Anybody want a Corona?

[spike]

And there ya have it.

[verb_to_trust]

ffs

Full fledged submissive?

[macphisto]

I think we’re on the verge of breaking new ground tonight, team!

[macphisto]

sfe

[verb_to_trust]

And there ya have it.

Not in time, sorry

[spike]

And there ya have it.

Not in time, sorry

Either sentiment works. You’ve moved into virus denier territory now.

[4/5]

My kids got A's last year. They're getting A's now. Only one has depression, and I'm pretty sure he was gonna have that anyhow.

It sucked. It wasn't a disaster.

I know you mean well, but this is a really, really bad take. I'd encourage you to talk to virtually anybody in the education field and see what they think. Since we're going anecdotal I'll share that in the course of the past two school years I've had 5 students who were Baker Acted or spent time in an institution for suicide attempts/threats. In my first 10 years teaching I'm not aware of having had any students who were Baker Acted/institutionalized. Small sample and anecdotal, I'm aware but still. At our senior awards ceremony Wednesday night there was a new scholarship announced in memory of a student (not one I knew personally) who committed suicide during remote learning. He came to the school and hung himself in the woods behind the baseball field.

Our enrollment in AP classes fell by over 50% from last year to this year. I know that's not a perfect measurement of anything but to go from 3,600 AP exams administered to 1,400 in the course of a year suggests something is up. Student achievement this year has been terrible. Ask any math teacher if they feel like any real learning took place from March 2020 to August 2021. (Ftr I'm not one of those teachers who whines that each successive class is worse and worse and pines for the good ol' days. C/o 2018 and 2019 were my two best classes ever.) It's just so abundantly clear that things are different right now and for the worse nearly across the board. And yes, life is complex and multivariate and people are cruel on social media and million other things are happening as well, but even before getting into the data and studies that are/will confirm this was disastrous (and most of all for the kids/families most dependent on public schools who couldn't afford to enroll in private schools--I guarantee that this widens and exacerbates racial/socioeconomic achievement gaps) it already seems clear to virtually everybody in education that I've spoken with that remote learning was disastrous. But you are right that letter grades were high last year. Most A's and F's ever interestingly enough.

[B]

I know it's a privileged take, and I'm not proud of that. But I was also comparing the problems we had with what could have been if kids had been in person and coming home to wipe out whole families with COVID.

Given that I spend most of my COVID discussions hearing about the violent oppression of governments forcing people to wear a cloth mask and/or get a vaccine, I tend to downplay the impact of COVID mitigation attempts.

[Peeps]

I know it's a privileged take, and I'm not proud of that. But I was also comparing the problems we had with what could have been if kids had been in person and coming home to wipe out whole families with COVID.

Given that I spend most of my COVID discussions hearing about the violent oppression of governments forcing people to wear a cloth mask and/or get a vaccine, I tend to downplay the impact of COVID mitigation attempts.

You should stay away from the board

[simple schoolboy]

[quote="B"]I know it's a privileged take, and I'm not proud of that. But I was also comparing the problems we had with what could have been if kids had been in person and coming home to wipe out whole families with COVID.

Given that I spend most of my COVID discussions hearing about the violent oppression of governments forcing people to wear a cloth mask and/or get a vaccine, I tend to downplay the impact of COVID mitigation attempts.[/quote]

How many 70 year olds have school aged children? Entire families wiped out?

People complained about ineffective mitigation efforts therefore we were justified in actively harmful ineffective mitigation efforts? Do you learn anything in a MPH program other than petty tyranny 101?

[spike]

tYrAnNy!!!

[4/5]

It's astounding and disheartening how popular mocking freedom and liberty has become.

[Peeps]

It's astounding and disheartening how popular mocking freedom and liberty has become.

