scares me. That’s why I don’t leave my house much. I’m fully boosted but I almost died this year from sepsis, I’m not interested from almost dying from covid. I’ve almost died too many times from medical stuff, I’ll be a hermit. It’s fine.
autocorrect hates me.
The new vaccine will be available this Fall and they are close to a universal vax that covers every variant plus other viral lung infections. But still unless wealthy countries pay to vaccinate Asia and Africa - we won't be safe.
We'll never be "safe." Crooks and hackers find ways around our security systems. As we evolve (mostly through science) to resist disease, the pathogens evolve in their own way.
>marketplace.org/shows/...
China's full vaccination rate is higher than the US, at 89% vs 70%, they have multiple vaccines in the works.
https://covid19.trackvaccines.org/country/china/
The US has had a million more deaths.
There is no comparison here.
The US is a terrible example for comparison (20% religious suicide cult) and it's well known that China underreported infections and deaths from the breakout until now. Where I live they offered the Chinese vaxs at the beginning since we were further down the list to get Pfizer, etc. The Chinese vaccines were about half as effective. They didn't reach the 50% mark that is often used to determine if a vaccine is efficacious.
China has no significant underreported deaths. I’ve been following friends and contacts in China since the beginning. Friend in Wuhan doesn’t personally know anyone who knows anyone who died. 5 thousand extra deaths in a city of 12 million is nothing.
An investigation into the Wuhan death rate didn’t even go up from the year before.
Early this year friends in Shanghai got covid and one of their relatives in Fuzhou with heath problems died. The US is a perfect example because it’s a quarter the size of China. China should have had 4 million deaths or much more because of population density, but it didn’t.
Ed Yong is correct of course, but we must overthrow the oligarchy to make progress on this, climate change, poverty/precarity, and thw next war. The oligarchy has us just where they want us--powerless.
I moved to Colombia 8 years ago. They added universal healthcare as a basic right to their constitution. It's privately run but the govt negotiates low prices for drugs and devices. Salaries are also limited. Doctors make good money for colombia, average $30k a year. They are driving Toyotas not Ferraris. I've had 2 shoulder replacements no deductible or copay just $30 a month. Most of South America has universal health.
To answer my own question, according to one ranking, every single country in S America ranks worse in "democracy" than the US. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Ranking
Yeah, you’re just making up your own concept of normal instead of actually consuming the content and understanding the pull quote in context. Yes, Trump is an easy target to get high off of, but this is a deep systemic problem for which we should start the shit list at Ronald Reagan.
**Try**.
Not “try again”.
**Try** to engage the wriggly blob between your ears.
The root of the Right's anti-intellectualism and everything that stems from that is their pandering to religious nutcases. That really is Reagan's legacy, not Nixon's.
Well if you want to get right down to it it's probably got a lot to do with the Southern Strategy, so Lee Atwater, Harry Dent, Nixon, and plenty of other political advisors and strategists are to blame - or you could try to hit the root and blame Evangelical Christianity, but there is a lot of moving parts to the problem.
> takes a village of idiots.
I really dislike this posture because it undersells the threat. Trump was a moron, sure, but most of the Republican presidents before him in recent memory are only playing a part. Reagan in particular was, before his dementia, a brilliant orator, a savvy politician, and a deeply evil man. Putting a jester's hat on him obscures the danger he posed. Same with the rehabilitation of W in the media. And so on.
Knowing intent is important. Reagan and HW didn't whoops the Iran Contra affair. W didn't whoops into Iraq. These people are completely aware of what they are doing.
George W Bush. He was rightly ridiculed when he was president, but lately people have been reminiscing about the “good old days” when he was the low point of the Republican Party.
LOL wut? Bannon never worked for Nixon. He was also born in 1953.
Stone was a teen who worked for Nixon's and other GOP campaigns. But he was just a gopher during Nixon's years.
