Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "Channel 4 News"
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It strikes me that the goal of flattening the curve is probably at odds with avoiding the impoverishment of us all, perhaps for no payoff whatever in lives saved. Lives may be at first be saved by slowing an otherwise uncontrolled spread, but slowing the spread roughly means shutting down the country until most people are vaccinated or have caught the virus and recovered. Pausing the economy for a full year or longer (the mayor of New York now says the shutdown there will last into next year) would likely be a disaster in many ways worse than letting the disease run its course whilst the sick and the old are safely hunkered down for several months.
And drawing out the spread over time is not guaranteed to save a great many lives anyway, as hospitals may be overwhelmed even by a relative trickle of patients: it's clear that they can't handle an influx of the sick amounting to 5% of the population, but what makes anyone think they could handle even 0.5%? Hospitals will no doubt rise to the occasion in astonishing ways, but they operate within realistic limits against which there is ultimately no remedy.
Thus the best way to save the most vulnerable might be to focus on isolating them in the most thoroughgoing manner possible, a task more achievable if people are working at their jobs and circulating freely, maintaining the normal functioning of things needed to support such an effort. To isolate those most at risk for, say, half a year is not only much easier on them and all of us than doing so for twelve months or more---it also gives the virus much less time to get through to them.
Imagine on the one hand emerging from the summer with herd immunity achieved at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and with a quick economic and social recovery at hand.
Contrast this with, on the other hand, having the disease hanging over us all for a year or longer whilst it slowly but inexorably picks off the vulnerable one by one, at the cost of a similar---or greater---number of lives and also an economic and financial hole so deep that it takes several years or a decade to climb out of it.
All the while we would swing back and forth agonizingly between tantalizing reprieve and resurgent outbreaks which continue through 2021. Quality of life and standards of living, obviously, but also the health of the people in all other respects would be sure to be seriously impacted. Do we know whether society could hang together throughout all that? We are most certainly (we in the anglosphere nations at least) not the same people who withstood the Second World War with such stoic resilience.
And what if the net effect of an unnecessarily protracted struggle against the disease is a sudden massive transfer of political and economic power to China?
The UK national science advisor may have been right to float the herd immunity idea. The country which gets through this soonest will enjoy an enormous feeling of gladness and will also be the envy of the world. Possibly it could mean considering how many lives we permit (or cause) to be ruined in favour of the uncertain chance of saving a single one. Possibly it could mean sacrificing a certain number of younger lives for a vastly greater number of older ones.
As Orwell said, "It is disagreeable to weigh human lives like groceries", but in the worst circumstances that may be precisely what is wisest.
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George V Thanks for your reply. Call it speculation if you like, but it's university scientists, health agencies, and heads of state who are predicting 40 to 80% infection rates, and I mean they've done it this week. Actually I think I stopped hearing 40% last week.
As for the 0.5% to 3.4% fatality rates, South Korea, which is now a rich country on a par with Japan, is the only one so far to achieve 0.5%, and that was only through an extremely focused effort, making all the right moves, and massive unity.
Let's face it, the US, with all its impressive strengths, is much more unruly and socially untidy, with huge swathes of poverty, ignorance, and disorganization (crime, drugs, etc.) that South Korea actually doesn't have.
People in LA are lining up around the block to panic-buy guns. I saw the footage.
I'm a foreigner, so you know your countrymen and I basically observe them through the telescope of exported TV and Internet. Cheers and good luck (your majesty lol).
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@cathygr "They do it on purpose. Channel 4, Sky news ... desperate ... to use such tactics."
Yes, yes, and yes. Blame it on the 90s, when the culture went all-out to teach us that playing fair was for losers and 'wimps'.
And who put on that show? The Me Generation, born between 1945 and 1964.
The disappearance of integrity, manners, and any charm in social life are all part of what I call The Collapse of Character, the result of The Great Slackening. Coming next, the disappearance of prosperity, security, and freedom. Thanks, baby boomers.
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@realfreedom8932 But is that not perhaps a promising indicator? When I was much younger and foolishly mixed up with investment bankers, a couple of them once told me that they paid attention to the parking lot when they visited clients. If the senior management drove expensive cars, they told me, they took it as a bad sign. If they saw instead Subarus, Maximas, Oldsmobiles, Passats, and the like, they deduced they were dealing with more solid and trustworthy people and conducted business afterward in part with that in mind. I never forgot the distinction. (They themselves sometimes preferred M series sedans and Jaguars, but let that pass. They didn't have shareholders and thousands of employees depending on them, just scores of women and bartenders.) Cheers.
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So what would you have done? Built a thousand new hospitals, something that takes a generation to do? Invented a vaccine, something that takes a full year to do? Trained thousands of doctors and nurses, something it takes a decade to do? Expanded the manufacturing of masks, something it takes years to do?
