South Korea certainly seems like a success, with a per capita death rate about 3% of what the US saw. In fact contrary to your point, there is a very wide spread in covid impact from nation to nation. Here's a graph of all nations with 10M+ populations (scaled to eliminate Peru, which is a significant outlier that makes the graph hard to read):
And while there's lots of confounding issues here, like developing nations or autocracies with underreported or suspect data, it's pretty clear that some countries are doing a ton better than others. And it certainly looks to my eyes that among developed democracies, the nations with stronger popular adherence to mitigation strategies (in particular vaccination rates, but distancing and mask-wearing too) are the ones who are winning.
(And needless to say, the US is pretty much at the bottom of the list of industrial democracies.)
To be clear: "safe" in this context generally implies more than merely "physically unharmed". It's quite clear that Jack Ma was coerced into giving up control of Alibaba. It seems likely that Peng Shuai is being similarly pressured.
Having authorities (for example) scream in your face about their ability to wreck your career and that of all your friends and family is not what most people would consider "safe".
The first example cites what I guess is an attempted cancellation of Peter Thiel:
> In his recent book “The Contrarian,” journalist Max Chafkin assigns an ideology to Mr. Thiel, then defines it as “fascist” and even tries to blame this concocted “Thielism” for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. There is little doubt that the book would never have come to be had Mr. Thiel not supported Donald Trump in 2016.
I mean, OK. I guess it's probably unfair. But... to cite this kind of thing as an example of censorious excess and the decline of society and not at least nod to Thiel's own successful cancellation and destruction of Gawker media seems... logically suspect.
I mean, who is it not OK to destroy for ideological reasons and who is fair game?
> who is it not OK to destroy for ideological reasons and who is fair game
IMHO, that's the problem right there. Once you get into this "you did it, so can I" game, you've set into motion the wheels of destruction. This seems best summarized by this quote:
> Destroying the mechanisms of democracy to preserve democracy won’t work
Incidentally, the history of the aptly descriptive idiom "fighting fire with fire" offers a cautionary tale of its own[0]:
> The source of this phrase was actual fire-fighting that was taken on by US settlers in the 19th century. They attempted to guard against grass or forest fires by deliberately raising small controllable fires, which they called 'back-fires', to remove any flammable material in advance of a larger fire and so deprive it of fuel. This literal 'fighting fire with fire' was often successful, although the settlers' lack of effective fire control equipment meant that their own fires occasionally got out of control and made matters worse rather than better.
Correct. A canceling is social/mob justice, never settled in a court of law.
To conflate the two is playing into the pitchforks of the cancel crowd. These label legal acts or free speech as illegal racism or hate speech, and we should not go along with that madness.
Cancel tactics are precisely the way they are, because they were designed to function without playing by societies formal rules, or the reasonable defense of choosing not to listen to someone you deeply despise, yet leave their speech and platform alone (they do not care about Alex Jones, but care about the views of those who like to listen to him).
Your absolutely valid point was downvoted/cancelled in a similar manner: projected to be factually incorrect due to political bias against Thiel.
I think of “cancellation” as being tried and convicted in the court of public opinion; this is somewhat orthogonal to being tried and convicted in an actual court of law. An example of someone on the left being cancelled is Al Franken.
I don’t think Thiel really changed the public’s opinion of Gawker. They were always considered extremely low-brow tabloid media, and to their users I think that was sort of the appeal. They didn’t shut down due to a drop in popularity, they shut down because a lawsuit bankrupted them.
Right-wing cancelation happens, but it is usually reported as a campaign of harassment.
Instead of calling your advertisers to complain about perceived racism, think unsavory stuff like spam and GamerGate threats.
Right canceling grew out of troll and gamer culture. Left canceling SJW grew out of decades-old activism.
It is of similar type: ganging up on someone your group picked as the next victim, robbing them of their safety or speech without a formal and fair judgment.
But left-wing canceling (say, leaving 100 bad reviews on Yelp for a family business of someone going viral for a 10 second out of context clip on Twitter) is way more advanced and sophisticated. 4chan lost gamergate the moment the press focused on the death threats of a few incapable of expressing their autistic rage in an argument.
The left is more savvy. It knows that a single newspaper photo of 3 activists has similar value to a hundred uncovered protests. They know how to wield the taboo of racism as a weapon to avoid critique. They make you remember why their victim deserved it.
The court system is not particularly equal if you piss off a billionare. And Thiel just went and found something to sue about because he didn't like Gawker's _other_ coverage.
