New England Journal of Medicine Resoundingly Endorses Biden (nejm.org) 363
BishopBerkeley writes: In another first, the editors of the The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) endorse Joe Biden by stating that the current government needs to be fired. Although they don't mention any names, the editors of the NEJM state in shockingly forceful and accusatory language that the current administration is totally incompetent and does not deserve to keep its job. The editorial, somberly titled "Dying in a Leadership Vacuum" bases its opinion on some dispiriting statistics:
"The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly."
The Administration's extreme rhetoric and extreme actions are earning extreme reactions. Last month, Scientific American broke a 175-year tradition of not endorsing a presidential candidate by throwing their support behind Joe Biden. "We'd love to stay out of politics, but this president has been so anti-science that we can't ignore it," editor in chief, Laura Helmuth told The Washington Post.
The editor in chief of Science Magazine also denounced Trump, but stopped short of endorsing presidential candidate Joe Biden.
"The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly."
The Administration's extreme rhetoric and extreme actions are earning extreme reactions. Last month, Scientific American broke a 175-year tradition of not endorsing a presidential candidate by throwing their support behind Joe Biden. "We'd love to stay out of politics, but this president has been so anti-science that we can't ignore it," editor in chief, Laura Helmuth told The Washington Post.
The editor in chief of Science Magazine also denounced Trump, but stopped short of endorsing presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I see you ran foul of the "I don't like your opinion, so therefore you must be a troll" moderator.
Re: The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
To godwin this argument, if the current president were literally adolf hitler, your argument is just as dumb. A magazine representing doctors couldn't mention the president was mass murdering their patients because it's just "politics". In this case, the magazine is accusing the current administration of incompetence to the point of being close to mass manslaughter.
Re: The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your argument may make sense if no one else was raising these issues.
But the failings of Donald Trump are obvious and are broadcast everywhere.
Adding their "me too" to the avalanche of denunciations is going to make no difference.
The politicization of the NEJM is pointless and unnecessary. It damages their credibility and their reputation for impartiality.
Re: The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
The politicization of the NEJM is pointless and unnecessary.
I pray we never meet a time where someone even as jaded as you finally agrees it has a point and is necessary. If not now, when?
Re: The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:5, Funny)
To answer your question, just read Bill's first sentence or invert the conditions the second, i.e. it would have a point and be necessary if the Trump's failings were non-obvious and sparsely broadcast.
Logic, it makes everything easier.
Re: The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Adding their "me too" to the avalanche of denunciations is going to make no difference.
Oh, bullshit. The people keeping the infection rates up right now are anti-mask idiots operating on bad information. The people with the right information, we're not just talking about the brains but also the people who end up dealing with the tragic avalanche of dip-shittery, they absolutely should be standing up and denouncing it if simply because their silence on the matter just makes their lives devastatingly harder.
The thickheadedness of a portion of the American Public is not a reason for doctors to stay silent on the matter... because 'noise', and the 'politicization' of NEJM is is a result. not a cause. There are lots of Republicans in the hospital right now as we discuss this.
It is not unncessary (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if you're an IT person and the President went on TV and said "ShanghaiBill will fix every Americans PC personally because he fixed mine! Doesn't matter how broken. Got a Commodore 64 in the attic? He'll make it run Crysis Remastered at 4k!"
That is essentially what Trump did. It would be profoundly irresponsible for the doctors of this country to stay silent.
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Trump made it necessary when he got a deadly virus, recieved a level of medical care that is unobtainable to 99% of the population, and then went on national television as the President of The United States and told everyone that the doctors, including those of the NEJM, could easily provided that same level of treatment to every single American free of Charge.
And Trump could easily have been much sicker, including dying from this, no matter how much medical attention he received.
Honestly given Trump's age (Score:2)
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You have to account for how hard he got it (Score:2)
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medical history and how hard the virus hit him I think if he was a regular Joe he'd be dead right now.
