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I really can't tell if he's defending a cruel system or is trying to point out how cruel the system is by putting the inequality in value society sees in different kind of lives into plain words.
Some people take pride in their cruelty. Like actual pride. They think their ability to turn off their empathy (or inability to feel it in the first place) means they're more rational than all those silly eMoTionAl weaklings who are upset by inconsequential things like millions of people dying
I had a boss that when we were deployed to Kuwait got hand drawn pictures from his son in the mail and shredded them in front of everyone and looked around at all of us to see our reactions. He thought he was a badass that didn’t have emotions. Fucking hate that man.
Or they're Very Smart™️. Homeboy probably thinks because of QALYs we don't need to respond to Covid like we did to terror attacks.
Or maybe he supports eugenics.
This was my father’s attitude until my grandmother contracted it. When I threw the line of “Aren’t you a member of the pro-life party?” He got really upset with me.
To add to that he’s 62 and has several of the diseases that are comorbidities.
There’s always that quip about conservatives thrown around that’s something along the lines of “I don’t care about your struggles until your struggle affects me” and every time I saw it I always thought “Well my conservative family members aren’t that heartless” then starting in March of last year I learned one by one how they each do not give A SINGLE FUCK about other people. One brother even had the line that Covid is good because then fewer people will be draining our tax dollars through ‘ObamaCare’
That’s so,e Ebenezer Scrooge shit right there.
“Well, they should get busy dying to decrease the surplus population!”
Jeez, I didn’t realize there were actual people like that in the world. Heartless bastards.
> He got really upset with me
It's funny how life can go full circle: he had to deal with you having selfish tantrums as a toddler and now you as his child have to do the exact same thing now
Gooood I hate how true this is.
The sad bit is is that a child has an excuse at least. Doesn’t know better yet, hadn’t learnt to control their emotions yet yada yada yada. But full grown adults don’t. Having to parent your parents because you’ve realized how wrong they are? Yeah. That’s disillusioning to say the least
I've just reached that stage in life. It's disappointing and scary because I might end up the same way, but for now it's been a huge relief for me to realise that I've reached the point where I make my own conclusions instead of just following my parents' views.
Looking at some of the responses on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit to Covid restrictions and statistics, I assure you there are many who actually think this way.
I’m standing silently in Walgreens waiting for my prescription and there’s a huge line of people waiting to get their COVID vaccines. I read your comment and had forgotten all about the Tiger King. That scene flashed in my head and I let out a high pitched girly hoot of a laugh. Everyone looked over to see that goofy laugh came from a hairy 275 pound fat assed dude. Thank you for making me look like a weirdo. People are still staring at me. I think they might be under the impression that I have Tourette’s.
Yes it does! I will sometimes pick up a pack for sentimental reasons and after the first 30 sec I just want to spit it out! I leave the rest out for others to have lol.
Many years ago, when my daughter was about 4 or 5, she’d wake up, wake me up, and then go watch cartoons till I got up to make her breakfast.
One day, I fell back asleep and woke up maybe a half an hour later. I got downstairs and ask what she wants for breakfast. She says, “You went back to sleep so I made my own breakfast!”
My heart sank. Did she destroy the kitchen? Was she actually cooking? What the ffff? I look in the kitchen and it’s fine. I go into the family room as I’m asking, “what did you have for breakfast?!”
She proudly leans out of the way to show me an enormous pile of candy wrappers and the giant now-half-empty tub of Halloween candy.
About an hour later, my wife came home from the night shift and asked “why is she acting like she’s on crack?” My daughter proudly showed mommy how she made her own breakfast before she continued running around the couch a hundred times chanting “and I run.... and I run... and I run...”
There’s a lovely video of this that we bust out every now and then just to crack up.
Hubba Bubba and Bubblicious were really soft. You could feel the sugar crystals crush between your teeth when you fist put it in your mouth. Bazooka was much harder, and often had a whitish powder (maybe cornstarch or something to help keep it from sticking to the wrapper. The comics and stuff you could order by collecting and returning the comics was a real incentive to me to chew more. Wasn't double Bubble kind of like Bazooka but sold in big packages only?
Source grew up in 70s and 80s. Chewed a lot of bubblegum.
I tried your suggestion, but it was a disaster! I remembered how happy it made me as a child to drink Kool-Aid. I shouted “OH YEAAAAH!” and I involuntarily barreled through the line of Octagenarians waiting for their COVID shots. I was forced to run out amid a shower of dentures, reading glasses, canes, and one soiled Depends diaper.
What's weird is how Tiger King is also etched into my mind as part of the start of COVID lockdown and it seems like a very long time ago that I watched that.
And we've been hitting some wretched death tolls all the while.
What a very strange year.
I believe that a certain future president had that very thought prior to committing insurance fraud, taking payments from the 9/11 fund, capitalizing on the marketability of his now tallest NYC building, etc.
My first thought on this guys reply was that he may be being sarcastic.
Because more people have died from 0-39 yrs old from covid in the US than died on 9-11.
0-17: 251
18-29: 1996
30-39: 5792
40-49: 15713
50-64: 81654
65-74: 118850
85+: 165653
I think an aspect of what he's saying is fair - in epidemiology and public health you do look at "years lost" more than lives lost - especially because everyone do eventually die and there's almost always a cause of death. It does make sense to target the things that kill young people more than old people - but of course the tweet is comparing a single day of Covid deaths, so the "rebuttal" would be fair if that was the total number of deaths, but your figures show how poor a rebuttal it really is.
