Like any other vaccine, I weighed the risk vs benefit and took the odds and got vaccinated. I'm for vaccination. I'm not for forcing vaccines upon a population who are hesitant for their own reasons for something that so far, is a relatively mid-level virus. If this were the plague, I'd want more stringent enforcement, given the same vaccine odds.
That said, I hope Twitter et al don't knee jerk react-to this and block discussion just because it would counter their preferred narrative.
I remember quite a few SARS and swine-flu scares over the past few decades - the disease would be quite destructive but small in scale. We aren't at "bring out your dead" levels yet but we have been living primarily in lockdowns for the past year and a half. If this doesn't qualify as a plague we should take seriously and address I'm rather afraid what would actually reach that level for you.
or drugs in general. Just look at adverse effects of Ibuprofen. Common drug, but unlike vaccines, it is not used for whole population at once. So adverse effects even if more common are not that visible.
Yeah I know there are side effects for many people. For me the second time it felt a bit like I ran into a door handle at the spot where I got the jab. Like a minor bruise. That was all. But this is anecdotal of course. Some people will get it worse. They always said side effects would be possible for some people. There's also a reason we all have to wait 15 minutes before leaving. The possible allergy is another anticipated side-effect.
If these were serious and common however, really the hospitals would be so busy by now taking care of all of them. The number of people that got the vaccine here in europe in the space of the last few months is enormous. We started much later than the US but have caught up in a really short time. And with the exception of the UK most countries have used mostly mRNA types and very little AstraZeneca. As a result we had (and probably still have) higher numbers going through vaccination per month than the US.
Even the tiniest percentage of serious complications would have been flooding the hospitals which were already at high pressure due to covid.
Sure, BTC exists, and governments have an interest in keeping it going since there is great traceability, but a digital currency that you can use everyday and everywhere to but a Coke is probably still a ways out.
This won't happen. NZ keeping Covid out is down to good luck, not competence. On a long enough time scale NZ will face the same fate as those across the ditch.
That seems overly dismissive. NZ could have been run by a bunch of jackasses like so many other states/nations have been who did nothing but politicize and posture. Sure its an advantage to be on an island but it's one which is easily squandered through negligence - and it wasn't.
I'd say the biggest advantage we had was being too small for Fox News to broadcast here
We do have some jackasses, fortunately they aren't in power, but they are actively sowing division and racism -National Party. If they'd been in we'd look like UK, Belgium, Louisiana as I'm sure they would have weaponis do it against minorities and Maori.
Quite different demographics here (I live in Otago, southern NZ) many, many people understand enough biology to know to be aware (life sciences is 80% of our economy). Also we have per capita < idiots and selfishness here.
We have to keep covid / Delta out, would collapse health system and kill tens of thousands (especially Polynesians).
Good time to move away from tourism income, helping us bridge to low-carbon, 21st C fit state.
Which policies in particular do they find 1984-esque?
Also I'm not sure where 99.97% is coming from, I'm getting ~98.3% from the CDC's Data Tracker page. Of course unreported cases could increase that, but it still seems significantly different from whatever source that's from.
I don't think that he is implying that COVID == 1984, but rather that there are some massive (surface-level) similarities between the handling of the COVID pandemic and general US policies and the policies in 1984.
And non-governmental creators and spreaders of misinformation love calling out the government for the same as an apparently effective cover for their own lunacy.
False official narratives are only one slice of the mucky pie.
Capitulating to the lowest common denominator is a recipe for disaster. The self-anointed who feign outrage over an inanimate object are just chasing power.
>The self-anointed who feign outrage over an inanimate object are just chasing power.
What power do you believe the Wisconsin Black Student Union, campus planning committee and Wisconsin Involvement Network (Wunk Sheek) are chasing, and why do you believe it was necessary for them to conspire to pretend to be upset about this inanimate object?
What do you believe this cabal's true end goal is, now that the rock has been moved and nothing stands in their way?
waiting in the wings for the right opportunities to ratchet themselves up to positions of real authority, given the current population size. Even if everyone in the entire state of Wisconsin is perfectly well intentioned, which I highly doubt, not everyone on Earth is.
Or.... maybe the story is exactly as it appears: a student coalition petitioned to have the rock removed because it reminded them of a racist element of the school's past, and were successful. Maybe there is no Robespierre secretly gathering power and sharpening the guillotine, and no slippery slope towards the cultural Marxist dystopia Hacker News always seems to believe the world is tumbling headlong into.
It's pretty simple. Demonstrate that their voices are heard and action taken as a result, and move on to something else. Yesterday, a rock; today, a portrait; tomorrow, a person.
But don't you find it odd that an Indigenous student group would be involved in an elaborate, multi-stage plot to "remove" people? It seems like the sort of thing they would be against, on principle.
So either the rock is meaningless, in which case... "more" power to them?
...or it's removal is meaningful, in which case they were right?
Either way: they have some not entirely implausible story of it being a symbol of something universally abhorred.
You are getting emotional in your indignation over their emotion. But then... that's it, isn't it? So you're grasping at straws trying to find some sinister motive in their actions, and base your argument on the absolute meaninglessness of the McMuffin at the center of it, and how you couldn't care less about it's whereabouts. But in the end, your argument comes back to "this doesn't matter".
So they kinda win by default, overwhelmingly, even if one were to agree that it's meaningless?
The rock isn’t _meaningless_, it’s inanimate. (Nice try at reframing though). As a 2 billion year old inanimate object, any racist qualities are obviously extrinsic. So those that find offense sufficient to want to remove the rock are themselves, assigning meaning to the words of an obscure article written over 100 years ago.
What is not meaningless is the time and resources redirected towards the rocks removal. Those are taxpayer funds btw, as this is a state university.
It’s perfectly congruent to feel indignation about the wasteful spending of public funds, without legitimizing the frivolous ‘outrage’ at the center of it.
