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Forums - General Discussion - Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

Pemalite said:

LurkerJ said:

Like many others, you seem to be happy to draw the lines between being a decent human being and an asshole, and it wasn’t hard to guess that the line starts where you good deeds stop.

Here, let me a draw a line: Good for you being a charitable person, but that’s not really an accomplishment when we live in the first world. Think long and hard about the life that you’re living and how much money, time, effort you waste while people literally die of hunger. You are really not doing enough to make this world a better place and prevent famine, welcome to the club.

You really want a list of what I do for other people? Fine then.

* I donate to charities to feed the homeless and poor.
* I cut people out of vehicles that have been in a vehicle accident.
* I scale down 200 feet high cliffs to rescue people from the bottom.
* I run into the burning building to pull a parents trapped child out while everyone else is trying to escape.
* I stand between towns and cities and raging bushfires.
* I venture out to sea to pluck people out of the Ocean after their boats have sank.
* I respond to toxic spills/leaks in Hazmat that could silently kill allot of people.
* I will jump into a small blow-up boat and travel down swift water rivers to rescue people.
* I dangle from a rope at the end of a helicopter to rescue people stuck in flood waters.
* I crawl in confined/restricted spaces with compromised atmospheres to rescue animals and stuck people.
* I dig through collapsed rubble/buildings to pull people out after a building collapse/earth quake.

I even respond to incidents involving the Coronavirus... Last week, I responded to a child who was stuck underneath a train.

And I also do more than that... Now compare it to what you do... And ask if I need to do more for humanity.

I think I do plenty to make this world a better place... But if the best argument you can put forth is to question my ability to help others... It makes me question your motives.

Bold: I really don't, because I don't claim moral superiority and I am not interested in issuing purity tests and drawing lines to define who's moral and who's not, and that's been my point from the very beginning, just because you've done good deeds (and you seem to have done a lot of them), you still don't get to draw lines and categorize people into good and bad based on how they want to appraoch the current crisis. 

The radical shift on how people live these have had serious OBJECTIVE consequences on mental, physical health, ecomony, education, etc. Following either the Chinese model or the Swedish model is going to have trade-offs, whichever one you choose, you are not an asshole for acknowleding the trade-offs or believing "lives taken by COVID19" isn't the only metric that should drive policy making.

Trumpstyle said:

I always believe in everything I say, sometimes I might add some humor into my posts.

As to why we doing unbelievable good is because we beating all the math models, the most famous one is the imperial college London, the dude behind this is Neil Ferguson who recently said in a interview on youtube channel Unherd that our daily dead is just gonna keep increasing and we won't achieve herd immunity. We are beating him. Another famous math model is at the site healthdata.org which says our daily dead is gonna increase to ~500 in late may. And we gonna need 4000+ ICU beds, we currently using ~400 and it's going down.

Than we have the 22 famous scientists that went public against us here in Sweden, one of them retweeted another math model that about 90k swedes is gonna die, we won't even be close to reaching this number. And one them also made a math model which said we gonna need 2000 ICU beds in Stockholm in May and 5000 ICU beds in June, ofc they never mentioned this. It's actually from them I got all the previous links on Anders Tegnell and Johan Giesecke, about 90-95% will barely notice anything from this virus and Johan giesecke criticizing other countries and other countries should do as we doing. You should note they have gotten everything wrong, but they don't mention this.

I don't see what Donald Trump has do to with anything.

Good on Sweden for beating expectations and embarassing the experts and showing the world that there is always a place for skepticism. Stockholm is a densely populated city so those numbers are truly impressive compared to what the models predicted.

It will be interesting to continue following their numbers as other countries start to open up and experience a second wave while numbers continue to fall in Sweden.

SpokenTruth said:
Pemalite said:


I think I do plenty to make this world a better place... But if the best argument you can put forth is to question my ability to help others... It makes me question your motives.

Lurker J's entire premise is that because we don't put all our time, energy and money into helping Africa (and I hope he means southeast Asia and Latin America too) on the same scale we have for SARS-CoV-2 that we're all hypocritical assholes. But like I told him, that's a topic for a different thread which he apparently doesn't have the interest in starting but doesn't mind using it for gotcha points in here.

Nope, my premise is that people who take into considerations the downsides of lockdowns and believe that there should be more to policy making than just "preventing death by this one communicable disease" aren't assholes, and they have a point, and they should be given the benefit of the doubt. And that those who draw lines to define morality using the "COVID19 deaths" stick should spare us because it's hypocritical to pick that one crisis that they happen to care about, and ignore the rest of the crises that have plagued that modern word for decades. 

