Lord Ratner

Rather fitting username...

No. Now that it has been adequately shown that vaccination does not meaningfully impact transmission, no mandates of any kind are justified in my opinion. Private organizations are free to do as they see fit, and to a lesser extent so are states, but the federal government should excuse themselves from any further decision making.

You're failing to look at the numbers. Unbridled libertarianism implies that if only three people out of 300 million want it, then they should get it. This issue is nowhere near that imbalance. You have a pretty even split across the country of people who are pro-mandates and people who are against. Even if that split was only 33/66, you would not be anywhere near approaching the threshold for "unbridled." In the case of a pandemic, an easy threshold to use would be what people are doing on their own. People didn't need to be harassed to stay at home and wear masks back in March of 2020. The streets were empty and the masks were sold out. Yeah, you had a fringe element that had no interest in participating in any measures, but that was not representative of any meaningful portion of the population. Two weeks to stop the spread had wide bipartisan buy-in. There's your threshold for a mandate. Now, many months after those two agreed upon weeks, we have a very different debate with a very different split. Again, you are falling into the trap of choosing your belief and interpreting it was "right." Our system is designed to take these controversial topics with no clear majority (and thus no "right" answer) and put them into stasis until the natural process of societal evolution determines and outcome. Relying on the power of the state to predetermine society's decision is, and always will be, a recipe for disaster. In fact there are very few cases that call for such measures, and one could argue that the abolition of slavery might have been the only one in American history. Even then, there's a compelling argument that the tide was already turning in a very dramatic fashion, and hundreds of thousands of lives and many decades of strife could have been avoided with a little bit of patience. The obvious and understandable counter to that is one cannot have patience in regards to a matter as morally abhorrent as slavery. I lean towards the latter, but I understand the former. But the civil rights movement, women's right to vote, and gay rights in America were all politically fought well after the public perception had changed. 1% of the population that was already well within the acceptable range for "dying of old age" is not by any stretch of the imagination ad issue comparable to slavery, so no, it is absolutely not worth sacrificing liberty for those deaths. Call me when it's a bunch of kids dying.

Don't take this to be patronizing, because it's not meant to be. You've more than proven yourself as a good faith debater. People wildly misunderstand the benefit of individual freedom. In this case, your post points it out perfectly. Often the false choice is given between, in this case, people refusing vaccination out of spite, and those same people getting vaccinated without any spite. I'll point out that spiteful people were very much present in the golden age, and in all likelihood they represented a larger percentage of the population. But that's not how people work. The people who would refuse to get the vaccine out of spite will get the vaccine if they're forced to, but it's not going to remove the spite. And that spite isn't just going to dissolve, it will be redirected and in all likelihood amplified. The reason we have individual freedom is because people are flawed; you can't make them altruistic, but you can recognize that when left to their own devices, they often act in a predictable and largely beneficent manner. Start telling people what to do, and you run head first into many, many, many different wants and needs of a very diverse society, and inevitably you are unable to fulfill their desires in the way they would if left to their own devices. Now you end up taking a very mildly spiteful person, or perhaps a person who's not spiteful at all, and you and engender a much greater level of spite in them. People don't like being told what to do. And they really hate when you tell them what to do with their families. This, and only this is why socialism/totalitarianism ultimately fails. We don't let people do what they want because people make the right decisions. People make the wrong decisions all the time. We give them freedom because people who are not free to make the wrong decisions tend to make much much worse decisions when their liberty is restricted. This is also why the perpetrators of totalitarianism are often quite intelligent. Intelligent people see what actions, taken collectively, would produce the most human flourishing. When they run head first into less intelligent stubborn people, it drives them mad because they see what can be while others do not. But their attempts to trade Liberty for Paradise always fail. This also ignores the history of very intelligent people failing to follow their own logical, common-good edicts. Turns out even the leaders don't tend to like the prescriptions for a utopian society. This is why people like me, fully vaccinated, support those who choose not to. Not because I give a shit about what they think about vaccines, but because I want to live in a society where most people act mostly good. And that doesn't happen when people no longer feel in control of their destiny. Cherry picking the one issue that you care more about than they do and characterizing their decision as being an asshole is disingenuous. The totality of their decisions are almost certainly largely in line with a society that promotes human flourishing. But they're not going to align 100%. Falling into the trap of thinking that someone who disagrees with you on one issue should be characterized as an asshole because of it is, simply put, being an asshole yourself. And if you're ignorant enough (I don't think you are) to think that half of the population are assholes and you just happen to be on the team of good people, then a few steps back might be required to recalibrate your perception of both "sides."

Here's the screenshot it blocks the menu

There it is, the overstep. Definitely a troll. You had me for a while, well done 😂🤣

I find those who have difficulty understanding the convictions of others rarely have particularly meaningful convictions of their own. So he probably won't.