Testing capacity ought to have been ramped up, I would agree, but I don't think that's necessarily possible. The governments have money and authority but they don't have magic wands. Aside from that the only reasonable measures to take in advance of the spread were to alert the public and hospitals to be ready to take basic precautions and make basic preparations.
Drug companies and university labs need no prompting whatever to begin doing whatever they can. The public would never have accepted travel bans, nationwide shutdowns, and extensive quarantining while under one person in a million was infected.
Now that economic effects are emerging, governments are taking steps on that front. Their timing has been just about right.
You can warn, you can inform, you can succour, you can write some cheques, and you can reassure, but you can't confine every person on Earth and you can't write a law against a plague.
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@Redfoxx-pg7km You wrote: "... right wing/mainstream (same thing really...)"
The mainstream is right-wing, you say? This assertion is unhelpful in every way except one: it tells us how far left you are.
From the North Pole all points, however frozen and bleak they may in fact be, are South. In like manner, from the Left Pole all points are Right.
I've come to believe that Left extremism and Right extremism alike are, far from being separate phenomena of thought, in fact a single aspect of personality. You and your mirror-image counterparts on the Right are indeed brethren and sisters at heart, less in thought than in character, with highly similar feelings, reactions, hopes, and instincts to one another. Extremes meet, I was told in boyhood, and I have found it to be true.
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@Charlieband
"Shares and voting rights." That's quite clear, and up to a point valid, too. Thanks for rephrasing.
But I don't know if the UK's influence on Europe has been in sufficient proportion to Europe's influence on the UK. If you're the tail and you can wag the dog, stick with it. If you're just a tail on the dog, maybe you should go off and be your own dog. To tell the difference one would have had to pay close attention for a long time, and I haven't, for I don't even live there.
I also like your pointing out the limitations of democracy. Pretending it's perfect is dangerous. One must search for its weaknesses, identify them, accept them, and think hard about them. Then one is ready to do something about them. The whole process takes the brittleness out of it. Suppleness lasts.
Thanks again for your interesting reply. Merry Xmas to you, too.
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It strikes me that the goal of flattening the curve is probably at odds with avoiding the impoverishment of us all, perhaps for no payoff whatever in lives saved. Lives may be at first be saved by slowing an otherwise uncontrolled spread, but slowing the spread roughly means shutting down the country until most people are vaccinated or have caught the virus and recovered. Pausing the economy for a full year or longer would likely be a disaster in many ways worse than letting the disease run its course whilst the sick and the old are safely hunkered down for several months.
And drawing out the spread over time is not guaranteed to save a great many lives anyway, as hospitals may be overwhelmed even by a relative trickle of patients: it's clear that they can't handle an influx of the sick amounting to 5% of the population, but what makes anyone think they could handle even 1%? Hospitals will no doubt rise to the occasion in astonishing ways, but they operate within realistic limits against which there is ultimately no remedy.
Thus the best way to save the most vulnerable might be to focus on isolating them in the most thoroughgoing manner possible, a task more achievable if people are working at their jobs and circulating freely, maintaining the normal functioning of things needed to support such an effort. It would also free up things like masks and medicines for those who need them most, including medical workers. To isolate those most at risk for, say, half a year is not only much easier on them and all of us than doing so for twelve months or more---it also gives the virus much less time to get through to them.
Imagine on the one hand emerging from the summer with herd immunity achieved at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and with a quick economic and social recovery at hand, versus having the disease hanging over us all for a year or longer whilst it slowly but inexorably picks off the vulnerable one by one, at the cost of a similar (or greater) number of lives and also an economic and financial hole so deep that it takes several years or a decade to climb out of it.
All the while we would swing back and forth agonizingly between tantalizing reprieve and resurgent outbreaks which continue through 2021. Quality of life and standards of living, obviously, but also the health of the people in all other respects would be sure to be seriously impacted. Do we know whether society could hang together throughout all that? We are most certainly (whichever anglosphere nation we inhabit) not the same people who withstood the Second World War with such stoic resilience.
And what if the net effect of an unnecessarily protracted struggle against the disease is a sudden massive transfer of political and economic power to China?
The national science advisor may have been right to float the herd immunity idea. The country which gets through this soonest will enjoy an enormous feeling of gladness and will also be the envy of the world. Possibly it could mean considering how many lives we permit (or cause) to be ruined in favour of the uncertain chance of saving a single one. Possibly it could mean sacrificing a certain number of younger lives for a vastly greater number of older ones. As Orwell said, "It is disagreeable to weigh human lives like groceries", but in the worst circumstances that may be precisely what is wisest.
