The Last Gasp by Robert Gore

[Grayling813]

https://straightlinelogic.com/2020/03/2 ... bert-gore/

When you can’t love, you hate. When you can’t build, you destroy. When you’re ignored, you scream. When you can’t tell the truth, you lie. When you can’t reason, you panic. When no one will follow you out of admiration or respect, you compel. When you can’t live, you kill.

This is it, the last gasp of the psychopaths who express their contempt and hatred for humanity by trying to rule it. Compulsion, not voluntary and natural cooperation. Power, pull, and politics, not incentives, competition, honest production, and value-for-value trade. From each according to his virtue to each according to his depravity.

It can’t work. It won’t work. They know it. Do you?

As the totalitarian horror unfolds before our eyes, only the willfully blind will ignore it. Only those who refuse to think will fail to grasp its implications. Only the irretrievably corrupt will embrace it.

In the US, over 600,000 will die of heart disease and cancer will kill more than 350,000 this year (statistics from the CDC and National Cancer Institute). Those aren’t one-shot numbers, either, they happen every year. Yet, nobody’s talking about forcing anyone to do anything about those diseases, although many of the deaths reflect lifestyle choices that could be forcibly changed through compulsory exercise and dietary restrictions. People still have the freedom to die of heart disease and cancer.

Long article, worth reading and considering.

[Grayling813]

Follow up article
https://straightlinelogic.com/2020/03/2 ... bert-gore/

Mathematical grounds for optimism concerning the coronavirus, but not governments.

[srothstein]

He is correct that people are not literate in math. I was in another forum, which I decided to no longer waste my time on, when someone posted how the infection would increase if nothing is done, if the contact between people was cut by 50%, and then if it was cut by a second 50%. His meme started with a 2.5 times every five days. It showed it continuing to increase even after the second cut. I pointed out that the growth rate was 2.5 to start with, then cut 1.25, then cut to 0.625 as the meme said, the virus dies out very quickly after the second cut.

This would be a strong argument to implement as much social distancing as you could it it were true. The meme showed it still increasing the total number infected even after the second cut. Some of the people on the forum of course made personal attacks and said they would take the word of doctors over me. They refused to even try to understand the math.

EDIT: I corrected that half of 1.25 is 0.625 not .0625. I really can do math, my typing is just nowhere near as competent. I want to thank jerry_r60 for letting me know about the typo. It is really bad to make what appears to be a math error in a post about how bad other people are at math.