Defamation is illegal and should be illegal. Publications that go around exposing the details of famous people's private lives are trash and nothing of value was lost. This type of lawsuit should happen more often
Why would Thiel, an individual, "cancel" and destroy an entire corporation? (And how often does that even happen, anyway?)
It seems disingenuous to not also mention why Thiel was angry with Gawker, and to not also mention that most people will never be in a position to be able to fight back when a giant media corporation publishes private and personal details about our lives.
Obviously true, but still on balance government-directed spending (especially outside the US, but even here too) is more likely to take long term goals like climate mitigation seriously. And the big picture changes, at the level of serious regulation, can only be done by governments.
If you have $20 to spend and want to do the least damage, give it to the government as tax, basically.
Maybe, but not necessarily. I bet many of us paper over requirements we think don't add value, where we can get away with it. Solely because we think it adds no value.
While both might be illegal, there's a massive difference between papering over a requirement for a business application and papering over a requirement for a mechanical specification.
The former might cost a customer money; the latter puts lives at risk.
There is always a chance it is, however without some deep knowledge on the reasons for the spec, its impossible to say why a spec exists in the first place.
Many of these large scale engineering specs are "take the worst possible situation you can ever think of and design it so that it can survive 1.3x of that". Yes it sounds stupid to the layman, but this is how you make shit that survives everything you toss at it.
Ignoring "dumb specifications" is the reason why SpaceX lost a payload. They used non aeronautical grade metal, which did not conform to the requirements for spaceflight, causing a mission failure.
Only in a specious sense. The point to money isn't "scarcity", the point to money is TRUST. You trust that $1 is going to be worth $1 tomorrow, and that it will be worth $1 to the shopkeeper and the bank and your family and everyone else. So anywhere you want to trade for something, you can do it in dollars. It's true that to provide that stability you have to control the supply, so money is "scarce". But only in the sense that the economy it represents is finite.
NFTs don't provide that, therefore they aren't a good medium of exchange. They aren't "scarce" in the way that money is or has to be.
They're also a Tulip bubble, but that's a different thing.
> It's true that to provide that stability you have to control the supply...
Doesn't sound specious to me. The artificial scarcity is real, and has real consequences for real people. While trust is the primary property of money, scarcity-at-any-point-in-time is a fundamentally necessary (but not sufficient) to be a money.
This seems like an attempt at misdirection. In a lawful society, the reason for surveilling suspected terrorists is because you actually suspect them of terrorism, not because they're currently your political opponents.
If you ran with a gang in your 20's, that doesn't give the government permanent access to a wire tap when you start doing social justice advocacy in your 40's.
So depressing. The argument was that there are "grave constitutional concerns" with allowing implementation of the mandate (which is odd to begin with, considering that medical practice regulation like this has been done by the federal government for centuries).
Note that this is exactly the same panel of the same circuit court that found two months ago that the Texas abortion law (which clearly intersected with an existing right found by SCOTUS, that was its whole point!) was perfectly fine and not worth enjoining until a specific case came up.
This is just lawless. It's hard to imagine a more politically motivated judiciary than the fifth circuit right now. SCOTUS went along last time, I can only pray they come to their sense this round.
> medical practice regulation like this has been done by the federal
Yes, by law, but not executive order. OSHA was established to limit workplace injury. There is a long history of trying to use OSHA to regulate workplaces in ways that exceed the authorizing legislation, and each of them have been ruled unconstitutional.
> medical practice regulation like this has been done by the federal government for centuries
You know who doesn't do medical regulation? OSHA. Because they are not authorized to do it. You want to use "The Federal Government" to mandate a vaccine -- then pass a law.
> Note that this is exactly the same panel of the same circuit court that found two months ago that the Texas abortion law
You know the difference between the Texas abortion law and this executive order? One was a law, the other a decree.
Don't try to excuse rule by decree on the grounds that vaccines are good. Pass a law requiring them, but don't try to impose them via executive order. Respect the law.
> This is just lawless.
The executive order was lawless. If you want to mandate a vaccine, then pass legislation. If you think you can ban increases in rent, then do that via legislation. If you think CO2 should be regulated as a pollutant under the EPA, then pass legislation.
Stop trying to rule via executive order, and you can start moaning about lawlessness when actual laws, rather than decrees, are dismissed in the courts.
The court responds to the arguments made before it. This was a motion for a temporary injunction so all the court said was "there are grave statutory and constitutional concerns" and so the relief was granted.
By the way, no one on the defense was foolish enough to make the kind of arguments you made - e.g. "The Federal Government has a history of regulating medicine, so this executive order is constitutional".