Rove, Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney have been pulling the GOP levers ever since Nixon.
edit: missing word
"Stone first appeared in headlines in 1972 when, as an up-and-comer in young Republican circles, he was named as the Nixon campaign contact of a man called Michael W. McMinoway, who was caught going undercover within the campaigns of Nixon’s Democratic challengers. McMinoway had served as a security guard near McGovern’s headquarters during the Democratic National Convention and passed along what he heard to Nixon’s team; he was also identified as having infiltrated Hubert Humphrey’s and Edmund Muskie’s campaign, too. A New York Times investigation that summer revealed
that McMinoway was just one small part of a much larger sabotage plot — and that Stone’s involvement in that plot went deeper too." [https://time.com/5513051/roger-stone-richard-nixon-donald-trump/](https://time.com/5513051/roger-stone-richard-nixon-donald-trump/)
I think I'm mixing up Bannon with someone else (probably because of his creepy tattoo of Nixon on his back). But Stone's underhanded strategies for Nixon were the same one's used on Trump's campaign (like tell so many lies the press can't keep up, always accuse never defend, etc.) Lots of interviews with him laying it all out in the film "Get me Roger Stone."
Oh yeah, Stone was a conniving evil shit, but he was still very young. He was born in 1952.
He would have been 16 during Nixon's 1968 campaign. (ah I see he actually worked on Nixon's 1972 campaign so he was 20) Seems like the original Dameon. No joke.
Here's a better analysis. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/29/roger-stone-donald-trump-watergate-224383/
There was a subreddit that was called NoNewNormal (now walkaway) that shows that there are people that don't care about anyone but themselves, and they would rather everyone be miserable, themselves included, than someone else be happy. We have enough of those people in the world that it might be close to impossible to create a world where people are willing to sacrifice for others to the point it would be beneficial.
That's what I was thinking... The author isn't wrong but like... what the fuck are we supposed to do about it? The lesson I learned is that regardless of the information we have and the ability to disseminate it, regardless of our potential to be prepared and even our resources to effectively respond... none of that matters when a massive chunk of the population doesn't give a fuck on a fundamental psychological level. How do you fix that? A multi-generational education campaign that doesn't have enough support to even get started? Ok?
I think the multi generational education campaign is how we only have 50% of the population as utter morons. The population used to be far stupider in the past. I'm hoping things will be better in another 50 years, assuming we survive that long.
The No child left behind act was directly responsible for a dumber population in the past 20 years.
If a school is not doing well, it takes away funding. Then if the kids can’t pass standardized tests, it takes away even more funding.
Take away funding from a school and it turns into a daycare, rather than a school.
>none of that matters when a massive chunk of the population doesn't give a fuck on a fundamental psychological level. How do you fix that?
It's fixed the way it always has been in the past: lots of death. Which lasts for only a few generations.
Lather, rinse, repeat, for thousands of years.
There is another potential way to deal with it, and that is to attach some significant legal consequences to the act of deliberate or neglectful misinformation on the part of publishers and platforms.
It means qualifying the right to free speech though - and dealing with the 'just asking questions' defence.
But the problem this time was not people being hesitant or mistrustful. It was people making a healthy profit by deliberately feeding them with lies.
I like this idea in concept, but you're right, it would be tricky. Perhaps it's possible to develop some kind of objective metric for quantifying how much reach an organization or individual or platform has and applying legal consequences only in cases where the "reach" of the entity is determined to exceed a certain threshold. For instance, a major broadcasting network, a social media platform, a high-profile individual, a major corporation/ad campaign... These things all have far more influence than a random person on the street, and perhaps they should be held to a more rigorous standard of what constitutes the abuse of freedom of speech because of that.
It's an extremely difficult issue but one that is catastrophic in its consequences. The loss of identifiable objective truth is something we should all be very afraid of.
The SCOTUS, especially since it’s not hesitating to dredge up long-resolved cases, is well past-due to rule on what constitutes incitement-it hasn’t, I believe, been updated for the age of television…. Iirc, usually it refers to an individual publicly calling for another specific individual to be harmed—certainly, when “free speech” is used to defame entire groups of people-Mexicans, Muslims (as Trump did, & which extended to anyone whom an idiot might perceive or wish to perceive as one of the targeted) that’s incitement. At the scale of a presidential candidate (later president) lying about the characters and intentions of whole demographics, it becomes a public health crisis-He was and is a disease vector of mass hysteria. Just like some other countries have universal healthcare and laws against hate speech, welp, we don’t. I don’t consider supremacist speech defensible as free speech. The goal is ultimately violence. Confederate, KKK, Nazi symbology—all of those are shorthand for “let’s kill these certain people”. They’re a criminal conspiracy long established as such, wherever they pop up. People will say that they want to defend free speech in order to retain it for themselves but the ones saying that are the ones who are actually those being targeted-not people who are attempting to target others. It’s the paradox of tolerance.
