Aren't the unvaccinated about four times more likely to get infected? Whatever the statistics show exactly, it's just math and probabilities.

Perhaps. But those who are not infectious can never infect others. If we are to deign to enforce segregation we should segregate the infectious from the uninfected. It would be the gentlemanly thing to do.

Oh dear; you don't know what a straw-man is.

I don't know if you are up on current events or not but maybe you're not aware of Biden's vaccine mandates for companies who employ over 100 people, even though it's in the first paragraph of Krugman's piece you quoted. If they do not enforce his vaccine mandates, to fire unvaccinated employees, they face massive fines. So much for corporate power.

His mandate should begin very soon and will effect nearly 100 million workers, you know, those people you used to support.

All of Krugman's specious and fallacious arguments were to support his conclusion, which for some reason you left out.

"All of this has a clear policy implication for the Biden administration and for other leaders like governors and mayors — namely, full speed ahead. Vaccine mandates won’t cause mass resignations; they will cause a sharp rise in vaccination rates, which is key both to finally getting Covid under control and to achieving sustained economic recovery."

Oh look, the state. Does Biden represent United Airlines or Tyson? Nope. Did I mention United Airlines or Tyson? Nope. Did I say physically forcing? Nope.

And now we're comparing vaccine mandates to smoking bans. Another false analogy, I'm afraid, just like seatbelt laws. More casuistry.

I have no problem with you refusing to get vaccinated as long as you have no problem with being restricted in your behavior so that other people won't be infected.

That doesn’t sound like a fair compromise. Only the infected can infect others, and the infected are both vaccinated and unvaccinated. So why would you restrict their behavior but not the others?

Krugman’s argument is a stupid one. The fact that governments have in the past regulated this or that activity isn’t an argument that they should keep on doing so, that they should force companies to mandate vaccines, that they should violate someone’s bodily autonomy and their right to make one’s own medical decisions, and so on. No, this is nothing like complaining about seatbelts, but it’s no surprise people keep bringing it up. False analogies and appeals to tradition are the few arguments they have left.

Absent any coherent argument they have state coercion, the last resort of the weak. Of course many people will comply when the government threatens to end their livelihood. Cruelty and coercion may be successful, sure, but achieving success through these means only serves to illustrate how their other efforts until then were utter failures.

Any day now….

But when we see that you have fallen for numerous such hoaxes it is entirely explicable.

I’m moving 600 miles north next spring. No matter: I suspect you’ll defend the paternalism long beyond then. Perhaps forever?

I cringed when I read that. “The government has always taken your freedom so you should not be angry when it takes more”. You cannot smoke in theatres or drive without a seatbelt, therefor you should let the government mandate your medical decisions, is not the first but one of the more ridiculous appeals to tradition I’ve ever seen. I wish I could scrub it from my memory, but then again this type of reasoning is the norm.

How many times have climate alarmists been right? One day, I guess.

And Riley champions the state and boss’ orders. Nothing much has changed.

The science says they aren’t required. What happened to listening to science?

You’re copying and pasting other people’s arguments.

The workers might not require vaccines.

Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination, and vaccines can be safely prioritized to those who have not been infected before.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v3

All you guys have are false analogies and never anything about the issue at hand. Chefs? :lol:

Last year front line workers were heroes. It was all fake, of course. Now they’re replaceable.

Foreign workers could replace NY’s unvaccinated hospital, nursing home staffers: Hochul

That you would nonetheless refuse to get vaccinated, although you have no good reason for that decision, but just because you don't feel like it, shows an antisocial attitude. Would you be prepared to sign a waiver to the effect that you will refuse medical treatment if you catch covid even if your condition becomes critical? That would be at least a step towards common decency.

It’s a step backward from both common decency and human rights to suggest that some should refuse, or be refused, medical treatments because they are unvaccinated. It’s not only antisocial, but cruel.

:up:
You’re probably right.

I was just trying to look at it from the Marxist point of view. I am neither a Marxist nor a collectivist, so I could be wrong. It just seems to me that toil, exploitation, and wage slavery would be negated if it was robots rather than workers under control of the capitalists.