Trump wasn't "hit hard".
eg. British PM Boris Johnson would have had the same level of health care and he was in hospital a lot longer than Trump was.
Re:Honestly given Trump's age (Score:5, Informative)
Johnson didn't have the same level of healthcare because the experimental treatment that Trump got didn't exist back then.
Trump had a human cell based treatment, interestingly using a cell culture from an aborted foetus which is something he has previously spoken against. Seems than when his arse is on the line he is willing to put moral objections aside.
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Boris was treated by the same health service using the same methods that are available to everybody in the country.
That's the key difference really, rather than the severity of the infection.
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The politicization of the NEJM is pointless and unnecessary.
Maybe the people there felt they couldn't keep quiet any longer. They simply HAD to say something.
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The politicization of the NEJM is pointless and unnecessary. It damages their credibility and their reputation for impartiality.
Perhaps there could be a political motivation behind the NEJM's endorsement. However, this is not obvious because there is a more cogent medical argument. If they believe that the current administration is directly responsible for a significant part of the pandemic outcomes (e.g., deaths that could have been prevented in the past and future), then they could believe that their medical oath to do no harm requires them to call for public policy to prevent future medical harm.
There are those that would view
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Lots of media are accusing their governments of that, despite the fact that the problems are far deeper.
Yes, I've seen the flaws in the US response, and it comes from all sides, not just the head of state (though I really didn't like that response at all).
The OP argument has merit. How much is definitely up for debate, but it has merit, and it's not a troll.
Re: The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've been doing most whatever I want outside with no fear of arrest. I am expected to socially distance and line ups are more spaced out. Stores and such are implementing mask requirements so it is possible to get arrested for trespassing and the right wingers are freaking out about businesses making requirements to enter their business as they only care about themselves. There has been a couple of people fined for holding large parties and of course, Americans arrested, fined and shipped out of the country
Re:The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the administration has been so bad in science and health that it's nearly impossible to stay out of of the politics. It's clear that Trump is actively hostile towards science, he doesn't believe in it or understand it, and medicine is a branch of science that he is constantly undermining and giving false statements about on a near daily basis during this pandemic. This is not just normal every day politics here, Trump is way beyond the Pale. When the president is an extremist, then it doing a tiny small amount of politics may be necessary, and that's all these publications are doing. A publication will lose credibility if they take the neutral stance of "well, the president may or may not be right, we don't want to take a stand, and we encourage you to wear or not wear a mask depending upon factors that we are too neutral to discuss."
When the president lies, then it is a citizen's DUTY to call this out. A true patriot will not hide behind the president or make excuses for his faults. Trump is fallible, and he proves it every day.
Trump has lost credibility, not the NEJM or SA. Those publications only lose credibility in the eyes of those who believe Trump is always right and they probably already discounted those publications already for heinous sin of disagreeing with Trump.
Re:The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:5, Interesting)
he doesn't believe in it or understand it
He certainly believes in it. He made statements (not public ones) in February that show he recognized COVID as a threat. When he got sick, he didn't turn to HCQ, he got a cutting edge treatment form Regeneron. His public persona and his policies are anti-science, but he clearly believes in it.
Re:The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
He's also promoted hydroxychloroquine, Lysol, and bleach and pretty much anything else his rich pharma friends asked him to promote to bump their stock price. A corrupt broken clock isn't right twice a day - it just happens to show the current time by coincidence.
And let's be clear: the Regeneron treatment he received is experimental, certainly mindbogglingly expensive (I'd love to know what his visit to Walter Reed cost taxpayers), and unobtainable by 99.999 999 9% (*) of the population. Not exactly a fair standard.
* Apparently more than three consecutive 9's trips the lameness filter's "ascii art" rule. How advanced.
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Trump has been trying to kill Regeneron so why don't you leave your political bubble yourself.