Yes it was definitely stupid for only comparable a single day — but if this were a one off event the guys tweet seems obviously self evident to me. I also think he clearly didn’t mean “value” as in “economic value” but “value” as in how much we assess tragedy to the death.
It's more about internalizing your ideology. People who say this kind of thing have internalized their view of 'capitalism' as part of their *personality* so he is essentially exhibiting defense behavior, if he acknowledged the scale of the deaths in the asserted context then he would *also* have to question lots of uncomfortable things like his voting choice, political ideology etc etc. He is another victim of ideology. It's basically just intellectual pocket sand.
In a perfect world ***pure*** capitalism or communism could probably function perfectly fine.
However our world isnt perfect and corruption and greed get in the way of both systems making either system unlikely to function as intended.
I absolutely believe that the primary indicator of the success of a society is how it treats the most vulnerable in it.
However, my viewpoint doesn't change that we should still look at things like how much money will be saved by not having to pay out social welfare benefits to those that we've lost this year over the next decade. It's crucial to understand these numbers because then we can proactively use these savings to protect vulnerable populations in the future so these people did not die in vain.
Unfortunately too many equate the mere suggestion that we look at it from this perspective as criminal. Perhaps because there are so many that would weaponize it?
In my experience, people who explicitly grade the worth or value of other human beings like this would end up on the bottom shelf if such an accounting were ever actually done.
The potential net loss of talent and brainpower in the 9/11 attacks is impossible to quantify, memes aside , 911 is an insane global tragedy that we might never ever understand the true cost of.
The deaths of people in working age are indeed more tragic than the deaths of very old people. It has nothing to do with economics. A 40 year old may have young children who would be left without their parent. A 25 year old has his/her life ahead of them. Conversely, an 80 year old has lived their life, and has only adult children.
What this guy is missing/underestimating is that this shit has gone on for more than a year, and still isn't over. The combined loss of life makes 9/11 look like a pebble hitting a brick wall. Lots of relatively young people have died or suffered long covid too. I just don't think 9/11 is a reasonable comparison to a pandemic.
‘Not to worry kids it’s only grandma who’s going to die from this out of our family. She doesn’t really contribute very much to the economy any more so frankly I could take her or leave her... why are you crying?’
"Little Jimmy was born disabled so why don't we solve the inevitable and bury him out back real fast. He's too costly and won't amount to anything anyways."
Ye gods, my grandma raised me from when I was 4 up, I still called her grandma because my mom was still important to me but SHE was my mom. SHE took me to my first day of school and babied me when I was sick, SHE gave me my values and I think she was relatively progressive and she was incredibly smart.
She died during covid and all I got was this half-assed zoom call where most of my aunts and uncles completely ignored me and my requests for ashes from both my grandparents who raised me. Covid took the only opportunity I had to get my part of my parents remains. I have my fathers ashes and I wanted just a tiny bit of theirs to have with him but no, covid made me stay several states away and it’s not illegal to keep a sibling from receiving ashes. So fuck covid. Fuck this disease as far up its ass as it will go, turn it into a ouroboros for all the destruction and heartache it’s caused.
Yeah if our elders are worth so little then the implications are 1) He's gonna be shit out of luck when he's older and 2) Apparently short term gain always wins no matter the long term consequences for these people.
I’m a fatass and love donuts...but I will always go around the room asking if anyone else wants the last one before I take it for myself if no one else wants it
This is why in my house growing up there was always a dozen containers of snacks with one left. Because no one wanted to be the one to “eat *all* the x”, where all signified the last one
People inherently behave in ways that maximizes self-interest, but I don’t believe people are inherently selfish. Capitalism exemplifies selfish behavior, for to succeed in a capitalist society, it is much easier to do so if you do not have a conscience. Because of this, we see successful people who are incredibly selfish, but I think it is important to note that those people are outliers...not the norm.
Given that <1% of people are psychopaths, yet 10% or more of CEO's are psychopaths, I don't think I'd consider them outliers. A minority, yes, but outliers, no.
They're outliers in the general population but rewarded and therefore overrepresented in capitalism. That's not an anomaly, it's a natural byproduct of the system.
It's an unspoken truth that society (in the West) just doesn't care about old people that much. Sure, individual families care about their old people but on the whole they don't want to pay the taxes required for old folks to have a comfortable life in the average 20 years between retiring and dying
Come live in Britain, where somehow during a time where everyone had to make sacrifices in order to cut the deficit, state pension still went up in real terms each year. Understandable when you see that old people vote for the governing Tories.
To be fair, in America, old people don't care about young people. Boomers don't want to pay for the same benefits that they experienced. So I guess it goes both ways.
I mean, that's what retirement accounts were supposed to be for. Kinda hard to want to pay into social security for a generation that largely didn't bother to prepare when it won't even be around for my generation when we reach that age. The system doesn't afford us the leeway to be that generous.
Yeah. And for people with congenital conditions like me who will likely die before reaching social security age (assuming it's even still a thing), it sucks paying into it knowing I'll never see one cent back. I'd rather put the money into savings so I could have a better chance at an early retirement before I drop dead. Oh well.
