Mask-Burning: The Ethics of Freedom

Density is one of the factors that should produce a higher rate (and density) of infection in Hawaii than in Idaho. There are several others - racial conflict, high rates of tourist and traveller and immigrant exposure, higher costs of importing stuff like medical supplies, higher rates of diagnosis and detection (Hawaii has superior medical care generally), the age structure of the population, and so forth.

And of course there's simple luck. Covid is largely (disproportionately) spread by just a few of the infected - that introduces a large stochastic component to the models.

Bottom line: all else accounted for, luck removed from the model, Hawaii should have a significantly higher rate of Covid infection than Idaho. The question is not why Hawaii has a high rate - Hawaii isn't an outlier in the US, given its circumstances. The question is why Idaho does.

 

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[#OwnTheLibs | #BecauseOfCourse]​

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Extraordinary conspiracism from John Nolte↱ of Breitbart:

Do you want to know why I think Howard Stern is going full-monster with his mockery of three fellow human beings who died of the coronavirus? Because leftists like Stern and CNNLOL and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated.

Nothing else makes sense to me.

In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?

If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I'm never getting vaccinated!​

And, no, he's not joking. Well, okay, this is Breitbart, after all, so, yeah, whatever; Nolte continues:

And why is that a perfectly human response? Because no one ever wants to feel like they are being bullied or ridiculed or mocked or pushed into doing anything.

Who wants to cave to piece of shit like Howard Stern (or Jimmy Kimmel or these repulsive doctors refusing to treat the unvaccinated or Bette Midler or, or, or…) Who wants to feel like they're caving to a guy who's such a piece of shit he publicly mocks people who have died. And he's not just a piece of shit mocking them; he's a piece of shit hurting the families the dead men left behind.

No one wants to cave to a piece of shit like that, or a scumbag like Fauci, or any of the scumbags at CNNLOL, so we don't. And what's the result? They're all vaccinated, and we're not! And when you look at the numbers, the only numbers that matter, which is who's dying, it's overwhelmingly the unvaccinated who are dying, and they have just manipulated millions of their political enemies into the unvaccinated camp ....

.... Could it be…? Could it possibly be that the left has manipulated huge swathes of Trump voters into believing they are owning the left by not taking the life-saving Trump Vaccine?​

And the answer, of course: No, not really; y'all did that to yourselves.
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Notes:

Nolte, John. "Nolte: Howard Stern Proves Democrats Want Unvaccinated Trump Voters Dead". Breitbart.com. 10 September 2021. Web.Archive.org. 20 September 2021. https://bit.ly/3ArPXcZ

 

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Well... most of the covid-deniers ive seen interviewed are Dumer-than-Dirt... an while grinnin like a mule eatin briers -- proclaim that ther trust in the Lord will see them through.!!!

They do prove to be teechable tho... as most of 'em on ther covid death-bed finally wish they had taken the vaccine.!!!

That bein said... i do give some of 'em a bit of credit for doin ther best to be science minded as they continue ther covid vaccine research usin FaceBook an Fox News

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Mayb John Nolte has a pont... that the Trumper-Snowflakes just need ther hand held

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I'll go with the short form, today; there's history to this one: We must prepare ourselves for the prospect of societal reconciliation demanding that (A) Trump followers and other conservatives are not culpable according to liberal belief in insanity defenses; (B) this requires liberals to simply let it all pass according to an old conservative myth about liberal theses on crime and punishment.

If that seems a bit abstract, it's kind of like the old hyperbole about how liberals hate crime victims and don't want to punish criminals; the way that works is that since liberals refuse to execute the noncompetent, they must not want to punish any criminals at all.

It's that last part conservatives have really screwed up. But it comes around, in its way, because noncompetency might well be the only excuse, as such, they leave themselves.

It's something I hear woven into masculinist and antisocial narratives. We all have some sort of "if only", a recognition of our frailty somehow distinctly instilled by society (i.e., externally) but avoidable "if only", and the construction usually observes an external failure that would significantly affect an internal result. Sometimes it's as simple as, if only someone had said it that way twenty years ago.

Actually, it's a long post that can wait, but we ought not be surprised to encounter this variation on the Covidist Right; its emergence is nearly inevitable. The short form, there, is that it will always be somebody else's fault for failing to find a way to stop them.

I think of an anime version of the lamentation, except the scene doesn't actually make sense that way. Never mind, it has to do with how the story went. Still, with this rightist crowd, when we are called upon to answer for this part, the answer will be that if nobody came to save them, it is because nobody could figure out how to save them from themselves.

And, because I am of that generation, it must be stated explicitly: No, curbstomping would not be considered saving or helping them, even if they will eventually blame us for not literally kicking some sense into them. When they want to know why we didn't stop them, we can reasonably respond by calmly asking just how they think we should have done that.

Spoiler

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So a higher percentage of "suspicious" in a higher density state, that has mask and vaccine mandates, rivals the "hesitant" is a lower density states without any mask/vaccine mandates?
You sure it's not the visitors?

The Latest: Hawaii gov seeks to limit visits to the islands​

Or as in every country and state, covid just ends up taking the same course, with protective measures only delaying the inevitable?

 

We know that's not the case.
For example, vaccinated people don't die nearly as frequently as unvaccinated people even when the vaccine doesn't take and they catch the virus. Not only do they survive more often, but they don't get as sick (so they don't wreck the medical care infrastructure, which saves even more lives than their own), and they don't suffer long term affliction as often or as severely (saving their relatives and then local taxpayers and medical personnel and so forth).

It probably is the visitors, plus the racial factors of course. And no doubt the military presence brings extra risk as it has with most plagues.
So? Those are known factors, which marked Hawaii as endangered from the very earliest days of the plague. It's doing better than was feared, statistically - which some have noted is quite possibly a benefit of their more competent and better prepared system. Unlike in most US. States the penalty for seeking medical care early, when symptoms are mild and the severity not yet manifest, is low and limited in Hawaii. That is life-saving in the early stages of a respiratory plague, when people facing thousands of dollars in potential medical bills even if they weren't sick are likely to delay seeing a doc until they're sure - and by then it's too late.

Again: Hawaii is not the mystery in this comparison - the disease there is tracking as expected. The mystery is Idaho, which demographically and geographically and circumstantially should be one of the least afflicted States but is instead getting hit almost as hard as Hawaii.

And not just Idaho. The lefty fact-chasers have made a sort of dark game out of comparing US States with countries that have First World medical care systems - States like South Dakota, for example, lightly populated and demographically youthful and adequately fed etc, with countries like South Korea and its dense, aging, vulnerable population right on the Chinese/NK border. What would you predict? What would you expect?

Side note: A few years ago the stats pros ran an outcome after diagnosis comparison between all 34 of the countries with First World medical care systems - the US ranked 34th (dead last) with ordinary assumptions of statistical reliability, and 32nd or 33rd with assumptions made in favor of the US. I kept a copy, and just now took another look at it: turns out that ranking would have made a reasonably good predictor of the spread and severity of Covid. Again: the US came in dead last - and it's not going to lose that rank any time soon. The US has a firm grip on the title of "least effective Covid response in the industrialized world" - not only in comparison with its expenditures and available expertise, but in absolute terms: dollar for dollar and death for death, the US has the Covid stats of a second or third world country - an average one (the better ones are in a different league). (We've even had teams from Doctors Without Borders and similar organizations, helping us out in the areas where we're getting overwhelmed.)

Remember when US nurses and doctors at top-ranked hospitals were dressing in duck-taped garbage bags for isolation and rigging splits in single patient oxygen feeds to allow two patients to breathe on one pump? People died because of that.