Almost as shocking as mocking doctors and scientists who have spent their lives studying diseases and how best to stop a pandemic

[McParadigm]

More than 1.3 billion children across 171 countries schooled remotely during that time frame, with many countries outlasting our run (23 countries, including the Philippines, were still at it and planning on finishing a third year of remote learning as of January, though I haven’t checked for updates since then). For children in a number of countries, school simply didn’t exist for a year or more.

So whatever your opinion of remote learning…it doesn’t demonstrate a way that our response was outsized compared to other nations.

I don't think I argued that it was. I certainly didn't intend to. My intention was to illustrate that switching to remote learning for a year and half is an example of at least one policy that indicates things weren't "wide open" in the U.S. since April 2020. And to further use it as an example as policy that should have been avoided because it imposed enormous costs, often on the least advantaged, with questionable benefits.

We may have gotten lost in the text on this one. Spike described the United States as being open “relative to other countries.” You responded that maybe that was true relative to China, then segued in the same paragraph to talking about schools. I interpreted that as being part of the same thought.

It's astounding and disheartening how popular mocking freedom and liberty has become.

Equating temporary public health measures that were rolled back with tyranny is more of a mockery of liberty than making fun of someone for doing it is.

[washing machine]

It's astounding and disheartening how popular mocking freedom and liberty has become.

Your takes on the last few pages have been great. This one cuts to the chase in a particular good way.

I've personally never been anti-mask or anti-vax, but the last two years have really helped me understand the inefficiency of government on a number of policies and I think also I'm understanding human nature in a different way as well. I am very much anti-mandate now, but it's easy to say that in hindsight.

[4/5]

It's astounding and disheartening how popular mocking freedom and liberty has become.

Almost as shocking as mocking doctors and scientists who have spent their lives studying diseases and how best to stop a pandemic

Well I don't know about the bolded part seeing as in March 2020 Fauci pivoted hard from the long-standing consensus among epidemiologists and infectious disease experts that lockdowns don't stop pandemics. But mocking/ignoring/whatevering experts is one thing and may or may not be justified and may be deserving of ridicule itself. But mocking the basis for the liberal tradition with the implication that freedom isn't something to be cherished and protected, or at least is subservient to the interests and whims of People in Official Positions be they elected or unelected, strikes me as very dangerous.

[spike]

I wonder what percentage of RM will be at the next Capitol Insurrection.

[4/5]

It's astounding and disheartening how popular mocking freedom and liberty has become.

Equating temporary public health measures that were rolled back with tyranny is more of a mockery of liberty than making fun of someone for doing it is.

Fwiw, Schoolboy said "petty tyranny" in a post that very reasonably responded to B's defense of why he lumps all questions about covid mitigation into the same basket and the response is to exaggerate and mock him for using the word 'tyranny.'

I don't disagree with you that to say mask mandates are tyranny makes a mockery of liberty. You're absolutely right. And it's why the people who are against masks often do a true disservice to liberty/freedom by invoking it as their defense. At the same time, laws that prevent people from working either by decreeing that you are non-essential or because you haven't made the preferred medical choices...well, it doesn't strike me as so hyperbolic anymore to start flirting with words like "petty tyranny" or "tyranny." Is it absolutism or totalitarianism? No, of course not. But it isn't very liberal or free, either.

I value the freedom to make my own decisions whenever possible and accept that a measure of coercion from governments is necessary. I think every one on this board agrees with that sentence but we can reasonably disagree on how much coercion is too little or too much. I understand the frustration that you and peeps and spike and most of you guys express towards certain people on covid-related issue stuff, I do. That's fine, it's just difference of opinion. But like I just said in another post before reading your response to my previous one, going after freedom instead of misinformation or a bad faith interpretation of events or whatever else just strikes me as the wrong tactic and one that bodes poorly for the future long after covid is a distant memory.

[McParadigm]

Fwiw, Schoolboy said "petty tyranny" in a post that very reasonably responded to B's defense of why he lumps all questions about covid mitigation into the same basket and the response is to exaggerate and mock him for using the word 'tyranny.’

