Lurker > SmartMuffin

https://twitter.com/jonkirbysthlm/status/1290971887242280960

Australia really has just gone full-on totalitarian. This is terrifying.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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https://twitter.com/ElonBachman/status/1290800671168634881

Brief summary of the evidence, so far.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztD6yMREnOQ

roughnecks literally undefeated

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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https://www.aier.org/article/the-virus-doesnt-care-about-your-policies/

Here's an article with much more detail on the whole "lockdowns don't work" data.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/there-no-proven-effectiveness-netherlands-refuses-mandate-mask-wearing-public

Lasa - do you agree with the Dutch government that masks are not proven to be effective?

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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Are they counting deaths per million or actual number?

Per million.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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Let's play "Onion, Babylon Bee, or Real?"

https://twitter.com/EdCove19/status/1288915620390723586

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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Can you share with me what youre reading in that graph? Cuz to me it kind of just looks like a mess. Whats the number on the y axis represent?

The y-axis represents "government response stringency," basically an attempt to try and quantify how strict lockdown policy has been. Higher values = stricter lockdown. I'm not familiar with the specifics and details of how they go about estimating it.

But the story of the graph is that it's basically wholly uncorrelated with deaths per million. Chile and Peru had strict lockdowns, but bad outcomes. Burundi and Tanzania had little lockdown, and great results. Uganda and Mozambique had strict lockdown, but good results. Sweden and Belgium had relatively unstrict lockdowns, and also bad results.

Basically, this shows that lockdown severity is not at all a good predictor of deaths, nor vice versa. If all you know about a country is that it lockdowned strictly or minimally, you wouldn't be able to predict whether they had high or low deaths per million at all, or the other way around (I give you the deaths per million and ask you to guess the lockdown policy).

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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https://nypost.com/2020/07/25/fdny-official-defends-excluding-famed-9-11-officer-from-procession/

9/11 firefighter kicked out of ceremony solely because he's white.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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Wait, you dont honestly think they are against mall in voting because they think its unfair?

I think they believe that, yes. Actually, I think that both parties are utterly convinced that they would easily win any fair election, and that the only explanation for a loss would be some sort of unfair shenanigans (see: Russiagate, Stacey Abrams, etc.)

Only this time around, the Democrats are right about that, and the GOP is wrong.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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LordoftheMorons posted...

Oh cool good to see Muffin complete the transition from anarchist to dictatorship stan!

The lockdowns are dictatorship. Quite literally in the sense that they are all being promulgated by executive order rather than by legislative law.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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Wouldnt it make Republican Governors want more lockdowns though?

Nah. Republicans are stupid enough to not realize they're about to become completely annihilated. They think that so long as the election is fair, they will definitely win, because they've successfully convinced everyone that Democrats are the real racists!

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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I support that 100%. It's probably the only thing that would get Democrats to agree to end the lockdowns.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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It has been two months since the Memorial Day "spike."

Here's the all-age US death chart.



Still no surge of deaths. Still no second wave.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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https://twitter.com/jeffreyatucker/status/1288572692959043585

This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say there is no evidence that lockdowns work.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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Right-wing media covered it extensively and threw a huge fit about it, but it was definitely framed as "this proves Obama is bad" rather than "this proves government is bad"

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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Then say that, rather than frame it as a "what if" when it actually did, in fact, happen.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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if it was Obama trying something like this

Obama literally assassinated American civilians without trial

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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It more than tripled my income, but I was a pretty weird/unique case.

Generally I'd say its worth it but this is remarkably bad timing...

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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DoomTheGyarados posted...

I don't know about that, as a business owner myself now. Like police brutality in general should be a no let's be clear about that but people's property being damaged and lost can ruin someone's life.

Saw a great insight on this the other day... all the blue-checks are totally fine with riots and burning buildings down because they're all people whose life progress is tied to education and intellectual property... not to buildings and merchandise and real-world, tangible, goods. "You can't burn a graduate degree."

"It's just stuff" is easy to say when you make your living doing something that doesn't require huge investments in stuff.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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xp1337 posted...

MLB's "no bubble, let's yolo this" strategy going swimmingly.

The Miami Marlins had 3 positive cases, had a team meeting and decided "yeah, let's play", played the Philadelphia Phillies, and today it turns out they're (Marlins) up to 11 positive cases. Both the Marlins' game against the Baltimore Orioles and the Phillies' games against the Yankees now postponed.

I was borderline on whether MLB could pull this off but didn't expect it to get this bad this quickly. Guess my instinct that the NBA being the only ones with a realistic chance of finishing their season might hold up.

Professional athletes are at zero risk from COVID. Getting herd immunity early will be a competitive advantage.


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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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It's almost like blue states have generally handled the pandemic better than red ones!

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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It's hard, if not impossible, to separate the effect of protests from the effect of states reopening

Actually it's easy as hell, because Texas and Florida started reopening in early May, and there was no spike throughout the entire month of May until two weeks after the protests.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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holy shit maybe! I think that sounds vaguely familiar, did I send you like 10 shitty games for a total of $20 bucks or something?

