Has RI gone MAGA?

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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby Elvis » Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:16 pm

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby Elvis » Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:23 pm

Iamwhomiam » Fri Sep 24, 2021 1:14 pm wrote:How about you taking your gripes with the moderator via pm



:scared: Surely we can arrive at some understanding without that. :D
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby Elvis » Sun Sep 26, 2021 9:28 pm

:adore:

Marionumber1 » Fri Sep 24, 2021 3:17 pm wrote:
Karmamatterz » Fri Sep 24, 2021 4:05 pm wrote:Always framing anything that isn't extreme left, anti-capitalist, pro socialist, pro communist, pro authoritarian nanny state and paternalistic as MAGA MAGA MAGA.


Ah yes, the ongoing COVID operation was clearly a manifestation of a leftist/socialist/communist impulse in our society. Protecting Big Pharma from scrutiny, supporting the ability of private companies to access people's health records (and make hiring/firing decisions from that), and empowering a hybrid public/private surveillance state are stark examples of being "anti-capitalist", right? The mainstream "left" is garbage on these issues but they are also not left-wing in any real sense.

The idea that this board has gone "MAGA" is very much unfounded. I have yet to see anyone here express support for Trump, even if I have seen some people express a belief (which is highly-misguided in my opinion) that Trump is somehow an aberration or at odds with the deep state. And as much as it makes me cringe, if right-wing sources are the only ones reporting on critical information, it makes sense to use them (though I'd add qualifiers for the inherent bias) and doing so does not make someone "MAGA". The tribalism and gatekeeping, however, goes both ways, as many of the people here who take the greatest offense at being called "MAGA" are also quick to accuse a person of supporting Big Pharma, authoritarianism, etc. if that person expresses the slightest challenge to anything they said.

Little-noted blast from the past: the mostly Republican-affiliated American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a shadowy corporate lobby group with immense influence in state legislatures around the country, was a pivotal force in pushing mandatory vaccines circa 2015: https://www.naturalblaze.com/2015/07/alec-behind-recent-push-for-mandatory.html Yes, those considering themselves leftists who supported this legislation are dupes, but so are figures on the right who continue to support this apparatus and its servants in politics. It is a major problem that to most people familiar with the idea of a deep state, the term mainly evokes "liberal" entities like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Trilateral Commission, Bill Gates, etc. but not conservative entities like ALEC, the Council for National Policy (CNP), Robert Mercer, etc.
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby Karmamatterz » Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:24 pm

Mac was never banned, you dumb ass.


@Iam, would you please clarify your statement? You've posted in that admin where JR announced Mac being banned so you've read it. You were to varying degrees also involved with the situation leading up to the ban back when the lockdowns and hysteria began.

Post by JR:
As a result of board happenings I guess MacC will no longer want to be my friend in the real world, but we were friends for a long time in Berlin. Banning him really upset me.


viewtopic.php?f=8&t=42114#p688359

Why not be honest about this? JR was transparent about it, why are you denying? I'll fully admit at times I'm a dumb ass, but not in this case.
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby stickdog99 » Mon Sep 27, 2021 7:36 pm

https://www.bournbrookmag.com/home/covi ... e-pandemic

Covid and the moral matrix: Will the new “lockdown code of ethics” persist beyond the pandemic?

Written By Gabrielle Bauer

It isn’t clear, at this juncture, whether society will snap back to its pre-Covid morality or reshape itself around this new “moral matrix.”

The Covid pandemic has upended the free world’s moral framework, laying time-honoured norms of personal agency, social responsibility, and risk tolerance to waste. Consider what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had to say about pandemic management in 2008: “The notion that we need to ‘trade liberty for security’ is misguided and dangerous. Public health concerns cannot be addressed with law enforcement or national security tools.” 13 years later, in a guest essay in The New York Times, the ACLU proclaimed that “the real threat to civil liberties comes from states banning vaccine and mask mandates”. The shift in the Overton window is real.

It isn’t clear, at this juncture, whether society will snap back to its pre-Covid morality or reshape itself around this new “moral matrix”. If the matrix solidifies, life will become more secure, more predictable- and to some of us, a lot less interesting.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with moral shifts. The gradual shift in society’s view of homosexuality- from an inherently immoral condition to a morally neutral variant of biology- has enabled gay individuals and communities to flourish. A similar sea change has rocked our perceptions of physical and intellectual disability, lifting a burden of shame from millions of shoulders. We used to think animals exist solely for human sustenance and pleasure, but now regard them as sentient beings in their own right (and with their own rights). If cats and dogs and whales could speak, surely they would thank us.

