I've seen several excellent threads recently discussing, among other things, the Delta variant of the Wuhan Flu. While cases are indeed rising, fatalities are not going up proportionately. Dig these charts.
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| It's the Delta variant! We're doomed! |
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| Err, maybe not. |
If you want to read an excellent fisking of some of the most recent panic porn, you can find one here. The author of that post is a statistician who goes off on an ABC News piece designed to terrify you. What you find is almost no actionable information and stats carefully chosen to be both alarming and inconsistent with each other.
Dittos for the Global Warming Climate Change hysteria. It may or may not be happening, but if it is and it's driven by CO2, China is the culprit by a significant margin. The US has done plenty to reduce our footprint, but the rational response now is to learn to cope with whatever is coming. That, of course is not what we're being fed. Instead, all we get is fear, fear, fear.
And so on and so forth. White supremacists, voting laws, blah blah blah, it's all fear porn all the time.
Why?
Well, if you don't have a crisis you can't have heroes. Going back to the WuFlu, what if we were told more about who is really at risk? If we discovered what the comorbidities were and the death rates for people without those problems, we'd be able to gauge the danger to our own lives and act accordingly.
Of course, if we did that, we wouldn't need all those heroes.
Recalling a portion of KT's Theory of Everything, there's a strong demand for self-esteem pornography.
The diversity crowd feels a frisson of pleasure when someone like Lori Lightfoot, a black lesbian, wins an election. They're silent when Macy's leaves a 170,000 square foot hole in the Magnificent Mile and when Chicago murders skyrocket, almost all of which are black-on-black.
It's not that they don't know, it's that they are solving a totally different equation than what they claim.
They are not fighting inequality, they're morally masturbating. Diversity, trans, racial justice, all of it is just pornography. It feels so good, but nothing gets done. Further, they risk nothing, since it's the mania du jour. No one will be canceled if they encourage a young girl to take lethal doses of testosterone. Instead, they might be elected President...
BLM is porn. The trans movement is porn. The Green New Deal and associated trillion-dollar programs are porn. It all makes us feel so, so, so gooooood, but in nine months we'll have ... nothing.
The Wuhan Flu response is porn as well. For example, there's no reason to mask children, vaccinate them or keep them out of schools. If we had a decent handle on the risk demographics, most of us could live normal lives.
So why the fear? What do all of those things have in common? Fear creates a need, a need that you can fill. When you fill an important need, you're a hero.
- Black people need you otherwise they'll be attacked by white supremacists.
- Transmen and transwomen need you otherwise they'll suffer pain from being misgendered.
- The planet needs you otherwise we'll all die of heat stroke.
- Everyone around you, regardless of healthiness, is at risk from the Wuhan Flu. They need you to get vaccinated and wear a mask.
You are so very, very important!
It's all self-esteem pornography.
5 comments:
So much wrongness.
On fear-mongering generally:
1) I can't think of a better term for your "lizard empire" descriptions.
2) Your recent post on the "jello of vegans" had more than it's share.
3) Fear porn has been linked to the news business since there has been a news business.
On Covid19:
1) It's obvious from a casual glance that there is a lag of 3-4 weeks between the case count rising and the increase in deaths, although I am hoping enough people are vaccinated that the mortality rate will be low.
2) Again, many of the people who don't die will still suffer long-term effects.
3) The vaccine is, at best, 95% effective. That means 5% of those receiving it are still susceptible.
4) The fisking you linked was rather pathetic, frankly. No one expects an ABC News report to hold to the standards of publication for a scientific publication, and it's not like it found actual errors.
5) Kids who don't get sick can still infect susceptible grown-ups.
6) Wearing a mask and getting vaccinated isn't heroic (although I would argue it's patriotic).
On Global Warming:
1) We are seeing almost exactly what people predicted 20-30 years ago.
2) China is making more of an effort to mitigate that we have.
3) Our contribution of CO2 per capita has always dwarfed China's.
Ending:
1) Black people are well aware of how they are differently treated without me.
2) Trans people are well aware of their suffering without my input.
One Brow we need to be fact based here.
While the US has more per capita, the "earth" doesn't care about per-capita.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
I didn't do the math, but it looks to me like 2-6 add up to the emissions of 1.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-3/
I remember in the 70s when we were headed for an ice age, and people would starve to death. Spoilers, Soylent Green is people.
Mostly Nothing,
I completely agree. Although 2-5 add up to slightly more than China, it's also a fair point. However, seeing as China is more than 4 times our population and putting out less than half the CO2, trying to reduce theirs will be more difficult. You get bigger hunks of meat from a bull than a calf. Also, as I mentioned, China is engaging in their own environmental efforts.
Since we are talking facts, did you notice that the AEIs list only had 9 people on it, 2 of which (Commoner and the NYT editorial) were not wrong?
Yes, the popular magazines talk about an ice age in the 70s. The scientific literature did not.
https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm
Probably the people at AEI are aware of this, but they don't really care as long as they can convince some people otherwise.
This chart doesn't seem like China is actually trying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#/media/File:Total_CO2_by_Region.svg
And the rest of the world looks to be negating any effort put in by 2 through 5
Mostly Nothing,
I see the leveling off of the Chinese emissions since 2014 as a sign of making an effort.
I agree the "rest of the world" is an issue. However, I've always thought of the US as a world leader, a shining beacon on a hill. Shouldn't we lead rather than follow?
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