Loathsome, shouting, overtalking, rude, partisan asshole of a bully making a performance for his voting base. All the things he opines about are advisory restrictions, not mandatory requirements. Jordan can stick it right up his puckered behind.
Yesterday I received an email offering me videos to use in class that discussed controversial subjects; they were going to provide a balanced look at both sides. One of the topics was COVID-19. That really isn’t a case of “both sides”, at least not balanced sides. One side has tons of evidence and data; the other side is just unbalanced.
Interesting that Fauci wouldn’t give him a number.
I suppose it’s possible that the CDC doesn’t have a definite end-of-lockdown number.
More likely Jordan was hoping to badger Fauci into giving him a number that he could use against him, and Fauci is savvy enough not to play along.
COVID is currently killing 500K Americans/year. If that rate were to hold steady-state, then COVID would ultimately kill about 10% of Americans. For comparison, car crashes, guns and drugs each kill about 1% of Americans, and we accept those risks. (We drive and own guns and use drugs and tell ourselves that we won’t be in the 1%.) I suppose if we could get COVID down to a 1% risk, then people would accept it the way they accept those other risks and the lockdown would end. (Or not. People don’t treat all risks the same.)
Note also the framing that the lockdown is something the CDC has imposed on the American people. False. The CDC issues guidance, but has no enforcement power. Really, the lockdown came from the people, and it started about two weeks before government guidance and mandates issued in 2020 April.
Ikn @4 I prefer driving myself also, mostly because I enjoy driving and I feel less crowded, even though there are others driving along with you and at close proximity in traffic. Statistically it is much less safe than air or rail travel by a huge margin, but I think it is more about the control that you have to surrender. Say if there is a problem on a flight, there isn’t much you can do about it, but we tend to think that we could avoid such things if we have more control of our trajectory if we are at the wheel. This isn’t necessarily the case. A professional pilot and crew are much more educated and experienced at dealing with dangerous situations in aircraft than your average driver is able to deal with in their own car. An experienced and professional driver is just as safe as any other form of travel except for one factor, which is having to negotiate the roadways with some of the most arrogant, distracted, unskilled and unqualified ‘drivers’ out there. I usually feel fairly safe because I am confident in my driving skills and level of attention, but you never know when you will find yourself being tailgated by Bruce Jenner, hauling ass in a hulking SUV with a trailer, fiddling with his phone or wig or whatever he was doing.
Sorry, way off topic, but this is why during the pandemic it’s much safer to follow the guidelines and limit exposure, as the risk factor goes down significantly if it’s taken seriously. Where there are educated and highly trained professionals available, why would anyone prefer the advice of some no talent politician. It’s confounding.
twiliter, I’m definitely aware of the illusion of control. That’s what my students all say: I’m in control. Maybe…of your own car…if no external or internal things are altering your state of alertness. But not of other drivers.
I actually loathe driving. I’m not a bad driver, but it feels like such a waste of time sitting with my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road when I could be reading, or writing, or…reading B&W…anything. My life is too full and too busy for me to take time to drive with anything other than grudging, but I live in a part of the country with no mass transit.
I do understand about the comfort of planes; I hate being cramped in that tiny space with no leg room, and a stranger so close beside you they are almost in your lap. The seats seem to be getting smaller even as Americans are getting larger.
Trains, though, have more leg room than a car (at least, Amtrak does). The seats are close together, but not like the plane. A little closer than in a car, unless you have three people in the backseat of a car. And there is the option of sleeping quarters, though the price becomes comparable with a plane at that point. In coach, it is cheaper than flying and driving. It is definitely my preferred way to travel.
Maybe wearing a mask also takes away the sense of control for some people. For me, it adds a sense of control, the ability to make my environment safer. Both sides might be wrong, but a lot of it is about what, and who, we choose to believe and what evidence we require or accept for our belief.
Interesting that Fauci wouldn’t give him a number.
Interesting in what way? It seems perfectly normal to me, but I may have a different perspective. As a research scientist, I would be unwilling to commit to a number like that, put on the spot, out of the blue, without first having consulted with my peers and discussed the various alternatives. Perhaps Fauci has had some of those discussions but they were unable to come to a good consensus. It’s obvious that Jordan was trying to reduce a complicated decision to a fast, easy answer that he could use politically in the future. It seems to me that Fauci was just unwilling to play that game.
And to me it looked as if Jordan would keep on performatively shouting no matter what Fauci said, so there’s no point in playing his (Jordan’s) stupid gimme a number game.