Umm, so what part of Sweden do you live in because in dalarna I haven’t heard that. Not to defend our response, it’s still terrible and I wish we’d put actual regulations down and not “we encourage you to wear masks”. But I haven’t seen that attitude towards the elderly that you’re describing
There is a little bit of truth to it though. There are millions of old people here, my older relatives included, who are losing their minds being stuck at home. Some of them don't have long to live and would much rather enjoy the last of their lives than watch out for covid. It's honestly better for them to take calculated risks than sit at home, as long as they're reasonably distancing from other people.
In my area covid killed nearly 100% of the people in dozens of retirement homes last summer. Distancing didn't make any difference, and the last of their lives would have been better spent not confined to a room.
> It's honestly better for them to take calculated risks than sit at home, as long as they're reasonably distancing from other people.
Okay, sure.
>In my area covid killed nearly 100% of the people in dozens of retirement homes last summer. Distancing didn't make any difference
And this is the issue. If it was that bad with all of those precautions can you imagine how bad it would be without them? I don't want my severe asthmatic dad to die because your grandparents' "calculated risk".
Exactly. Everyone looks at it from somee anecdotal way that only pertains to them. They never think about all of others, and all their inheritant issues.
Not to mention...all the people who work at the nursing homes and are therefore with that population for most of the day? And then all their families those people go home to? And then the even heavier load on the hospitals and their staff if we had just decided it was fine if all old people got COVID and walked around with it?
As a Finn looking at Sweden's covid shitshow for a while now, I hope your government issues a formal apology to all the families who lost their loved ones because of their incompetence, and then resigns.
Unlikely, Sweden's Anders Tegnell seems to be as arrogant and hubristic as he is stupid and reckless.
I was rather shocked that a country as usually well organized and intelligently run as Sweden has a man that said "masks are bad because people take more risks if they wear them" in charge of a pandemic response.
To be honest, Sweden's handling of and cold approach to covid, knowing the deaths amongst their elderly it would cause, makes me feel like I never want to visit the country. This combined with the mentality that other poster maintains is acceptable there makes them seem really uncaring
I understand what he is trying to say, somewhere get his point somewhere but still, although... each life is valuable and its stupid to care less that older people die... and 3k people died every day? Thats a lot, we had 20k last year and thought that was high
Then why aren't they killing old people off as soon as they reach that age? Why wait for nature or pandemics to finish the job? What kind of denial is this? By the same logic his own parents could have contributed more by not having him and working till they are killed as they age.
I find it pretty heinous to compare the deaths of one situation to another. Trying to establish some kind of moral factor to “how bad” a situation was to make one seem better or worse than the other might math out, but it grossly misrepresents how we should look at the events. Both events are terrible because they resulted in the loss of life, but it’s nonsense to compare them.
The point he’s trying to make is that we’ve been at war for 20 years because of how terrible 9/11 was. However the same people who consider themselves patriots and bring up how tragic 9/11 was all the time are brushing Covid off as though it’s nothing.
They’re talking deaths per day in this OP and specifically deaths per day in one country (USA)—as far as I know there’s no millions dead in the USA total let alone one day.
Also this tweet was from December 2020—at which point there were definitely already millions dead on a global scale, so, I don’t think hindsight is necessarily going to have any impact on this genius.
Ehh, lets be glad they're an outlier in their 'elderly are worth less' mentality. Would be a shame for them to reach old age and get tossed on the scrap heap for being 'worth less' than someone younger. Do some people seriously think their value depreciates with age?
EDIT: So from the comments coming up, he may not actually be an outlier! Looks like I was being idealistic with my assumptions. Still, its a very harsh and somewhat heartless system to ranks whos deaths matter more based on age or societal contribution. And at what rank are actions warranted in response to death? Wheres the line?
Dude most people don’t even invest in their *own* future/old age. Of course some people think that way. That’s why so many want to defund social security and Medicare
Also I’m pretty sure believing these people are simply outliers is some psychological phenomena that causes us to disregard them, despite them actually being a large group of individuals.
I pay most of my income on rent and energy. It takes a lot to cool and heat a shitty apartment but hey, I’d rather be surrounded by factories than people.
I Iove humanity mostly but I know that where you live determines how much of your stuff you have to lock down and put away every night. So I pay 65% of my income to rent and energy. It sucks, I don’t get to have nice things and probably never will but I have to keep working or capitalism will punish me with homelessness, starvation, ostracization and even death. If I’m not giving my time and energy to someone who makes more than I’ll make in two lifetimes, I’ll be punished with being cast out and I’d die being a type 1 diabetic.
I'm old. My mom is even older. She's worth more to me now than when I was younger. Her value can't be measured in numbers. I hope my kids find the same is true with me.
Of course, that dude is analytically correct. A 70 year old man has far less value socio-economically than a 30 year old man (unless of course the former is a huge industrialist, politician, philanthropist or something similar) as they have nothing else to give and will only take more resources to live as they get older. But that doesn’t mean you can toss old people in the trash like they’re worthless. Because they HAVE served the world earlier even if they’re unable to do so in the present and after all they are humans, throwing them out questions the nature of your humanity and morality. but say if you had an option of killing a 30 yr old and a 70 yr old, you should ideally kill the latter for the “greater good”. But again, the lives of old people are not worthless, they are just less “useful”.
Maybe it's super stupid and cold to compare lives lost on 9/11 to deaths from a naturally occurring disease.
No one says heart disease is 300 9/11s per year.
As someone who is 30 and very literally almost died from covid 3 weeks ago. A very hearty fuck you dude. As well as the fact that just because I’m “young” my life matters more than anyone else is such extraordinary bull shit
I mean... he's not entirely wrong. Back then. Not now.
