OBJECTION!

Maybe he should quit and find a higher paying job.

I try not to be but sometimes I can’t help myself.

I’m not talking about changes over time, talking about things I’ve seen recently on here regarding Russia’s current status, in response to news stories and comments discussing the danger of escalation going nuclear.

Shroedinger’s Russian nuclear arsenal. When there’s a story about risking escalation, libs tell me it’s fine because Russia doesn’t have the money to maintain its nukes, so it’d only be a “limited” nuclear exchange. When this story comes out, the libs tell me that Russia has a much larger and better maintained nuclear stockpile, so it’s only necessary for the US to spend more on it to catch up. It’s sort of the same way that Russia simultaneously is on the verge of defeat, yet also has the intention and capability to conquer all of Europe, like Hitler, if we don’t stop him here.

The enemy is both strong and weak, and you never know which one it’s gonna be.

YES

My understanding is that a tankie is defined as someone who seeks to promote global peace, understanding, and equality, with nuanced views that incorporate marginalized and international perspectives, grounded in historical evidence.

That’s how I see it used anyway.

You seem to have gotten lost, this is a top level comment.

By this logic and threshold, the only logical solution would be to isolate entirely… No more flights, no more imports.

Thank you for that clearly good faith interpretation of what I said, but you actually misunderstood me.

The cost benefit analysis of making a handful of people have three weeks of quarantine to add a extra layer of security against a deadly pandemic ravaging the country makes it worth it. The cost benefit of “shutting down all trade” is obviously no longer worth the tradeoff.

By your logic, you should be an anti-masker, since accepting any level of inconvenience to mitigate risk of spreading disease is totally unacceptable and it’s apparently all-or-nothing with no room for middle ground with you.

In fact, fuck lab goggles. Scientists and doctors are super smart and never make mistakes or have accidents so who needs 'em? If you’re going to wear lab goggles, why not shut down the whole global economy while you’re at it, that’s basically the same thing. Right?

Even if the likelihood was low, the enormous harm that could have been caused by Ebola spreading to the US outweighs a mere inconvenience for a small number of people.

Trump obviously spread tons of misinformation and mishandled everything, and had he not sold the PPE in the first place, there’d have been no reason for Fauci to lie. But I hold scientists to a higher standard of conduct than politicians. When Fauci spoke, he was speaking to the public as a representative of scientists in general, and when he lied and damaged public trust, he did damage to uncountable scientific efforts that will take decades to repair, if it can be repaired at all. That sort of betrayal of trust is a serious offense.

I fully expect every word that comes out of any president’s mouth to be a lie, but I used to trust the CDC, and now I can’t.

[Citation needed]

The citation is in the next paragraph.

Did you mean to say that people who can treat the sick shouldn’t be the most protected during an epidemic? If the doctors aren’t safe, we’re ALL kinda unsafe, right?

In the case of Ebola, it wasn’t the doctors’ safety but their convenience that he was concerned about. In the case of COVID, he prioritized doctors’ safety to the point of lying to the public, which contributed to the spread of misinformation and breakdown of public trust, resulting in countless unnecessary deaths.

When the CDC finally started telling the truth about masks, people were able to start making cloth masks at home and donating them to hospitals. Had he been honest from the start, that could’ve happened much earlier.

The safety of doctors and healthcare workers is very important, but it doesn’t justify breaking public trust. Public trust in science is crucial, and when it breaks down you get people refusing to vaccinate their kids and drinking raw milk and other such nonsense. Honesty is a fundamental part of scientific ethics. What he did violated the Hippocratic Oath.

Effortpost that’s going to get misinterpreted and downvoted to hell.

During the hearing, Greene told Fauci he . . . “belonged in prison” for “crimes against humanity”

This is a case of accidentally telling the truth by lying twice. Fauci and the CDC massively mishandled the pandemic and lied to the public… by claiming that masks don’t work.

Masks absolutely do work, there has never been any serious scientific questions about this. It’s a respiratory illness. Countries like China, Vietnam, etc. always knew to use masks, right from the start. But for some reason, in Feb 2020, the surgeon general was tweeting this:

Masks absolutely do work, but Fauci is on record saying the exact same stuff on 60 Minutes. CNN even ran articles like, “Masks may actually increase your coronavirus risk if worn improperly, surgeon general warns,” and “Masks can’t stop the coronavirus in the US, but hysteria has led to bulk-buying, price-gouging and serious fear for the future,” containing many of the false narratives that would later become core parts of the anti-mask truthers.

Masks absolutely do work, so why did they do this? Two reasons. First, to cover for the fact that the Trump administration sold off the PPE necessary to be prepared for this eventuality. Second, because Fauci has a history of supporting libertarian policies prioritizing the safety of doctors over the general public. In fact, Fauci didn’t just mishandle one pandemic, he mishandled three.

During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, Fauci opposed quarantines for doctors returning from treating the illness abroad, calling them “draconian.” Several Democratic governors implemented measures anyway, but there was no federal policy. Ebola is much more deadly than COVID and it could’ve been devastating if we hadn’t gotten lucky or if those quarantines hadn’t been implemented on a local level.