The real debate is whether it is in OSHA's purview to do this, which of course it's not, but with a sympathetic judge and lots of smoke being thrown in people's eyes, there is a hope that courts will overlook that. Most commentators predict this will not be found constitutional, just like the executive order banning evictions -- I mean, seriously?? And notice that there were no arguments saying that CDC actually had the authority to ban evictions, it was just emotionalizing at what bad things evictions are and so of course we should give the CDC this extra-legal authority.
And each time, people on the left are just shocked when the courts strike this down.
Look, you can stay in this bubble and be constantly surprised yourself, or you can dig into the legalities of executive orders on your own as well as this dirty legal history of OSHA. It's not a pretty picture, and you should not support using executive orders to change the scope of authority of regulatory bodies, because one day a President of the other party will be in charge and then you really don't want extra-judicial decrees to carry the force of law.
> This was a motion for a temporary injunction so all the court said was "there are grave statutory and constitutional concerns" and so the relief was granted.
That's right. And two months ago, with a case that had clear and obvious "constitutional concerns" (seriously, it undermined Roe!) they said "Nah, we're good" and refused to stay it. That's the problem here. They aren't making a legal finding at all, they're making a political finding. And you know it.
> The real debate is whether it is in OSHA's purview to do this
Not in this case it isn't. That hasn't even been heard yet. The question is whether or not to stay the mandate only.
This isn't about getting it Right or Wrong though. This is about making pre-trial injunction decisions based on baldly partisan reasoning. The 9th and 6th may have a "partisan" view of jurisprudence, but they're consistently so. The fifth is making shit up. That's the lawless part. They don't care, they just want their side to win.
I'm sorry, but a federal agency creating a policy that will cause hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their jobs without a law being passed by Congress is insane. And at this point in the pandemic and the total amount people vaccinated, how can the Osha say it needs an emergency request. Especially when they don't take into account for natural immunity which from all evidence is more durable than the vaccines? This is not in the purview of OSHA, and mandates can be done by state governments if they want to push it.
First, the idea of "conflict of interest" is not about allowing or disallowing testimony. That's (1) normally an argument you make after testimony and (2) absolutely not something one party to a suit (the State of Florida in this case, via its organ the University of Florida) gets to decide unilaterally.
Second, your logic is exactly backwards. The reason you might infer a conflict of interest and thus judge someone's testimony because of their employer is that they might be induced (e.g. by being rewarded or punished) to represent their employer's opinions instead of their own. Here, they were called by the plaintiffs and are expected to testify against the interests of the State.
Cite for that? No one with any expertise has predicted a >7% inflation level that I'm aware of. This sounds like something you got from talk radio.
(Edit: two replies have taken this out of context. Savings bonds have a minimum term of five years (well, without penalty). For them to have a negative yield, we need to see aggregate inflation >7.12% over the next five years. That's nuts, sorry. No one is predicting that.)
This particular Bond yields current inflation levels:
"How is the interest rate of an I bond determined?
The interest rate combines two separate rates:
A fixed rate of return, which remains the same throughout the life of the I bond.
A variable semiannual inflation rate based on changes in the Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U). The Bureau of the Fiscal Service announces the rates each May and November. The semiannual inflation rate announced in May is the change between the CPI-U figures from the preceding September and March; the inflation rate announced in November is the change between the CPI-U figures from the preceding March and September."
So its fairly safe to assume that current inflation levels are indeed 7%.
Great, then surely you can cite me the source you used to predict that general inflation (not, ahem, some cherry picked real estate numbers) would be higher than 7% over the life of this bond, producing the negative interest you were teasing?
Not for five years they aren't! That chart ends in a few months. It's just reflecting CURRENT inflation rates. Again I ask, because everyone insists on cherry picking their way around this: Where is the source predicting a >7.12% inflation rate over the next five years? There is none. That's looney-tunes conspiracy nonsense.
Right, calling this some kind of talk radio conspiracy theory is completely ignorant. Go to the analysts at any major bank and see what they've got in their models. Or better yet, as you mentioned, go to the fed itself. And you KNOW, the fed is understating, not overstating those numbers.
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
And while there's lots of confounding issues here, like developing nations or autocracies with underreported or suspect data, it's pretty clear that some countries are doing a ton better than others. And it certainly looks to my eyes that among developed democracies, the nations with stronger popular adherence to mitigation strategies (in particular vaccination rates, but distancing and mask-wearing too) are the ones who are winning.
(And needless to say, the US is pretty much at the bottom of the list of industrial democracies.)