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Thread: COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

  1. #12021
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    How about food, clothing, heat, water, and malt whisky? You have listed 3 commodities that other people have to produce for you as examples of freedom. Do you believe that you have a "right" to other people's production?
    I'm completely unsure and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know very much about this sort of thing. I think there's a trade-off between "pragmatic freedom" and "actual freedom". What I mean by this is that in say, an anarchy, you have total "actual freedom", but pragmatically, it's restricted because, for example, you have no protection (aside from protecting yourself). In a welfare state, you lose some "actual freedom" and "pragmatic freedom" in exchange for other "pragmatic freedom". Where you want to be on this curve and what you should optimize for, I have no idea.

    From what I understand, I think you believe it's up to the individual to take their "actual freedom" and forge their own "pragmatic freedom". (And sorry about these stupid terms, I don't know what else to call it.)

    Do you believe that circumcision is mandatory in the US?
    Of course not. But my point was that in some cases in other countries, the state protects you from your parents, which is a kind of freedom.

    Everybody dies, so the things you do before that happens should be important to you. Hiding safely under your kitchen table in the safest place in the world may well be your decision. Have fun with that.
    I strongly agree. You will die--living a boring and fearful life as some sort of misguided preventative measure is real stupid.

    Quote Originally Posted by Will Morris View Post
    Now, almost two months later, my bench has gone down almost 40# and I have a 75% supraspinatus tear and I've never had shoulder complaints previously.

    I doubt very seriously that the vaccine had anything at all to do with the rotator cuff tear and this is just a coincidence with great timing, but, damn, I liked where my bench press was prior to the vaccine.
    That's a big bummer; let's hope the nature of your ailments is largely coincidental rather than causal. Should be interesting to see what other members of the board report in time. I'll update once I get my booster.

  2. #12022
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    Quote Originally Posted by wal View Post
    You folk in the US have a 2nd Amendment, but here in Aus there is no such thing, the last mass shooting years ago in Tasmania removed most firearms after a gun amnesty and buy back scheme, a plan I might add is being considered by the folk in Washington DC. So your AR-15 will be the first to go after Biden bypasses the congress and makes an executive decision, then will come concealable firearms and you will be like the rest of us with on open carry only for your cell phone.
    Sorry, not that simple, executive orders overruling the constitution and amendments, while something many a president has dreamed of doing, still has to contend with two things: The Supreme Court and the willingness of the police to go door to door. Remember, most states have no registration and reselling of firearms by private citizens doesn't in most cases require a paper trail. Here in Virginia, the state government is currently democratic and very anti-firearm, but many areas within Virginia have declared themselves “2nd Amendment zones and the police have said they will not enforce state laws that infringe on 2nd Amendment rights.

  3. #12023
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    Quote Originally Posted by zft View Post
    where we can reasonably infer that the probability that a gun will save your life is extremely small (since your probability of being murdered is already very small). And yes--I understand your objections. People dying from COVID had pre-existing conditions; they were going to die anyway. Yada yada. That's not the point. The point is that concern over being murdered and concern from dying from COVID-19 are equally silly since the probability of either happening is small enough to not be worthwhile to attempt to minimize. There are plenty of other things that are far more probable that you can optimize instead.

    What I'm saying is this: shut the fuck up about your "views" and "values" (which you probably only have by happenstance of being born where you were born and not somewhere else--it seems so silly to hold on to something so capricious, so vehemently), be more pragmatic, and live a local existence instead of arguing about all this bullshit that doesn't affect you anyway.

    [1] List of countries by intentional homicide rate - Wikipedia
    [2] Mortality Analyses - Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center
    I didn’t buy the gun because I’m afraid of getting murdered. You assume too much without having a clue as to what my lifestyle is, who I’m protecting, or what scenarios I’d like to avoid. I plan on actually carrying the thing for less than an hour per week, under specific circumstances.

    I’ve put years of thought into this and the dramatic increase in crime and lack of police in my city made me decide that carrying, in specific situations, is worth the liability. I don’t plan on ever having to draw it, but now it’s there in the event that I may ever need it. The gun isn’t my first line of defense - it’s a last resort.

    Also, eat a bag of dicks you opinionated, presumptuous asshat. You don’t know shit.

    Quote Originally Posted by wal View Post
    Austin TX. Right I get it, where else would one want an open carry license. The link you provided most of it is overwhelming, however I am becoming covid weary, anyhow do you have "Krispy Kremes" in Texas? You do!