Re:The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:4, Insightful)
When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
He threw the first punch
Re: The end of impartial journalism is nigh. (Score:2, Insightful)
No, asking white people to write letters of apology to black coworkers and classmates and telling them they're beneficiaries of "white privilege" creates animosity and is divisive. I went to inner city schools for most of my pre-college education, so I had the same schooling and heard the teachers say the same thing: you need an education to succeed in life. Listening to that statement amd taking it to heart is "white privilege"
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Yes, you figured it out. We're scared of you because you put a con man in charge of nuclear weapons. What, did you think any sane person wouldn't admit that?
Masks aren't a sacrifice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah - you get a little bit of swamp-nose if you aren't able to get a bit of privacy to clean off during a long work session - but simple facemasks aren't a violation of anything - hell, they INCREASE privacy, they're largely private rules precenting access to private property, and where they're required, it's legitimately to directly save lives of vulnerable people during a major pandemic.
I can't even see a libertarian objection to the simple rules set in place here. In fact, in most libertarian extremes I've seen - this is one of those critical cases where a community need can create rules that the community enforces, and should.
The fact that it's this weird modern offshoot of American "Conservatism" that considers asking for mask wearing to access resources and inflict active disease on folks ... that's much more a mark on what we now call conservatism than it is on anything else.
And let's face reality - it's really Trump. Normally - yes, we'd have a contingent of anti-vaxx folks making very angry reactions to any public health effort - but we'd also normally have folks like John McCain calming fears and damping fires in the case of major pandemic.
Now though, the crazy folks aren't writing bitter editorials on page D6, they're running the show and setting the defaults to all public response.
I look forward to the tide shifting WAAAY back, as the newer voters outnumber the older generations.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Masks aren't a sacrifice. (Score:5, Informative)
You don't know who needs one or not (due to the way the virus expresses asymptomatically in many). Safest globally is to wear masks overall, as it depresses the rate of transmission significantly. So there's nobody that doesn't need them in that frame.
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ass u me (Score:2)
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Can of worms... (Score:2)
So, what happens when some of their members disagree? Are they to be cancelled? Hounded out of their careers?
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There is no disagreement in the left. You either agree, or you are not allowed to speak. Everything is simpler that way. Your opinion will be decided for you and you get no say in the matter.
Federalism (Score:2)
How do they not get it?
USA rate is more than double that of Canada.... (Score:2)
It is hardly surprising that a disease which requires close contact to spread would spread faster where population density is highest.
Honestly, I don't really know if it's fair to say that the USA is doing any worse than Canada in that regard.... relatively speaking. Heck, maybe Canada is doing worse.
NEJM has pushed left-wing politics for decades. (Score:4, Insightful)
The New England Journal of Medicine has been into left-wing politics for decades.
It shows up primarily in their publication of a llarge number of bogus anti-gun research papers, including some which even their authors had to retract later.
I could go into this in detail but that would be a long digression. The main point is that public health is the wrong discipline and their models just don't work for a "disease" where the actors are intelligent people of varying moral character rather than mindless micoscopic lifeforms just doing their best to reproduce. The relevant discipline is criminology, which has its own journals and does a far better job of analyzing the issues and otherwise doing science on them.
But it's nice to see the operators of the NEJM being honest and up-front about their political leanings and that the will use their soapbox to campaign for one side of the current political divide.
Re:NEJM has pushed left-wing politics for decades. (Score:4, Insightful)
As a UK resident, I find it odd what people in the USA call "left wing". I am not sure Joe Biden would be called "left wing" over here. Certainly not a conservative, but maybe a centrist.
There is a natural tendency for people directly involved in medicine to care for people less fortunate than themselves. This is probably why they took up medicine in the first place. This care for less fortunate people is a basis for liberal political ideas, in my view, so perhaps there is a tendency for medical people to support liberal views.