My mistake, I thought we were in a thread talking about COVID mandates. If I knew we were going to quibble over context-free interpretations of my post, I would have made it simpler to follow for you.

I don't have to, we have a pandemic that tested the theory for us. We also have countries and states with vastly different vaccination rates and preventing policies and guess what, the spread doesn't correlate. Univariate analysis works in a petri dish, not a society. Two weeks to stop the spread. Masks. Six feet spacing. Pre-travel testing. Vaccines. And according to the figurehead of the American effort, the plan until only recently was to "beat" COVID. Not slow it down, beat it. Do I need to Google the many times he claimed we needed to get to effectively zero cases before we can be humans again? I'll take my cursory understanding of human nature over your cursory understanding of growth dynamics any day. And what was even better, the self righteous pricks (like some in this very thread) who screamed the loudest about the callous disregard for human life and the raw selfishness of those who just wanted to accept COVID, maintain individual freedom, and move on with life, those "leaders" were caught in hair salons, destination weddings, expensive restaurants, public parks, Thanksgiving dinners, and ask manner of other normal human activities at the exact time they were being us for wanting the same. Math is great, but when 2+2=5 maybe you should take another look at the assumptions.

Correct, butt the actual delta matters. For example, a lot of medical studies talk about risk of rare diseases tripling, but it's from .06% to .19% Going from 38% to 25% is not going to have an effect on the outcome of a highly infectious disease.

Some strange banner ads are back. I'll see if I can get a screenshot

It's astounding people have been tricked into a risk management philosophy for COVID that they do not apply to any other aspects of their life.

Per studies already cited in this thread, the effectiveness of stopping the spread tapers off after about 4 months, depending on the variant it goes as low as completely ineffective, or somewhere around 10% more effective. If that's your standard for a mandate, then I think you're just the type of guy who loves being told what to do.

Ok. So why should a <21 get the shot then, if they don't want to? Again, it does not meaningfully stop spread. So... Why mandate it?

Do you though?

Tell me you've never been involved in a legal battle without telling me you've never been involved in a legal battle

As long as you also admit that the entire decision to mandate the vaccinations is equally political, I'll accept your premise. But if you think the mandates are somehow apolitical (justified using illogical reasons that don't hold up to reality) while those against the mandate are political (justifying their stance using illogical reasons that don't hold up to reality), then I'd say you are throwing some pretty big stones from a glass house. And with omicron, the mandates got even sillier.

No, you've actually been quite helpful in demonstrating that no amount of scientific evidence or reality is going to change California's mind, so why should the rest of us suffer? In the hopes that they'll stick to whatever new reopening metric they invent and subsequently disregard? If they fuck their ports up enough, it'll just cause new ports to spring up elsewhere. I'm sure Mexico would love the port business, and you can drive trucks from Mexico straight into Texas. Remember, the business interests that made California an economic powerhouse were born of a much more conservative governance. Stray too far from that and the business will (continue to) leave.

This is rather ironic to come from someone who believes in mandates, if I understand your position correctly. I'm a huge fan of the states' rights concept, so if California wants to lock down forever, more power to them. But mandating citizens in Texas wear masks or get vaccinated because California politicians have terrified their population is retarded. And anti-American.

If you live in a red state you'd know that commerce needs no such encouragement. People are uncomfortable because they are being told they should be. In the places where they aren't being frightened they are back to regular life. This stopped being about disease spread a year ago.

You completely ignored the study I posted, which is undisputed, that shows almost no infection prevention after a few months. Infection ≠ Serious hospitalization or death, which is reduced by the vaccine. But it doesn't reduce the spread for more than a few months, which means mandates are unjustified. But you're just trolling at this point, so carry on.

We need to get away from this idea of "what party you will vote for in the future." If you look at the electoral college in the past, presidents from both sides won overwhelming majorities of the country, and the states swung from left to right like a pendulum. We need to go back to that. There should be no Democratic or Republican voters. Those are teams. There are certainly liberal-minded and conservative-minded people, but those people should make a decision on which politicians and which parties represent their priorities at the moment they cast a vote, and just like those priorities change regularly and in response to the world around us, so too should the people you vote for each election. I know you aren't advocating for party loyalty, but I think we're at a point where even the language we use to describe politics is inadvertently reinforcing the notion that each of us belongs to a political team, and the voting trends support this notion.

*On the internet.

@pawnman, focusing on mandates specifically, how much do you feel they need to reduce the spread to justify a mandate (outside of the military)? A few posts back I posted the research showing minimal effect on spread. To be clear, I'm not arguing about hospitalizations or death. Clearly the vaccine works to reduce that. But it's that justification for a mandate?

Yup. Expect this story to disappear from the national coverage. But it'll get (R)s elected in WI.