Negatory

Actually pretty easy. 63M vs 66M, 63M wins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election Also, non-voters are significantly less likely to have conservative viewpoints. https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/10/29/the-party-of-nonvoters/ Say what you want, but it's pretty obvious how the government could not be representative of the viewpoint of the average American. I'm not talking about the American voter, I'm talking about the American. And that's who actually matters.

Fair enough, I see your side of it. My question is how do we ever get back to more efficient, less partisan politics when both sides are such babies? In reality, some principles that espouse fairness, voter representation, or the spirit of the constitution (such as what McConnell hypocritically suggested in 2016) are exactly what would help unite the country. Are we past things like that? Is it so clearly one team versus the other? Are the gloves fully off? I agree that the dems were blatantly unfair during the Kavanaugh confirmation, and I understand the desire to “get back” at them. It just makes me sad for the future of the country and our ability to actually unite and make meaningful progress against external threats such as China, deficits, or Global Warming. Here’s to the 2020s being another lost decade of progress, just like the 2010s.

He’s just pointing out blatant hypocritical statements that didn’t need to be said in 2016. Nothing more, nothing less.

Whoa sparky, calm down. The linked story literally had nothing in it calling out a conspiracy, even going so far as to say it was due purely to “inattention.” I think the point of posting it was that even the commander in chief’s office made one of the same mistakes that pisses off a lot of Air Force pilots. How can we hold orgs like PA to a higher standard if the CiC’s office does the same thing? Also, I’m positive this would have been linked if Biden or Clinton had done it.

Huh? Are you saying the CIA, FBI, DISA, etc are all wrong about Russian interference? Is this more disinformation? ”The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee submitted the first in their five-volume 1,313-page report in July 2019 in which they concluded that the January 2017 intelligence community assessment alleging Russian interference was "coherent and well-constructed". ” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections

I’m not naive. There’s a difference between war and posturing, and to say we’re at war with Iran is laughable. I have had them tell me to leave their airspace before and intentionally ignored it, but that ain’t war. You probably also say we’re at war with Russia when it’s convenient to your argument but disregard the numerous pro Russia foreign policy moves that have been made by the administration. By your logic, you’d probably say we’re at war with China, Venezuela, Yemen, half of Africa, etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Qasem_Soleimani I guess this was just a continuation of our longstanding war with Iran. More blatant propaganda drivel.

You guys have any experience with this training? At my org (group level), we went around the room and, if you were white, you basically had to admit how you have been privileged and how you have internal biases. Super not awkward and fake, let me tell you. And this wasn’t optional. Literally every person had to talk. If you were black, you had to go around and tell the room about your experiences being oppressed based on your skin color. One of the TSgts didn’t know what to say and started rambling about how she’s never had a bad experience or felt scared until the last week when a rent a cop pulled her over on base for speeding. She went on to say that the cop was super nice and did nothing wrong, but that she felt like she should be scared so she was. We are creating victims and people with victim complexes. It also amplifies any sort of racial divide that existed before. The whole training takes away from the fact that there really are race bias problems out there, and that is what we should be focusing on.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/09/military-is-subject-to-trumps-upcoming-payroll-tax-deferral-too/ Looks like some folks are getting short term loans for the next 4 months.

Also, I just looked into the actual comorbidities page on the CDC website, and some of the top conditions that were present when patients died of COVID that were counted as comorbidities were pneumonia, respiratory distress syndrome, respiratory arrest, and respiratory failure... Also, they listed cardiac arrest - something that happens when you die - as a comorbidity. If you don't see how the data is being skewed here, you're being intellectually dishonest. Seems fairly obvious that the overwhelming majority of people who died of COVID - a disease that is known to cause respiratory and heart issues - should have associated respiratory and heart issues when they die. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR3-wrg3tTKK5-9tOHPGAHWFVO3DfslkJ0KsDEPQpWmPbKtp6EsoVV2Qs1Q (Table 3) We've known all along that COVID causes people to have pneumonia, a cough, trouble breathing, and respiratory distress. Don't pretend like a report that says that those conditions happen in people with COVID is some sort of proof that COVID's actual death rate is vastly overstated.

The liberal media is getting this entirely wrong, as usual. The mayor of SF, when asked if Pelosi violated the city health order: "So look, Nancy Pelosi has done so much for this city and even this country and in the midst of this pandemic and all the stuff that’s happening amidst this election, she is in Washington D.C. fighting against a tyrant every single day," Breed said. "We need to be focused on the issues and the fact that over 180,000 people have died in this country and we have a president that continues to divide us." YGBSM. Can democrats just have some integrity and condemn that she did the exact opposite of what they've been saying? Why doesn't she just admit guilt and apologize? Why is the political system so broken in this country? What choice is there for a rational voter when it's just Republicans and Democrats? Every day further convinces me that constitutional amendments are in order: ranked choice voting and term limits for people in congress.

Sure, you’re right. The economic impact is real and must be considered versus health effects, and my argument oversimplified that very important fact.