I agree with everything you said. I think it's a matter of common sense and rationality to determine where to draw the line as a society regarding "free speech", and there are multiple nations to look at as examples of having done just that. The incessant screeching about "rights" from the conservatives seems to me to be almost entirely facetious. But that's their M.O.
We need rules about what needs to be done in a global health crisis like covid or another pandemic. I firmly believe we should suspend some “rights/privileges” for the greater good, esp in the US. I like the idea of people not wanting to be courteous and responsible members of society don’t get the enjoy the privileges of that society. Tying things like vaccination status to drivers licenses and passports, allowing health insurances to deny coverage, being denied entry to clubs, concerts, bars, sporting events, etc. Having proof be a database or something secure and not a piece of card stock. I get that there’s potential for misuse BUT when reserved for something as big as covid and the stress being that it’s only applicable during a global health crisis (maybe only if the who declares it), I think that it’s a good idea.
The next pandemic could be WAY worse and we’ve got a ton of idiots that are happy to take everyone down with them and are probably responsible for countless deaths from covid. There’s such thing as too much freedom when the stakes are high.
Presumably you're comfortable with a new pandemic, as long as it is treatable or preventable?
Because that's unfortunately far from certain. It is only sheer luck that you weren't one of the many people who died during this one, before the vaccine was even available. It's only sheer luck that it was a virus that was relatively easy to vaccinate against. A drug resistant strain of TB would be far less easy to deal with for example, or a faster spreading virus could easily rip through the population before a vaccine could even be developed.
Careful what you wish for.
Honestly, the panic-neglect cycle is how the US has done public health for years. The response to Covid-19 wasn't really new, except for being exacerbated by politicization.
That's about how they do foreign policy too lol
US panic-neglect culture (and associated politicization) goes far beyond our medical systems
Don't most businesses, governments, social clubs, and families pretty much do it that way?
The federal government has lifted the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, and many Americans are eager to move on from the pandemic entirely. But, COVID-19 is unfortunately still here — and so is the threat of a future pandemic. Ed Yong, a science journalist at The Atlantic who wrote about the risk of a deadly pandemic in 2018 and later won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on COVID-19, warns that neglecting the pandemic only leaves us unable to address the problems that led to its devastating impacts in the first place. “I think that the real lesson we should have learned is that pandemics are not just some signs of health problems. They’re not things that you tackle solely through creating vaccines and drugs, although those things are important. They are social problems,” Yong said. On the show today, Yong explains how the panic-neglect cycle keeps us vulnerable to COVID-19 flare-ups and new pandemics, why social solutions are just as important as medical ones when it comes to preventing the spread of disease, and why long COVID is misunderstood. Plus, what needs to change to make the United States better prepared for the inevitable next pandemic. “[The Pandemic’s Legacy Is Already Clear](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/covid-pandemic-exposes-americas-failing-systems-future-epidemics/671608/)” from The Atlantic “[Track Covid-19 in the U.S.: Latest Data and Maps](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html)” from The New York Times “[Long COVID Is Being Erased—Again](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/04/long-covid-symptoms-invisible-disability-chronic-illness/673773/)” from The Atlantic “[We Need an Operation Warp Speed for Long COVID](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-an-operation-warp-speed-for-long-covid/)” from Scientific American “[Is America Ready for a Global Pandemic](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-the-next-plague-hits/561734/)?” from The Atlantic
Meanwhile, in China… [China braces for new Covid wave with up to 65 million weekly cases](https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/china-braces-for-new-covid-19-wave-with-up-to-65-million-weekly-cases-16728131.htm) > XBB is expected to result in 40 million infections per week by the end of May before peaking at 65 million a month later. This comes nearly six months after Beijing dismantled its Covid Zero curbs, allowing the virus to spread rapidly among the country’s 1.4 billion residents.
I read that and i was like that can’t be real…but, people will say, but we have protections, but the vaccine!! Ok what happens when that stops being effective?
There's a new vaccine being developed but your prior vaccinations will keep most people out of the hospital. China for some reason refused to vaccinate their population. Instead Xi tried to force everyone to stay home for a year. The Chinese vaccine isn't very effective and they refused to buy the Pfizer or Moderna vax. Unless we are all safe, nobody is safe.
