Safety Third - Covid Edition

A While back I'd written a post on safety being important, but not the most important thing. Safety has to serve repeatably getting things done, and is not an ultimate virtue in and of itself. Put another way, there is a difference between staying alive, and living. Every choice involves risks, and one of the most common causes of death is slipping in the shower or bathtub.

A guy can die as a result of simply falling over in his house and hitting his head.

While I'm not in the "just a flu" or "it doesn't exist" crowd - there's too much evidence that the virus exists, that it behaves differently from other typical seasonal flu viruses, and that the mortality rate is higher - the truth of the matter is that, for all practical purposes, outside of NY, NJ, and a few other blue state enclaves, it doesn't. Over a third of the cases in the US are in NY and NJ alone. Another third are mostly in New England and around the Great Lakes. For everyone else, they're not overrun by corona-chan, and the hospitals are relatively empty as other services have slowed to a near stop.

But the Karens and the politicians who think they are our mommies are making their decisions as if even one death is a tragedy which should be avoided. We've shifted from risk mitigation - making sure the hospitals are not overwhelmed - to "we gotta find a cure." And the mommys have taken this to psychotic and dystopian extremes, keeping us from feeling human touch - social distancing is anything but social, much like social justice is anything but justice. Note the kids boxed away from each other in the screenshot of this tweet below:

I especially love the scolding Karen trying to shame him about deceptively "cropping" the image. Follow the tweet and if the reply is still up, you will see other people note that the full image is not better, and if anything, worse.

I'll also note we still haven't found a cure for the common cold.

For every life saved by this hoax - and I do mean, for the illiterate, hoax in the sense that Trump used, that a core of truth would be blown up until we are being saked to upend our lives on the basis of that which is qualitatively and quantitatively not true - we lose others due to the economic wreckage of the lockdown. A rise in unemployment is followed by an increase in suicides, among other things. And as I pointed out in the beginning, life is not without risk. We mitigate it, but living alone and separate without human company and meetings is not living.

Also - the ones who impost this on us are hypocrites who want us to do as they say. We are, as observed at Peter Grant's site, not all in this together.

Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame, and still one of the scant handful of presenters of a worthwhile TED talk, did an interview at the Rubin report. The full interview is an hour long but was also presented in segments. The first opens with the discussion of how putting safety first has other negative consequences; incidentally, it turns out that Travis Taylor may have gotten the "safety third" mantra from Mike. The second segment discusses the damage and danger of referring to jobs that people rely on to feed their families as "non-essential." The third focuses on how Corona-chan has stripped back the curtains on college education for those willing to see.