Last edited by LurkerJ - on 03 May 2020

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I gotta say, many posts here discussing the USA number have an almost celebratory tone to them.



LurkerJ said:
I gotta say, many posts here discussing the USA number have an almost celebratory tone to them.

You complain about people pointing out high death toll numbers of USA then you praise Sweden.  The reason why we have high death toll is because our population is severely sick.  We have massive amounts of people with underlying health conditions.  Our numbers would be double if there wasn't any lockdown and followed Sweden.  Sweden's population is far healthier than ours (you better be from USA if not you can just stop your bitching).

I want you to picture in your mind the average trump supporter before you congratulate all those people protesting lockdown measures.  The average trump supporter is old, overweight and has underlying health conditions. 

Last edited by sethnintendo - on 03 May 2020

You know what i would like in the U.S as a none American citizen?
That people more actively care about the health system instead of going on dumb protest over a timely loss of freedom for Covid protection,you have valid things to protest about so please go do that.



Ka-pi96 said:
Trumpstyle said:

I don't see what Donald Trump has do to with anything.

Well, other than your name/avatar both your speech style and content are very trump like. The over-inflated ego, the use of hyperbole, the arrogance, the simple mistakes. They're all there. It's fair to assume you're just satirising trump, because that's exactly how it looks.

Underlined: Describing a lot of the posts here, including some of mine, in fact, describing a lot of what's been said in the past few months everywhere. Humans oaught to give each the benefit of the doubt in these certain times because most of us are bound to say something incredibly stupid at one point especially that when we didn't have enough data and had to rely on foreign biased reports. 

With said, trumpstyle ought to celebrate because:

Sweden is a model for the new coronavirus normal, says WHO

Not that I trust WHO but it's an increasingly adopted infatuation among experts and doctors from all over the world, so yeah..



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LurkerJ said:

Bold: I really don't, because I don't claim moral superiority and I am not interested in issuing purity tests and drawing lines to define who's moral and who's not, and that's been my point from the very beginning, just because you've done good deeds (and you seem to have done a lot of them), you still don't get to draw lines and categorize people into good and bad based on how they want to appraoch the current crisis. 

The radical shift on how people live these have had serious OBJECTIVE consequences on mental, physical health, ecomony, education, etc. Following either the Chinese model or the Swedish model is going to have trade-offs, whichever one you choose, you are not an asshole for acknowleding the trade-offs or believing "lives taken by COVID19" isn't the only metric that should drive policy making.

I am of the personal belief that anyone who is willing to give up their life to save others gets to take a degree of moral superiority.
Be it Military, Police Officers or the like. - They have proven they are moral.

Either way, I can and will judge other peoples moralities, I will judge the good and bad deeds someone has done and I will draw "lines" so to speak, religion has been doing it for thousands of years... And so will I.
You should be aware of what I am like as a user, I don't mince words to save face, I don't care, I will say how I think it is.

So if someone is willing to place the economy over life, I will judge them for it and I will judge them harshly for it... And I am of the belief that they lack empathy and morality because of it, money is a material object, life is not, life is far more valuable.

Someones health, education and so forth doesn't need to be forfeit due to lock down measures, I am doing a diploma with lectures given to me on a weekly basis, digitally, my education hasn't halted.
Teachers are teaching their students over the internet.

Businesses are operating over the internet, taking orders, doing deliveries, they changed their business models... For example my local movie theater shut down, so the owners started to deliver DVD/Blu-Ray movies with popcorn, drinks and chocolate and other stuff and are turning a profit.

Is it an ideal situation? Hell no. But neither are hundreds of thousands of people including children and babies that end up dead... And some of the people that survive the disease may have to endure with life-long health implications that may impact their ability to contribute to the economy and self life achievements and become a burden on the health care system.

Either way... YOU said that me being "charitable" isn't an achievement because we live in the "first world". - And told me to question the extent I go out of my way to assist others because people in the world are still starving to death... You even went out of your way to assert that I don't do enough.

So with the list I provided prior... Am I doing enough? Or are you just trying to save face now?

