Lord Ratner

I think we just bought 8 lbs of butter at Costco today. My wife likes to say it helps you maintain a glossy coat 😂🤣. But partially hydrogenated oils are fantastic for making shelf-stable treats, which is why damn near everything had them. Turns out it's one of the few dietary studies that is actually recreateable... PHOs are just bad news. Be that as it may, they are nearly extinct despite then being legal. The market is often capable of doing what done tell us only government can accomplish.

Yes, but partially hydrogenated oils are also on their way out, and those are f'n delicious.

And yet, without any law, HFCS is rapidly becoming a relic of the past. Good post.

Depends on the vaccine and the affected group. For example, measles is really bad news for small children, and they can't just get the vaccine early enough to avoid it. Vaccination for measles unquestionably stops transmission, so in that case herd immunity and mandatory vaccinations is a justified goal. But I've never been against all vaccine requirements, just the ones that aren't logically it scientifically justified. Similarly with inspections. Would a reasonable person taking reasonable precautions be at risk of irreversible damage without the inspection process? That can be justified, and obviously drugs fall into that category. But hair stylists should not have inspection/certification, because a bad haircut or a nicked ear is not irreparable harm.

You can't take the minimum percentage for a group of people and cite that as the percentage. The statistic was that people over the age of 70, as a group, experience a 4% fatality rate per year. That means that some significant portion of that group is going to experience a lower fatality rate, well another portion experiences a higher rate. He didn't say "people above the age of 70 have a rate of death within their one year age range of 4% or greater. People over 70 is the group. You have to take the mortality rate of the whole group. Using your own citation, at 60 years old you already have a probability of death of 1.1%. so in this case I think you are misreading the statistics.

That's not how averages work...

No dude, it's like asking "when is it okay to lock all the Japanese citizens up on internment camps." Besides, I already have an example of a plausible metric. While hospitals are out of beds. But the entire point of our system, which works better than any other, is that *no one* gets to arbitrarily choose the metric. When you let people decide for themselves, they generally decide correctly. To imply otherwise is to deny a few hundred years of post-enlightenment human flourishing. How quickly we lapse back into centralized control as a means to solve our problems. And look, we tried it again and it failed. But I'm supposed to accept a faulty premise or it's "black and white" thinking? Nah.

Even the framing of your question is wrong. It implies that people can't take care of themselves. They can, and they do all the time. In fact anybody who's involved in the government is we are should be see me aware that the government is largely incapable of accomplishing anything on a grand scale. It's not just an argument of Liberty, it's an argument of Lost causes. And sacrificing Liberty for a lost cause is a double whammy.

Actually it's very easy for me. No mandates. I do not believe they work, because humans don't work that way. If the mortality rate is sufficient to justify a lockdown, the society will lock down on their own. Again, and to be crystal clear, it has nothing to do with what makes the most sense. It has to do with what is possible, and it is not possible to lock down a population of humans without a true threat. And this was not a true threat. Do I wish that humans were more rational? Not really. I accept humanity for what it is and I am continually amazed triumphs. Those who spend their days lamenting the shortcomings of our species are fantastically myopic. As for mortality rates, I find them equally uncompelling. Which old people are you considering? How about the millions of people over 60 that have no interest in lockdowns, or being protected against their will? There are perfectly acceptable ways to protect yourself from the vaccine that do not require everybody else to stop going to TJ Maxx, or getting a shot they don't want. Since, as you well know, the vaccine does not stop the spread, exactly what is the mandate accomplishing? I think there is at least a debatable premise pre-vaccine, but once the vaccine exists and is accessible, we go back to letting people make their own decisions. Two weeks to stop the spread was reasonable. It would have been equally reasonable to say "we will lock down until there are available hospital beds." But we have had available hospital beds now for over a year. So no, it's not particularly hard at all to come up with a reasonable metric. But the time for reasonable metrics passed over a year ago. Everything we're doing now has nothing to do with the disease and everything to do with a battle of ideologies.

Which implies that the flu has always existed at the literal edge of contagions that require a federally-mandated response. I doubt most Americans would have accepted that characterization of the flu before everything became a political battle. But that would at least be *something.* We have been given nothing.

