Comments by CC99 (page 4)

I don't think we're the best country in the world. We are a good one, comparisons to the hell that is North Korea are obscene, but we are not the best. I think Japan is the best country in the world for all the following reasons... - No mass surveillance of its citizens. - Tiny crime rate (you can pass out drunk on the streets of Tokyo and nobody will steal anything) - Trust based society, people simply trust one another to do the right thing and often times they do. - Strong family values. - Best freedom of expression in the world (No other country can create shows like Rising of the Shield Hero, Ishuzoku Reviewers, or Kiss X Sis without it getting shutdown by moral guardians and/or ideological purists) - Cutest, most feminine girls on Earth. - Cheap, legal, and widespread prostitution. - The almost complete absence of "woke culture." Many people in Japan don't even know what feminism is. - Lowest number of homeless people per capita in the world. - Cleanest cities on Earth, practically no graffiti or trash anywhere. - Highest life expectancy in the world. - Practically no political divisiveness/hatred. They are very unified. - Group dating parties to help shy people find dates. - And of course... Schoolgirl uniforms. Even their previously awful work culture doesn't count against them anymore. They worked like dogs in the 1980s but there's been a major push for labor reform there and their average working hours in 2018 dropped below Canada's.

The 1.4% number was determined by antibody tests in New York state. They tested about 15,000 people and extrapolated from that study that 12.3% of the state got infected. Pretty much everywhere antibody tests are being done, a similar fatality rate of 1-1.5% shows up. In France and Spain, antibody tests are finding that about 5% of the population got infected and both Spain and France got devastated from only 5% of its population getting infected. The lowest fatality rate they have found was 0.5% in Japan but I think that's because their obesity rate is so tiny compared to the rest of the world. Actually right now is a great opportunity to repair the economy by fixing the infrastructure. We'll probably have to wait until after the election because the Democrats don't want to give Trump anything to put on his resume for re-election. But if Trump gets reelected then he won't be able to serve another term so I think the Democrats would stop trying to block everything he does. Everyone knows the infrastructure desperately needs to be fixed and eventually people are going to get mad at the Democrats if they keep preventing an infrastructure plan from getting passed. I highly doubt that Biden is going to win. He's an unbelievably weak candidate. As soon as he gets up on the debate stage in September, Trump is going to wipe the floor with him. None of the liberal people I know are enthusiastic about him and some downright dislike him. I've heard several people say they refuse to vote for Biden even if it meant Trump winning. Since Trump really wants to fix the infrastructure I think that will become his #1 goal after reelection to repair the economy. So don't worry, it is highly unlikely that half the country will end up in poverty. We might have a rough upcoming couple of years but we will recover from this. Even if only 20% of the country got infected though like what happened with swine flu, the prospect of nearly a million people dying is too horrifying to risk. @Founder The thing is that these are the kind of situations government is meant for. If one was to take a 100% libertarian perspective then you might argue that we shouldn't imprison people for crimes but rather trust that social consequences or community justice would take care of that issue. Its highly likely if we did that though that crime rates would spike or you would have brutal vigilante gangs. Similarly, in a case like this, a government mandated lockdown is necessary because a lot of people simply wouldn't follow instructions if there wasn't one. We had a hard enough time as it was trying to get people to take the virus seriously and even with a lockdown we had over 100,000 people die. Many other countries tried not having a lockdown, such as Iran and the UK but those countries eventually reversed course after large numbers of people started dying. Although the US has the most number of deaths, the UK and Iran have had more deaths per capita than the US has (once you take into account how much Iran has lied about their death toll, the real death toll in Iran was actually around 44,000 according to resistance groups in Iran). The number of people who would've died had we not imposed a lockdown would've been a lot more horrific than it already was. Its easy to think of wandering around as harmless but its really not when a virus like COVID 19 is spreading. Simply walking around in public could make you guilty of manslaughter. At this point I do think the worst is over and we should start re-opening the economy. It would be too extreme to have a lockdown right now the same way as we did back in March and April. I do think warm weather and humidity makes it really hard for COVID 19 to spread as we've seen from Africa's resilience. But I do think that the lockdown was a reasonable and necessary step back in March and I'm really glad they did it or else things could've been a whole lot worse.

A 1.4% fatality rate is not minuscule. If half the population got infected that would kill close to 2.4 million people. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/ Why do people have such a problem with a government mandated shutdown during a virus? I think the marijuana, prostitution laws, and censorship imposed by the FCC on TV and radio stations are a much bigger violation of civil liberties than a government taking reasonable actions to prevent a virus from spreading. If the measures continue after the virus is long gone, feel free to lay into them. But you have to accept flexibility in policy when crisis situations arise.