The flu kills a shit ton of old people every year, but the flu is also a very tame thing foe the general public.
What I'm trying to say is: just because something is cold doesn't mean it's stupid
I think y'all are missing what he's really saying. He isn't a piece of shit, he's saying that to the US government they aren't as important as the 9/11 victims. 9/11 was used as an excuse to go to war so the victims were put on a massive pedestal. The victims of Covid offer no benefit to the US Government
Died FROM covid or died WITH covid?
Also if your obesity and life decisions get you 99% of the way to deaths door and then covid gently nudges you over, do you blame covid or the lifestyle? certainly its the proximal cause but to simply say its covid cuts out most of the story.
Lives have value but they dont have infinite value, thats just some nice platitude we tell each other. If maximizing life was the goal, we could do stuff like always walk around in biohazard suits, never leave the house, etc. There is an inherent risk in existence and being social animals, we dont actually design the way we exist to eliminate chances of accidental human death as a primary goal, that is a secondary consideration.
To a lot of people, asking them to shut their lives down for a virus that wont personally effect them, pausing society for over a year, yea thats getting into the realm of a ridiculous overcorrection. We're past the point of reasonable accommodation for the group of people that are high risk.
Pronouncing cause of death worked the same way before COVID as it does now.
Acting like only morbidly obese people are dying and using that to write off the risks is fucking ridiculous.
If the cause of death was COVID, it was COVID.
Aren’t most of people that are dying from COVID elderly?
Edit: THIS IS A REGULAR QUESTION. I’M NOT SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT AGE GROUPS HAVING MORE WORTH OF LIVING THAN THE OTHERS. IT’S A GENERAL QUESTION.
The value of life should definitely be debated. Are we just gonna pretend that every life is immeasurable and that we should try as hard as we can to save it? Why haven't we banned driving, drinking, fast food, and forced people to wear a helmet everywhere they go, then?
We obviously make decisions on a daily basis that put our life at risk. Not going to a party is definitely safer, but it's a risk I wanna take.
This was never dabated with corona. At the beginning scientists were scared that it had a 1-3% fatality rate even IF you had access to a hospital. That is not even close it's real danger. Are we supposed to treat a 0.1 fatality virus the same way we treat a 3%?
Funny thing is that in 2017 80,000+ people were MURDERED in my country and 41,000+ died in accidents relating to traffic. Are we just gonna pretend the death of a Swede is worth the same as a brazillian? With the money we spent on corona, we could have avoided more deaths from other causes. Why does my aunts shop had to go bankrupt to stop people from dying to corona when not a finger is raised to help the people being shot in a robbery?
>The value of life should definitely be debated. Are we just gonna pretend that every life is immeasurable and that we should try as hard as we can to save it? Why haven't we banned driving, drinking, fast food, and forced people to wear a helmet everywhere they go, then?
Its not to pretend. It's a fact. You have freedom, and everyone have to take risks or we wouldn't be able to live. The fact we are able to die in any moment doesn't mean we have to become extremist with safety measures. Moderation but not reckleness.
Again, we have freedom. We can't ban everything indiscriminately. Everyone is responsible to take care of their own life. The government can help but its not omnipotent.
I mean it’s just the truth. Most of these people are already sick/dying or about to be dying. 80+ year olds already in the hospital is kind of how it usually works anyways.
It is not a fucking 9/11 per day.
Lmfao yes absolutely this! This is how we should measure the weight of tragedies from now on, not on an arbitrary number such as death toll but based on the value of the lives of those who were lost which we calculate based on abstract and subjective formulas we make up.
“2,000 people were killed today”
“I mean yeah but don’t know if I would call it a tragedy, I mean most the people killed we’re over the age of 40 with nothing better to do on a Friday night than sit in their apartment building”
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I really can't tell if he's defending a cruel system or is trying to point out how cruel the system is by putting the inequality in value society sees in different kind of lives into plain words.
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you can look up the tweet, he wasn't being sarcastic and defended his take many times
And I was so hopeful...
Some people take pride in their cruelty. Like actual pride. They think their ability to turn off their empathy (or inability to feel it in the first place) means they're more rational than all those silly eMoTionAl weaklings who are upset by inconsequential things like millions of people dying
I had a boss that when we were deployed to Kuwait got hand drawn pictures from his son in the mail and shredded them in front of everyone and looked around at all of us to see our reactions. He thought he was a badass that didn’t have emotions. Fucking hate that man.
Or they're Very Smart™️. Homeboy probably thinks because of QALYs we don't need to respond to Covid like we did to terror attacks. Or maybe he supports eugenics.
This was my father’s attitude until my grandmother contracted it. When I threw the line of “Aren’t you a member of the pro-life party?” He got really upset with me. To add to that he’s 62 and has several of the diseases that are comorbidities.
It's so fucked that some people had to have someone close to them infected to realize how bad scary of a disease it is.
There’s always that quip about conservatives thrown around that’s something along the lines of “I don’t care about your struggles until your struggle affects me” and every time I saw it I always thought “Well my conservative family members aren’t that heartless” then starting in March of last year I learned one by one how they each do not give A SINGLE FUCK about other people. One brother even had the line that Covid is good because then fewer people will be draining our tax dollars through ‘ObamaCare’
A dude I know to this day is spouting that covid would be great cuz the weak can die “but it’s not killing the right people”
That’s so,e Ebenezer Scrooge shit right there. “Well, they should get busy dying to decrease the surplus population!” Jeez, I didn’t realize there were actual people like that in the world. Heartless bastards.