Does the Lockdown Code of Ethics represent the same kind of moral evolution? On the face of it, a moral code that calls for discipline, self-abnegation and unity of purpose has a lot to recommend it. But that’s not how the Code plays out in the real world. Laying out its core tenets can help us understand why. According to the Code:

1. Human life has an unbounded value that places it above all other ethical concerns. Life is sacred. It cannot be part of any cost-benefit transaction. The fact of living trumps quality of life, full stop.

2. Not doing everything possible to extend life is unethical. Material and psychological setbacks can be overcome, death cannot. If we have the scientific tools to extend life, we should spare no effort to do to.

3. Age should not factor into the life-saving calculus. We should labour as hard to save a ninety-year-old as a nine-year-old. A life is a life. The health-economic measure of QALY [quality-adjusted life years] is reductive and offensive.

4. Individual health is a collective responsibility. This applies especially to transmissible diseases. Our collective duty to keep transmission in check overrides our freedom to manage personal risk. If someone catches a disease from us, we bear full responsibility.

5. Human rights rank far behind public safety. Safety categorically trumps liberty, and a state of health emergency supersedes individual rights.

Those of us who fall into the lockdown-critical camp have called these tenets into question. We have argued that the sanctity of life resides in lived experience, rather than biologic subsistence. If saving lives requires that we take away most of the things that make life worth living, is there a point when the tradeoff no longer makes sense? Stanford University professor of medicine and economics Jay Bhattacharya has called lockdowns “not a human way to live”, while Oxford university epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta has described them as “unpoetic”. People who regard the extension of biological life as society’s highest duty may find such words offensive. But to those of us whose bones cry for culture, connection, and communion, the words make perfect sense.

We have argued that the aim of “saving every life,” while undoubtedly well intentioned, may incur too high a cost to society. Plunging fifty people into long-term depression or food insecurity to extend one person’s life does not necessarily support the greater good. We do not have unlimited resources to throw at the human family, and morally courageous leaders recognize that public health involves trade-offs and tough choices. Public health decisions driven primarily by emotions- “when my uncle got Covid, I realized how serious it is”- rarely serve society’s best interests. Effective leadership requires a certain detachment—an ability to balance costs and benefits, including life itself. As Daniel Hannan remarked in an article in The Telegraph earlier this year": “The one thing worse than putting a value on life is refusing to do so.”

We have argued that pandemic policy should take age into consideration – the age of those most affected by Covid and those most affected by lockdowns. Policies that seek to push back the death of our oldest and frailest at all costs place an undue burden on younger people (leaving aside the question of whether the policies actually prevent deaths). Most worrisome of all, lockdowns and protracted restrictions set young people up for a bleaker, more uncertain future. Nobody is suggesting that we simply leave grandma to die or that grandma is “less valuable” than little Aislynn. It’s simply that grandma has already had her shot at life, while Aislynn has not. We should be thinking more of Aislynn.

Age matters. Ethics committees aside, most of us understand this instinctively. Anyone who has attended the funeral of a nine year-old and a 90 year-old knows the difference in their bones. For all the moral outrage it has recently provoked, the QALY metric plays a time-honoured role in health economics. It underpins many healthcare funding decisions and helps us dole out limited resources fairly. Confronting the “agephant in the room” may be awkward, but ignoring it hasn’t done our Covid science advisors and policymakers any favours.

We have argued that duty of care should have (and has always had) limits, and that a healthy society balances collective and individual needs. Even during a pandemic, individuals can’t bear full responsibility for everyone else’s health. Calling people killers for unwittingly transmitting a virus flies in the face of biological reality. On a planet shared by humans and viruses, all of us have partaken in transmission chains that culminate in some deaths. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not murder. If we micromanage human interaction as long as Covid might be lurking in our midst, we can never live full lives again.

We have argued that human rights are, if not unalienable, pretty damned important. They imbue life with dignity, purpose and hope. If they matter at all, they matter at all times. While personal freedoms may need to flex during a pandemic, they shouldn’t simply disappear. If nothing else, the equipoise between public safety and civil liberties merits an uncensored discussion.