You’re right. Absolutely f*&k MSM that says it’s okay for protestors to be outside but it’s not okay for churchs to congregate. Seriously. I 100% agree that CNN and MSNBC have contributed just as much as FOX as to why our nation can’t have a unified approach to this natural disaster. I am personally not for any news organization; I am equally against everyone that is anti-science. Turns out that’s the majority of the government press and mainstream media. I believe that Dr. Fauci and the CDC are some of the last bastions of integrity and rational thought when it comes to public health, and it pisses me off to no end when news organizations cherry pick/misrepresent data from their reports to support political positions.

I regret presenting it this way as I said at the premise, but after seeing the 6% COVID CDC statistics presented so many times incorrectly (across this forum and many different social media sites), I am frustrated. Mainly, I am frustrated that the smartest people I know seem to embrace points without doing much critical thinking because it aligns with them from an identity standpoint. And to your second point, whether you like it or not, your choices and beliefs absolutely will be assessed with 20/20 hindsight. There often IS a right side of history. You don’t see too many textbooks now spouting the merits of the San Francisco antimasker alliance that existed during the Spanish Flu.

This post is unfortunately more condescending than I like, but I guess it is what it is. Your analysis is, at best, fallacious and, at worst, intentionally misleading. I'll trust in Hanlon's razor and just assume incompetence over malice. Also, you'll note that these graphs have websites at the bottom. It's a thing called a "source." You still are ignoring excess mortality and arguing that COVID has had marginal total effects, all with no actual data to back it up. Your stats for Flu/Chronic Respiratory Disease/Diabetes show... nothing? They don't compare apples to apples. You would need to have TOTAL deaths for FLU/Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease/Diabetes in 2020, including both COVID and non-COVID - and it would need to be extrapolated to December - to compare the two datasets. Tons of people, literally the vast majority of them (>99%), live with and through those diseases every year. The fact that there are cases where they died with COVID only really proves that COVID does what has been said: causes death in the population. Literally nothing more. It just shows that deaths happen. Now if you could extrapolate the data from everyone that got COVID, then you could possibly compare the outcomes of the population without COVID that died from those diseases to the population with COVID that did, but that's not even close to what you did. Your argument that they had a pre-existing condition and would have died "regardless" is also absurd. Do you know how many people have pre-existing conditions in America? 40% of the country is obese for god's sake. The fact that a huge percentage of society has pre-existing conditions should be ASSUMED in discussions like these. The population of America is at risk health-wise, no duh, but that doesn't mean they are going to keel over and die year-to-year. 1) What do you think caused the 200k excess deaths up to this point this year? And how exactly does it matter what is a CF or a RC? When it comes down to death statistics, there is a reason why they don't put CF/RC on the death certificate: it usually doesn't matter because it's a combination of health effects that causes mortality. And before you go there, of course people with COVID that died in a car accident did NOT die of COVID, I'm not arguing that. But what's the difference from this year to the last decade? These people died because of something different. What could it be? Spoilers: It's the coronavirus combined with a naturally vulnerable population that ALWAYS EXISTS based on how humans age. 2) Here's the one other logical fallacy I'll dig into a little more (feel free to have me address more later). Your argument that folks with pre-existing conditions would have died "regardless" is horseshit. I bet even you or someone in your family has a pre-existing condition, based on the statistics. Or at least your VA claim will show it here in a few years. I'll put down money on that one. The number of Americans that have a pre-existing condition is up to 86% by insurer's definitions for people age 55-64. 48% of them have a no-shit health high risk pre-existing condition. They don't even report on those older than that, because it's basically assumed that the majority of the aged population has something significantly wrong with their health. "Sorry grandma, I know you have diabetes and high blood pressure, which you could probably live with for another 10-15 years with simple treatment, but the economy must open up. Although COVID disproportionately kills those over the age of 70 - and if you get it you have a high chance of hospitalization and a 5-10% chance of death - that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. Ignore the fact that we likely will have a working vaccine in the next year which would stop all of this, my mutual funds need to go up NOW. FAKE NEWS. DON'T TREAD ON ME." Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02483-2 It's not that hard. Wear your stupid mask, stop hanging out with all your friends, put your travel plans on a temporary hold, get over the fact that national sports and colleges aren't gonna be on TV, and understand that society isn't actually powerless when it comes to battling infectious disease. For all the shit conservatives give liberals over being babies, they have a real problem toughening up and adjusting their lifestyle temporarily for a global catastrophe. Literally FOX News hosts in the height of the deaths in April ran a segment about how hard it is to not be able to get your hair done, while, at the same time, medical teams across the world from Italy to Spain to the UK to the US were delivering bodies to morgues at a weekly rate 5-15 times higher than normal. Want to know something? Those countries don't have the magnitude of problem we have now. They learned and their societies adapted. Numerous other countries and societies haven't F'd this GLOBAL DISEASE away like we have. BLAB (BOTTOM LINE AT THE BOTTOM): Stop arguing about whether or not COVID causes deaths. It does. If you want to argue that 100's of thousands of deaths aren't that bad in the big scheme of the population and we can accept a few 100 thousand more, then that's your prerogative. I disagree, but at least now we are arguing about opinions. Out.

