No, you really don’t. The accurate figure is not 25,000 either. I rounded up. Did that matter? No.
You don’t need accuracy, you need relevance. 25,000 dead people is as relevant as 25,000 dead children.
If it were not relevant you’d be arguing that instead of relying on petty nitpicking.
Yes. Because that’s the important issue here. Their age.
Of course I read it. My comment is about the self-centered narcissistic navel-gazing of the modern left which is leaving mass victims of poverty out in the cold. Of which this is an example.
The hate crime issue is of course important, the poor victim of course has been massively wronged. The issue (and the purpose of this report) is with the complaint that this ‘deserved’ some front page treatment in way other deaths (by the thousands) don’t.
There’s only one front page to a newspaper and not everyone can be on it, so every claim that an issue should get more attention is a claim that some competing issue should get less.
Presumably, no one’s suggesting the local papers all ran with big blank spaces where the story could have gone. They reported something else instead. So this is a claim that that something else should be kicked out and replaced with this.
In reality, that something else was probably some fucking Costco advert, but the thing it should have been replaced with is the continued mass starvation of thousands, or the genocide, or the hundreds dying homeless. There are bigger problems.
Yeah. About 25,000 children died from starvation on the same day too. No one reported that either.
If you can’t tell the difference between driving a man to suicide and claiming a man ought be beyond all criticism then I doubt we have much to talk about.
My response was a push back against the idea the the Republican party were on some uniquely unprecedented witch hunt. These things have been going on since McCarthy and further. Fauci knew what he was signing up for and willingly took the job.
He behaved in a way not suited to his office (in obfuscating about the origins), that was deserving of reprimand and he is so being reprimanded.
It has nothing to do with his other policies, nor is he magically exculpated from all wrongdoing because he made a few mundanely correct decisions.
He’s just a civil servant. He gets plauded when he does right, and faces consequences when he does wrong. Just like every other civil servant in the world should. Most of the time he just does his job.
It’s not complicated.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/critical-thinking
noun
the process of thinking carefully about a subject or idea, without allowing feelings or opinions to affect you
We can just work with the standard definition.
Start with the process. What rational process gets you from ‘awful things happened during Covid’ to ‘The health minister at the time cannot be criticised’?
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The downvotes are par for the course, if I was interested in a popularity contest I wouldn’t have commented on a thread about Fauci!
You’re right on lockdowns. The jury is out, but most seem to think them a mistake, or mistakenly applied.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0261759
According to our estimates, the policy intervention saved 866,350–1,711,150 lives (4,886,214–9,650,886 quality-adjusted life-years), while mortality attributable to the economic downturn was 57,922–245,055 lives (2,093,811–8,858,444 life-years). We conclude that the number of lives saved by the spring-summer lockdowns and other COVID-19-mitigation was greater than the number of lives potentially lost due to the economic downturn. However, the net impact on quality-adjusted life expectancy is ambiguous
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/15/9295
The comparative analysis of different countries showed that the assumption of lockdowns’ effectiveness cannot be supported by evidence—neither regarding the present COVID-19 pandemic, nor regarding the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu and other less-severe pandemics in the past. The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save. It is suggested therefore that a thorough cost-benefit analysis should be performed before imposing any lockdown for either COVID-19 or any future pandemic.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.625778/full
a cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 finds that lockdowns are far more harmful to public health (at least 5–10 times so in terms of wellbeing years) than COVID-19 can be.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3782395
Biomedical evidence from the early months of the pandemic suggests that lockdowns were associated with a reduced viral reproductive rate, but that less restrictive measures also had a similar effect. Lockdowns are associated with reduced mortality in epidemiological modelling studies but not in studies based on empirical data from the Covid-19 pandemic. Psychological research supports the proposition that lengthy lockdowns may exacerbate stressors such as social isolation and unemployment that have been shown to be strong predictors of falling ill if exposed to a respiratory virus. Studies at the economic level of analysis points to the possibility that deaths associated with economic harms or underfunding of other health issues may outweigh the deaths that lockdowns save, and that the extremely high financial cost of lockdowns may have negative implications for overall population health in terms of diminished resources for treating other conditions.
Good point. Give me an example of critical thinking then.
Let’s use the exact topic as a springboard seeing as we’re on it.
Proposition A: A nurse complains about how horrible her experience of Covid was because of all the death and suffering… Conclusion B: So no-one should criticise Dr Fauci.
Talk me through the critical thinking that makes proposition A lead to conclusion B.
Or, with Covid itself…
Proposition: A government spokesman says I ought do X to prevent a virus from spreading. Conclusion: therefore I ought to do X
Talk me through the application of ‘critical thinking skills’ in that analysis.
I suspect we might be talking at cross purposes, as you may be using the new meaning of ‘critical thinking’, which is roughly ‘beleive everything The Atlantic tells me’.
Sure. But there are also some scientists who think the lockdown didn’t work, or only work really fast and hard. Or only work in dense populations but are useless in sparse ones. The Democrats don’t have a monopoly on truth, they’re not omniscient. They just had a different idea of how they wanted to respond based (like every other politician) on what they thought would sell well to their electorate.
Who knows what they word have actually done in power. I hate to break it to you, but politicians lie - it’s kind of their job.
I think a lot of it came from the impact of social media algorithms driving people into increasingly polarised groups such that to prove you weren’t in ‘their’ group you had to fervently believe the exact opposite of everything ‘they’ believed.
