That's a nice quote, but still doesn't answer the question.
No government in their right mind wants to continue lockdowns unnecessarily. Lockdowns cost a lot of money and make a lot of voters angry
Every offical that was selling the initial lockdown. Just have to get the R0 below 1, remember? You really think the masses would have been OK with a year of lockdowns and the despair that entails up front?
Your conclusions don't match reality. States like Florida have open stadiums and are fairing the same as states like California that insist on totalitarian overreach.
California has done somewhat better than Florida overall — and the vast, vast majority of cases in California came from Southern California, where the lockdown and mask rules were largely not followed. California is 40+ million people; it's basically two Floridas. The northern one followed the rules, the southern didn't, and you can see very clearly which way resulted in fewer cases and deaths. Northern California had one of the lowest case rates in the country. Southern California had one of the highest.
Well, in Germany three politicians who had to resign because of corruption where they had made deals with companies manufacturing masks and made hundreds of thousands of euros. And this is just facts and no conspiracy theories, and I bet this goes on at every level. If you find a way to (legitimately) control people and peoples behaviours, of course it's lucrative.
You can't just say it's "lucrative." You have to say how. Are you saying that a controlling number of powerful politicians or their backers are heavily invested in mask manufacture, but not in any of the parts of the economy that are affected negatively by the lockdowns?
And "hundreds of thousands of Euros?" That's a pittance. There has to be more to be made (than maybe enough to buy a studio apartment in Berlin) in order to justify the shutdown of a large part of world industry.
That might happen, but when you think about conspiracies, always think who would be against them.
Ok, they make money from selling masks. But do you really think no shareholders in hotel chains, airlines, airports, etc. are trying to push back against that?
Covid is hurting a ton of businesses. A lot of powerful people are behind those businesses that feel that pain.
They do, but people complaining about this tend to convenient focus on the powerful people making money because of lockdowns while absolutely ignoring the powerful people <<losing>> money because of them.
Note that this is Florida's official death rate which we know underestimates the real rate. The governor stepped in and made all numbers go through a special department which does things like throw out any deaths from non-residents (snowbirds and visitors).
Based on excess death counts, the real number for Florida maybe 25-100% higher. See:
Florida is currently facing a $2-$3 billion tax shortfall (numbers vary depending on the time of projection [0]) and California is facing a budget surplus [1]. There are details around this like one-off capital gains and tax rates and budget cuts, but the overall story is that FL had a slightly higher death rate than CA in exchange for an overall economy that isn't doing so well. Some of this is due to the fact that FL's economy is tourism-driven and my personal response to that is: as a tourist I was very tempted to (safely) visit FL this winter, but the whole "our state doesn't believe in basic COVID restrictions" thing made that much too scary.
They're not the same, Florida is higher. But overall Florida seems to be an outlier among the "low restriction" states and California seems to be an outlier among the "high restriction" states. A better approach would be to average the groups of states that took different approaches, and maybe also try to normalize by other confounders like population density. This is probably a better approach because there might be other pandemics in the future that are way deadlier, and we should actually know what works and what doesn't.
You wrote "to bail out California" and yet the headline says "robust budget." Do you have evidence that California was bailed out?
How much money does California give the federal government compared to that $26 billion that it got back? How much does California give vs. other states?
“Westerners with PC leanings” are considered ridiculous by most every culture in the world. If there is any ideology that has a “power grab over language and definition” it is the modern, Western left.
Before the internet you could have two local newspapers in every town, each profitably reporting facts.
Then the internet came and commoditised facts. New facts are disseminated immediately across social media. Open Google News and you can find thousands of articles covering the same event.
Suddenly, just reporting facts was no longer a viable business. Being a newspaper of record was no longer economically viable. Only the news media that shifted to reporting opinions, outrage, and entertainment survived.
> The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed.
> As George Orwell understood when he created the “memory hole” concept in 1984, an institution that can obliterate memory can control history.
> The innovation of the Trump era was companies learned they could operate on a sort of editorial margin, borrowing credibility for unproven stories from audiences themselves, who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage centers.
> Mistakes became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer understood as mistakes.
Here's a video where an ex-lawyer goes through a NYT article on election fraud and absolutely tears apart the misleading language they use to build the case that there was "no" election fraud:
The beauty of this style of reporting is that the writer's skill with words allows them to plant specific ideas into reader's minds, but if anyone was to call them out on the carpet, they can completely truthfully say that nothing in the article is untrue, or explicitly asserts conclusions that any typical reader would naturally draw.
The NYT is arguably one of the best news outlets going, so I'm not sure how one could hope that this situation will ever improve.
Oh, it's an ex-lawyer? Not just some random guy sitting in his car? Thanks for including that tidbit, so I know this arbitrary YouTube video is credible.
Or maybe, just maybe, you're doing the same thing you complain about, and cherry-picking your sources and relying on stories that support your existing biases.
The answer is not to reason every sentence from first principles, like the HHG2G character who is pleasantly surprised every morning to discover that a pencil makes marks on paper. At every point, new information builds on previous information, and that usually works out reasonably well. There are exceptions, perhaps most notably in the case of the NYT, the post-9/11 Iraq war, but most of the time it works better than any other solution, and more importantly, any alternative would work less well.
"It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States." — Thomas Sowell
Of course it's also a fallacy to lump the entire phenomenon of slavery under one umbrella. Islam does not allow enslaving people just by attacking them and taking them hostage as what the US did with Africa. Furthermore, the system is fundamentally different under Islam, so much so that the Mamluk Sultanate came to be, something unprecedented in human history.
this is a stupid argument, the African slave trade and it's ramifications are so throughly discussed in America because it is the main type of slavery that occurred in the US
> In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.