They get counted in excess deaths, which is why I think it’s probably a better metric when it comes to total impact. And if the disease still got to you with restrictions (probably via asymptomatic transmission), how can we reasonably ask for those at risk to avoid infection? They still have to get food, go to the doctor, fix their homes, interact with those that care for them. Unfortunately, there is no such thing anymore as a self-sufficient man; everyone is very interconnected.

What would you recommend?

Okay, how about it's just a unproven theory that the government as a whole (or is it just the liberal portions, i'm not hip and read in) is conspiring to present skewed results? Does that work? Explain how in systems thinking - which asserts that one can't look at individual things like coronavirus specific death tolls and instead should look at the combination of effects in the whole system - discounts anything I said previously. I am not following your logic. COVID proves that isolation thinking - i.e. personal liberty over all else - is ineffective. https://www.thinknpc.org/blog/covid-19-means-systems-thinking-is-no-longer-optional/

It’s literally a conspiracy theory. Choosing not to trust multiple different independent methods of calculating deaths due to Covid - which all correlate - because you don’t want to/have second hand information that can’t be uniformly applied to a large statistical model isn’t smart - it’s akin to antivaxxer logic. If you feel so strongly that this is just a current misunderstanding that will be disproven, I’ll put down $5000 dollars right now (through an intermediary of your choice) that the 95% confidence interval for death numbers from Mar-August 2020 will contain 200k. We can even wait until 2023 and aggrandize all the studies, to “let the truth come out.” I highly doubt any of you are interested. This isn’t just one model, it’s numerous studies. Here’s the dumbed down summary of how they work. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencealert.com/2020-has-killed-up-to-200-000-extra-people-in-the-us-so-far/amp They use regressions, this accounts for the increasing number of deaths from year to year. From this, in July, multiple different studies showed at least 160-200k+ deaths over normal. You don’t think this correlates closely to what the CDC was tracking? YGBSM. And, in reality, for decision making it literally shouldn’t matter how people died when it comes to effects. Suicide, accident that wasn’t treated because of hospital availability, pneumonia at home, economic despair - they all are because of COVID and the second order effects of a global pandemic. Someone that died because they couldn’t get a CT scan because hospitals were full just as much died from the social effects of this disease. But, yes, let’s keep arguing semantics. In total, you guys have named sub-20 cases of this “fraud” happening. But this mindset has entirely skewed your perception of the situation and changed how America reacts and works together It’s literally exactly how you’re being brainwashed to believe that voting by mail will be entirely illegitimate when there are less than 100 cases of fraud in any election in recent history.

You keep repeating that the death numbers are skewed with nothing to back it up. What do you think has caused the >200k excess deaths in the US since Mar 2020?

The protesting has lost its purpose. If you want people to care, maybe don’t attack politicians. There’s no apparent strategy other than to be mad and break stuff. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8672681/BLM-protesters-gather-outside-White-House-Trumps-RNC-speech.html

Dude he named a bunch of things a leader could have done to LEAD more effectively. A pandemic is exacerbated by the population and how they perceive and enact guidance. Not making a strategy or backing up those that did (e.g. the CDC) is a large contributing factor to why we are here. How’d you get so blinded by bias?

Do you ever think that you are being propagandized? Because that’s what this is. It’s intentional divisive spoofer comm, to reduce your trust in the actually fairly accurate data we have to make decisions on. Im not saying the actual instances of fraud you or Brabus talked about didn’t happen. I’m sure they did. But you are subconsciously being told to apply these isolated instances - which are almost meaningless in the big picture - to literally the entire data set.

You’re right about infections, the scientific view now is COVID infections are probably on the order of magnitude 10 times higher than test results show. But deaths are probably much closer than you or a random second hand source you know give credit. You can’t dismiss deaths just because doing so fits your narrative, either. A relatively accurate way to determine COVID effect is to assume that, compared to previous years, any change in death rate is likely due to COVID. Just take the excess deaths over 2019, 2018, 2017, etc., compare it to 2020, and you have a pretty close estimate to its impact. Since March, ~200,000 more people than usual have died in the US. So that’s our best estimate at actual impact. So if we say 10 times the confirmed cases, or 60 million cases, that means 0.3% mortality for the population at large. Doesn’t sound that bad, only like 5-10 times worse than the flu based on similar analysis. Still doesn’t take into account the age based mortality, which really are where the hard questions lie. If 70+ year olds have an estimated 5-15% mortality rate that goes up the older you are, how does that change the calculus? People don’t like going down this path, because it’s easier to ignore that and focus on the fact that working age folks would probably be fine. But it should be the center of the moral question: Is the economy worth a large amount of deaths of older Americans? That’s what the reopen/herd immunity plan does. Is there a way to effectively isolate them from the rest of society (would require social assistance never before seen in the US)? How do we pay for it? Who accepts the risk? Where do you draw the line? The science is real and can accurately enough show death rates and infections to action on. Let’s stop arguing about CDC data for no reason and start arguing about the more important policy questions that must be answered.

If that’s not a good metric, what is?