So, just so I know what we're actually arguing about, does anybody still support mandates? Not the military, because if I learned one thing in the military it's that the senior leaders are either morons, or "good dudes" who aren't willing to fall on their swords because they're lying to themselves about how bad they want the next promotion. Let's just focus on mandates for the general population. If I had been granted godlike powers I couldn't have made a more hilarious evolution, going from Alpha to Delta, which effectively negated the benefits of mandates, seeing that the Delta evolution wasn't enough to convince the disciplinarians that mandates weren't enough, so then we get omicron, which is fantastically contagious regardless of your vaccination status. Yet still people are arguing for mandates? Just tell me what the mandate is supposed to accomplish, *and* the minimum statistical improvement in that metric for you to feel like compelled action is justified. I asked this question since the beginning of the pandemic, and none of the "pro-mandate" crowd has ever answered it. What is the metric for when this shit is over? What is the limiting principle? Fauci said that we might never stop wearing masks on planes. Are people so wedded to their tribe now that they can't see the insanity of even considering that possibility?

I always hated this line from atheists, and I'm atheist. You can't simultaneously argue that religion is just a human construct that doesn't reflect reality, while pinning the overwhelming majority of human evil on religion. If you can't specify which religion is the most evil, then you aren't making a statement at all. The only logically consistent position for an atheist is to explain religion as a normal and (so far) inescapable desire for humans to put faith in something. But if God doesn't exist, then "religion" describes no group with any meaningful borders. It's like saying sadness is the greatest source of evil, or greed, or jealously. No. Humans are the greatest source of evil. And I'm pretty sure the communists have the record for most fatalities in the modern era, so your point is both logically and factually wrong. The overwhelming amount of charity work has come from religious groups. So is religion the greatest source of good in the history of humanity? It's always curious when atheists create a replacement for religion that looks a whole lot like religion, in their pursuit of stamping out religion.

Careful with stats. Every year 4% of that demographic dies. And it's a mathematical certainty that there is significant overlap of the 4% and the 1%.

Your failure to adequately research medical developments before joining is your fault. Period. So you made an agreement regarding all previously-existing vaccines, regardless of how they were developed. COVID has plenty of considerations that are new, and I support those who dissent to the new considerations, but "deliberately undo and hinder my God given natural cellular processes" is not at all a medically consistent statement if you take *any* medications. If that's not what you really meant, then put some more effort into what you post before getting self righteous. You (as a group) don't have many allies left, so maybe don't alienate them when they point out a bad argument.

Which part? Doesn't matter for COVID, or doesn't matter for anything? Religious accommodations are not granted for many medical things, regardless of sincere beliefs. Your option is to not join. COVID is new, so there are new considerations. But if your sincere beliefs regarding COVID vaccination aren't logically consistent with other medical decisions you've made as a military member pre-COVID, then they aren't sincere beliefs, are they? Don't lose the moral high ground by being reflexively anti-everything.

Yeah, I'm not sure "deliberately undo and hinder my God given natural cellular processes" jives with taking *any* medication. Definitely a bridge too far, and inconsistent with any COVID-only objections I tend to support.

Mo Amer has a great skit in his Netflix special that mentions aliens in the news https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81435608?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=cp&vlang=en&clip=81513720 Starts ~ 5:10

Mandates are not a medical issue. The only part of mandates that is remotely medical is the technical aspects of how a mandate could stop the spread. We're well past the point of proving that mandates won't do that (pesky human nature), so now mandates are entirely a policy issue. Whether or not the vaccine works or is safe is certainly a medical issue, best left to medical professionals to determine. But there aren't a lot of people here fighting over the safety of the vaccine, rather their freedom to determine that for themselves. But this is far more about the compliant being upset at the noncompliant. Often when a rule is nonsensical, those who followed the rule will defend it regardless of the actual justification of the rule. It's human nature, no one wants to feel like they chose incorrectly, and to a greater extent, people tend to want others to do as they do. Religion, political beliefs, and drug addiction are all areas where this effect is observable. Plenty of republicans are still doing it with Trump, so it's not even a conservative/liberal disposition. We simply don't like what's different.

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.