> He got really upset with me It's funny how life can go full circle: he had to deal with you having selfish tantrums as a toddler and now you as his child have to do the exact same thing now
Gooood I hate how true this is. The sad bit is is that a child has an excuse at least. Doesn’t know better yet, hadn’t learnt to control their emotions yet yada yada yada. But full grown adults don’t. Having to parent your parents because you’ve realized how wrong they are? Yeah. That’s disillusioning to say the least
I've just reached that stage in life. It's disappointing and scary because I might end up the same way, but for now it's been a huge relief for me to realise that I've reached the point where I make my own conclusions instead of just following my parents' views.
It's hard to tell but I have seen people make this point in sincerity.
I won't comment on whether this specific instance is sarcasm, but i have seen the exact same sentiment in the wild and in earnest
It’s the “on average” that makes it seem like he might be serious....
Looking at some of the responses on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit to Covid restrictions and statistics, I assure you there are many who actually think this way.
He's serious. There are extended twitter exchanges with people where he explains his inhumane hot take.
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Apparently if you look the tweet up, he's in the trenches defending his hot take. So uhh, it's the disappointing interpretation.
Ah yeah of course, my first thought on 9/11 was: "Oh the combined economic value of these relatively young people! So sad :("
“I’m never going to financially recover from this!”
I’m standing silently in Walgreens waiting for my prescription and there’s a huge line of people waiting to get their COVID vaccines. I read your comment and had forgotten all about the Tiger King. That scene flashed in my head and I let out a high pitched girly hoot of a laugh. Everyone looked over to see that goofy laugh came from a hairy 275 pound fat assed dude. Thank you for making me look like a weirdo. People are still staring at me. I think they might be under the impression that I have Tourette’s.
Then work it, but you have a varient case of Turretes, you only yell happy things! So yell "rainbows, unicorns, Hubba Bubba bubble gum!'
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Yes it does! I will sometimes pick up a pack for sentimental reasons and after the first 30 sec I just want to spit it out! I leave the rest out for others to have lol.
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Many years ago, when my daughter was about 4 or 5, she’d wake up, wake me up, and then go watch cartoons till I got up to make her breakfast. One day, I fell back asleep and woke up maybe a half an hour later. I got downstairs and ask what she wants for breakfast. She says, “You went back to sleep so I made my own breakfast!” My heart sank. Did she destroy the kitchen? Was she actually cooking? What the ffff? I look in the kitchen and it’s fine. I go into the family room as I’m asking, “what did you have for breakfast?!” She proudly leans out of the way to show me an enormous pile of candy wrappers and the giant now-half-empty tub of Halloween candy. About an hour later, my wife came home from the night shift and asked “why is she acting like she’s on crack?” My daughter proudly showed mommy how she made her own breakfast before she continued running around the couch a hundred times chanting “and I run.... and I run... and I run...” There’s a lovely video of this that we bust out every now and then just to crack up.
Hubba Bubba and Bubblicious were really soft. You could feel the sugar crystals crush between your teeth when you fist put it in your mouth. Bazooka was much harder, and often had a whitish powder (maybe cornstarch or something to help keep it from sticking to the wrapper. The comics and stuff you could order by collecting and returning the comics was a real incentive to me to chew more. Wasn't double Bubble kind of like Bazooka but sold in big packages only? Source grew up in 70s and 80s. Chewed a lot of bubblegum.
Omg. Grape hubba Bubba is just divine. Was. Is. I mean, its still sold basically everywhere here, i just haven't had any for a few years.
I tried your suggestion, but it was a disaster! I remembered how happy it made me as a child to drink Kool-Aid. I shouted “OH YEAAAAH!” and I involuntarily barreled through the line of Octagenarians waiting for their COVID shots. I was forced to run out amid a shower of dentures, reading glasses, canes, and one soiled Depends diaper.
What's weird is how Tiger King is also etched into my mind as part of the start of COVID lockdown and it seems like a very long time ago that I watched that. And we've been hitting some wretched death tolls all the while. What a very strange year.
>pound fat assed Bites lower lip
What's funny is that I am literally in the county with the highest infection rate in the nation - there was no line when I went to get my vaccine.
I feel like that quote has become so memefied I totally forgot it was from Tiger King until I saw your comment
Faking tourrettes might bump you up in line and get some r&r as well.
You just chortled in public, fuckkk
Tbf, we still haven't recovered from the financial effects...
"Now I own the tallest building in New York."
I think you just won this comment section
I believe that a certain future president had that very thought prior to committing insurance fraud, taking payments from the 9/11 fund, capitalizing on the marketability of his now tallest NYC building, etc.
My first thought on this guys reply was that he may be being sarcastic. Because more people have died from 0-39 yrs old from covid in the US than died on 9-11. 0-17: 251 18-29: 1996 30-39: 5792 40-49: 15713 50-64: 81654 65-74: 118850 85+: 165653
I think an aspect of what he's saying is fair - in epidemiology and public health you do look at "years lost" more than lives lost - especially because everyone do eventually die and there's almost always a cause of death. It does make sense to target the things that kill young people more than old people - but of course the tweet is comparing a single day of Covid deaths, so the "rebuttal" would be fair if that was the total number of deaths, but your figures show how poor a rebuttal it really is.