I don't think hindsight was really necessary in this case. Back in February I thought the virus was a bit worse than I do now. I was saying all the following back in February when this first started. 1. I would have shutdown all travel from China and told other nations to do the same. Citing the rapid growth in infection rates from Wuhan and the strong likelihood that China was not telling the truth. 2. I would have funded rapid testing kits and ordered an increase in production. 3. I would have shutdown travel to and from any nation where cases were developing. I would have then contact traced people who had recently arrived from that country, quarantined them, and tested them. People testing negative were free to go, people testing positive must remain in a government facility for 21 days. 4. Anywhere cases pop up from domestic clusters or people who were in contact with foreigners that tested positive would result in immediately quarantining all people who had contact with that individual. Negative testers would be free to go, positive tests stay in quarantine for 21 days. 5. If infections spike rapidly in a particular city, the whole city goes on immediate lockdown. Nobody goes in or out. Open up travel to foreign countries only when that country hasn't reported any new cases in 14 days. My methods may sound a little harsh, but if we had done what I would've done back in February, the virus would probably not have spread here and we wouldn't have needed a national shutdown because it wouldn't have spread in the first place. My method is basically the South Korean method, and the South Korean method worked.

@ChessMaster Normally it is. But I think people have gotten so used to the left-wing media politicizing everything that they are not noticing that on this specific issue, the right at this moment is taking a lot of same tactics right out of their handbook. It was not the left this time that sowed political division, it was absolutely Fox News' fault that this became a political issue. They are actively encouraging people to break the social distancing guidelines and downplaying the severity of the virus. Fox has gone from inviting approximately 14 medical experts onto their show per day to 1 a day. They'll show you videos and studies of people giving statistics without giving you the real context behind those statistics and why health experts aren't taking them seriously. They cherry pick data from states that haven't been heavily effected by the virus in order to further their narrative that the virus is not dangerous and that locking down was unnecessary. They are actually using examples of lockdown successes and using it to make people think locking down was stupid. Its unbelievably asinine. I don't understand why they are doing this in the first place. What purpose does this serve? The only thing I can think of is they're just trying to find another way to make people resentful towards the left because they know a lot of people don't like the shutdown, which is just as scummy as the stuff the left-wing media has been doing since Trump got elected.

I have lost respect for Elon Musk and for Fox News because of their behavior during this pandemic. I can't believe they are turning this virus into a left-right issue. I mean for fuck's sake, is there anything in this country that we can just fucking agree on? Such as, I don't know, not spreading a deadly virus to other people? Nope, apparently deadly viruses are a liberal hoax. Even a pandemic becomes a left-right issue. This fucking country is hopeless. The political divisions in the US are almost as bad an Arab country.

@TiredTraveler You do realize that the death toll of COVID 19 is much higher than the 2017-2018 flu season which killed 61,000 and was apparently the worst one we've had since 1967. And I don't need to mention that we are far from done with this thing. Literally three seconds of research could've shown you that before you made yourself look like a retard. But I guess the next thing you'll say is "Ah those socialist governors are putting down every death as COVID 19 to keep you locked up in your home!"

I actually don't believe vaccines really work either. And they have had some pretty awful effects on me. Every time I take a vaccine it wrecks havoc on my mental health for years afterward. I don't recover until around two-three years later. One vaccine I took gave me a horrific rash all over my body. I hate vaccines I will not be getting one even if it is for COVID 19. But Papi_Chulo and JamesSD are largely correct. Its really scary to imagine how bad things could've gotten if we didn't shut down. Italy's excess mortality rates indicate that 56,000 people have died in Italy. Give Italy the same population as the US and that would've been close to 300,000 deaths. The mortality rate is not 6% but it is probably around 1%. Unbelievably stupid to claim that the mortality rate is 0.1%. In order for that to be true, the US would've had to have at least 78 million people infected. That's 25% of the entire population of the US. Even the people we test don't turn out to be infected at that high of a rate. We've conducted 8.6 million tests and 1.3 million of them came back positive. That means about 16-17% of tests come back positive. Obviously people who are going in to get tested are much much more likely to be infected than the general population is.

The only good thing that really came out of the Soviet Union is that it shows that at heart, women don't really want "gender equality." The Soviet Union actually forced gender equality and made women to work in the same way that men were required to work, and now, Russian women hate feminism and want to be like 1950s American housewives. Feminists aren't gaining anything for men or women, they just want to get rid of the idea of a woman devoting herself to a man and considering men to be the primary source of happiness in her life. I wonder sometimes if feminism is a corporate conspiracy. Make both men and women live for work instead of each other and make it taboo for a man to live for a woman and for a woman to live for a man.