In this particular case, NEJM appear to be saying that Trump has massively mismanaged the response to the pandemic, and continues to do so. This is a medical matter, which the NEJM is quite right to point out. Actually supporting a rival candidate to Trump may perhaps be going too far, but perhaps the NEJM see it as their civic duty to do prevent further harm to the people of the USA.
Trump: less anti-science than most Democrats, BUT (Score:3)
The problem is not that Trump is anti-science, but that he does not care enough about the subject to be pro-science in any organized, visionary way. A pro-science president would at least have kicked open Yucca Mountain by now and bulldozed the thugs off the road to Maunakea. The extra flak he would have taken for these actions would be small in comparison to the flak he has absorbed for everything else.
Biden will be a well-organized grownup who will be intellectually in favor of science, but fat chance that he will risk annoying the party's anti-science wing.
Zero Credibility (Score:3)
If you want to lose all credibility in the scientific journalism community, endorse a political candidate. Especially that one.
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
It's mismanagement, in the U.S.
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Re:Misleading headline (Score:4, Informative)
Trump didn't do that. Your stupid governors did.
Perhaps, but Trump abrogated all responsibility for mandated behavior, or leadership, or even just consistent well-informed guidance for how to deal with the pandemic to the states. Just so he could wave his hands and say "not my fault." In a national emergency, the federal government is responsible, whether they want to be or not. Dipshit red-state governors should never even have been given the opportunity to kill as many people as they have.
OP is a troll (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing you give him will be enough unless you're prepared to spend hours pouring over and summarizing reports. Best thing to do is call trolls like this ou
Re: Misleading headline (Score:2)
Think about the things you've done in the last week outside of your home, then think about the fact you'd be arrested most places for doing them because you'd be locked down.
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I live in a Federal country. The Federal government still gave guidance, our leader set an example, self-isolating when his wife caught it, wearing a mask and practicing social distancing.. Has been arranging PPE, rather then trying to be divisive. All over the country politicians worked together regardless of party to get help to the people rather then writing off half the country.
Just setting a good example can go a long ways, and the opposite is true, setting a bad example does not help things.
Re:Misleading headline (Score:4, Informative)
Your comments about NZ fail pretty badly when you take into account what happened with our “second wave” - starting with zero infection in the community, within a week of the first community case there were 70 and it was accelerating and the country was back into lockdown
We have the population densities to make it bad (Auckland has 1.4 million people in its urban area) but we also have the policies to stop it once its detected - Auckland was isolated from the rest of the country, people were prevented from going into or out of that region (which is a lot more than you seem to think it is - a lot of people commute from Hamilton, Huntley etc on a daily or weekly basis to work in Auckland) and masks were mandated and enforced. And so we beat it a second time.
The basic fact is the US has completely fucked up its response, and no amount of dismissing the countries which have been successful will change that - time for the US to put on its big boy pants and act its fucking age.
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They key is population density, not population per city.
Auckland has a population denseity of 1,200 per square kilometer.
New York, for example has near 10,300 per square kilometer.
Auckland has a population of circa 1.4 million to New York's near 19 million.
The density alone is near an order or magnitude greater, and that's how things spread; higher the density, the greater the quantity of probable vectors, and it's non-linear.
Lots of cities in the rest of the world have incredibly high densities that would
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I'm in the middle of an election. None of the parties has been blasting the others about the response to the pandemic, it hasn't even been mentioned. Lots of talk about how to recover the economy along with the traditional talking points.
There's no need to politicize a disease.
Re: Misleading headline (Score:4, Informative)
If the US had the same death rate as Canada, there would be less than 90,000 deaths, not 210,000.
Re: Misleading headline (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Quebec, and we have made many of the same mistakes here as in the USAâ"opening too early, concentrating on "the economy", forcing children back to school with no plan for making classrooms safe and no option to keep children at home, etc. And you'll see that our numbers are terrible. If you factor Quebec's mismanagement out of the Canadian numbers, the rest of the country is doing considerably better. The story of Canadian failure in the face of this pandemic is largely the story of Quebec. Half the deaths are from this province.