    "In case you needed another reason to get your COVID-19 vaccination, Krispy Kreme is sweetening the deal — it's giving free doughnuts to anyone with proof of vaccination, all year long."

    Krispy Kreme will give you a free doughnut every day this year — if you've been vaccinated - CBS News

    You folk over there really know how to get every one into the spirit of the occasion.
    I don’t plan on ever open carrying. I mentioned an IWB holster - This is for concealed carry. LTC means license to carry and it is required to legally carry, open or concealed, in texas.

  4. #12024
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    Quote Originally Posted by UberBabs View Post
    So naive. I am 63, no anti-vaxxer, and able to think for myself despite an ivy-league law degree. I will not get the "vaccine" because: 1) I am healthy and not an obese lump; 2) the reporting on deaths from COVID-19 is suspect given the perverse monetary incentives for hospitals to categorize deaths as caused by COVID; 3) these (Moderna and Pfizer) are not vaccines but gene therapy of a type that has never before worked; 4) it remains an experimental therapy that was rushed out without any study of long-term effects, particularly on the immune system; 5) big pharma -- an industry sector whose actors sometimes -- too often -- can't be distinguished from criminals is making and stands to make billions of dollars off these "vaccines"; 6) the federal government has given big pharma a waiver of any liability whatsoever for negative consequences from these "vaccines"; 7) I don't trust the government to accurately report the side effects from these "vaccines" because the government never admits being wrong; 8) established science is being discarded, e.g., herd immunity from actual infection apparently is now not as good as getting a "vaccine" that only mimics the spike protein and not the whole virus; and 9) there is a concerted PR campaign and misreporting designed to instill fear and hysteria in the populace to condition the people to obey, and to pressure private businesses to do in effect what the government is barred from doing itself (government cannot mandate that people take an experimental drug or therapy, but Wal-Mart can prohibit you from entering the premises without your passport). Finally, I used to be in law enforcement and always tended to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt in any situation (saying that once got me bounced from a jury panel), but I am increasingly concerned that law enforcement personnel do not have the cojones to stand up to absurd restrictions (in LA the television can be on in a bar or restaurant, but no live entertainment) that can easily progress to totalitarian oppression. I will not go along for as long as I can hold out.
    All of this plus

    A concerted effort by media, big tech and government to hide mortality data to make the virus seem worse than it is,

    Disappearing all information for effect therapies against the virus.

  5. #12025
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    You don't understand us, wal.
    You don't think Biden and Harris want to disarm the domestic owners of firearms in the US? I bet you a Texas style pork roast they are going to give it huge push as they will claim they have a mandate. Of course there will be a huge sale of 300mm dia storm water pipe from the hardware shops, cut into 1.5 meters lengths with two end caps.

  6. #12026
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    Quote Originally Posted by wal View Post
    You don't think Biden and Harris want to disarm the domestic owners of firearms in the US? I bet you a Texas style pork roast they are going to give it huge push as they will claim they have a mandate. Of course there will be a huge sale of 300mm dia storm water pipe from the hardware shops, cut into 1.5 meters lengths with two end caps.
    I see what you mean, wal. You think that because they want to, they actually can.

  7. #12027
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    Saw this story and it made me wonder. What role does the government have in enforcement of vaccine cards if, as Babs mentioned, the government is expecting the private sector to do what the government can not do?

    FBI is panicked… Issues warning over ‘fake’ vaccination cards… – CITIZEN FREE PRESS

  8. #12028
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    Quote Originally Posted by Soule View Post
    I plan on actually carrying the thing for less than an hour per week, under specific circumstances.
    If you are new to carrying I would recommend against this. I would suggest carrying daily and practicing your draw and target acquisition every morning (dry fire practice, aiming at something that you wouldn’t be heartbroken if you neglected to verify that your weapon is unloaded). For at least a month or so. Otherwise it will always feel foreign when you carry and you won’t know what to do if you actually need it.

  9. #12029
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    Milton Mayer wrote this in 1955. Every sentence is relevant today.

    An excerpt from:
    They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

    Milton Mayer

    But Then It Was Too Late

    "What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

    "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

    "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

    "You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

    "Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

    "Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

    "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

    "How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

    "Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

    "Yes," I said.

    "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

    "Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

    "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

  10. #12030
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    "But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

    "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

    "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

    "You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

    "Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

    "What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

    I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

    "I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom."

    "And the judge?"

    "Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know."

    I said nothing.

    "Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

    "Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."



    Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966, 2017 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)

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