The trade between worker and robot might be the start of the much-heralded epoch of social revolution we were told about. To me it would be ironic for a class struggle organized to bring back toil, exploitation, and wage slavery, but again, maybe I’m wrong.

It’s a kind of racket. If our predictions don’t come to fruition we can say our predictions altered the course of events. Rinse, repeat. Bush acolyte David Frum did the same in his book “Trumpocracy”, which warned about Trump’s push towards illiberalism. He never warned that the push towards illiberalism would come from him and people like him in the form of covid fascism.

Wouldn’t the exploitation of robots reduce toil and drudgery and wage slavery, thereby liberating the worker to pursue his own creative endeavors?

A clock that never hits midnight is broken. It’s not the greatest analogy given that they are atomic scientists.

It was tongue-in-cheek. Those old demarcations never existed in the first place.

Hardly. Some union members were protesting their own union while shit-talking the Labour government. So much for labour.

One minute you’re working, sitting pretty, next the industry is arbitrarily shut down by the state. It’s good to see labour in Australia is finding its teeth again.

Is it that you want me to read through your list of links and arrive at a conclusion you have yet to argue?

That is why it is necessary for government to regulate everyone under threat of violence.

All that for a non-sequitur? Didn’t help at all.

We should stop dead trees from decaying, too.

Furthermore, we apply the experimentally derived decomposition function to a global map of deadwood carbon synthesized from empirical and remote-sensing data, obtaining an estimate of 10.9 ± 3.2  petagram of carbon per year released from deadwood globally, with 93 per cent originating from tropical forests. Globally, the net effect of insects may account for 29 per cent of the carbon flux from deadwood, which suggests a functional importance of insects in the decomposition of deadwood and the carbon cycle.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03740-8

A petagram is a billion metric tons.

Could be better, could be worse?

I see no “social responses” in your Gish gallop, unfortunately.

There are definitely problematic humans out there. (Are you one of them?)

I’m not sure criminal activity and frustrated doctors constitute enough reason to regiment the lives of all citizens.

This is an interesting report from the Telegraph. Wuhan scientists planned to release coronavirus particles into cave bats, leaked papers reveal.

New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing "novel chimeric spike proteins" of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund the work.

Papers, confirmed as genuine by a former member of the Trump administration, show they were hoping to introduce "human-specific cleavage sites" to bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells.

People are always telling me to “trust the science” and to otherwise put faith in a category of mammals called “experts”, but then we find they’re funding gain-of-function research and planning to create “chimeric viruses” enhanced to infect humans more easily, with no doubt the purpose of protecting us from this disease.

Even more frightening:

A Covid-19 researcher from the World Health Organisation (WHO), who wished to remain anonymous, said it was alarming that the grant proposal included plans to enhance the more deadly disease of Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers).

“The scary part is they were making infectious chimeric Mers viruses,” the source said. “These viruses have a fatality rate over 30 per cent, which is at least an order of magnitude more deadly than Sars-CoV-2.

Just brilliant. Well, at least the Lancet, used as it was to promote unscientific propaganda, has started publishing some views contrary to the misinformation platter we’ve been dining from the past couple years. But, for now, they can only appeal for an “objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2”, because while it was impossible then, it is certainly not easy now.

On July 5, 2021, a Correspondence was published in The Lancet called “Science, not speculation, is essential to determine how SARS-CoV-2 reached humans”.1 The letter recapitulates the arguments of an earlier letter (published in February, 2020) by the same authors,2 which claimed overwhelming support for the hypothesis that the novel coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic originated in wildlife. The authors associated any alternative view with conspiracy theories by stating: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin”. The statement has imparted a silencing effect on the wider scientific debate, including among science journalists.3 The 2021 letter did not repeat the proposition that scientists open to alternative hypotheses were conspiracy theorists, but did state: “We believe the strongest clue from new, credible, and peer-reviewed evidence in the scientific literature is that the virus evolved in nature, while suggestions of a laboratory leak source of the pandemic remain without scientifically validated evidence that directly supports it in peer-reviewed scientific journals”. In fact, this argument could literally be reversed. As will be shown below, there is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, and a laboratory-related accident is plausible.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02019-5/fulltext#%20

Ahh, “there is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2”. Imagine saying this a year ago.

