Welcome to the Hardcore Husky Forums. Folks who are well-known in Cyberland and not that dumb.
Specious Moral Reasoning of “If it saves a single human life, it’s worth it.”
MikeDamone
Member Posts: 37,781
In three parts -
In addition to Coronavirus being used by crooks in public office as an excuse to wreak wholesale destruction, to blame it on something not even alive, and then to use that destruction to extort even more from those who are suffering at their own hands, it also brings out some of the most absolutely dumb-assed examples of banality ever to be passed off as thought:
Immediately following is some guy’s reply to a friend who was trying to put the Coronavirus Con-job into context:
“I appreciate this share. However it is Not [sic] a credible argument. Children are dying. Doctors nurses grocery store workers young adults as well as elderly [sic X 6]
Ask the family members of those who died or are suffering if they think its [sic] a threat and see what they say. The five year old child with no compromising [sic] conditions.
—R. M.
The more times I read it, the more I was disgusted by the complete lack of thought, the inability to make meaningful distinctions, the alacrity to guilt-trip people from the saddle of moribund moral high horse, and the patina of self-righteousness.
Your statement above is devoid of context.
An argument lacking context is an argument lacking validity.
Trying to mount an argument without context is usually done by three groups of people:
1) Those who are inept at making a rational argument buttressed by evidence (factual context),
2) Those who have been successfully manipulated by others into accepting images and emotions as substitutes for reason and evidence,
3) Those who deliberately use images and emotions to promote conclusions for which they are incapable of devising a rational argument, much less assemble the unambiguous factual data needed to support it.
So they embrace contextless generalities to give the impression of being comprehensive and float images to make those generalities feel as though they actually mean something.
They make up seemingly meaningful sayings like those for which Martin Luther King Jr was notorious:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
—MLK, Jr
“Eat your hamburger because kids are starving in India.”
—guilt-tripping moms
“Whatever threatens the lives of polar bears is a threat to humanity.”
—Gretards around the world
“If it saves only a single human life, it’s worth it.”
—the rationally and morally defective
All of them are nonsensical, but rely on sentence structure or buzzwords or emotional imagery to give the impression of making a solid propositional statement.
For example, every single statement you made above could be made about every single source of harm, disease, or cause of death or misery anywhere on earth and at any point throughout human history.
Welcome to the human condition, baby.
Children are dying of neoplastic diseases.
Children are dying of starvation.
Children are beaten and dying from a variety of diseases contracted by being forced to work in cobalt mines in the DRC to supply Chinese companies the raw materials for their lithium ion batteries.
Every single person on earth, regardless of gender, age, race, national origin, language, political party, educational attainment, across the entire range of human intelligence and human morality will eventually succumb to something or other and give up the ghost.
Even “the five year old child with no “compromising conditions.”
And virtually all of those who succumb to death also have someone close who will be affected by their passing, whether emotionally or even in some life-threatening way.
But none of those facts necessarily provides valid justification for anything that anyone chooses to do on the basis of his claim that he’s “trying to save a life” or “trying to prevent a death.”
In addition to Coronavirus being used by crooks in public office as an excuse to wreak wholesale destruction, to blame it on something not even alive, and then to use that destruction to extort even more from those who are suffering at their own hands, it also brings out some of the most absolutely dumb-assed examples of banality ever to be passed off as thought:
Immediately following is some guy’s reply to a friend who was trying to put the Coronavirus Con-job into context:
“I appreciate this share. However it is Not [sic] a credible argument. Children are dying. Doctors nurses grocery store workers young adults as well as elderly [sic X 6]
Ask the family members of those who died or are suffering if they think its [sic] a threat and see what they say. The five year old child with no compromising [sic] conditions.
—R. M.
The more times I read it, the more I was disgusted by the complete lack of thought, the inability to make meaningful distinctions, the alacrity to guilt-trip people from the saddle of moribund moral high horse, and the patina of self-righteousness.
Your statement above is devoid of context.
An argument lacking context is an argument lacking validity.
Trying to mount an argument without context is usually done by three groups of people:
1) Those who are inept at making a rational argument buttressed by evidence (factual context),
2) Those who have been successfully manipulated by others into accepting images and emotions as substitutes for reason and evidence,
3) Those who deliberately use images and emotions to promote conclusions for which they are incapable of devising a rational argument, much less assemble the unambiguous factual data needed to support it.
So they embrace contextless generalities to give the impression of being comprehensive and float images to make those generalities feel as though they actually mean something.
They make up seemingly meaningful sayings like those for which Martin Luther King Jr was notorious:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
—MLK, Jr
“Eat your hamburger because kids are starving in India.”
—guilt-tripping moms
“Whatever threatens the lives of polar bears is a threat to humanity.”