I mean, he used the word in a mocking way. He didn’t employ the word ‘tyranny’ to illustrate a point about B's explanation, or to expand on an idea of his own. He used it in a sentence expressing scorn. “Do you learn anything in a MPH program other than petty tyranny 101” isn't an argument, it's just an insult.

I don't disagree with you that to say mask mandates are tyranny makes a mockery of liberty. You're absolutely right. And it's why the people who are against masks often do a true disservice to liberty/freedom by invoking it as their defense.

At the same time, laws that prevent people from working either by decreeing that you are non-essential or because you haven't made the preferred medical choices...well, it doesn't strike me as so hyperbolic anymore to start flirting with words like "petty tyranny" or "tyranny." Is it absolutism or totalitarianism? No, of course not. But it isn't very liberal or free, either.

I absolutely understand the discomfort that stems from policies like the ones you listed above, and I think it's unavoidable that some reactive policy decisions were unhelpful in the end. I also think that the discomfort you describe is a healthy part of the American mentality. It motivates us to want as quick a revocation of restricting policies as possible, and protects us from sliding across that line into something dangerous. It puts a constant pressure on elected officials and society at large to get off that highway at the next best exit. And here we are.

Can you think of a crisis on the level of a global pandemic that America was forced to react to in the past, where there weren't some temporary oversteps of civil authority or control? Our history seems to be that of a sine wave of liberty, rather than of a charted course. From the yellow fever outbreak to journalism rights during the Civil War to our domestic reaction to 9/11, we do our sloppy best to navigate these questions...we are guaranteed to get a lot wrong, because perfection is a fantasy, and then we do our best to clean it up afterwards. In those cases where we have made lasting changes to liberty, they have generally been expansive (civil rights, women's rights, gay marriage, not calling them freedom fries, etc) rather than reductive.

I remember when this thread was regularly falling into "the government never returns the freedoms it takes away, you sheep" territory. I don't know what to tell you. I won't be wearing a mask when I fly home in June, though I will still have to take my shoes off at security ( ). Other people will wear their masks, I'm sure. Who cares? It's their business now, and hardly worth noticing.

I value the freedom to make my own decisions whenever possible and accept that a measure of coercion from governments is necessary. I think every one on this board agrees with that sentence

This deserves a poll.

but we can reasonably disagree on how much coercion is too little or too much.

We can and should reasonably disagree about such things. That disagreement AND the debate it produces are both essential to our democracy, I think. But here and now, on the Red Mosquito, we can't have that reasonable disagreement without first being honest with ourselves about the contempt that has infested it.

“Do you learn anything in a MPH program other than petty tyranny 101” isn’t a conversation on coercion or societal good, any more than "lol you dumbshit" would be. And more importantly, neither post does what you did here: present a rationale (either philosophically or through evidence-based arguments) that supports your beliefs.

I understand the frustration that you and peeps and spike and most of you guys express towards certain people on covid-related issue stuff, I do. That's fine, it's just difference of opinion.

I think you and Bi_3 are some of the only posters here who I've ever felt real frustration towards, but that's because our differences of opinion are occasionally matched to actual debate. Frustration is a healthy part of a debate. It means you care about the outcome.

But I can't pretend to carry the same level of interest in people who post flat assertions with dismissive tones as I have in those who make the effort to articulate and defend a position. That stuff is just noise to me. How can an opinion that even the opinion holder doesn't value enough to advocate for be frustrating to me? I can't be more passionate about your ideas than you are.

But like I just said in another post before reading your response to my previous one, going after freedom instead of misinformation or a bad faith interpretation of events or whatever else just strikes me as the wrong tactic and one that bodes poorly for the future long after covid is a distant memory.

I think I know what you mean by this, but I'd appreciate any expansion you have to offer.

[spike]

So how many paragraphs does a post need to qualify as true advocacy?