We have sort of memory-holed this
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Back when people were actually thinking harder about statistics like this, which were bandied about back then, we were able to come to a rational conclusion that people dying with COVID should not equate, as a pure value proposition, with young men dying in war, or people dying in the WTC. It's a manipulative and sort of gross use of statistics, but not surprising from Alexander.
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COVID was a huge deal, sure, let's all agree. Alexander's use of that statistic, which was lowest common denominator messaging at the time, remains gross. I hope his self-righteousness gives him comfort as he lives with the backlash against that sort of hysteria mongering.
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You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
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You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
@Klaus said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
COVID was like 100,000 Columbine massacres.
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You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
I am sure everyone here knew or knew of someone (usually a senior) who died with COVID as opposed to directly from COVID.
I also recall that the culling effect” of COVID was applauded if not welcomed by at least one health care services bean counter.
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You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
@Klaus said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
Yeah, you can apply a discount factor but it’s still a big number. 250k were under 65. More military-age men died of Covid than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The latter gets mentioned. Not the former. He has a point.
Only non-witches get due process.
- Cotton Mather, Salem Massachusetts, 1692
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Apart from the deaths, there are plenty of people suffering with various after-effects, long Covid and what-have-you. I know quite a few people who've struggled.
I was only joking
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@Klaus said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
Yeah, you can apply a discount factor but it’s still a big number. 250k were under 65. More military-age men died of Covid than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The latter gets mentioned. Not the former. He has a point.
@jon-nyc said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
@Klaus said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
Yeah, you can apply a discount factor but it’s still a big number. 250k were under 65. More military-age men died of Covid than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The latter gets mentioned. Not the former. He has a point.
He's got a mouthful of cheap rhetoric, and no point beyond a number. The number of people who died with COVID. He wants people to draw an emotional equivalency between COVID and something that he thinks resonates more with them as a tragedy, and he deploys cheap rhetoric to do so.
"Nobody talks about the dead people", "people only talk about lab leak", this guy is obviously a deeply tribal rhetorician, and I get that it resonates, but count me out. It's tedious rhetorical hackery from a social influencer.
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By the way your misconception of Scott Alexander is on the order of @Jolly blowing off the Manhattan Institute because of the word ‘Manhattan’ in its name, despite the fact that Chistopher Rufo, Glenn Lowry, and Coleman Hughes all work there. Maybe you’ll get a more neutral exposure to him at some point.
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By the way your misconception of Scott Alexander is on the order of @Jolly blowing off the Manhattan Institute because of the word ‘Manhattan’ in its name, despite the fact that Chistopher Rufo, Glenn Lowry, and Coleman Hughes all work there. Maybe you’ll get a more neutral exposure to him at some point.
@jon-nyc said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
By the way your misconception of Scott Alexander is on the order of Jolly blowing off the Manhattan Institute because of the word ‘Manhattan’ despite the fact that Rufo, Lowry, and Coleman Hughes all work there. Maybe you get a lore neutral exposure to him at some point.
I knew you'd push back against my claims of him being deeply tribal, but there are micro-tribes, and he fits a pattern. It's ok. I believe you that your twitter feed never mentions COVID deaths. That has become the twitter reality, and Mr Alexander is deeply troubled by it.
he's right that the death toll of COVID is like 100,000 Columbine massacres. He is exactly right.
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I was being literal. I didn’t expect you to be convinced by my post, rather I hope you ‘discover’ him some day in a more emotionally neutral context.
@jon-nyc said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
I was being literal. I didn’t expect you to be convinced by my post, rather I hope you ‘discover’ him some day in a more emotionally neutral context.
I am not completely unfamiliar with him. In fact, you and I have discussed him here before, where his writings revealed him to easily slide into a contemptuous, snide mode against people who are probably a lot smarter and objectively more accomplished as intellectuals than he is. But that is neither here nor there. I am sure he is a very successful public intellectual influencer as these things go.
His rhetoric in this case, remains objectively cheap and emotionally manipulative, motivated by his perception that people aren't sad enough about COVID, and that they are too sad about certain aspects of the reaction. So he's going to do something about that. Voila, COVID is like 100,000 Columbine massacres. Well played, Mr Alexander.
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We’ve had this argument before. It will take at least a decades worth of excess death data to tell the tale.
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@jon-nyc said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
We already have decades of excess death data.
Not since 2020…
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@jon-nyc said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
We already have decades of excess death data.
Not since 2020…
@LuFins-Dad said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
@jon-nyc said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
We already have decades of excess death data.
Not since 2020…
Why can't we use the decades prior to 2020?
I was only joking
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@Klaus said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
Yeah, you can apply a discount factor but it’s still a big number. 250k were under 65. More military-age men died of Covid than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The latter gets mentioned. Not the former. He has a point.
@jon-nyc said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
@Klaus said in We have sort of memory-holed this:
You have to consider how many years of good life would most of those 1.2m have had without COVID? For some, it was really tragic. But for many, COVID was just the last push for a body that was close to death anyway.
Yeah, you can apply a discount factor but it’s still a big number. 250k were under 65. More military-age men died of Covid than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The latter gets mentioned. Not the former. He has a point.
True, but by this measure we have talked about 9/11 way too much.
Our attention differs by how a person dies. The death of a soldier or a fireman on duty, or a person dying from a terror attack, will always draw more attention than somebody silently dying in a hospital. Is that a good thing? I don't know. I think there is some reasonable logic behind it. What do you think?