—Gretards around the world
“If it saves only a single human life, it’s worth it.”
—the rationally and morally defective
All of them are nonsensical, but rely on sentence structure or buzzwords or emotional imagery to give the impression of making a solid propositional statement.
For example, every single statement you made above could be made about every single source of harm, disease, or cause of death or misery anywhere on earth and at any point throughout human history.
Welcome to the human condition, baby.
Children are dying of neoplastic diseases.
Children are dying of starvation.
Children are beaten and dying from a variety of diseases contracted by being forced to work in cobalt mines in the DRC to supply Chinese companies the raw materials for their lithium ion batteries.
Every single person on earth, regardless of gender, age, race, national origin, language, political party, educational attainment, across the entire range of human intelligence and human morality will eventually succumb to something or other and give up the ghost.
Even “the five year old child with no “compromising conditions.”
And virtually all of those who succumb to death also have someone close who will be affected by their passing, whether emotionally or even in some life-threatening way.
But none of those facts necessarily provides valid justification for anything that anyone chooses to do on the basis of his claim that he’s “trying to save a life” or “trying to prevent a death.”
Comments
And yet, in your paragraph above, that is ALL you’ve done. And since your list of consequences being used to justify actions for which there is only an unsubstantiated claim of efficacy is a list that actually comprises the entire human condition, you have completely failed to demonstrate that any particular action is actually warranted in one specific instance of the general human condition.
That someone can engage in a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to link any two things is not evidence that there exists any meaningful, direct relationship between them.
In addition, any claim that an action is justified because of the good intentions lying behind it has been recognized, as long as people have been able to reason, to be utterly insufficient.
“If it saves just a single life” means that 30,000,000 jobs lost, businesses ruined, homes lost, liberties destroyed are worth it?
No, that’s just a weird exercise in dubious moral calculus that YOU are welcome to engage in if the cost will be borne by you alone. But neither you nor anyone else has the moral right to demand that of another.
You may choose not to resist evil and to turn YOUR other cheek, but to compel someone, whether by law or by moral manipulation, to set up the jaw of another so that an evil person can get just the right angle to deliver the most devastating blow is one of the most fundamentally evil things anyone could do.
We can choose for our own person to not resist evil, but if there are others whose welfare depends on our ability to protect them, we have a duty to spot that evil and, to the best of our ability, to completely eff it up.
You, though, have no moral or legal basis to order what, whether, or to what extent others may or may not do, should or should not do, must or must not do, especially not on the basis of specious reasoning that because A could possibly eventually end up causing Z you must order what can or should be done every step along the way.
So let’s look at some other contexts of respiratory disease to determine if the current prescribed Covid-19 response is reasonable or is a social-engineering con job:
1) The 1918 influenza was one of the most brutal pandemics since the last episode of the plague. It swept the entire world in less than a year during a time when there was no air travel, very limited ship travel due to WW1, and a week or longer was required to travel between continents. That particular variant of H1N1 influenza was estimated to have infected fully 1/2 of a 3.8 billion world population. The mortality estimates range as high as 100 million people. Its virulence was extreme with people falling dead in as short a time as a few hours after first exhibiting symptoms. It hit mostly healthy adults with the greatest severity, much less so the very young and very old, killing principally by triggering a cytokine storm that resulted in acute respiratory distress syndrome. This overreaction of the immune system was more deadly than the disease itself.
If a respiratory disease with that level of infectivity and virulence had hit today in a world with 4.5 billion air passengers per year able to travel between any major cities around the world in less than 24 hours and then to be able to make connecting flights to arrive almost anywhere else in a few hours while sitting in the small confined spaces of airplanes breathing recirculated air, touching surfaces contaminated just hours earlier by the non-symptomatic infected or waiting airside inside sealed airports between legs of their journey, the result today, compared to 1918, for any place within a few hours of any airport with international flights, would be an extinction-level event.
Does Covid-19 pose this level of danger?
Not even barely maybe sorta kinda.
How do we know?
Because of epidemiologically-sound analyses of its behavior in a closed system with a population of almost 5000 people that originated at the disease epicenter in the early days: the cruise ship, The Diamond Princess.
Analysis early on demonstrated it to be relatively innocuous except for the predictable increase of mortality with age and comorbidities. On average, over 50% of the less than 20% that finally did get infected under those very crowded and confined conditions were completely without symptoms. The prediction for the general US population based on the age demographics of the shipboard population was a mortality rate of around 0.05% plus/minus five-fold either way, and remarkably low for anyone under 60 years of age. And since then subsequent analyses of various populations (the crew of a US aircraft carrier, the residents of both Santa Clara and Los Angeles County) have only underscored this.