And even still, our numbers are lower than most states. It is remarkable the degree to which the USA has failed at a federal level. And I suspect the Canadian economy will recover sooner as well, since the disaster relief (or "stimulus", if you must, but it really is more like disaster relief) has continued to flow throughout.
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in a bad light to someone who actually understands statistics?
If you're implying that's you, then I'm highly skeptical.
Someone who understands statistics would know that the sample size of the population is not what's important, but the randomness of the sample and the distribution of the population.
Being those weren't addressed at all by you or the link, there's precisely nothing to make you think that the ultimately infection rate for either of the 3 countries is skewed, one way or another, and the reasons you give for them possibly being so don't really factor i
Picking apart the points in the article (Score:5, Informative)
And we're getting our assed kicked by every other country. South Korea, Japan and the Netherlands comes to mind. One of the most hilarious things of 2020 is that the Trump Whitehouse has more confirmed cases than New Zealand. I can't make this shit up.
And no, you're not willing to be informed. You've got Google. You can find the studies with a few hours of searching and reading. You put that in your post because it's a very high bar (like I said, few hours searching & reading) and nobody's going to do that for a
A little bit of Googling and I found this [vox.com] but again, it won't meet your bar because you intentionally set it too high as a rhetorical device so you could win the argument in this thread.
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If the New England Journal of Medicine is left-wing, then who is still in the center?
Not Biden, he's also right-wing [politicalcompass.org], just a notch to the left and less authoritarian than Trump. So who?
I'm 99% certain you can't answer, because you believe everything Trump tells you. Prove me wrong. Tell me the last time Trump said something you didn't believe.
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I don't agree with Trump on his immigration policies and his trade policies. So I don't believe many of his claims on those topics, because I think he's mistaken on them.
Your 99% certainty turns out to be false.
If you think Biden is more right-wing than Trump is, then you're in a very small minority. According to your linked graph, there is no such thing as a left-wing authoritarian candidate in the U.S. It seems the issue is more that you are so far left-wing that everyone looks right-wing to you.
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Ok good, but what specifically did he say that you didn't believe?
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I'll accept that. You proved me wrong. I wish there were more thinking Republicans like yourself, but "thinking party member" is kind of an oxymoron, for both parties, because the whole purpose of political parties is to control the way people think and vote!
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You should read the rest of the thread. I was giving examples of recent statements of Trump's which I don't believe/agree with...
Based on Opinion Polls Bernie Sanders (Score:2)
But opinions polls do not equal votes, especially in a country that tolerates stuff like this [cnn.com]
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Re:Not exactly news for nerds... (Score:5, Informative)
Or maybe they're calling him anti-science because he's an anti-vax anti-mask snake-oil-promoting climate denialist who defunds and silences the government's scientists whenever they contradict his aforementioned anti-science views?
Re:Not exactly news for nerds... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh I didn't even remember his denial of COVID19 seriousness. That it's a little flu, doesn't affect young people, will go away with the warm weather like a miracle. And the Woodward tapes show that he knew it was all a lie, told to prop up the stock market at the expense of a few dozen 9/11s worth of dead Americans.
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I can fact check you all day long:
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
https://abcnews.go.com/Politic... [go.com]
But you have become a being of pure mendacity. You'll just obtain and spew more lies from the fascist fever swamps and if you run out, you'll probably just recycle old ones. You lie with every breath for your orange god-emperor. Hopefully your vile dogshit ideology will soon be crushed, burned, pissed on only after it stops smoking, and entombed in the nuclear waste dump beneath the dustbin of history.
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I think VP Harris expressly said that she did not trust the process under Trump and that if it went though the normal process she would be the first in line.
As you must have heard, and apparently don't believe, Trump has been meddling with the FDA https://www.upi.com/Top_News/U... [upi.com] , the DOJ https://www.washingtonexaminer... [washingtonexaminer.com], and our foreign intelligence https://www.vox.com/policy-and... [vox.com] to help him get reelected.