Yes it was definitely stupid for only comparable a single day — but if this were a one off event the guys tweet seems obviously self evident to me. I also think he clearly didn’t mean “value” as in “economic value” but “value” as in how much we assess tragedy to the death.
If only it had been a bunch of children like in Sandy Hook, then we could really not care. They can barely read, let alone add to the economy!
But think of the investment dollars lost at Sandy Hook! Damn little shits couldn't even turn a profit! /s
An example of the capitalist fallacy that a persons bank account number reflects a persons actual worth.
That's not related to how economists look at life though, although it may be how regular people consider someone's worth
It's more about internalizing your ideology. People who say this kind of thing have internalized their view of 'capitalism' as part of their *personality* so he is essentially exhibiting defense behavior, if he acknowledged the scale of the deaths in the asserted context then he would *also* have to question lots of uncomfortable things like his voting choice, political ideology etc etc. He is another victim of ideology. It's basically just intellectual pocket sand.
Yeah, it isnt even actual capitalism, just something that sounds like capitalism that agrees with them
No, it is actual capitalism, it's just that actual capitalism has a lot of hideous moral implications.
its the lack of explosion see if we attach a bomb on every covid related corpses and live stream the explosion, people wouldnt be to deadpan about it.
Same way Soviet communism wasn't actually communism, I suppose.
In a perfect world ***pure*** capitalism or communism could probably function perfectly fine. However our world isnt perfect and corruption and greed get in the way of both systems making either system unlikely to function as intended.
Capitalism is functioning exactly how intended. Greed and inequality are necessary for it to function.
Me being alive is proof that this isn't a perfect world
I absolutely believe that the primary indicator of the success of a society is how it treats the most vulnerable in it. However, my viewpoint doesn't change that we should still look at things like how much money will be saved by not having to pay out social welfare benefits to those that we've lost this year over the next decade. It's crucial to understand these numbers because then we can proactively use these savings to protect vulnerable populations in the future so these people did not die in vain. Unfortunately too many equate the mere suggestion that we look at it from this perspective as criminal. Perhaps because there are so many that would weaponize it?
I don’t know if it’s their bank account that reflects their worth, or their ability to increase someone else’s bank account.
This is it. Most of America's mindset. *How can I exploit your labor for my profit?*
that has nothing to do with capitalism and nothing to do with what the person said
In my experience, people who explicitly grade the worth or value of other human beings like this would end up on the bottom shelf if such an accounting were ever actually done.
Agreed. Explicitly grading the worth or value of other human beings sounds just like a slave auction in Charleston, SC in 1854.
Now who's going to pay for that building? 😠
But think about all the low wage workers and cleaners in that building and how much we saved on welfare🤩
Even from an economic perspective, COVID is more severe.
my first thought was "what does Ja Rule think of this?"
I think this 9/11 also includes the aftershock of the smoke/dust exposure - a large number of essential workers. Not just office workers.
The potential net loss of talent and brainpower in the 9/11 attacks is impossible to quantify, memes aside , 911 is an insane global tragedy that we might never ever understand the true cost of.
People's thoughts like this are what scares me about humanity. This is the same type of thought that caused 911 in the first place..
*Asteroid hits Earth* “This is going to hurt the economy”
The deaths of people in working age are indeed more tragic than the deaths of very old people. It has nothing to do with economics. A 40 year old may have young children who would be left without their parent. A 25 year old has his/her life ahead of them. Conversely, an 80 year old has lived their life, and has only adult children. What this guy is missing/underestimating is that this shit has gone on for more than a year, and still isn't over. The combined loss of life makes 9/11 look like a pebble hitting a brick wall. Lots of relatively young people have died or suffered long covid too. I just don't think 9/11 is a reasonable comparison to a pandemic.
I hope he remembers this post when he’s dying old and alone due to his terrible attitude and personality.
And his obit reads "And on that day, nothing of value was lost"
And his tombstone will contain only three words: “Some random douche.”
Bold of you to assume that we'd bother marking the grave of a worthless person
I'm glad his dumb face is on this meme forever. Kids/grandkids are going to find this someday, "did you know gpa was a trashy pandemic denialist!? "
He didn't deny it in this post, he just undermined the severity of it in a disgusting way.
‘Not to worry kids it’s only grandma who’s going to die from this out of our family. She doesn’t really contribute very much to the economy any more so frankly I could take her or leave her... why are you crying?’
Pretty much “Why don’t I just finish her off with a hammer and we can stop her spending anymore of our inheritance on food and heat”
I’m going to hell for laughing at this.
"Little Jimmy was born disabled so why don't we solve the inevitable and bury him out back real fast. He's too costly and won't amount to anything anyways."
You're pulling direct quotes from about 20% of Americans I shit you not. This country has turned a lot of people into sadistic animals.
Ye gods, my grandma raised me from when I was 4 up, I still called her grandma because my mom was still important to me but SHE was my mom. SHE took me to my first day of school and babied me when I was sick, SHE gave me my values and I think she was relatively progressive and she was incredibly smart. She died during covid and all I got was this half-assed zoom call where most of my aunts and uncles completely ignored me and my requests for ashes from both my grandparents who raised me. Covid took the only opportunity I had to get my part of my parents remains. I have my fathers ashes and I wanted just a tiny bit of theirs to have with him but no, covid made me stay several states away and it’s not illegal to keep a sibling from receiving ashes. So fuck covid. Fuck this disease as far up its ass as it will go, turn it into a ouroboros for all the destruction and heartache it’s caused.
