Crazy American Politics

[Mason89]

24 minutes ago, OrlandoDon said:

I worked at the self proclaimed #1 DEI school in LA for 17 years, I’d hazard a guess I’m more educated in all of the topics you reference. Annual professional development was a big thing, I’m well versed and have a good grounding in what you reference. 

I work in Scotland where your job application gets binned depending on what school you went to. 
 

Life experience is valuable but you can’t argue the numbers. 

 

[TheDonbytheDee]

3 hours ago, Jupiter said:

Traditional vaccines like smallpox and polio are great and have saved milions of lives. The covid vaccines were mediocre at best, sure they saved some old people from dying of covid, but they didn't stop people from catching and speading covid. And the average age of people who died from/with covid was higher than average life expectancy.

The biggest problem I had with the covid vaccine is that it was only tested for a few months compared to about 10 years for other vaccines. Which is why I didn't get it. And I've never had covid as far as I know.

In all the time you have posted on AbMad and here I don't think you have ever posted so a reply so long.

Well done min.

Edited 17 hours ago by TheDonbytheDee

[TheDonbytheDee]

My Brother went down the covid vaccine rabbit hole and is now a huge follower of Neil Oliver, as he tells us the things that Governments don't want us to know.

I think I've posted before, but he claims his leukemia was due to the Vaccine, but his issue was he had his cancer before the vaccine.

Unfortunately, Google has replaced common sense for a lot of people.

 

[Mason89]

Oliver tells you things government do want you to know, it’s just that it’s not our government. 

[RicoS321]

13 hours ago, Mason89 said:

I’ve no idea what point you’re trying to make in the first paragraph. On your second, preventing children from attending school was an intelligent response based on the science 

Then you are indeed as bad as those you criticise. Probably worse, as you attempt to maintain the moral high ground at the same time. 

My point, when saying:

13 hours ago, Mason89 said:

Then you didn't learn much from your experience of anti vaccine groups, did you? Any reason is a legitimate reason for not being vaccinated. I have a friend whose mum died after being injected prior to a routine operation. She was a fit and healthy under 50 year old who was absolutely terrified she would die being injected. The physical reasons might not be legitimate (and I would hugely disagree), but the social reasons most certainly are. The authoritarian approach of the Californian state officials would have been an absolute dream for the anti vax astroturfers, as you well know. 

Is that by forcing people unnecessarily to get vaccinated, you create the conditions for extremist anti vaccine groups to thrive (which should have been very obvious to you if you were "years ahead of the curve on anti vax"). Similarly, if you lump people together - as you did - by calling them anti vaxxer, as opposed to anti COVID vaccine, you create the conditions for extremist anti vaccine groups to thrive. Thus, the response in California led directly to the predictable rise in anti vaccine shite. Because banning people's children from school was not "based on science", nor intelligent (hence why it didn't happen in Scotland and most other places who took a similar approach to COVID). 

Obviously, I think you're just generally at it, but your lack of middle ground and thoughtfulness makes you appear like a teenage activist. Or a troll. Or an idiot. I suspect neither are correct.

[Mason89]

You’ve created a scenario there and filled in all the blanks to suit it. The extremist anti vaccine groups were already there long before Covid. Like I said, it was Christmas Day for them when it appeared. When people unsurprisingly started doing their own research, it was their shite they were reading for the most part. 
If everyone had did their bit instead of saying ‘well actually, I read on mumsnet that the local authority next door is opening their pub a week earlier &  it’s unfair that I should wear a mask in Morrisons as it’s against my civil liberties and I read that in Sweden schools are open and actually he NHS isn’t overworked because I saw a TikTok of some nurses dancing……..’ 

We all have our own individual experiences of COVID and for me, nothing rips my knitting more than people being drama queens about masks, vaccines etc while folk had to isolate and people downplaying it. It’s a bad flu, it’s only old people that died etc. 

On the subject of schooling, nobody is ever honest about it, so it’s not a debate worth having 

[RicoS321]

9 hours ago, TheDonbytheDee said:

My Brother went down the covid vaccine rabbit hole and is now a huge follower of Neil Oliver, as he tells us the things that Governments don't want us to know.

I think I've posted before, but he claims his leukemia was due to the Vaccine, but his issue was he had his cancer before the vaccine.

Unfortunately, Google has replaced common sense for a lot of people.