It’s also quite likely that, even after lots of time to think about it, there wouldn’t be one single number. Assuming we interpret Jordan’s “get our liberties back” as “removal of ALL restrictions and complete return to pre-COVID status quo,” I would expect that would depend on the numbers/rates of:
— vaccination
— new cases
— new hospitalizations
— new ICU cases
— deaths
As well as:
— what restrictions are currently in place in that jurisdiction
— whether those restrictions have been changed recently
— the extent to which people are complying with the restrictions
We could get to, say, 75% vaccination, and the answer of what restrictions should be in place would be very different if positive test rates, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all going down even after restrictions have been relaxed more than a month ago, as compared to a scenario where those numbers are remaining stubbornly high or even increasing despite fairly significant restrictions.
Also, I’d like to ask Jordan, “Give me a number of how many students under your care have to be molested before you’d do something about it. WHAT’S THE NUMBER?”
There is nothing preventing Jordan from crowding into a church, maskless, with whatever like minded idiots stupid enough to join him. Go on, exercise your first amendment rights, go liberty yourself silly.
Hate to do the driving comparison again, but there are no laws mandating mask wearing, however there are laws mandating seatbelts. Legislating safety is hardly a new thing, yet these people think it’s a constitutional crisis to wear masks? These are really stupid arguments. It’s not like Jordan knows how to wear one anyway, he spend half of that video with his mask hanging down off his nose.
People are terrible at understanding, evaluating and dealing with risk, even when they take this into account. Even people who are experts at understanding, evaluating and dealing with risk are bad at it unless they are really concentrating and even then have to admit to a lot of guesswork.
I say this as someone who is supposed to be an expert at understanding, evaluating and dealing with risk.
We’re just not built for it. We struggle enormously to, say, treat proximate risk in a similar way to distant risk. We even have a phrase for it: mortgaging one’s future. See climate change. The driving vs planes scenario is another good example; the feeling of control, the placing of oneself at the centre of a situation, makes risk seem to disappear for several reasons. One is the perplexing idea that “surely nothing bad is going to happen to me” as well as the illusion of being able to dispel any problems through competency that has already been mentioned.
We’re built for such uncertainties as “is there a monster behind that rock?” and we really tend to struggle with anything more complex or abstract. And probability! Don’t get me started. I used to teach it to masters students who really shouldn’t have found it as difficult as they did. Not that I’m the world’s greatest teacher.
Loathsome, shouting, overtalking, rude, partisan asshole of a bully making a performance for his voting base. All the things he opines about are advisory restrictions, not mandatory requirements. Jordan can stick it right up his puckered behind.
Yesterday I received an email offering me videos to use in class that discussed controversial subjects; they were going to provide a balanced look at both sides. One of the topics was COVID-19. That really isn’t a case of “both sides”, at least not balanced sides. One side has tons of evidence and data; the other side is just unbalanced.
Interesting that Fauci wouldn’t give him a number.
I suppose it’s possible that the CDC doesn’t have a definite end-of-lockdown number.
More likely Jordan was hoping to badger Fauci into giving him a number that he could use against him, and Fauci is savvy enough not to play along.
COVID is currently killing 500K Americans/year. If that rate were to hold steady-state, then COVID would ultimately kill about 10% of Americans. For comparison, car crashes, guns and drugs each kill about 1% of Americans, and we accept those risks. (We drive and own guns and use drugs and tell ourselves that we won’t be in the 1%.) I suppose if we could get COVID down to a 1% risk, then people would accept it the way they accept those other risks and the lockdown would end. (Or not. People don’t treat all risks the same.)
Note also the framing that the lockdown is something the CDC has imposed on the American people. False. The CDC issues guidance, but has no enforcement power. Really, the lockdown came from the people, and it started about two weeks before government guidance and mandates issued in 2020 April.
So true. Most of my students say they would never take an airplane or train because they would rather have the safety of their car. Uh, yeah.
Ikn @4 I prefer driving myself also, mostly because I enjoy driving and I feel less crowded, even though there are others driving along with you and at close proximity in traffic. Statistically it is much less safe than air or rail travel by a huge margin, but I think it is more about the control that you have to surrender. Say if there is a problem on a flight, there isn’t much you can do about it, but we tend to think that we could avoid such things if we have more control of our trajectory if we are at the wheel. This isn’t necessarily the case. A professional pilot and crew are much more educated and experienced at dealing with dangerous situations in aircraft than your average driver is able to deal with in their own car. An experienced and professional driver is just as safe as any other form of travel except for one factor, which is having to negotiate the roadways with some of the most arrogant, distracted, unskilled and unqualified ‘drivers’ out there. I usually feel fairly safe because I am confident in my driving skills and level of attention, but you never know when you will find yourself being tailgated by Bruce Jenner, hauling ass in a hulking SUV with a trailer, fiddling with his phone or wig or whatever he was doing.