Politicians, being politicians, jumped on that and pinned their flags to one group or the other. Meanwhile, health institutions and scientists, not, as you say, magically immune from the influences the rest of us are under, did the same.
But my point is really that they all still just did their job under those circumstances. Not as saints, not as evil masterminds, but as biased, ideologically-blinded, rash, stressed-out, fucked-up, and disillusioned ordinary people. Just like the rest of us.
And some of the ideas coming out of that are going to be fine, some are going to be harmless but annoying, and a few are going to be properly crap. That’s how the world is.
What’s crazy is seeing everything as black and white.
And on your last point. Scientists did come out and question many of Fauci’s policies. They were removed from social media and in many cases fired.
It’s easy to claim majority support when you silence opposing voices.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4
Exactly. That’s his job and he did it. That’s it.
As to the obfuscation. He went on the Newt Gingrich podcast and said the idea of a lab origin was a conspiracy theory without any scientific basis eight days after a meeting he had with top scientists at which the majority were of the opinion that it probably was. In what way is that ‘not stating something as fact when it’s uncertain’?
He’d just come from a meeting where he’d been told it was uncertain, and he stated publicly that believing it amounted to conspiracy theory.
I can’t understand why people defend the man. I can’t understand why anyone would particularly hate him either. He’s just a normal political appointee.
Again, he chose a job in the public eye. He wasn’t drafted in. And he literally wrote in his diary that he was enjoying the attention.
Politicians trying to make appointees look bad is standard practice. David Kelly was literally driven to suicide by the pressure to relent over Iraq.
As above. This was a global crisis. The issues were not caused by the Republican party, nor by the Democrats, nor by anyone even in America! I know… Imagine a thing happening that isn’t directly to do with America!
A nasty virus spread throughout the world. Governments and scientists didn’t know what to do. They rushed to make policies to deal with it, within the crappy, corrupt political systems that all countries have. Most came up with a mostly crappy response, mostly dictated by corporate lobbies and electioneering, like every other policy they’ve ever come up with. Lots of people died. Lots more than would have if everything had been done perfectly, but we don’t live in such a world and we would no more have if the Democrats were in charge.
Again, this is normal. All bureaucrats were under immense pressure, it was an unprecedented situation. He faced no personal consequences whatsoever for the unpopularity of his policies and wrote in his diary how pleased he was about the positive attention he was getting. He wasn’t drafted in, he chose a highly public-facing, political appointment.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Standard political appointee willing to hold a highly public position. A mildly narcissistic pen-pusher.
But the key thing here is not Fauci’s character, it’s the fact that none of the terrible things the nurse mentioned had anything to do with him. He didn’t personally do anything to prevent them, he didn’t come up with any ideas, he didn’t ‘fight the system’ to get some concession that no one else wanted. He just followed advice, and he didn’t even do that as well as others did.
What’s any of that got to do with Dr Fauci? Covid was a global crisis managed by thousands of health policy bureaucrats across the world.
On policy, Fauci did pretty much the same as the rest of them which is follow advice from official organisations like the WHO. He didn’t save the world by coming up with some crazy idea which ‘might just work…’ like the final scenes in a Hollywood film. He’s just took the advice of the agencies whose job it was to provide it, and then relayed that advice to his staff.
Where there was uncertainty about best practice he didn’t even do particularly well, nor particularly badly either, both of which, of course can only be judged in hindsight. America’s experience policy-wise was about middling.
He certainly obfuscated more than was helpful about the likely origins, which doesn’t make him a great person, but I’m not sure that made any difference to the course of the pandemic.
Anyone whose overall assessment of Fauci is anything other than ‘meh’ needs to spend half a day with Médecins Sans Frontières and see want real heroes look like.
Well, insomnia seems to do you good, that was an interesting and measured post, which is a rarity.
I think I agree with most of what you say, which is unfortunately going to make my post far more boring than yours deserves in response.
I feel similarly about Anonymous but for my cynicism about their capabilities making me perhaps a little less concerned about their lack of structure. Their actions amuse me solely because they tend to be aimed at institutions who deserve to be rattled. I don’t imagine them taking Barclay’s down, but it would give me a wry smile if their websites went down for a day.
Likewise disillusioned with the left (though I suspect maybe resulting from different experiences). I’m what might be called the old left - unions, environmentalism, welfare. It saddens me to see so much individualism dominate the modern left and I blame that for our lack of collective action. Far too much concern about themselves to think much about others. I’m not saying my generation were martyrs, but we got on fucking boats and sailed in front of whaling harpoons. We didn’t whinge about our feelings, then throw a street party and call it activism.
Anyway, rant over. I too am old and tired, and probably far more curmudgeonly than is healthy.
So, yes, maybe structure is key, it stops any Tom, Dick, or Harry from deciding their neighbour is a fascist because he didn’t give the lawnmower back and therefore is the justified recipient of violent counteraction. But, as above, I’m not sure I even trust structures anymore.
I joined a few days ago. I’ve posted about a number of issues, all on a similar being (the loss of effective action through a reversion to performative activism).
It pretty much the only topic I’m interested in posting on.
As such, I’m unlikely (even given time) to have said this about a cisgender person because cisgender activism is not one of the issues affected by such changes.
I don’t go around balancing my comments by identity. I don’t think “oh, my last comment criticised a woman, I’d best make sure I criticise a man next”. That is exactly the type of performative activism I’m opposing here. Waste of time. Doesn’t actually help anyone who’s seriously suffering.
If we want to help prevent another such particular poor victim we’d be better off adding our voices to the already large campaign against gun violence in general.