 

There is no such thing as common sense. Most of our lives are just led by where we're willing to set out our boundaries. Mason thinks it was "common sense" (or scientific) to ban people's children from school, the Scottish government didn't, for example. Our responses to things are ultimately just an amalgamation of external influences. Your brother's cancer diagnosis has probably shaken him to the degree that he requires something to blame, or a reason for it. I can't imagine the trauma that that particular situation would cause, and its not irrational to find use in the irrational. Our lives are filled with irrational beliefs. Our economic system is predicated on infinite, exponential, growth for example. To the extent that very intelligent, professional, people argue over "the economy" and GDP, and are pressed on such matters without qualification by seemingly intelligent interviewers. All engaged in a game who's only purpose is the game itself. Every single person sent to [often meaningless] work to satiate it. That's not common sense, is it? Everyone I speak to thinks that plastic recycling is common sense, but I think it's an extremely destructive practice that actively harms the environment by design, and can never work. Who's common sense is correct? To me, the science around climate change is common sense, but the solutions presented to us as common sense are anything but, and are in themselves a form of denialism. The point I'm labouring is that seemingly "obvious", common sense policies and ideas surround us on a daily basis un-scrutinised, and often not even open for scrutiny. In such an environment, it's almost impossible for there not to be conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. Everyone would have believed that there could be a trafficking ring at the very top of US society, but yet nobody believed it. At this point in our system's life, when it's creaking and visibly falling apart, it's anything but irrational to see conspiracy everywhere. It's a completely normal response. One person's vaccine conspiracy is another's trafficking or recycling conspiracy. 

[Mason89]

Why do you keep saying the Scottish government kept schools open? 

[RicoS321]

40 minutes ago, Mason89 said:

You’ve created a scenario there and filled in all the blanks to suit it. The extremist anti vaccine groups were already there long before Covid. Like I said, it was Christmas Day for them when it appeared. When people unsurprisingly started doing their own research, it was their shite they were reading for the most part. 
If everyone had did their bit instead of saying ‘well actually, I read on mumsnet that the local authority next door is opening their pub a week earlier &  it’s unfair that I should wear a mask in Morrisons as it’s against my civil liberties and I read that in Sweden schools are open and actually he NHS isn’t overworked because I saw a TikTok of some nurses dancing……..’ 

We all have our own individual experiences of COVID and for me, nothing rips my knitting more than people being drama queens about masks, vaccines etc while folk had to isolate and people downplaying it. It’s a bad flu, it’s only old people that died etc. 

On the subject of schooling, nobody is ever honest about it, so it’s not a debate worth having 

I'm well aware of those anti vax groups and people like Andrew Wakefield being welcomed with open arms and wallets long before COVID. If we were both aware of them, then why wasn't the Californian state? I'm not filling in blanks or creating scenarios, I'm describing what actually happened. The anti vaccine groups got a foothold that wasn't previously accessible and launched their nonsense into the stratosphere. Exactly the same would have happened in Scotland had we taken the "unscientific" approach of California (in reality both approaches were unscientific, they were social measures). Instead, we actually had a very speedy and very high uptake of vaccines. My only minor criticism of Scotland's (the UK really) approach is that when it became very evident that the vaccine would never be enough to control the spread of the virus, that the advice should have changed to reflect the policy in all subsequent years of COVID vaccination (take it if you want, akin to the flu shot). There was, in my opinion, in most countries, an attempt to conflate taking the COVID vaccine with taking the measles vaccine (as an example). There was an implication (in fact it was stated on off the ball, no less, by Leitchy) that a form of herd immunity could be attained, that was clearly not tested nor validated by any research or subsequent evidence anywhere in the world. 

[Mason89]

Does is matter if Jason Leitch was wrong though? There were clear benefits to vaccinating children, for them and for society as a whole. Parents refusing to doing so, for the most part werent weighing anything up. They were projecting their fears onto their children based on misinformation 

Now it’s open season and in some cases a complete cop out. There’s an anti vaxxer in my town who blames his 3 kids being a bit highly strung on the measles vaccine. You’ll know the type, a digital content creator who films himself in his car telling you how the world really works. There is zero evidence of the MMR jab being linked to this anywhere. What’s more likely is the fact he’s a fucking idiot, his wife is a fucking idiot, so the chances are that’s not going to skip a generation. Who’s to blame? Big Pharma. 

[Mason89]

Anyway, back on topic. 
 

Donald Trump is a nonce 

[Bukta Bertie]

The loon Hegseth. He's a real piece of work isn't he.

Rivalling Trump, Netanyahu and Badenoch for the 'Most Odious Individual in the World' trophy.

Who else remembers when Cock Sparrer used to sing "put 'em up against a wall and shoot 'em". Not sure why that tune came to mind. Totally unrelated. 