We have argued all these things, but on balance we have not done a good job selling our position. Perhaps the tide of fear and indignation is too powerful for skeptical voices to break through. If the moral matrix swirling around us becomes part of our permanent landscape, we skeptics agree that something important will have been lost. It remains to be seen whether history takes our side.
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby stickdog99 » Mon Sep 27, 2021 9:39 pm

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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby DrEvil » Mon Sep 27, 2021 11:42 pm

^^I think you're posting in the wrong thread.
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby stickdog99 » Tue Sep 28, 2021 3:06 am

Really? So God on our side isn't MAGA?
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby BenDhyan » Tue Sep 28, 2021 3:54 am

Judge for yourselves..
At the 40 sec mark, some of those smart scientists would have to be atheists, yet apparently being guided by God, how does that work? And all the vaccinated also...

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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby thrulookingglass » Tue Sep 28, 2021 7:45 am

Your "God" created the entire universe in six days. Do you think he can't cure a simple disease? Caught in his own web of lies.
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby BenDhyan » Tue Sep 28, 2021 8:04 am

^ precisely my first thought, it would be much simpler for God to not allow covid in the first instance, And how come He does not use His Divine power to make those recalcitants have their vaccination. Something doesn't gel?

Oh and now we have this.... :

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MacCruiskeen

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Sep 28, 2021 3:02 pm

.

I see misunderstanding above.

As correctly quoted, he was blocked back then.

He has been unblocked for months but hasn't posted.
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Sep 29, 2021 10:12 pm

stickdog99 » Sat Sep 25, 2021 4:55 am wrote:JFC, Iamwhomiam, do you seriously self-identify as Team Blue? Does anyone here reading this?

And if you want to demean me by calling me a socialist libertarian, that's fine. But as for your blatantly false accusations of incivility, fuck you!

:heartflowers:


I have no interest in insulting you stickdog. Just lose the childish name calling of those who disagree with you and learn to disagree with them civilly. Your own words reveal your true character to all who read them.
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Sep 29, 2021 10:24 pm

Karmamatterz » Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:24 pm wrote:
Mac was never banned, you dumb ass.


@Iam, would you please clarify your statement? You've posted in that admin where JR announced Mac being banned so you've read it. You were to varying degrees also involved with the situation leading up to the ban back when the lockdowns and hysteria began.

Post by JR:
As a result of board happenings I guess MacC will no longer want to be my friend in the real world, but we were friends for a long time in Berlin. Banning him really upset me.


viewtopic.php?f=8&t=42114#p688359

Why not be honest about this? JR was transparent about it, why are you denying? I'll fully admit at times I'm a dumb ass, but not in this case.


I apologize karmamatterz. My memory failed me, to be honest, and I only remember Jack asking him back both privately and publicly. I'm not dishonest, karma, and my apology is sincere. As embarrassing as it is, thank you for correcting me.

And thank you Jack, for affirming my error:

JackRiddler wrote:.

I see misunderstanding above.

As correctly quoted, he was blocked back then.

He has been unblocked for months but hasn't posted.
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Re: Has RI gone MAGA?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Sep 29, 2021 10:55 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Fri Sep 24, 2021 11:01 pm wrote:
Iamwhomiam » Fri Sep 24, 2021 7:14 pm wrote:I would never consider David Rockefeller or the institutions he founded "liberal," Mario.


I definitely would; there is no modern liberalism outside the orbit of Rockefeller money and control.

The fact we have to put so many of these political "philosophies" in "quotes" like "liberals" is a big tell that we're talking about some cynical bullshit, a stage show. The entire concept of a political spectrum is an artifact from a revolution where urbanites roamed the countryside murdering farmers in creative, modern ways. After awhile they had Napoleon. Now they have Macron.

It's just statists arguing about who should control the state and who should be ground to dust underneath it. Rockefellers are definitely liberals, Timothy Leary famously decided he'd rather play for the Yankees because the CIA is liberal, too.


Well, Mr WRex, I'm trying to wrap my head around this "... there is no modern liberalism outside the orbit of Rockefeller money and control." I'll concede that among Rockefeller's cohorts he appears liberal, but I've always imagined the philanthropic institutions he founded were nothing more than propaganda tools to polish the family's image and reputation, much alike the stage show you describe in your second sentence. Others of his class felt no concern for common folk; they were more the grind them to dust type of folk.
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