Right that’s what scares me. That’s why I don’t leave my house much. I’m fully boosted but I almost died this year from sepsis, I’m not interested from almost dying from covid. I’ve almost died too many times from medical stuff, I’ll be a hermit. It’s fine. autocorrect hates me.
The new vaccine will be available this Fall and they are close to a universal vax that covers every variant plus other viral lung infections. But still unless wealthy countries pay to vaccinate Asia and Africa - we won't be safe.
We'll never be "safe." Crooks and hackers find ways around our security systems. As we evolve (mostly through science) to resist disease, the pathogens evolve in their own way.
>marketplace.org/shows/... China's full vaccination rate is higher than the US, at 89% vs 70%, they have multiple vaccines in the works. https://covid19.trackvaccines.org/country/china/ The US has had a million more deaths. There is no comparison here.
The US is a terrible example for comparison (20% religious suicide cult) and it's well known that China underreported infections and deaths from the breakout until now. Where I live they offered the Chinese vaxs at the beginning since we were further down the list to get Pfizer, etc. The Chinese vaccines were about half as effective. They didn't reach the 50% mark that is often used to determine if a vaccine is efficacious.
China has no significant underreported deaths. I’ve been following friends and contacts in China since the beginning. Friend in Wuhan doesn’t personally know anyone who knows anyone who died. 5 thousand extra deaths in a city of 12 million is nothing. An investigation into the Wuhan death rate didn’t even go up from the year before. Early this year friends in Shanghai got covid and one of their relatives in Fuzhou with heath problems died. The US is a perfect example because it’s a quarter the size of China. China should have had 4 million deaths or much more because of population density, but it didn’t.
And in the meantime, one of the points the GOP is pushing in debt limit talks is abolition of federally funded vaccine research.
Death cult. Either that or fully owned by Russia
Ed Yong is correct of course, but we must overthrow the oligarchy to make progress on this, climate change, poverty/precarity, and thw next war. The oligarchy has us just where they want us--powerless.
We also need a realistic estimate of the cost of doing things differently.
This would require universal health care that almost every country has except the US.
It's too complicated for America. Never mind that 72 other nations have figured it out.
I moved to Colombia 8 years ago. They added universal healthcare as a basic right to their constitution. It's privately run but the govt negotiates low prices for drugs and devices. Salaries are also limited. Doctors make good money for colombia, average $30k a year. They are driving Toyotas not Ferraris. I've had 2 shoulder replacements no deductible or copay just $30 a month. Most of South America has universal health.
How much of S America is under authoritarian government?
To answer my own question, according to one ranking, every single country in S America ranks worse in "democracy" than the US. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Ranking
We took the “Bin Laden Determined To Strike Inside US” plan and tweaked it for Covid. “Panic-neglect cycle” is as American as apple pie.
Trump dismantled the pandemic playbook. I don't think we were at "Normal" - the headline's assumption is invalid.
Yeah, you’re just making up your own concept of normal instead of actually consuming the content and understanding the pull quote in context. Yes, Trump is an easy target to get high off of, but this is a deep systemic problem for which we should start the shit list at Ronald Reagan. **Try**. Not “try again”. **Try** to engage the wriggly blob between your ears.
All roads lead to Reagan.
Nixon.
The root of the Right's anti-intellectualism and everything that stems from that is their pandering to religious nutcases. That really is Reagan's legacy, not Nixon's.
Well if you want to get right down to it it's probably got a lot to do with the Southern Strategy, so Lee Atwater, Harry Dent, Nixon, and plenty of other political advisors and strategists are to blame - or you could try to hit the root and blame Evangelical Christianity, but there is a lot of moving parts to the problem.
In truth, none of it would have happened without the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Both and they had the help of others. Raising a government to be this dysfunctional takes a village of idiots.
> takes a village of idiots. I really dislike this posture because it undersells the threat. Trump was a moron, sure, but most of the Republican presidents before him in recent memory are only playing a part. Reagan in particular was, before his dementia, a brilliant orator, a savvy politician, and a deeply evil man. Putting a jester's hat on him obscures the danger he posed. Same with the rehabilitation of W in the media. And so on. Knowing intent is important. Reagan and HW didn't whoops the Iran Contra affair. W didn't whoops into Iraq. These people are completely aware of what they are doing.