Here is the list again:

*****************************************************

* I donate to charities to feed the homeless and poor.
* I cut people out of vehicles that have been in a vehicle accident.
* I scale down 200 feet high cliffs to rescue people from the bottom.
* I run into the burning building to pull a parents trapped child out while everyone else is trying to escape.
* I stand between towns and cities and raging bushfires.
* I venture out to sea to pluck people out of the Ocean after their boats have sank.
* I respond to toxic spills/leaks in Hazmat that could silently kill allot of people.
* I will jump into a small blow-up boat and travel down swift water rivers to rescue people.
* I dangle from a rope at the end of a helicopter to rescue people stuck in flood waters.
* I crawl in confined/restricted spaces with compromised atmospheres to rescue animals and stuck people.
* I dig through collapsed rubble/buildings to pull people out after a building collapse/earth quake.

I even respond to incidents involving the Coronavirus... Last week, I responded to a child who was stuck underneath a train.

*****************************************************

LurkerJ said:

Nope, my premise is that people who take into considerations the downsides of lockdows and believe that there should be more to policy making than just "preventing death by this one communicable disease" aren't assholes, and they have a point, and they should be given the benefit of the doubt. And that those who draw lines to define morality using the "COVID19 deaths" stick should spare us because it's hypocritical to pick that one crisis that they happen to care about, and ignore the rest of the crises that have plagued that modern word for decades. 

That's a false equivalency. You don't know what people do in their private or professional lives to assert that they do nothing in other "crises".

Don't be selfish. Just stay at home... Protect your self, your friends, your family and those who are vulnerable.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

Ka-pi96 said:
Pyro as Bill said:

Like I said, people dying while being positive doesn't mean Covid killed them.

Given the demographic breakdown of CV deaths, do you think this 5yr old died of Covid of the underlying health condition?

As of 16th April, 91% of UK covid deaths had other health conditions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52308783

So are you going to argue that covid has barely killed anybody because of that? I can assure you that deaths over the past few months would have been significantly lower without covid, so covid is undoubtedly causing those deaths, regardless of other health conditions. The vast majority of those people wouldn't normally have died.

Yep that's totally what I'm going to argue and I'm 100% definitely not arguing that kids with leukemia, suicide victims and people who died in a car crash who tested positive for covid didn't die of covid.

I'm also definitely not saying that people claiming to "think of the children" are cowards hiding behind terminally ill kids.



Nov 2016 - NES outsells PS1 (JP)

Don't Play Stationary 4 ever. Switch!

Where is this myth that Sweden is doing better even coming from? It's completely false. Not only is the infection and death rate higher than in comparable countries, the economy is suffering just as much.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/ki-sanker-bnp-prognos-ytterligare

Some parts of the article using Google translator:

"The rapidly changing situation has led the National Institute of Economic Research to make a completely new forecast of the economic situation, just weeks after the earlier forecast. The situation is now significantly different. Instead of a GDP loss of around 3 percent, the government sees a 7 percent decline for the entire year.

It also looks bleak for unemployment. It is expected to be 11 percent next year. And that is thanks to the support measures introduced.

He calls the development we now see a historic loss worse than during the financial crisis. This is the biggest decline in a single year since the 50s.

He says that the development has been extremely fast and the negative effects are hitting the Swedish and global economy harder than predicted just a few weeks ago.

Unemployment is expected to rise to 11.0 per cent next year from a previous forecast of 8.9 per cent. For this year, the figure is revised up from 8.7 to 10.2 percent.

In an even worse scenario, Swedish GDP collapses by 10 percent this year and unemployment rises to about 12 percent this year and 14 percent next year."



I'd be really careful comparing the strategies of smaller and more isolated countries to anyone else. What works in one country doesn't work in every country.
Sweden is a sparsely populated country on a peninsula bordering other sparsely populated countries. Meaning they are playing on easy mode from the start. You can see the bad affects their policy is having in the more densely populated cities. Other than that their geography and demography is doing most of the heavy lifting for them.

Same goes for small islands with low populations. It's great that Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand are having such a great success, but they too were playing on easy mode from the beginning. Islands are easy to close and lower populations are easier to track and isolate.
You can see that same effect in the US. General consensus is that they're doing a terrible job at everything, yet their sparsely populated states in the midwest and their islands are barely affected.

What I'm saying is that Sweden shouldn't be a model for anyone. In general.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

Pemalite said:

I am of the personal belief that anyone who is willing to give up their life to save others gets to take a degree of moral superiority.
Be it Military, Police Officers or the like. - They have proven they are moral.