2) The 1968-69 Hong Kong flu saw a million people die in the US. Nationwide shut down that blew out the economy and caused tens of millions to lose their jobs? Nope.
3) The 2009 swine flu saw ~876,000 die worldwide (~12,500 US) out of 1.4 billion infected (~60.8 million US). Nationwide shut down that blew out the economy and caused tens of millions to lose their jobs? Nope.
4) The 2017-2018 US seasonal flu saw about 61,000 people die out of about 45,000,000 infected. Nationwide shut down that blew out the economy and caused tens of millions to lose their jobs? Nope.
Yet at a time when the number of US deaths from Coronavirus was fewer than 50, equal to 1/3 of the yearly deaths due to choking on popcorn, with 77% of them confined to one state, Washington, and 75% of those from a single nursing facility, a certain group of people, including Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, Bill de Blasio, the communist former-terrorist head of the W.H.O., the major news media, and Democrat mayors and governors of some of the largest states, within a period of days, without reference to any new understanding of the disease, contrary to what was already known, suddenly went from, “Hey, no threat or problem here from Coronavirus or any need to alter your normal day to day activities and anyone suggesting you do is a racist xenophobe trying to divert attention from his impeachment and trial” to ape-shit insane, engaging in behavior and issuing edicts that were utterly inappropriate in the context of what was actually known about the Coronavirus disease itself and in the context of relatively recent bouts of epidemic respiratory diseases:
The reaction to Coronavirus was unprecedented and, given the nature of the disease, unwarranted.
Instead of relying on epidemiological studies of actual populations with the disease and comparing it to other outbreaks of seasonal respiratory disease (AKA science), they relied on projections produced by computer modeling designed by folks like Philandering Ferguson formerly from Imperial College, UK, already notorious for his grossly sensationalist and inaccurate work, confirmed later by him when he said that his Covid-19 disease model projections were designed, not to provide information, but to spur action, and some US associates of his (AKA propaganda created to provoke a response that would be used to justify, in the absence of and contrary to factual information, the desired policy decisions).
And along with his wildly inaccurate predictions (inaccurate in every single index) made to provoke fear to stimulate and rationalize policy responses came the acts of social engineering designed to reify that fear and justify the policy response: “social distancing,” canceling public attendance of sporting events, then canceling entire sporting seasons, canceling the rest of the school year (one of the few benefits of their overreaction), talking about canceling the rest of the 2020 primary elections (though the crowd of usual suspects had already been calling for that as a way of knocking off Bernie, but now they could characterize it as an act of self-sacrifice done to ensure public safety), canceling almost all elective surgical procedures, canceling routine medical appointments, ordering the wearing of masks, imposition of stay-at-home orders, the designation of essential versus non-essential jobs, threatening the arrest of churchgoers, etc.
All of these were done for the purpose of using actions, symbols, and coerced behaviors to stand in as physical or behavioral representations of a danger that never existed, at least not in the context of any previous epidemic of respiratory disease, in order to make people feel fear of a threat by causing them to act in ways that were assumed to represent an actual threat and, so, to believe there WAS a threat and, so, to accept as truthful the explanations provided by those who had engineered the symbols, as well as their criticisms of anyone opposing them as being “anti-public health,” anti-science (just as they had previously been doing in their global warming movement), and enemies of public safety.
And, at this point, I can hear someone say, “You just don’t care about the suffering of others. You’re selfish and want what you think is best for you no matter the cost to others; you value dollars over lives; you’re antisocial for wanting to get back to life as usual; you’re endangering the rest of us cause “we’re all in this together.””
Uh huh.
What I care about is the well-being of those over 30,000,000 who have lost their jobs and the well-being of their families, all because a group of Democrat governors and mayors thought they found for themselves a political benefit of crashing the economy and blaming it on the presence of a virus that has an infection rate of about 20% and is 96% asymptomatic in that 20%, the remaining 4% that are symptomatic presenting as 98% mild, and of the 2% considered to be worse than mild still having, in any age category, a high to relatively high survival rate, the greatest mortality preferentially restricted to those of advancing age and increasingly so with the number and severity of comorbid conditions and not significantly higher, and in some cases much lower, than other seasonal respiratory diseases.
Against all this context about which you don’t appear to have a clue you can only offer, “The five year old child with no compromising conditions.”
It’s a wonder you didn’t post along with it a big-eyed, sorrowful-looking Japanese animé polar bear cuddling a baby Harp Seal and eschewing the offer of a Coke and a smile from corporate America.
My simplified theory on all this:
When you figure out the meaning of life - you die before you can tell anyone.
That covers smart kids from birth to age 10, slightly slower learners age 11-40, slow learners 41-65, and my age group 66+ that are just dumbfucks.
it also covers any medical condition, epidemic, or pandemic