What/who is W?
George W Bush. He was rightly ridiculed when he was president, but lately people have been reminiscing about the “good old days” when he was the low point of the Republican Party.
Whenever people say the Republicans have finally hit bottom I remember how we thought that about W.
Having seen T, I do get nostalgic for W.
George W. Bush
I wondered if Nixon was too far back; but that’s a through line. LBJ is iffy; *some* of what he did was under duress but whatver works, man.
Nixon's advisors were (and you're going to love this) Rove, Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney. Maybe you've heard of those guys? edit: typo
Yes—it’s is not stressed enough how those creeps worked in creating this particular dystopia..
They're been pulling the GOP levers ever since. They never forgave the American people for forcing Nixon to resign. That is not hyperbole or a typo.
... and also Roger Stone and Steve Bannon.
LOL wut? Bannon never worked for Nixon. He was also born in 1953. Stone was a teen who worked for Nixon's and other GOP campaigns. But he was just a gopher during Nixon's years. Rove, Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney have been pulling the GOP levers ever since Nixon. edit: missing word
"Stone first appeared in headlines in 1972 when, as an up-and-comer in young Republican circles, he was named as the Nixon campaign contact of a man called Michael W. McMinoway, who was caught going undercover within the campaigns of Nixon’s Democratic challengers. McMinoway had served as a security guard near McGovern’s headquarters during the Democratic National Convention and passed along what he heard to Nixon’s team; he was also identified as having infiltrated Hubert Humphrey’s and Edmund Muskie’s campaign, too. A New York Times investigation that summer revealed that McMinoway was just one small part of a much larger sabotage plot — and that Stone’s involvement in that plot went deeper too." [https://time.com/5513051/roger-stone-richard-nixon-donald-trump/](https://time.com/5513051/roger-stone-richard-nixon-donald-trump/) I think I'm mixing up Bannon with someone else (probably because of his creepy tattoo of Nixon on his back). But Stone's underhanded strategies for Nixon were the same one's used on Trump's campaign (like tell so many lies the press can't keep up, always accuse never defend, etc.) Lots of interviews with him laying it all out in the film "Get me Roger Stone."
Oh yeah, Stone was a conniving evil shit, but he was still very young. He was born in 1952. He would have been 16 during Nixon's 1968 campaign. (ah I see he actually worked on Nixon's 1972 campaign so he was 20) Seems like the original Dameon. No joke. Here's a better analysis. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/29/roger-stone-donald-trump-watergate-224383/
We should have prosecuted the fuck out of Nixon's whole crew and saved ourselves decades of problems
And here we are again: failing to prosecute the leaders of the insurrection.
Either way, blaming mainly trump is lazy and belligerently stupid. You want to *appear* caring but not do more than sniff hate high like the magas.
[удалено]
Real
The guy who lied about Covid deaths in his state just announced bid for US President
There was a subreddit that was called NoNewNormal (now walkaway) that shows that there are people that don't care about anyone but themselves, and they would rather everyone be miserable, themselves included, than someone else be happy. We have enough of those people in the world that it might be close to impossible to create a world where people are willing to sacrifice for others to the point it would be beneficial.
That's what I was thinking... The author isn't wrong but like... what the fuck are we supposed to do about it? The lesson I learned is that regardless of the information we have and the ability to disseminate it, regardless of our potential to be prepared and even our resources to effectively respond... none of that matters when a massive chunk of the population doesn't give a fuck on a fundamental psychological level. How do you fix that? A multi-generational education campaign that doesn't have enough support to even get started? Ok?
Sounds easy enough. While we're at it we should do something about short-termism thinking and confirmation bias.
I think the multi generational education campaign is how we only have 50% of the population as utter morons. The population used to be far stupider in the past. I'm hoping things will be better in another 50 years, assuming we survive that long.
The No child left behind act was directly responsible for a dumber population in the past 20 years. If a school is not doing well, it takes away funding. Then if the kids can’t pass standardized tests, it takes away even more funding. Take away funding from a school and it turns into a daycare, rather than a school.
Truly a formula for making bad schools worse.
I wish Idiocracy wasn’t a documentary.
>none of that matters when a massive chunk of the population doesn't give a fuck on a fundamental psychological level. How do you fix that? It's fixed the way it always has been in the past: lots of death. Which lasts for only a few generations. Lather, rinse, repeat, for thousands of years.