How’re those “social responses” working out? Not so well, the last time I checked. It’s no surprise that with all the genius of public health all they could come up with was imprisoning their citizens and trying to regiment society with draconian and arbitrary edicts. Such actions suggest people are more of a problem than Covid-19.

SARS-CoV-2/pandemic isn’t the one regimenting our lives. We are witness to the greatest peacetime policy failures in world history. Grab the popcorn.

Victoria Police granted 'no fly zone' over Melbourne's CBD

From Thursday, no aircraft is allowed within a three nautical mile radius or below 2500 feet of Melbourne's CBD without permission from police.

The "unprecedented" move has sparked anger and the Alliance for Journalists' Freedom (AJF) has demanded police immediately lift the order.

https://www.9news.com.au/national/melbourne-protests-victoria-police-granted-no-fly-zone-over-melbournes-cbd/656f4379-cbb0-45e8-9e38-948951586f22

Maybe they are trying to hide video such as this:

I can’t think of any men good enough to be another’s master. Can you?

It’s because, like you and me, they’re human. I can’t think of any man good enough to be another’s master. Can you?

No, I don’t drive on the wrong side of the road unless I’m passing someone. I don’t drive on the wrong side of the road because I don’t want to be hit by oncoming traffic.

I do understand what a pandemic is. I do understand the death toll and that people are getting ill. No, I do not believe governments act by and for the people.

Oh, so you do know who is infectious or not?

My only point is that your aversion to your fellow man, sick or not, is born of fear and ignorance. I say ignorance because you don’t know (nor care to know) whether you can get the disease from them. This leads invariably to your fear and intolerance of those you can only pretend are infectious, speaking about consent out of one side of the mouth while demanding state obedience out of the other. I just want to know how you are able to live like this?

If each state is determined by its anterior state the first state wouldn’t exist because there was no anterior state to determine it.

In any case, we couldn’t know the initial state of the dice and the exact interactions with its environment because by the time we did the initial state and exact interactions would be different. This is not because we are too slow or inadequate at examining states, but because there are no states.

I’ve discovered that covid authoritarianism is a chance moral refuge for otherwise immoral people. Through sheer tyranny of self-deception they’ve made avoiding people, covering one’s face, hiding in one’s home, and obeying authorities right or wrong, moral acts instead of acts born of fear and ignorance. It might work for a while, Tim, but it will be difficult to rid yourself of the stink you’ve since accumulated.

I side with the kids in your story. You meddled in someone else’s affairs, couldn’t make your case or got angry, so you ran to the authorities. That’s not something to be proud of, in my book. Snitching on your neighbors was commonplace in communist and Nazi regimes, so I can understand the comparison.

Yes.

Right, there is a way that preventing the planting of a bomb that would hurt a future person(s) is "good", even if there was no person alive to be aware that there was a prevention of this terrible thing that could have affected them.

Preventing the planting of a bomb is good. But you’d be saving no one if those potential victims were never born.

Illicit fried chicken and criminal travel. Thank god for the brave men and women of the Auckland Stasi for protecting everyone’s lives.

A police spokesperson told the BBC that officers made the arrest after they noticed a suspicious looking vehicle travelling on a gravel road on the outskirts of the city.

"Upon seeing the police car, the vehicle did a u-turn and sped off trying to evade police," they said. "The vehicle was searched and police located the cash, alongside empty ounce bags and a large amount of takeaways."

Police photos showed at least three buckets of chicken, about 10 cups of coleslaw, a large package of fries, and four large bags containing other KFC items.

They also seized NZ$100,000 (US$70,000; £51,000) in cash.

It is unclear whether the men intended to sell the food or if they hoped to use it as a distraction if they were to be pulled over.

New Zealand Covid: Men caught smuggling KFC into lockdown-hit Auckland