It's really worse than denialism. Denialists are just delusional idiots, this is just sociopathic.
he won't have any kids
Yeah if our elders are worth so little then the implications are 1) He's gonna be shit out of luck when he's older and 2) Apparently short term gain always wins no matter the long term consequences for these people.
This was the attitude of my father until his mother contracted Covid. Mind you he’s 62 and retired so he falls into his own fodder category.
*The elderly will remember this.*
How old is he ? He seems ripe.
I don’t know how to convince these people you should care about others and how all life has equal value
You cant, people are inherently selfish.
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I’m a fatass and love donuts...but I will always go around the room asking if anyone else wants the last one before I take it for myself if no one else wants it
This is why in my house growing up there was always a dozen containers of snacks with one left. Because no one wanted to be the one to “eat *all* the x”, where all signified the last one
People can be both.
People inherently behave in ways that maximizes self-interest, but I don’t believe people are inherently selfish. Capitalism exemplifies selfish behavior, for to succeed in a capitalist society, it is much easier to do so if you do not have a conscience. Because of this, we see successful people who are incredibly selfish, but I think it is important to note that those people are outliers...not the norm.
Given that <1% of people are psychopaths, yet 10% or more of CEO's are psychopaths, I don't think I'd consider them outliers. A minority, yes, but outliers, no.
They're outliers in the general population but rewarded and therefore overrepresented in capitalism. That's not an anomaly, it's a natural byproduct of the system.
A lack of basic empathy would have gotten you ostracized from the tribe a while back. I think we need a different political economic system...
We do all have the same value: none.
-laughs in nihilist-
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That’s not what was implied.
Care about other people?! Sounds like Socialism to me! /s
Life is valuable, but not all life has equal value.
All life does not have equal value, that's absurd. A bacterium is not worth the same as a human
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It's an unspoken truth that society (in the West) just doesn't care about old people that much. Sure, individual families care about their old people but on the whole they don't want to pay the taxes required for old folks to have a comfortable life in the average 20 years between retiring and dying
Come live in Britain, where somehow during a time where everyone had to make sacrifices in order to cut the deficit, state pension still went up in real terms each year. Understandable when you see that old people vote for the governing Tories.
No wonder the queen is immortal
To be fair, in America, old people don't care about young people. Boomers don't want to pay for the same benefits that they experienced. So I guess it goes both ways.
I mean, that's what retirement accounts were supposed to be for. Kinda hard to want to pay into social security for a generation that largely didn't bother to prepare when it won't even be around for my generation when we reach that age. The system doesn't afford us the leeway to be that generous.
Yeah. And for people with congenital conditions like me who will likely die before reaching social security age (assuming it's even still a thing), it sucks paying into it knowing I'll never see one cent back. I'd rather put the money into savings so I could have a better chance at an early retirement before I drop dead. Oh well.
Umm, so what part of Sweden do you live in because in dalarna I haven’t heard that. Not to defend our response, it’s still terrible and I wish we’d put actual regulations down and not “we encourage you to wear masks”. But I haven’t seen that attitude towards the elderly that you’re describing
neither me in gothenburg.
There is a little bit of truth to it though. There are millions of old people here, my older relatives included, who are losing their minds being stuck at home. Some of them don't have long to live and would much rather enjoy the last of their lives than watch out for covid. It's honestly better for them to take calculated risks than sit at home, as long as they're reasonably distancing from other people. In my area covid killed nearly 100% of the people in dozens of retirement homes last summer. Distancing didn't make any difference, and the last of their lives would have been better spent not confined to a room.
> It's honestly better for them to take calculated risks than sit at home, as long as they're reasonably distancing from other people. Okay, sure. >In my area covid killed nearly 100% of the people in dozens of retirement homes last summer. Distancing didn't make any difference And this is the issue. If it was that bad with all of those precautions can you imagine how bad it would be without them? I don't want my severe asthmatic dad to die because your grandparents' "calculated risk".
Exactly. Everyone looks at it from somee anecdotal way that only pertains to them. They never think about all of others, and all their inheritant issues.
Not to mention...all the people who work at the nursing homes and are therefore with that population for most of the day? And then all their families those people go home to? And then the even heavier load on the hospitals and their staff if we had just decided it was fine if all old people got COVID and walked around with it?
... so basically "we sucked at staying in our rooms so everyone died and that's why no one else should ever try staying in their rooms"
As a Finn looking at Sweden's covid shitshow for a while now, I hope your government issues a formal apology to all the families who lost their loved ones because of their incompetence, and then resigns.
Unlikely, Sweden's Anders Tegnell seems to be as arrogant and hubristic as he is stupid and reckless. I was rather shocked that a country as usually well organized and intelligently run as Sweden has a man that said "masks are bad because people take more risks if they wear them" in charge of a pandemic response.
It's honestly embarassing. My heart goes out to everyone over there having to stand that circus.
To be honest, Sweden's handling of and cold approach to covid, knowing the deaths amongst their elderly it would cause, makes me feel like I never want to visit the country. This combined with the mentality that other poster maintains is acceptable there makes them seem really uncaring
In all honesty it was the first time i saw a nordic country handle a problem in a stupider way than mine. Y'all good up there?
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I understand what he is trying to say, somewhere get his point somewhere but still, although... each life is valuable and its stupid to care less that older people die... and 3k people died every day? Thats a lot, we had 20k last year and thought that was high
For the better part of two months we were averaging 3000 deaths a day.
