> But (thankfully for society, if not so much for you or your loved ones) your experience is very atypical. Unless all had multiple comorbidities (immune suppression + obesity + something else), what happened to your family members was very, very, very rare.
Agreed, I wasn't attempting to extrapolate it over the general population. But you may consider your "media campaigns" comment from my POV.
The point I was attempting to make is that (as a relatively young man) I would risk many illnesses over a long-term debilitating illness that affected my sexual health, even if the former were objectively worse for my overall health. That's why I don't think severity and preference are necessarily correlated. Anyway, the "8 replies deep semantics argument" is not a good use of time for either of us, especially since I don't think our viewpoints are that far off.
If nothing else, I have learned more about HIV from this subthread than I expected, so there is that.
You've misquoted me twice in a short period of time, I didn't say that HIV would be preferable to the Delta variant. You're right, I would "prefer" COVID over HIV, but my personal preference is not a good metric of the overall severity.
In abstract, given the choice between something that had a (say) 30% chance to kill me but was mostly harmless in the long-run and HIV, I would "prefer" the former over the latter. But I also think that the former is more severe. In my view you're equating two things which are not the same.
For some context, I lost 6 family members in a short period of time to the Delta variant of COVID. My experience with COVID is not "media campaigns" but funerals.
> But by the same token, COVID is much less severe than HIV, even with modern treatment plans.
Do you have a source for this? This wouldn't surprise me for the Omicron variant, but I'm surprised that (for example) someone getting the Delta variant in 2021 was "much less severe" than someone getting HIV in 2021.
... and if Italy learned the lessons from Asian countries, the initial spike in Italy would not have been so devastating.
I think a more fair take would be that most countries did not take COVID19(in particular, the early variants which were much more dangerous) seriously enough until there was a major source of infections in their country, at which point it was obviously too late.
There are some exceptions(in particular, New Zealand, which is in the Anglo world that you malign), but I think in general it is a true statement.
I assume you're talking about the Mayo clinic firing 700 people for not getting the vaccine(given it was exactly 700 people and it was 6 days ago).
I opened the first 15 results on Google and every single one mentions the number of people as proportion of the overall company size. The vast majority are in paragraph 1 or 2.
Could you link to the article (hopefully from a reputable source) that doesn't mention the company size?
The statement that "the NDP and Green Party aren't a political threat to the Liberal party" is a staggering misunderstanding of a situation on which you are speaking authoritatively.
With the utmost respect, I think an elementary understanding of multi-party democracies would be a useful first step for this discussion.
It may be instructive to look at some of the key Canadian swing ridings:
There's a reason that Canadian Conservatives have fought tooth-and-nail against any type of ranked-choice voting system. I genuinely believe that the Conservatives would not win another election in my lifetime in a ranked-choice system.
If the CBC was the "propaganda arm" of the Liberal party, it would follow that they were be extremely negative towards the NDP and the Green party. The combined share of left-wing vote in Canada swamps the combined right-wing vote, and it's not particularly close. In 2021, there were 9 million left-wing votes and 6 million right-wing votes. If we put the BQ with the left-wing(which in my view isn't unreasonable), it's 10.5 million versus 6 million.
If the CBC had daily meetings where they planned on how to elect the Liberals in the next election, the most logical course of action would not to go after Conservatives, but to spend their time going after the other left-wing parties.
But, of course, that's not what happens. Why does that not happen? Because they're not a "propaganda arm" for the Liberal party, they are biased towards small L liberal viewpoints. And that difference is the difference between the CBC and a state-run propaganda program. The childishness is equating the two.
(FWIW, I know three people who work for the CBC, one of whom is a complete moron, and two of whom are good humans. All three are left-wing in their personal lives, but if any of them were in a meeting where it was discussed how to elect the Liberals in the next election, they would walk out on the spot. The idea that that happens is purely a Conservative fantasy.)
You're running straight into an established Canadian conservative talking point. It's pushed relentlessly by private news organisations who would reap financial benefit from the CBC being defunded. These organizations also happen to be the major news and opinion source for many conservative people in this country, so there's a convenient feedback loop in place. I'm sure this is not dissimilar to the other countries listed.
I agree with the majority of the linked substack in this thread, I think that the quality of CBC journalism is on a pretty clear downward trend, and I think that ignoring widespread societal issues to focus on the ultra-niche "darling of Twitter" social issues is journalistic malpractice at best.
That being said, the comparison of the CBC to Chinese state-run news broadcasting (while extremely common from conservative opinion makers in this country) is, I'm sorry, a completely childish take.
That immediately jumped out at me as well as a basic geopolitical error.
Nonetheless:
- The list of countries is taken from the malware. It is not speculation.
- The fact that a number of major malware strains do not install on machines with Russian and various other Eastern European localisation settings is an objective fact as anyone in the malware field can tell you.
These organisations exist to make money and "the heat" is a detriment to making money. These groups are able to operate with impunity because they take such drastic steps to not anger the local authorities(legitimate and illegitimate). As other commentators have pointed out, these list of countries are likely at the behest of those people, who have various reasons for choosing them. If interested, you can google about a fellow named Paunch if you want to understand the consequences of shitting where you eat as a Russian "cybercriminal".
From a purely money-making perspective, it's a lot more effective to fly under the radar and infect companies far away from them. The ROI simply isn't there for these groups to infect machines closer to home.
That is, of course, until you do something like this, which was clearly and obviously a massive fuck up.
Agreed, I wasn't attempting to extrapolate it over the general population. But you may consider your "media campaigns" comment from my POV.
The point I was attempting to make is that (as a relatively young man) I would risk many illnesses over a long-term debilitating illness that affected my sexual health, even if the former were objectively worse for my overall health. That's why I don't think severity and preference are necessarily correlated. Anyway, the "8 replies deep semantics argument" is not a good use of time for either of us, especially since I don't think our viewpoints are that far off.
If nothing else, I have learned more about HIV from this subthread than I expected, so there is that.