Ok, let's see where you attempt to deal with the questions presented. For reference, here are the questions:
"Our "normal" has been "We don't want to make further sacrifices to save those lives" so I would like some details on where you draw the line? What steps should we take to save a thousand lives from preventable non-covid sickness each year? What about tens of thousands? If another lockdown, or significantly increased taxation, or draconian measures concerning civil liberties (tracking, fines or incarceration for leaving the house sick, etc) were to cut down on these preventable deaths, would you be OK with them? Or, what's the threshold for how many deaths starts to rile you from your complacency and gets you going as an advocate for significant social and civil action to prevent it? Are we willing to make a depressed economy a new normal if it saves a few thousand lives from influenza and other sicknesses? What about tens of thousands?"
Nope - just talking about your stance on the covid lockdowns and even a catchphrase, "common sense" thrown in there.
Oh good, an anecdotal story about you and your dog and your social distancing habits. I was hoping to hear one of these.
Now you're getting to the heart of the issue - the problem with the forum! That's the real problem here! But hey, at least you mention the flu - though it is in the context of "someone in the forum said this about the flu".... And? Could you perhaps transition that dastardly forum comment someone else made about the flu into giving some ballpark on the questions asked above? Or do you figure that mentioning "common sense" once while telling me about you and your dog is the level of specificity that will satisfy the questions asked? You have one paragraph left - maybe you'll give at least one of those questions a crack in there!
... Nope. Back to bitching about the real problem, the forum. I will say, whatever aversion you have to the term "nothingburger" this was one of the most evasively self indulgent nothingburgers of a 300 word response to direct questions I could have hoped to receive. The ironic thing was that the closest you came to actually dealing with anything asked was using a cathprhase "common sense" and start to subtly direct it towards your own partisan politics (I bet your reading comprehension improves after it failed you in noticing the multiple direct questions asked and you don't waste the opportunity to deny this!).
For someone whose routine is to step into these threads with a stern demeanor and soberly ask people to take this seriously, it kinda seems like you just use the uproar over all of this as an excuse to put out catchphrases and subtly steer things towards your own partisan agenda. I generally ignore your longwinded posts. I suspect this illustrates why.
This is impressively shitty post. I should have expected this, but for some reason I thought you were going to be reasonable. If you could write a coherent post that is not scattershot, it would be easier to recognize what questions you want answers to. I'm not going to write you a novel, so I gave a general response. Your questions were asinine, so I thought they were rhetorical.
For example:
What steps should we take to save a thousand lives from preventable non-covid sickness each year?
You mean like massive anti-smoking campaigns? Massive moves to improve nutritional guidelines and education? PE? Health classes? Massive funding for flu vaccinations, measles, chickenpox, etc? Massive research with funding in the billions for Cancer, Heart Disease, AIDS?
How the hell is somebody supposed to provide a thorough answer to such an exhaustive question? Lol. Yeah, we take enormous measures constantly that require enormous research funding and manpower. I support that. I'm not going to write you a novel on it.
If another lockdown, or significantly increased taxation, or draconian measures concerning civil liberties (tracking, fines or incarceration for leaving the house sick, etc) were to cut down on these preventable deaths, would you be OK with them?
Our taxes already go towards combating these issues, as evidenced by the $400 million project just signed off on to combat the Flu, and the trillions of dollars spent on various projects at the NIH. So yeah, I'm okay with tax money going to combat illnesses.
No, I would not okay with incarceration for leaving your house while sick. Great questions! Lol.
Or, what's the threshold for how many deaths starts to rile you from your complacency and gets you going as an advocate for significant social and civil action to prevent it? Are we willing to make a depressed economy a new normal if it saves a few thousand lives from influenza and other sicknesses? What about tens of thousands?
Proportionality. The more severe the issue, the more severe the response needs to be. Each situation needs to be measured individually to determine the options available and the risks involved. In the case of Covid, we knew there was the possibility for devastation, and there was an unpredictability due to it being a novel virus we were not all that familiar with. We were looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths without action, and we just crossed 100,000 even with the measures taken.
No, a permanently depressed economy is not necessary. Which is why we are already opening the economy across the country in steps. But a temporary effort to slow a pandemic while we learn more about the disease, how to combat the disease, our healthcare limits, how it affects different age groups, etc, is reasonable to me.