Sorry, way off topic, but this is why during the pandemic it’s much safer to follow the guidelines and limit exposure, as the risk factor goes down significantly if it’s taken seriously. Where there are educated and highly trained professionals available, why would anyone prefer the advice of some no talent politician. It’s confounding.
twiliter, I’m definitely aware of the illusion of control. That’s what my students all say: I’m in control. Maybe…of your own car…if no external or internal things are altering your state of alertness. But not of other drivers.
I actually loathe driving. I’m not a bad driver, but it feels like such a waste of time sitting with my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road when I could be reading, or writing, or…reading B&W…anything. My life is too full and too busy for me to take time to drive with anything other than grudging, but I live in a part of the country with no mass transit.
I do understand about the comfort of planes; I hate being cramped in that tiny space with no leg room, and a stranger so close beside you they are almost in your lap. The seats seem to be getting smaller even as Americans are getting larger.
Trains, though, have more leg room than a car (at least, Amtrak does). The seats are close together, but not like the plane. A little closer than in a car, unless you have three people in the backseat of a car. And there is the option of sleeping quarters, though the price becomes comparable with a plane at that point. In coach, it is cheaper than flying and driving. It is definitely my preferred way to travel.
Maybe wearing a mask also takes away the sense of control for some people. For me, it adds a sense of control, the ability to make my environment safer. Both sides might be wrong, but a lot of it is about what, and who, we choose to believe and what evidence we require or accept for our belief.
Steven@3:
Interesting in what way? It seems perfectly normal to me, but I may have a different perspective. As a research scientist, I would be unwilling to commit to a number like that, put on the spot, out of the blue, without first having consulted with my peers and discussed the various alternatives. Perhaps Fauci has had some of those discussions but they were unable to come to a good consensus. It’s obvious that Jordan was trying to reduce a complicated decision to a fast, easy answer that he could use politically in the future. It seems to me that Fauci was just unwilling to play that game.
And to me it looked as if Jordan would keep on performatively shouting no matter what Fauci said, so there’s no point in playing his (Jordan’s) stupid gimme a number game.
It’s also quite likely that, even after lots of time to think about it, there wouldn’t be one single number. Assuming we interpret Jordan’s “get our liberties back” as “removal of ALL restrictions and complete return to pre-COVID status quo,” I would expect that would depend on the numbers/rates of:
— vaccination
— new cases
— new hospitalizations
— new ICU cases
— deaths
As well as:
— what restrictions are currently in place in that jurisdiction
— whether those restrictions have been changed recently
— the extent to which people are complying with the restrictions
We could get to, say, 75% vaccination, and the answer of what restrictions should be in place would be very different if positive test rates, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all going down even after restrictions have been relaxed more than a month ago, as compared to a scenario where those numbers are remaining stubbornly high or even increasing despite fairly significant restrictions.
Also, I’d like to ask Jordan, “Give me a number of how many students under your care have to be molested before you’d do something about it. WHAT’S THE NUMBER?”
There is nothing preventing Jordan from crowding into a church, maskless, with whatever like minded idiots stupid enough to join him. Go on, exercise your first amendment rights, go liberty yourself silly.
Hate to do the driving comparison again, but there are no laws mandating mask wearing, however there are laws mandating seatbelts. Legislating safety is hardly a new thing, yet these people think it’s a constitutional crisis to wear masks? These are really stupid arguments. It’s not like Jordan knows how to wear one anyway, he spend half of that video with his mask hanging down off his nose.
Good punchline, Screechy.
“You need to respect the Chair and shut your mouth” – Jackie Weaver has come a long way way from that Handforth Parish Council meeting.
People are terrible at understanding, evaluating and dealing with risk, even when they take this into account. Even people who are experts at understanding, evaluating and dealing with risk are bad at it unless they are really concentrating and even then have to admit to a lot of guesswork.
I say this as someone who is supposed to be an expert at understanding, evaluating and dealing with risk.
We’re just not built for it. We struggle enormously to, say, treat proximate risk in a similar way to distant risk. We even have a phrase for it: mortgaging one’s future. See climate change. The driving vs planes scenario is another good example; the feeling of control, the placing of oneself at the centre of a situation, makes risk seem to disappear for several reasons. One is the perplexing idea that “surely nothing bad is going to happen to me” as well as the illusion of being able to dispel any problems through competency that has already been mentioned.
We’re built for such uncertainties as “is there a monster behind that rock?” and we really tend to struggle with anything more complex or abstract. And probability! Don’t get me started. I used to teach it to masters students who really shouldn’t have found it as difficult as they did. Not that I’m the world’s greatest teacher.