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It strikes me that the goal of flattening the curve is probably at odds with avoiding the impoverishment of us all, perhaps for no payoff whatever in lives saved. Lives may be at first be saved by slowing an otherwise uncontrolled spread, but slowing the spread roughly means shutting down the country until most people are vaccinated or have caught the virus and recovered. Pausing the economy for a full year or longer would likely be a disaster in many ways worse than letting the disease run its course whilst the sick and the old are safely hunkered down for several months.
And drawing out the spread over time is not guaranteed to save a great many lives anyway, as hospitals may be overwhelmed even by a relative trickle of patients: it's clear that they can't handle an influx of the sick amounting to 5% of the population, but what makes anyone think they could handle even 1%? Hospitals will no doubt rise to the occasion in astonishing ways, but they operate within realistic limits against which there is ultimately no remedy.
Thus the best way to save the most vulnerable might be to focus on isolating them in the most thoroughgoing manner possible, a task more achievable if people are working at their jobs and circulating freely, maintaining the normal functioning of things needed to support such an effort. It would also free up things like masks and medicines for those who need them most, including medical workers. To isolate those most at risk for half a year is not only much easier on them and all of us than doing so for twelve months or more, and cheaper---it also gives the virus much less time to get through to them.
Imagine on the one hand emerging from the summer with herd immunity achieved at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and with a quick economic and social recovery at hand, versus having the disease hanging over us all for a year or longer whilst it slowly but inexorably picks off the vulnerable one by one, at the cost of a similar (or greater) number of lives---and also an economic and financial hole so deep that it takes several years or a decade to climb out of it.
All the while we would swing back and forth agonizingly between tantalizing reprieve and resurgent outbreaks which continue through 2021. Quality of life and standards of living, obviously, but also the health of the people in all other respects would be sure to be seriously impacted. Do we know whether society could hang together throughout all that? We are most certainly not the same people who withstood the Second World War with such stoic resilience.
And what if the net effect of an unnecessarily protracted struggle against the disease is a prompt, massive transfer of political and economic power to China?
The UK national science advisor may have been right to float the herd immunity idea. The country which gets through this soonest will enjoy an enormous feeling of gladness and also be the envy of the world. Possibly it could mean considering how many lives we permit to be ruined in favour of the uncertain chance of saving one. Possibly it could mean sacrificing a certain number of younger lives for a vastly greater number of older ones. As Orwell said, "It is disagreeable to weigh human lives like groceries", but in the worst circumstances that may be precisely what is wisest.
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@salvatoredebaldarellis4632
Thanks for your reply.
As you say you're all about strengthening democracy, we're in agreement that far anyway.
I like co-operation between neighbours, too, but when it amounts to your neighbours having veto rights on how you run your own house, scaling down the co-operation becomes appropriate. We probably agree on this principle, too.
And I like a lot of government, laws, and regulation myself but there can be such a thing as too much government, too many laws, and too much regulation. When that occurs, they should be reduced. We probably agree on that too.
I think we just disagree on whether the EU came to be an intrusive burden on the UK.
So cheers. Sorry for the long reply.
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The professor seems to regret the job the US has done. Yet it was Europe who gave them the job, because if they really did want to see better outcomes and a multipolar world, they could have put much more into NATO---perhaps enough to ensure that the US would not be the conductor running the entire performance, but more like the concertmaster sitting amongst them, leading them but with much less authority. In choosing not to do so, Europeans were shrewd in some sense because it left them free to focus on quality of life, social stability, health, and other things instead. But wouldn't it come in handy in the present century to be part of an even stronger NATO, a more balanced one, and one that for that reason would meet with more success in its global security efforts? Such a NATO might have kept Putin out of Crimea. As it was, he guessed easily and correctly that it wouldn't say much nor say it for very long.
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It strikes me that the goal of flattening the curve is probably at odds with avoiding the impoverishment of us all, perhaps for no payoff whatever in lives saved. Lives may be at first be saved by slowing an otherwise uncontrolled spread, but slowing the spread roughly means shutting down the country until most people are vaccinated or have caught the virus and recovered. Pausing the economy for a full year or longer would likely be a disaster in many ways worse than letting the disease run its course whilst the sick and the old are safely hunkered down for several months.
And drawing out the spread over time is not guaranteed to save a great many lives anyway, as hospitals may be overwhelmed even by a relative trickle of patients: it's clear that they can't handle an influx of the sick amounting to 5% of the population, but what makes anyone think they could handle even 1%? Hospitals will no doubt rise to the occasion in astonishing ways, but they operate within realistic limits against which there is ultimately no remedy.
