"I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not." Can you back that claim up? "Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior." Is the financial realities of scarcity, and the distribution of wealth resulting in potentially avoidable scarcities, that we all live under, not something that could be optimized? Are you not judging with your heart and blinding your brain to political/financial realities that are capital H Hard problems?
Needlessly politicizing a refusal to engage with science that doesn’t meet a pre-determined narrative of YOLOing freely to oblivion! How rude of me! Of course healthcare is political!
Risk mitigation whilst hospitals are at capacity? Nah, gotta live my life! Otherwise they might perceive me as weak-willed, and more important than my continued existence is to ensure I am not perceived as a weakling! Anything else is others being hysterical! Fuck doctors, am I right!
Willful missing of the point. Also not implying that the outcome is anything approaching a good outcome, just a grim Darwinian one, where thinking responding to covid in any way to improve life expectancies is just some sign of weakness. Our further atomization and slide towards a individualist society will leave us living shorter, less collaborative lives where we will try and treat cancer with a juice fast or some nonsense, instead of transforming our fundamental relationship to healthcare away from a not-for-profit one. But one is something a consumer can do, the other requires collective action, and that's only for the hysterical weaklings to dream of, so instead we will just virtue-signal our way towards dying at 30 on a bowflex machine after taking unregulated gym substances or whatever in a failed attempt to steel ourselves against our lack of societal fabric and collective ability to combat anything.
Flu season doesn't lead to insanely high excess death rates, and overwhelm hospital capacity, making things like biking now a much higher risk activity as any visit to a hospital due to a broken bone or something is far more likely to result in a lack of proper treatment. That we are in 2022 and still discussing this leads me to, very grimly, believe that we are in some period of hyper-darwinism, where this train of thought will only go away once the virus has incapacitated/killed those who seem to not understand what the word "excess deaths" means.
People are very quick to cry "someone should do something" when these extreme events happen. You offer the same people something, in the grand scheme of things fairly moderate like the Green New Deal, and they calcify back to their party affiliations. We're so doomed.
Enjoy the crime wave seems similarly inflammatory and impolite, but I find HN moderation frequently falls on a certain "if you say something rude/inflammatory but phrase it a certain way it's okay" which drives me up the wall.
I always am asked when I say we should reduce policing budgets, "have you ever needed police?" In my experience, they've always been either so late that myself and neighbours have had to get involved in breaking up a rape / other violent situations, or just completely useless when I've needed them for paperwork related stuff, i.e. credit card fraud. I think the police are asked to handle too many edge case situations, e.g. managing mentally ill populations, but are also grossly overpaid compared to other civil institutions, that if budgets were appropriately distributed, would lead to less of the issues police are required to intervene in. Also, among police put-maneuvering pregnant women, beating elderly bystanders just standing in Buffalo, or the myriad other documented instances of unnecessary police violence, there is a serious "bad apples spoil the bunch" issue in US policing due to the culture of other "innocent" officers backing their bad apples instead of weeding them out.
In any business, a department/team that isn't serving clients is usually re-evaluated, and budgets/resources re-allocated if they don't meet some performance plan. I don't see why bringing some business-world reasoning to policing in the US is so controversial, but I suspect that's more a framing thing of "defund the police" enflaming peoples emotions, as they get mad before reasoning.
No one in these situations ever talks about political capital. These shame based tactics arise from our powerlessness, as whether consciously or not, people who care about the environment realise that neither party, nor any private industry, will ultimately enact any true change on this front, so the only tool they have left is shaming. We are mired in plastic straws and twitter arguments purely because that is the only avenue left by those that actually hold the ability to change anything.
Those in lower socioeconomic classes are the ones I've known who've gotten it, mostly because they were forced to work in offices or some public facing role where they had to interact with a lot of people. There is a terror of small business owners who act like despotic lords of a fiefdom, that I find to be some of the worst actors in general.
Firing whistle-blowers is pretty egregious. If we can't try to fight for a better world after all this is over, what are we even doing besides just idly watching hundreds of thousands die?
There's a difference between holding diverging opinions, and defending someone who had sex with a sex trafficed minor, right? If we don't uphold at least that as a society, what are we?
Yet I find the discussion focusing on the meta level of the conversation medium, and not on the higher-order level of society in general, and how a paid collective of actors can overwhelm the power of the individual, to be disingenuous, and potentially a distractionary measure from the far more important conversation around the role of large corporations controlling narratives in our society. It reeks to me of the same debate-club nonsense, where someone can be arguing about some human atrocity, but the second someone makes some sort of named argumentative slip up, the conversation gets recentered completely on semantics or the medium of debate, completely destroying the discussion of the actual higher-order issue effecting the meta-connections between humans and the structures we deem permissible in governing us all...