The funny thing is, there's far more justification for being lax about sharks than coronavirus. A. Being lax about sharks is a personal decision to put your own life at risk, not a decision you made to put other people's lives at risk because you personally decided that the risk is low. B. Sharks kill hardly anybody. There's literally 1 US fatality every two years. So the number of people who die from sharks per year is 0.5.

@Skibum If we're talking about excuses that's one hell of a lousy one. The biggest reason why younger people die is car accidents. And most people are not driving cars very much right now.

"Sweden was a success story for strong people and a failure for cowardly sheeple." I'm sorry, are we medieval knights charging into war? What's this talk of strong people and cowardly people? In this situation, there are only logical people and dumb people. Thankfully we are past the age of history that promoted survival of the fittest type ideologies that would've shrugged at tens of thousands of deaths.

@desertscrub That's true, if Sweden had the same population as America does, the death toll would be 100,000-115,000. Sweden shouldn't even be having that many deaths, Sweden's population density is incredibly low compared to Europe and is even lower than the US. Italy's population density is almost 10x higher than Sweden's, Spain's density is almost 5x more dense, France's density is 6x higher, the UK is 13.5x more dense, Belgium is 19x more dense, and the Netherlands is 21x more dense. Its not surprising that the virus has a much easier time spreading in the rest of Europe, but Sweden is also one of the healthiest populations in the world during normal conditions. The US on the other hand, has extremely high rates of obesity and diabetes. Its not surprising that we are getting hit pretty hard. Given the characteristics of Sweden, they should barely be getting affected by it like Norway and Finland. But they're not, its obvious that not shutting down is the reason why they've had so many deaths. Apparently that doesn't stop deniers like the protesters in Michigan from acting as if Sweden is some kind of success story though. The only thing I think the coronavirus deniers are right about is that weather really does seem to have a tremendous impact on the viruses' ability to spread. Indonesia, India, and Pakistan should be getting devastated right now but they seem to be doing fairly okay. Although Brazil shows if your president is stupid enough even the weather might not save you.

^I've read about several experiments like this. I'm definitely not a blindly obedient person. I've experimented with a vast variety of drugs, the first time I got drunk I was 14 and found liquor in my brother's closet. I have a lot of controversial opinions that I am quite loud about no matter who disagrees. But common sense says this is one area where we really do need to do what we're told. Me dropping acid in my freshman dorm was not going to result in consequences to anybody other than myself. But me not practicing social distancing could kill people. So I take the latter much more seriously than the former.

I swear the deniers will do anything they can to excuse their selfish refusal to follow government mandates. Its true that COVID 19 is a bit less dangerous than some of the previous estimates put it at. But its turning out that the mortality rate pretty solidly hovers around 1%. It is still 10 times more deadly than the flu, its just that some early projections of 5% for example were definitely too high. I don't understand how the deniers can continue saying the things they do, meanwhile, 67,000-75,000 Americans are dead now, 54,000 Italians are dead when you look at excess mortality. Tens of thousands of people are dead in France, the UK, and Spain. Pretty much every country in the world has had a significantly higher death toll than their worst flu season. The same people who agree that China lied contradict themselves by saying the virus is not dangerous because the number of ash containers handed out by Chinese authorities is now showing that around 46,000 people died just in the city of Wuhan which is approximately 0.5% of the city's population. Meaning that if 50% of a city with a population of 9 million people got infected, then a 1% mortality rate would kill almost exactly 46,000 people. So yes, COVID 19 is not a catastrophically dangerous virus. But its definitely not "the flu." I can't believe people are still trying to make that claim with all the people who are dead from it now. And keep in mind, the death numbers in the US are much lower than they could've been. Lots of major metropolises in the US were barely affected because they shutdown in time. NYC did not shut down in time, which is why they've had such a high number of deaths. Antibody tests still show though that only 12.3% of New York and about 20% of NYC got infected. New York is still seeing hundreds of deaths per day and so far about 24,000-25,000 people there have died. This indicates 2.5 million people in New York got infected. During our worst flu season, about 60 million Americans got infected. This means if 60 million Americans got infected with covid 19, we would be seeing 600,000 deaths which is almost as many deaths as heart disease causes every year. Our leaders have decided that that is too many deaths to feel comfortable with allowing to happen so that's why we are shut down. Now if you comply with the policy and stay at home, this will be over faster.

@Mark94 Our healthcare system is not better than Italy's is and it certainly isn't vastly better. https://www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/051817_AC_global_healthcare_main.png

@Mark94 You say that like it is a mitigating factor. This is an inevitable result of the virus getting out of control is that hospitals get overwhelmed and people can't be treated. That's why we can't just walk around like everything is normal.

