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This is a good example of correct-yet-duplicitous reporting, with diffuse accountability. The UK dashboard reports “total number of COVID-19 associated UK deaths”, described as “deaths of people who have had a positive test result.” However, as the the CEBM complained, these do not necessarily have COVID-19 coded on the death certificate as a cause.Originally Posted by Mark Le Comte
All along, the NHS/PHE have (blithely) acknowledged:
Nonetheless, their data resulted in the following news reports:The Deaths of people who have tested positively for COVID-19 could in some cases be due to a different cause.
The UK is now pausing their death count. But that won’t even fix the problem going forward, much less repair past damage. If you search for “COVID19 UK deaths”, Google’s summary lacks these distinctions. Apple presents a shorter one even before you press search.UK Deaths From Confirmed COVID-19 Cases Rise by 148 to 44,798 - NYT
The United Kingdom's death toll from confirmed cases of COVID-19 rose to 44,830 - US News
A further 13 people who tested positive for coronavirus have died in UK hospitals, all of them in England - Evening Standard
Brevity is no excuse. These numbers have occupied headlines for months, yet they are not understood by the vast majority of readers.
I work on “trustworthy” (noise-resilient, fair, interpretable, etc.) machine learning. (So this discussion about noisy data and accountability is of interest to me.) From a technical standpoint, this means eschewing the predominant learning approach of expanding models until standard optimization algorithms work (which is called “improper” learning or overparameterization) in favor of keeping the model fixed, but designing more clever algorithms (which is called “proper” learning.) The models I’m studying are linear dynamical systems and halfspaces.
Member
Now, let's go through the same analysis for County Clerks, vote counters, Soros's paid "poll watchers" and others who are involved in official balloting.
Surely anyone with a criminal background, no citizenship or ties to political organizations isn't allowed to do those jobs?
Member
Of course they’re not! Neither are they highly trained in how to prevent the spread of diseases. Yet, you seem to make no hesitation to defer to “those who went to med school” as the experts on how to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
Anthony fucking Fauci screwed this up back in March. Remember the “wearing a mask is not necessary. It’s all about surface contamination,” trope? Most of this was based on a study that showed a bunch of different surfaces and how long the virus lived on them IN A PERFECT LABORATORY.
At the time, all the doctors said, “WASH YOUR HANDS,” but they didn’t say much about masks for the general public because that wasn’t the line of reasoning spouted by “the experts.” In fact, you were seen as some sort of heretic for buying a mask back then because the only people who needed them were medical workers!
There was an interview I watched with a Korean epidemiologist after South Korea contained it in early March. He’d managed through SARS-1, TB outbreaks, MERS, and Swine Flu. The first thing out of his mouth was, “The most important thing is to wear a mask. That’s how you contain it.”
You know how many of our doctors I heard referencing how Asia managed COVID-19? Zero. Because we have our own goddamn experts who have to figure this shit out and fuck the other experts who’ve dealt with this shit. “We need to study this further before making recommendations. In the meanwhile you people just stay bottled up and locked down while we run more experiments in a perfect laboratory setting. We’ll let you know when to come out of your holes and if you run a business that’s not essential, you can go fuck yourself.”
Do you honestly think we’d have this problem if, from the get go, they said, “We’re not locking down or taking other austere measures. Looks like masks or face coverings might work. Wear them, please, while we figure this out.”
Instead, they imposed tyranny upon the nation and then they expected everyone to follow like good little children with each new unveiling of the latest research done in perfect laboratory settings. Because, in science, common fucking sense takes a backseat to a year’s worth of testing. And until the experts can root out some fucking science, we have to take the harshest measures possible.
The denial of masks is, in my opinion, less about denying science, and more about shoving your middle finger in the air to those who fucked this country up, shut our businesses down, and imposed massive constraints on people in the name of fear and “letting the experts go to work.” People like you can’t seem to look any further past the “PhD” at the end of someone’s name and would gladly follow them off a cliff. Most of us just want those assholes to stop commandeering our lives so they can sleep better at night knowing their $200,000 in student loans had some higher purpose.
Member
From Harshray's (obviously) brilliant article:
The journalist, Rutherford, and the authors of the cited paper woefully misunderstand the phrase "experiment of nature."But the strongest evidence in favor of masks come from studies of real-world scenarios. “The most important thing are the epidemiologic data,” said Rutherford. Because it would be unethical to assign people to not wear a mask during a pandemic, the epidemiological evidence has come from so-called “experiments of nature.”
A recent study published in Health Affairs, for example, compared the COVID-19 growth rate before and after mask mandates in 15 states and the District of Columbia.
That idea: random genetic mutations are independent of the environment and administered treatments, and can therefore be used to determine causality. This is put to good use in e.g. drug discovery. (For example, if a drug happens to work on somebody with a rare genetic mutation, you may have discovered a therapeutic target.)
A city imposing a mask mandate is obviously not an experiment of nature. The paper is just a junky observational study with obvious confounders.
TMPHBITEU
Nonetheless, these people are Experts, and that's good enough for our very young friend Harshray, and everybody in the media as well.
