Right-wing websites are weighing the pros and cons of letting people die from coronavirus to help the economy

This exactly. They want sacrifice from others? They can go first. MFers.

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That’s because someone else pays it

Tucker being Tucker:

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I did not translate the sign, of course. I was just interpreting the themes and creating an analog between our current situation and the Nazi’s Aktion T4.

As far as I’m concerned, we should have self-distanced a lot of these very serious people in concrete and iron lock-down in 2009. They could reflect then on their very serious thoughts.

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Also, it’s more like “60 000 is what this person’s care costs over his lifetime.”

It’s not a question, it’s a statement. Otherwise, there would be a question mark and the sentence would have begun with caps.

Pardon the pedantry.

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Weighing the pros and cons is an essential component of any public health or policy exercise. This isn’t that. The excess dead stop being economically productive and it doesn’t take that high of a death rate to overcome even a relatively long lockdown. Adding the massive losses from permanent lung scarring and disability makes that an even faster tradeoff.

More than that, the whole thing works on a false assumption, namely that lifting the restrictions would return people to work. It would for the first few days, but people get scared when the deaths start to pile up. We’ve had other epidemic diseases and one of the things they’ve found is that if you prematurely lift the restrictions, then people stop trusting the lifted restrictions, even if they would actually be safe. Do people think public health officials haven’t run the numbers on this?

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just think: if the global economy collapses and people are suffering we will still have the exact same amount of resources we did before the collapse.

the suffering, then, is because of an artificial organization of natural and human resources

for example, compare that to famines that result from a lack of water, or other situations where we can’t provide the goods to meet basic human needs.

our economy is a prison of our own making.

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No, considering sacrificing anywhere from thousands to millions of American lives, not all seniors, just so we are clear, in order to get a bump in the Dow is always evil, wrong and without redeeming social value. That is not “pros and cons,” it is flat out despicable.

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Then, as now, both motivations work in parallel.

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It’s called triage when you have limited resources in any situation whether you are a capitalist or a communist or whatever. It’s just part of medicine, choosing who to see first, who to use what resources you have etc. The difference in public medicine is that this decision should be made on medical grounds - which is the best way to achieve the most good.

In extremist capitalist systems you get people like Al Johnson’s dad on the telly going on about going to the pub because he knows when the NHS is stretched beyond capacity it won’t matter to him, he will face a wallet triage and be ushered to a spanking new ventilator. See also the right wing nutters in US politics.

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PROGRESSIVES: Black Lives Matter!
CONSERVATIVES: Shame on you! All lives matter.

[Stock market takes a momentary dip in response to global health crisis]

CONSERVATIVES: Quick, let’t throw grandma into the volcano to see if that helps!

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Yeah, and the other problem with that scenario is that half of the track-bound people will indirectly be TrolleyCo shareholders - or shareholders in TrolleyCo suppliers - if they have any pension savings in investment funds.

What a dilemma for them! /s

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What I want to know is why this cretin is still Lt. Gov. and not in prison.

See also Rand, Ayn: The Virtue of Selfishness

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I actually forgot de Pfeffel’s real first name, and was wondering why a Labour ex-politician’s father would get special treatment.

He was an arsehole throughout his cabinet career though, so his estranged father might have believed that.

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These chucklefucks know it’s a longshot any significant amount of the population will actually buy this argument and see it as sound (well, not Trump, but whoever is whispering in his ear). I think they’re banking on not winning this argument in the short term, because to actually test their theory would prove them horrifically wrong. I mean, whoever actually gets the wheel at the back half of this thing is going to struggle to come off looking good, but their position is set up to look particularly atrocious if things don’t go well.

What they know is this: Immediately before an election year in which their signature move has been tax cuts for the wealthy, and their opposing team has been running on universal healthcare… a medical crisis hit that will lead to an economic downturn. They know they’re dead in the water for the executive and the senate in the next cycle.

So they’re laying the groundwork to complain later that the economic downturn caused by COVID wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if they had gotten the chance to do things The Nazi Way™. Because following an economic depression and global humanitarian crisis, things go one of two ways, a turn toward New Deal/Socialism or straight into fascism. They need to lose the battle if they want to make sure the war at least has a chance to break their way.

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Ted Kaczynski must be sitting there smirking.

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