That isn't being an antivaxxer and it isn't being against the vaccine because Trump is for it.
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I get it though, you're the guy that would eat a pile
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So exciting to see another group of left-wing people go public with their support of Biden and opposition to Trump.... must be "News For Nerds"!
Yeah you must be oppressed, it couldn't possibly be that you're backing a party as if it were a sports team and the collective resistance to reality is killing enough of you that a bunch of doctors are sick of handling your corpses.
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You're correct, it isn't.
The specific people [nejm.org] who make up the editorial board of the NEJM, however, very much are.
But hey, at least they aren't resorting to just insulting people they disagree with politically...
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I don’t see a D or R by their names. Maybe it’s because Biden says he will listen to them?
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You're literally replying to a thread in a story about the NEJM making science political... the irony.
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They're doctors who took an oath to help people, not stand aside as people die.
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Sorry, you're thinking of the Climate change crowd, I mean, the Global Warming crowd, I mean, the Anti-DDT Silent Spring crowd, I mean... I could go on. This politicization of science by the left pre-dates my birth, and I'm not that young.
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Never said that. The NEJM also made it political. Other groups making science political before doesn't mean the NEJM can't also make it political.
Re: Not exactly news for nerds... (Score:2, Insightful)
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No, it's actually not. There are many academic branches that publish decidedly junk (anti-science) papers, and call it science.. That's subversion, and primarily done by the left wing. It's endemic at the moment, and a symptom of the ridiculous polarisation of the USA..
Get rid of that, and there'll be a chance that you don't repeat what happened to the Arabic world a few hundred years ago (it was once at the forefront of science, until a highly polarised group got power, and made things taboo to question
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The mental gymnastics here are astounding.
No arguments here (Score:2)
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That "center right" party took a severe shift to the left, in fact more left than the left wing NDP to get elected this time. They're nowhere near "center right” in ANY policy at the moment. Though I do remember a time not that long ago when that party was center left instead of the current radical left they've become.
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I believe that it is less of a problem with the government, per se, as much as it lies with inherent vulnerabilities in how both counties operate, at a fundamental level, that a virus like this can easily exploit.
In particular, both countries offer citizens an exceptionally large freedom of mobility, and because this disease is most commonly spread by people while they are unaware that they have it, the practically unlimited ability for people who may otherwise believe themselves to be healthy and move a
Re:Take a civics class and go exercise a little mo (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Take a civics class and go exercise a little mo (Score:5, Insightful)
The government's job should be to give people information and let them decide. Have a problem going to a restaurant with people not wearing masks? Then don't go to that restaurant.
So the government should tell people about stoplights and drunk driving and then let them decide? If you have a problem with people running red lights you shouldn't drive through intersections?
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Re: Take a civics class and go exercise a little m (Score:2)
That is exactly what happens.
Scary numbers of people run red lights etc, despite being told that it is a bad idea, even if it is against the law.
That is not true (Score:2, Insightful)
The man got caught doing so many things that should have ended him (called soldiers suckers and losers, big friend with Jeff Epstien and joked about pedophilia, Nearly started a war with Iran, banged a porn star on the night after his 3rd wife gave birth to his 4th or 5th kid from 3 mothers, only paid $750 in taxes in last 2 years,
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What I find astounding is that COVID-19 was Trump's 9-11. It was his crisis to respond to, and if he had actually responded, he'd get re-elected.
All he had to do was actually be a leader, and enough of the centrists would have rewarded that.
But he fucked that up. Fucked it up in a baffling, nonsensical way.
Rally the CDC, mobilize industry, throw out a giant aid package with health care, unemployment, and stimulus, and boom, reelected.