Member
I use masks in my business, so I always have a few on hand. Back in March, just to see how people would react, I wore mask and protective eye wear to the store a couple of times, people looked at me like I was a freak. Now the same store has "Masks are required" signs everywhere. It was funny in March, now it's just sad.
Member
Shalom old bean,
I've seen it before, but just rewatched it from that part... Overall, I thought Zizek wiped the floor with Peterson during the whole debate, and JBP looked totally unprepared. I personally think Peterson is nothing more than a charlatan, who acts as an ideological pressure-relief valve. A liberal, centre right gate-keeper whose actual purpose is to absorb the energy of disenfranchised people, who have rejected wokeism and anti-white sentiments, and now find themselves naturally drifting towards the political right... He, and other liberal centrists like him, scoop these people up and prevent them from crossing too far over into the "real" dangerous far-right, alt-right and Third Position/National Socialism/Fascism, which would of course be a problem for the establishment, and neo-liberalism, if that became a trend. I think Zizek is much more authentic, and offers far more than Peterson's mantra of "group identity thinking is bad, and leads directly to the Holocaust and gulags".
I kind of half agree with Zizek here, though. As with you, I think the lady doth protest a little too much. I am not saying you are dishonest, but your technical expertise may be preventing you from seeing the wood from the trees, from the perspective of a layman. Of course the most recent, insane iterations of intersectionality and critical race and gender theory were arrived at from the work done by Marcuse, Adorno, etc., who came out of the social philosophy and critical theory of the Frankfurt School, whose job it was to examine, dismantle and rebuild what Marx's (and others) idealist philosophy had set out to do, and failed. Nobody knows who Marcuse is, but they've heard of Marx. Hence, cultural Marxism.
I'll be honest, I agree with you and I think blaming the recent social disintegration on "cultural Marxism" is technically incorrect, and lazy, but when the average person hears "cultural Marxism" he knows what this means: We will undoubtedly disagree on my next assessment, but I think the current form of critical theory was designed to subvert and undermine the West's ideals and values from within, under the guise of equality and fairness and altruism - not in order to pave the way for evil Communism in the West, but because these traditional European ideals, morals and values now impede the stated goals of neo-liberal capitalism more than they benefit it, and therefore anything which is an impediment to efficiency needs to be swept away.
I bring up Marcuse again, and I admit you're more familiar with him on a technical level than I, because of his link to US intelligence after he left Germany and came over. Of course, he has played down his role in the OSS, but it is obvious what he was, and what he was tasked to do in the broad sense. When the West acknowledged the threat of Marxist thought, and realised the inevitability of it spreading Westward they needed to ensure a more sympathetic, compatible (and ultimately, "safe") critical form infected the West first, before the more antagonistic, incompatible economic Marxism, Communism, gained any sort of foothold here.
Marcuse and friends' critical theory, which was purposely introduced into academia in the 50's and proliferated in the universities over the next few decades, was the perfect way to inoculate the West against any further legitimate threat to the American sphere of influence. While allowing Western societies to undergo a seemingly dramatic reorganization according to their critiques of traditional European "power structures", race, gender, religion, the family, patriarchy, etc. it allowed these ideas to safely play out at the social level, while retaining the dominance of capitalism and Pax Americana continued on.
This is why these BLM and AntiFa "comrades" are permitted violently role-play their little revolution today, and the real power - corporate money power - can afford to egg them on, and champion them, and pledge money to their causes, and comply with whatever equal opportunity policy amendments they demand... because none of it is any sort of a threat to the established order. In fact, many of these green-haired SJW's demands can actually be co-opted and beneficial to the neo-liberal order as with open borders and mass immigration, and the commoditization of millions of low-skilled economic migrants who are processed into Western societies as new consumers/producers.
It's interesting that nobody advocating for post-WW2 Third Position ideas, whom I follow, sees "cultural Marxism" as the real origin of the problems we face today either.
Member
Yep. 3 months ago, wearing a mask made you an asshole who didn’t care about the plight of the American medical worker. Today, you’re publicly outed for not wearing one.
Member
Perfect example of an “expert.”
“The battle is going to be very long, and we in Massachusetts are preparing for a second surge,” Dr. Jon Santiago, an emergency medicine physician and a state representative for Massachusetts, told Yahoo Finance’s The Ticker (video above). “Many think we will get one sometime in the fall. It’s unclear how big that will be, but we need to be prepared.”
From '''We need to be prepared''' for coronavirus surges, doctor warns
Really? What the fuck does an ER doctor know about vaccine development or second surges? How is he an “expert” in anything other than ER medicine? This is the bullshit people are following and is precisely akin to a doctor offering diet and nutrition advice... These assholes need to stay in their lane.
TMPHBITEU
When every single death rate graph shows precisely this, the "journalist" still types this ridiculous transparent baldfaced "cases" propaganda. Evil, or stupid?The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc across the U.S. and is not showing signs of slowing down despite some stay-at-home orders and face mask mandates.
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