You don't know what most of us do for a living, for all you know, and by your standards, I am entitled to to the same degree of moral superiority. Just because you're happy sharing details about yourself online doesn't make you the only one with one of those professions. 

Either way, I can and will judge other peoples moralities, I will judge the good and bad deeds someone has done and I will draw "lines" so to speak, religion has been doing it for thousands of years... And so will I. You should be aware of what I am like as a user, I don't mince words to save face, I don't care, I will say how I think it is.

You want to do what baseless ridiculous laughable religions have done? Is the standard you really want to live up to, one set by religions? lol


So if someone is willing to place the economy over life, I will judge them for it and I will judge them harshly for it... And I am of the belief that they lack empathy and morality because of it, money is a material object, life is not, life is far more valuable.

The two are connected, health, life-span, quality of life are all connected to economy. I am not gonna bother explaining the connections because I know you're being intellectually dishonest by separating the two the you're doing. I refuse to believe you're that dense. 

Someones health, education and so forth doesn't need to be forfeit due to lock down measures,

I am doing a diploma with lectures given to me on a weekly basis, digitally, my education hasn't halted. Teachers are teaching their students over the internet.

My education isn't hampered either, and I welcome the change, I actually believe this is a chance to stick a fork in traditional education because I have always advocated against it. I learned a lot more on my own than I did in school, if anything schools hindered me. so I'll give you this one.  


Businesses are operating over the internet, taking orders, doing deliveries, they changed their business models... For example my local movie theater shut down, so the owners started to deliver DVD/Blu-Ray movies with popcorn, drinks and chocolate and other stuff and are turning a profit.

Is it an ideal situation? Hell no. But neither are hundreds of thousands of people including children and babies that end up dead... And some of the people that survive the disease may have to endure with life-long health implications that may impact their ability to contribute to the economy and self life achievements and become a burden on the health care system.

It's the only metric that's driving your mindset, I get it, but others see it differently. I am not gonna go through this again.

Either way... YOU said that me being "charitable" isn't an achievement because we live in the "first world". - And told me to question the extent I go out of my way to assist others because people in the world are still starving to death... You even went out of your way to assert that I don't do enough. So with the list I provided prior... Am I doing enough? Or are you just trying to save face now?

Here is the list again:

Nope, you're not doing enough. It seems like you're a responder, so you get paid for what you do, and it happens to include noble acts, which is fine, but not really that heroic.

You still could do a lot more, for example, why do you spend so much money on electricity hungry PC components when kids in Africa are dying of famine? Don't be selfish, give up your video games passion and stick to expenseless hobbies, send the money you save by doing so to Africa, it can save a lot of lives there. 

Also, as someone who thinks so highly of his country and trust his politicians so much and love to brag about what you have compared to the rest of the world... why have you not taken the streets to protest the arm deals your country as made with monstrous regimes that have led to disastrous wars? In this particular case, a war that literally led to years long hunger and malnutrition:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/08/australias-arms-deals-ignoring-gross-violations-of-human-rights-ex-defence-official-says

Go out, protest, tell your people that a lot of what they enjoy is paid for by money gain from selling weapons to dictators engaging in a war that led to an outbreak of cholera that led to thousands dying. And also educate them that they're part of an axis that unforgivable waged the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's very easy to make fun of the USA internal policies when you selectively ignore your own country's external policies. 

So nope, overall, you haven't done enough and failed my morality test, sorry. 

LurkerJ said:

Nope, my premise is that people who take into considerations the downsides of lockdows and believe that there should be more to policy making than just "preventing death by this one communicable disease" aren't assholes, and they have a point, and they should be given the benefit of the doubt. And that those who draw lines to define morality using the "COVID19 deaths" stick should spare us because it's hypocritical to pick that one crisis that they happen to care about, and ignore the rest of the crises that have plagued that modern word for decades. 

That's a false equivalency. You don't know what people do in their private or professional lives to assert that they do nothing in other "crises".

It's not a secret that most of us don't devote enough attention to other people and the rest of the world, no would deny that, the world wouldn't like it is today if most of us give 2 shits. I can't believe that too many found this fact conversational. What the hell? It's fine people, I am not maligning you, it's just a reminder that we are animals.


Don't be selfish. Just stay at home... Protect your self, your friends, your family and those who are vulnerable.

That's your problem, really. It's the fact that you have this perceived notion that you care more because we have different mentalities. And it never occurs to you that I have people of all ages to care for. But hey...