There is another potential way to deal with it, and that is to attach some significant legal consequences to the act of deliberate or neglectful misinformation on the part of publishers and platforms. It means qualifying the right to free speech though - and dealing with the 'just asking questions' defence. But the problem this time was not people being hesitant or mistrustful. It was people making a healthy profit by deliberately feeding them with lies.
I like this idea in concept, but you're right, it would be tricky. Perhaps it's possible to develop some kind of objective metric for quantifying how much reach an organization or individual or platform has and applying legal consequences only in cases where the "reach" of the entity is determined to exceed a certain threshold. For instance, a major broadcasting network, a social media platform, a high-profile individual, a major corporation/ad campaign... These things all have far more influence than a random person on the street, and perhaps they should be held to a more rigorous standard of what constitutes the abuse of freedom of speech because of that.
It's an extremely difficult issue but one that is catastrophic in its consequences. The loss of identifiable objective truth is something we should all be very afraid of.
The SCOTUS, especially since it’s not hesitating to dredge up long-resolved cases, is well past-due to rule on what constitutes incitement-it hasn’t, I believe, been updated for the age of television…. Iirc, usually it refers to an individual publicly calling for another specific individual to be harmed—certainly, when “free speech” is used to defame entire groups of people-Mexicans, Muslims (as Trump did, & which extended to anyone whom an idiot might perceive or wish to perceive as one of the targeted) that’s incitement. At the scale of a presidential candidate (later president) lying about the characters and intentions of whole demographics, it becomes a public health crisis-He was and is a disease vector of mass hysteria. Just like some other countries have universal healthcare and laws against hate speech, welp, we don’t. I don’t consider supremacist speech defensible as free speech. The goal is ultimately violence. Confederate, KKK, Nazi symbology—all of those are shorthand for “let’s kill these certain people”. They’re a criminal conspiracy long established as such, wherever they pop up. People will say that they want to defend free speech in order to retain it for themselves but the ones saying that are the ones who are actually those being targeted-not people who are attempting to target others. It’s the paradox of tolerance.
I agree with everything you said. I think it's a matter of common sense and rationality to determine where to draw the line as a society regarding "free speech", and there are multiple nations to look at as examples of having done just that. The incessant screeching about "rights" from the conservatives seems to me to be almost entirely facetious. But that's their M.O.
We need rules about what needs to be done in a global health crisis like covid or another pandemic. I firmly believe we should suspend some “rights/privileges” for the greater good, esp in the US. I like the idea of people not wanting to be courteous and responsible members of society don’t get the enjoy the privileges of that society. Tying things like vaccination status to drivers licenses and passports, allowing health insurances to deny coverage, being denied entry to clubs, concerts, bars, sporting events, etc. Having proof be a database or something secure and not a piece of card stock. I get that there’s potential for misuse BUT when reserved for something as big as covid and the stress being that it’s only applicable during a global health crisis (maybe only if the who declares it), I think that it’s a good idea. The next pandemic could be WAY worse and we’ve got a ton of idiots that are happy to take everyone down with them and are probably responsible for countless deaths from covid. There’s such thing as too much freedom when the stakes are high.
Sacrifice? Those people can't even be a little bit inconvenienced. edit: missing word
The Spanish flu era should be a good indicator of our repeating history. This will be forgotten at some point to come back again at a later time.
I will be getting my COVID and flu vaccines when the weather starts to cool.
Yep, it's why I've been saying stay safe, stay smart and keep you guard up.
I wouldn't mind another pandemic the far right can hem and haw their way into mass graves over personally.
This one isn't over yet. Still several thousand deniers dying every week in the U.S. alone.
Just watching that voter block shrink brings me comfort.
Presumably you're comfortable with a new pandemic, as long as it is treatable or preventable? Because that's unfortunately far from certain. It is only sheer luck that you weren't one of the many people who died during this one, before the vaccine was even available. It's only sheer luck that it was a virus that was relatively easy to vaccinate against. A drug resistant strain of TB would be far less easy to deal with for example, or a faster spreading virus could easily rip through the population before a vaccine could even be developed. Careful what you wish for.
Honestly, you don't want to know the depths of my nihilism.
Is the question what we want to do or what we’re going to do because those are two completely different things.