Yes and studies can, and often have been wrong because of errors that the medical scientists didn't take into account. The cases in Italy are not evenly distributed. Almost half of them are occurring in the Lombardy region. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099375/coronavirus-cases-by-region-in-italy/ Bergamo is a city of 120,000 people. Typically during the month of March, about 3 people die per day for a total of 90 for the month of March. As of March 19th, they had 620 deaths. This means that over a week ago, 0.5% of the entire city was dead. https://www.corriere.it/politica/20_marzo_26/the-real-death-toll-for-covid-19-is-at-least-4-times-the-official-numbers-b5af0edc-6eeb-11ea-925b-a0c3cdbe1130.shtml I hear these new numbers are coming from Iceland. We have no idea how things are gonna pan out in Iceland yet or if they got the S strain instead of the L strain.

Did anyone conducting this study ask Dr. Fauci how the fuck Italy has 8,200 dead bodies right now?

"IGott, new mortality calculations are putting it at closer to .1%, basically that of the flu. " For fuck's sake man how are you still on this "its just the flu" bullshit? Seasonal flu on average kills 3,000 people in Italy, over the course on an entire season. COVID 19 has killed at least 3 times that many people in the course of a month and it hasn't even spread all over the country. Its heavily concentrated in the Northern regions of Italy among approximately 20 million people. If it was everywhere in Italy there would probably be 24,000 dead right now. I mean, I get it, the impact this is having on the economy is awful. But the consequences of this disease being allowed to spread out of control if we just went about our lives as normal would be a minimum of hundreds of thousands dead, perhaps millions. We have to continue social distancing or we are completely fucked. Hopefully our stimulus packages will repair some of the damage it has done to the economy.

@UprightCitizen Same, I don't understand why Skibum has chosen this topic to become so stubborn about. Talk about impeachment bullshit or SJWs and I'm completely with him. But this is an issue that we simply can't afford to bury our heads in the sand about. Individual actions are going to be critical to containing this virus.

"Do you really want to live in a civilization where social distance and virtual reality is the norm?" I suspect this comment may have been directed at me. This isn't entirely on the topic of COVID 19, but I suppose I will answer because its a good question and it should be answered. Before recently, food was not widely available. People could not take it for granted, people still can't in a lot of areas of the world. We have a society now where everyone can be fed according to their need. I want to see the same thing happen to sex. I want to see a civilization where everyone can have sex according to their need. As far as I can tell right now, the only ethical way for this to happen is for artificial sex technologies to be widely available and accepted. I do not wish to see a decrease in human to human sexual activity because of virtual reality becoming predominant. I simply wish to see an expansion of artificial forms of sex so that nobody has to rely on the arbitrary whims of humans anymore to get it. I want competition for sexual pleasure to end. As long as competition for sex exists, this means there will be people who need it that aren't getting it. Again, artificial technologies are the only way that this is going to happen. Once anybody can have the girl/boy of their dreams, nobody will need to compete with each other anymore in order to get sex. Right now, 28% of young men aged 22-35 did not have sex in the previous year. I do not consider this issue to be resolved until that number drops down to 0%. After tirelessly analyzing all the potential solutions that might hopefully bring this number down to 0%, I decided that the only one which is ethically feasible is sex robots. Sex robots will change sex from a limited resource into an abundant resource that everyone can have. The amount of issues that could be solved as a result of this are astonishing. Rape will likely be significantly reduced. Misogyny/misandry will probably largely disappear as well because there's no special power anyone can hold over the opposite sex anymore. Suicide rates will likely drop dramatically. Everyone will grow up in a world where sex is easily available, something as simple as ordering online. Subcultures will form among people who prefer digital/artificial sex or people who prefer traditional human sex. This doesn't mean everyone will live in virtual reality and have no contact with one another. Human on human sex may actually increase because robots will put an end to a lot of the resentment that men and women feel towards one another right now. It simply means that we will live in a civilization where nobody has to live with their needs unmet. I want to see the 2020s become the decade we see this become our reality.

@SJG The best case scenario which I hope for is that the warm weather will kill it. The news I've heard says that if this happens we may only get a death toll in the hundreds. A worst case scenario situation puts the death toll at over a million people but I'd like to think we can contain it and prevent its spread enough that that doesn't happen.

So what do you believe Skibum? Even Gammanu who was making fun of me last week has admitted that the NCAA wouldn't miss out on billions of dollars for something that was "mild." If medical experts telling us this is at least 10 times deadlier than the flu, crematorium workers in China saying that they've been burning 4-5 times the number of bodies they usually do, and Iran creating mass graves the size of football fields isn't enough to convince you, then what the hell will? I've never seen someone fight so hard to stay stuck inside their bubble of delusion.

I'm certainly not fascinated by everything everyone here says. Usually I just scroll past it. And sometimes SJG's posts are boring to me to, so I scroll past it. Its that simple. If you don't poke SJG he won't poke you.