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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I'll accept this if you accept the fact that there was a huge white supremacist contingent among and organizing the reopening protests.

This is absolutely thoroughly untrue. It's not even close, really.

Like, I'm in multiple such groups where those protests were and are organized and I've seen literally zero content that's... even tangentially about race at all.

I won't deny that there's a segment of the right in general that enjoys edgy jokes and pointing out IQ scores and crime statistics and things like that. But I never saw any of it in the reopen groups. It was mostly small business owners who were upset at seeing their life's work destroyed for no good reason while WalMart and Amazon stock reach record highs.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
http://dudewheresmyfreedom.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hufif8/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_20_2020/fz2axam/

Good commentary from the Australian perspective on how ostensibly-neutral institutions that have been taken over by left-wing political actors are actively undermining and permanently eroding public trust in said institutions.

This is how it sounds to many. Once the left are defecting from this grand sacrificial bargain that more left-wing institutions have begun, the right have no particular reason to think that the bargain itself is real. Why believe in coronavirus being threatening if the government is fine with thirty thousand people packed in the streets? And yes, you can argue this particular issue is an exception due to it being important. If you do, though, it sounds like this:

"Yes, this issue we said is important is important, but it's not more important than this big left-wing political movement."

Now, to the right, "big left-wing political movement" is certainly less important than virtually everything. So this maps neatly to 'this issue isn't important, we lied to you, you idiot.'. Even if that's not the message the institutions intend to convey, it's the message that's received. This degrades trust in institutions rapidly. If an institution is absolutely willing to tell you to co-operate - only to abandon that message when it comes to supporting political causes that you oppose defecting - suddenly it's no longer a trustworthy institution.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
http://dudewheresmyfreedom.com/

God Hand 120

Fuckin seriously? I think I literally threw this away like 5 years ago.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
http://dudewheresmyfreedom.com/

What did it overtake?

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
http://dudewheresmyfreedom.com/

I find it hilarious that all sports seem obsessed with finding the few things that make them unique compared to other sports, and utterly obliterating them in an attempt to become just like everyone else.

"Few teams make the playoffs" was one of the things that actually made baseball unique. But sure, just destroy it in your attempt to be more like the NBA or whatever. What could possibly go wrong?

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
http://dudewheresmyfreedom.com/

https://twitter.com/GarretLewis/status/1286644829061971969

You don't get to go to the baseball game, but he can.

You have to wear a mask, but he doesn't.

But tell me more about how this totally isn't about political control...

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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sweden: *literally has more covid deaths per million than the US*

That's not what LOTM said. He talked about having things "under control." Meaning recent caseloads, I assume.

If you want to use deaths per million as a metric, pretty much the entire country except the Northeast is doing great and should therefore be able to reopen immediately.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
http://dudewheresmyfreedom.com/

What steps did Sweden take?

They never closed their schools, at all. And their virus is now under control. How did that happen?

Furthermore, do you advocate reopening the schools in the Northeastern states where the virus is just as "under control" as it is in every other country?

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
http://dudewheresmyfreedom.com/

xp1337 posted...

Yeah, I almost posted that. They're really going for this and it's sad to see the CDC compromised enough to go along with it.

Nearly every other country already has or is reopening schools. Including all the socialist progressive European ones you love so very much.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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Corrik7 posted...

Nice to see caring players today in the Yankees/Nats opener. They all knelt pre-anthem together. Then stood for their national anthem. Now that is respectful of everyone. Good move and way to show sports how to do things right.

Yeah, I'm hesitatingly okay with this sort of gesture. While I still disagree with the core premise that there's anything going on worth protesting/kneeling over, it does address the whole flag/patriotism criticism. The argument of "it's not about the flag!" always rings hollow so long as you plan your protest to occur specifically during the time reserved for honoring the flag.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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xp1337 posted...

I think the interim name is silly but also think they should keep it so we can laugh at them for it. >_>

Seriously, I was prepared for them to be my most hated team this season, but they definitely just valued up to like 3rd favorite for as long as they keep this!

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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FFDragon posted...

wait what do burgandy and gold have to do with anything negative

the colors have always been good, I wouldn't expect those to change regardless of the new name

truly one of Lasa's more bizarre takes!

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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I honestly hope it ends up being unexpectedly popular and they keep it.

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https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/29524343/washington-nfl-team-use-washington-football-team-now-sources-say

Can I just say this is really fucking awesome and I sincerely hope that:

a. It is an intentional troll-job by Dan Snyder
b. They keep it like this forever

Reminds me of those unlicensed sports video games that have the city name and the color scheme but are afraid to use the nickname or logos for fear of getting sued. This is a literally perfect form of protest.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
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It's OK to hate baseball.

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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - https://imgur.com/W66HUUy
http://dudewheresmyfreedom.com/