The third one he mishandled (or rather, the first) was AIDS. I won’t get into details, but Fauci was the NIH director under Reagan, and prominent queer activists were saying things like that he was “a murderer” who “should be put before firing squad”

These truths have been buried under a mountain of bullshit spewed out by the right, to the point that making these legitimate criticisms of Fauci makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist. But unlike all the anti-mask bullshit, what I’ve said is true and supported by evidence. As someone who studied science in school, I’m ashamed that a scientist would break the public trust in such a way, and the fact that he was able to get away with it and brand himself as some sort of hero of science makes it so much worse. Science is still very reliable, but it can be compromised by politics, and it’s important to verify information from a variety of sources from different countries and international organizations - not just the CDC.

Hey now, don’t forget about draft dodgers

Remember that time managers at a Tyson meat processing plant ran a betting pool on how many of their workers would get covid?

Fuck off. The only reason I didn’t block you was to give you a chance to realize you said something incredibly fucked up and apologize. Your attitude is a perfect example of why I’m opposed to this garbage and has only served to validate my position, which I now am more convinced of than ever. Blocked.

You moved the goalpost by going from “we should ban assisted suicide” to “we should make suicide harder (instead of actually doing something against the root causes)”.

My position from the start has been that assisted suicide, if it is to be allowed at all, should only be allowed for people with incurable physical pain. You can find multiple different comments of me saying that in this thread.

I’m glad that you “went trough the same and turned out fine”, but most people that bring up that argument have not turned out fine.

Wow. Thank you so much for telling me you think that suicide is the only answer to my problems. That’s a very reasonable and normal thing to say to someone you’ve never met.

Showing your real colors. You people just want people with mental illness to kill themselves so we’ll be out of your hair. Go fuck yourself, asshole.

Completely writing off whatever progress I’ve made while knowing precisely jack shit about my journey. What the fuck is wrong with you to think that’s ok?

I have, actually, and that’s why I feel as strongly about this as I do. If I didn’t believe what I’ve said, I’d have most likely killed myself. I’m alive today for the hope that someday things could get better and for the knowledge that my death wouldn’t fix anything.

The goalposts have not moved a single inch.

If I had a plan to respond to someone horrible getting elected president, I would’ve used it long before now.

They’ll do it anyways, so why not make it less horrible for them?

I disagree with that. Will they do it anyway? There is evidence that putting up simple barriers to suicide (such as guardrails on a bridge) is effective at reducing suicide, while having a method of suicide readily available (such as a gun) can increase risks of suicide. Suicide is often an impulsive and irrational decision.

If some percentage of people would be deterred from suicide by the inconvenience of doing it themselves, and some percentage of that group would go on to recover enough to lead happy lives, wouldn’t that at least potentially be a good enough reason to restrict it?

But to answer your previous question, yes. We do let people suffer until society changes. Because I believe that it is better to endure the suffering and injustice caused by society than to look for an easy escape that doesn’t actually solve the problem, at least for anyone else. If I see suffering, is the proper solution to rip out my eyes? No. That’s incredibly misdirected, but that’s the logic of suicide. Rather than seeking to address the actual problem, it’s directing violence towards one’s own ability to sense and perceive the world around them. It is the ultimate form of “out of sight, out of mind,” taking it so far that you eliminate your own mind for having the audacity to report to you about unpleasantness. Addressing the underlying cause is what’s important, the pain is merely a symptom, which exists for the reason of telling us something’s wrong.

There are exceptions to that generalization. It is possible that the real source of the problem is within one’s body, that it’s causing incurable and unbearable physical pain. In those cases, I think it’s acceptable - but no further.

I wrote out some of my reasons here.

In short, it’s difficult to evaluate how much of a person’s psychological pain is innate and inherent to them and how much of it is caused by broader social factors. Even if every treatment option is exhausted, therapists can’t change society. I’m concerned that social changes for the sake of accommodation will get more difficult if assisted suicide becomes seen as an adequate solution.

Assisted suicide is fundamentally the same thing as non-assisted suicide, the only difference is that it makes less of mess. But the person is still gone and it’s every bit as tragic. Changing norms about suicide wouldn’t address the actual problems, it would only make the problems less visible and easier to ignore. If we’re going to change something, we should instead work to improve the conditions people are living in. Suicide is not the answer.

There are valid reasons to restrict certain actions or substances even if someone gives informed consent. While bodily autonomy is a right, it isn’t absolute to the point of outweighing all other rights and all practical considerations (no right is absolute). For any given right, whether it’s bodily autonomy, free speech, etc, there are valid reasons why limitations may be placed on it, and it isn’t valid to lump all of those reasons together with bullshit reasons people might want to restrict it. It would be like saying that people who don’t want it to be legal to shout “fire” in a theater are just like people who want to ban criticism of the government.

Fuck Nazis.