Thus the best way to save the most vulnerable might be to focus on isolating them in the most thoroughgoing manner possible, a task more achievable if people are working at their jobs and circulating freely, maintaining the normal functioning of things needed to support such an effort. It would also free up things like masks and medicines for those who need them most, including medical workers. To isolate those most at risk for, say, half a year is not only much easier on them and all of us than doing so for twelve months or more---it also gives the virus much less time to get through to them.
Imagine on the one hand emerging from the summer with herd immunity achieved at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and with a quick economic and social recovery at hand, versus having the disease hanging over us all for a year or longer whilst it slowly but inexorably picks off the vulnerable one by one, at the cost of a similar (or greater) number of lives and an economic and financial hole so deep that it takes several years or a decade to climb out of it.
All the while we would swing back and forth agonizingly between tantalizing reprieve and resurgent outbreaks which continue through 2021. Quality of life and standards of living, obviously, but also the health of the people in all other respects would be sure to be seriously impacted. Do we know whether society could hang together throughout all that? We are most certainly (whichever anglosphere nation we inhabit) not the same people who withstood the Second World War with such stoic resilience.
And what if the net effect of an unnecessarily protracted struggle against the disease is a sudden massive transfer of political and economic power to China?
The UK national science advisor may have been right to float the herd immunity idea. The country which gets through this soonest will enjoy an enormous feeling of gladness and will also be the envy of the world. Possibly it could mean considering how many lives we permit (or cause) to be ruined in favour of the uncertain chance of saving a single one. Possibly it could mean sacrificing a certain number of younger lives for a vastly greater number of older ones. As Orwell said, "It is disagreeable to weigh human lives like groceries", but in the worst circumstances that may be precisely what is wisest.
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@Martin Baldwin-Edwards
"Safer"? His constituents, the people of North East Somerset, who elected him and then re-elected him with a strong majority, are thus lovers of violence, you say? He's violent, and was selected by violent supporters to do violent things? HIs presence in the House of Commons threatens the safety of the UK?
Yes, just look at what a menace to public safety he is, stretched out weakly in a naff suit on a green bench. Children cry, women flee, and stout-hearted but unarmed men tremble at his sight.
A grateful nation extends its honours to you for your penetrating vision. Fools are they who call you brainless, callow, and contemptibly destructive of the language. You, sir, are truly a British, nay, a world hero and in no way one of the most idiotic [here a bad word is deleted] who ever walked the face of the Earth. The entire globe is safer for your wise pronouncements. I humbly thank you.
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You resort to the same "so you're saying" tactic as the interviewer.
Nonsense. If that's what they tell him, and he says that's what they tell him, his statement is accurate. He makes no claim about billions of men---your choice of punctuation between the two sentences you quote is your own, not his. One could insert a comma, semi-colon, or dash. (Anyway, though I'm asserting he was generalizing little in this instance, generalizations can be valuable; thus if one wishes to refute or even merely attack them, the attempt must be made on the basis of demerits shown to be inherent to them, not on the basis of the worthlessness of generalizing.)
I know a doctor who treats young people for their problems. He tells me something similar. He says many of his young male patients tell him they are ashamed of their maleness and see it as inferior to femaleness. Unsurprising, considering several decades of the media, schools, and other areas of culture and society telling boys and men how terrible they are. And this generation of men and boys are for the women of like age the men and boys from among which non-lesbians must select their partners. Not very appetizing, I would think.
It's hard to see sexism where you believe it can't exist. It's hard to believe it can exist when it's in your interest to disbelieve it. Cheers.
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Some commenters are mad about the now-rejected herd immunity idea floated by the Chief Science Advisor's (it was his idea, not the government's). He's dropped the idea because of flaws in it and many loud objections, but it was nothing sinister. At face value, it sounded like an effective way, and possibly a noble way, to save hundreds of thousands of lives. It's no wonder to me at all that he raised it for discussion.
It wasn't about infecting everyone. The idea was to isolate the elderly, whom it kills much more frequently, and then let the younger people catch it. The death rate for them might be similar to that of a seasonal flu. Once that was over the old could rejoin an immune nation and be spared the illness entirely. The idea was to save many lives, perhaps the better part of a million. The virus also could not return the following year, as the Spanish Flu did.
I'm not saying it should be done but neither does it sound the least bit sinister. Perhaps it would save many lives. What people probably didn't like about it was that it would spare many seniors at the cost of a much smaller number of younger people's lives, amounting to a sacrifice of the young for the old.
The question was along these lines: Is it more preferable that 200,000 younger people and 50,000 older people die, or that 50,000 younger people and 800,000 older people die? The totals are 250,000 and 850,000. I'm not saying these are the right numbers, but this is the sort of thing he had in mind. He's the Chief Science Adviser, not a supervillain.
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