It wouldn't be controversial, it wouldn't seem partisan, it would seem lik
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Heart disease, hypertension, COPD, and diabetes are not communicable and do not have exponential growth. Covid-19 deaths are about 4% of the total at a recent point in time. A few months ago, it was 0%. That's a heck of a difference. Nobody knows how high it will climb. You mention "2M Americans die every year due to heart disease". Well, Covid-19 has not even existed for a year. Even if the number who die the first year of Covid-19 is less than 2M, what will it be the years going forward? Again,
Re:Take a civics class and go exercise a little mo (Score:4, Informative)
The President actually has very little power. If there's anyone to blame, then you have to blame certain governors. Trump did what he could under his authority - stop flights from China - and then got called racist.
The right loves to repeat this lie. He didn't stop flights from China. He put a half-assed travel ban in place long after the horse had left the barn that was more of a Chinese national entry ban than a China flight ban, which is why people called it racist.
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And why the hell was citizenship a factor? The virus doesn't give a flying fuck about anyone's citizenship. So why completely block non-citizens from entering while allowing citizens in? And who are the non-US citizens who would've been to the affected areas at that time? That's right, Chinese nationals. So in effect this ban mostly just blocked Chinese nationals from entering. Yes, prove my point harder please.
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The president doesn’t help things when he claims the virus was a hoax created by Democrats. A hoax that required he be evacuated to a hospital by aircraft... Oh and receive still experimental medicines.
Re:Who cares what these biased political hacks thi (Score:4, Informative)
He never said that. He said that Democratic politicians claiming he was doing little about COVID is a hoax.
https://www.politifact.com/art... [politifact.com]
As an outsider, I used to believe that it was mainly the American Right that was full of conspiratorial rubbish. "Reality has a liberal bias", right? Sadly, now I know better: even ostensibly intelligent people believe whatever makes them feel good.
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The President is NOT a dictator or king. He does NOT rule. The LAW says that governors are the authority when it comes to a state's healthcare. The President can advise and assist, not compel. That's the law.
Well, no. https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/docs/... [cdc.gov] the LAW says that the CDC has broad powers in emergencies to prevent the spread of contagious diseases, and can overrule state governments in some situations. But if the president blocks the CDC, then they can't do their job.
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I think this is a lot simpler than the ideological arguments. Trump really has pissed off the drug companies. He has also defied insurance companies, particularly with the individual mandate repeal. I don't believe the NEJM et al. are isolated from this or impartial to it. Not even a little. The billionaires calling the shots at these institutions are the same billionaires calling the shots at big pharma, the media, etc.
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If you take a very simplistic view and say that liberty is simply a lack of restrictions, then any attempt to deal with the virus represents a loss of liberty. Every quarantine, every isolation, every bit of social distancing and mask wearing.
If you allow for a little more nuance and recognize that a per
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Everyone favors liberty
No, it not just diversity of opinions about liberty. There are people who genuinely want authoritarianism and want their preferred group think to be compulsory. We need to keep a watch for them.
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then any attempt to deal with the virus represents a loss of liberty.
Obviously, there's shades of grey. The more restrictions there are, the more it weighs towards the nanny side, and the less restrictions there are, the more it weighs towards the liberty side.
We can't possibly know in advance the damage to the economy that it could do. There's a risk it could start a recession. How many lives is that worth? Are 80 year old people with pre-existing conditions less valuable than a 30 year old with a family to feed? How many businesses (worth $100k each) shut down is wort
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It is (or at least _used_ to be) pretty damn clear that in this country, one person's liberty stops when it infringes on another's right to life. Liberty has nothing to do with this and throwing that word around is just equivocation by plutocrats and their brainwashed followers.
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Even if everything you said was true, Biden/Harris is still the better choice. Trump is a dumpster fire that burns like the sun, the opposition only needs to not be as bad for the horrified populace to vote for them/against Trump. And being 'not as bad as Trump' is really easy to do.
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Trump was accused of being racist when he instituted a travel ban not from China, but to Chinese citizens.