[RicoS321]

3 hours ago, Mason89 said:

Does is matter if Jason Leitch was wrong though? There were clear benefits to vaccinating children, for them and for society as a whole. Parents refusing to doing so, for the most part werent weighing anything up. They were projecting their fears onto their children based on misinformation 

Now it’s open season and in some cases a complete cop out. There’s an anti vaxxer in my town who blames his 3 kids being a bit highly strung on the measles vaccine. You’ll know the type, a digital content creator who films himself in his car telling you how the world really works. There is zero evidence of the MMR jab being linked to this anywhere. What’s more likely is the fact he’s a fucking idiot, his wife is a fucking idiot, so the chances are that’s not going to skip a generation. Who’s to blame? Big Pharma. 

There were not "clear benefits to children and society as a whole" though from a COVID vaccine. There were positives and negatives*. The positives were that 1 in every 200,000+ children would have been prevented from dying of COVID (and almost certainly have died from something else), and a larger but not significant number prevented from getting a debilitating illness. The negatives were the conflation of COVID vaccines with herd immunity vaccines such as measles, resulting in a reduction in uptake of those, along with a mistrust of vaccination more generally. I don't think Jason Leitch being wrong had a significant impact, no, hence Scotland's uptake of vaccines generally holding strong (with COVID shot at 2% among kids. I am one of the 90+% who have given their children all scheduled vaccines, which doesn't include COVID). 

The impact of California etc with their approach, has impacted the trust by allowing the extreme position a way in. We can see this with the significant reduction in overall vaccine uptake over there, and the spread of measles and such like that was previously largely dealt with. The guy in your town - aye, I do know the type - is almost certainly got a direct line to the states for all his vaccine news, and what your seeing is, in part, a result of unnecessarily authoritarian control by various states, and the subsequent backlash. There was no good science for that approach, it was a social engineering job, and the positives were outweighed by the negatives.

*I believe, genuinely, that the negatives of car travel outweigh the positives. The number of deaths, injuries, and permanent disabilities caused by cars is of an order of magnitude greater than that of COVID. I believe that there are clear benefits to children and society as a whole in ending the car as the primary form of transport. I'm aware that it would be a fucking ridiculous proposal though.

[Mason89]

I would disagree with all of that but you’re right about cars.
 

The vaccine didn’t prevent transmission but it certainly lowered the chances. Lessened the risk of long covid and reduced the severity of the symptoms. There was nothing to weigh up, no downside at all. You’re also putting teachers in a position. If I was one, I would’ve told them to ram it.
 

[RicoS321]

42 minutes ago, Mason89 said:

I would disagree with all of that but you’re right about cars.
 

The vaccine didn’t prevent transmission but it certainly lowered the chances. Lessened the risk of long covid and reduced the severity of the symptoms. There was nothing to weigh up, no downside at all. You’re also putting teachers in a position. If I was one, I would’ve told them to ram it.
 

Then I don't think you're as virtuous as your putting down of others would suggest.

You're right, vaccines didn't prevent transmission, that's the whole fucking point I've been making! Measles vaccines prevent transmission. You get 95% of the population vaccinated and you have protection, for everyone. Slowing transmission means that everyone that was going to get infected still gets infected (all other factors being equal), just within six months rather than three, for example. California's approach was exactly what you would do had you a vaccine that acted like measles. Your child and parents don't get the measles vaccine, then they can't come to school. Completely reasonable. That doesn't hold true for a vaccine that simply slows transmission, for very obvious reasons. That's because the California decision wasn't scientific, it was a failed attempt at social engineering. I guess we could dress it up as social science if it makes you feel better. By the time vaccination reached primary school children in Scotland, Omicron was well under way, and every single teacher at risk would have been vaccinated. You seem to be conflating two issues there which happened during COVID. Kids went back to school before vaccination was complete, so their vaccination was largely irrelevant by the time it would have come round. Teachers were put in a thankless position well before vaccination. 

[Don Julio]

6 hours ago, Mason89 said:

Does is matter if Jason Leitch was wrong though? There were clear benefits to vaccinating children, for them and for society as a whole. Parents refusing to doing so, for the most part werent weighing anything up. They were projecting their fears onto their children based on misinformation 

Now it’s open season and in some cases a complete cop out. There’s an anti vaxxer in my town who blames his 3 kids being a bit highly strung on the measles vaccine. You’ll know the type, a digital content creator who films himself in his car telling you how the world really works. There is zero evidence of the MMR jab being linked to this anywhere. What’s more likely is the fact he’s a fucking idiot, his wife is a fucking idiot, so the chances are that’s not going to skip a generation. Who’s to blame? Big Pharma. 

For once I disagree. There weren’t really clear benefits to vaccinating children, other than for their grandparents for instance. We vaccinated them to protect the rest of us. Isolated them to protect the rest of us. And we’re now seeing the price they paid.

Had I been the one making the decisions I might have done exactly the same. Hindsight is 20/20.

[Don Julio]

Rico will no doubt come along and point out the flaws in my argument!