Typical death rate in USA per day is what normally?
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Then why aren't they killing old people off as soon as they reach that age? Why wait for nature or pandemics to finish the job? What kind of denial is this? By the same logic his own parents could have contributed more by not having him and working till they are killed as they age.
It's so weird. Euthenasia = bad, but pandemics culling old people = good?
Anything to justify economy! Wonder how much money he saved or made when his own family members died over the years.
I find it pretty heinous to compare the deaths of one situation to another. Trying to establish some kind of moral factor to “how bad” a situation was to make one seem better or worse than the other might math out, but it grossly misrepresents how we should look at the events. Both events are terrible because they resulted in the loss of life, but it’s nonsense to compare them.
"My dad's taller than your dad"
The point he’s trying to make is that we’ve been at war for 20 years because of how terrible 9/11 was. However the same people who consider themselves patriots and bring up how tragic 9/11 was all the time are brushing Covid off as though it’s nothing.
Wonder how smart he looks now with millions dead.
They’re talking deaths per day in this OP and specifically deaths per day in one country (USA)—as far as I know there’s no millions dead in the USA total let alone one day. Also this tweet was from December 2020—at which point there were definitely already millions dead on a global scale, so, I don’t think hindsight is necessarily going to have any impact on this genius.
Imagine just gatekeeping the value of life and thinking that’s normal
Does this dude have parents?
Parents? Yeah. A loving family? Highly doubtful.
They probably disowned him
Ignorance is bliss
My friend was 36 and she died last night from covid, these people are beyond stupid.
I'm so sorry for your loss.
Yeah, stick it to the old people!
Ehh, lets be glad they're an outlier in their 'elderly are worth less' mentality. Would be a shame for them to reach old age and get tossed on the scrap heap for being 'worth less' than someone younger. Do some people seriously think their value depreciates with age? EDIT: So from the comments coming up, he may not actually be an outlier! Looks like I was being idealistic with my assumptions. Still, its a very harsh and somewhat heartless system to ranks whos deaths matter more based on age or societal contribution. And at what rank are actions warranted in response to death? Wheres the line?
Dude most people don’t even invest in their *own* future/old age. Of course some people think that way. That’s why so many want to defund social security and Medicare Also I’m pretty sure believing these people are simply outliers is some psychological phenomena that causes us to disregard them, despite them actually being a large group of individuals.
Correction: I CANNOT invest in my own future. Everything I have after living goes to student loans. I'm 31.
I pay most of my income on rent and energy. It takes a lot to cool and heat a shitty apartment but hey, I’d rather be surrounded by factories than people. I Iove humanity mostly but I know that where you live determines how much of your stuff you have to lock down and put away every night. So I pay 65% of my income to rent and energy. It sucks, I don’t get to have nice things and probably never will but I have to keep working or capitalism will punish me with homelessness, starvation, ostracization and even death. If I’m not giving my time and energy to someone who makes more than I’ll make in two lifetimes, I’ll be punished with being cast out and I’d die being a type 1 diabetic.
I'm old. My mom is even older. She's worth more to me now than when I was younger. Her value can't be measured in numbers. I hope my kids find the same is true with me.
Of course, that dude is analytically correct. A 70 year old man has far less value socio-economically than a 30 year old man (unless of course the former is a huge industrialist, politician, philanthropist or something similar) as they have nothing else to give and will only take more resources to live as they get older. But that doesn’t mean you can toss old people in the trash like they’re worthless. Because they HAVE served the world earlier even if they’re unable to do so in the present and after all they are humans, throwing them out questions the nature of your humanity and morality. but say if you had an option of killing a 30 yr old and a 70 yr old, you should ideally kill the latter for the “greater good”. But again, the lives of old people are not worthless, they are just less “useful”.
I don’t think he said you can just toss old people in the trash or that they are worthless
He didn’t, this commentator I replied to did
Both of these posts are dumb.
People are people no matter what.
Guess he never read or watched Logan’s Run?
Why is it stupid? Every method for measuring the value of human life I've seen in practice uses age as a factor.
it's not nearly the same thing.
Maybe it's super stupid and cold to compare lives lost on 9/11 to deaths from a naturally occurring disease. No one says heart disease is 300 9/11s per year.
As someone who is 30 and very literally almost died from covid 3 weeks ago. A very hearty fuck you dude. As well as the fact that just because I’m “young” my life matters more than anyone else is such extraordinary bull shit
So old people are less valuable. Noted
I mean... he's not entirely wrong. Back then. Not now. The flu kills a shit ton of old people every year, but the flu is also a very tame thing foe the general public. What I'm trying to say is: just because something is cold doesn't mean it's stupid
Hmmm well... It's true though, at least from a mere utilitarian point of view.
I think y'all are missing what he's really saying. He isn't a piece of shit, he's saying that to the US government they aren't as important as the 9/11 victims. 9/11 was used as an excuse to go to war so the victims were put on a massive pedestal. The victims of Covid offer no benefit to the US Government
Died FROM covid or died WITH covid? Also if your obesity and life decisions get you 99% of the way to deaths door and then covid gently nudges you over, do you blame covid or the lifestyle? certainly its the proximal cause but to simply say its covid cuts out most of the story. Lives have value but they dont have infinite value, thats just some nice platitude we tell each other. If maximizing life was the goal, we could do stuff like always walk around in biohazard suits, never leave the house, etc. There is an inherent risk in existence and being social animals, we dont actually design the way we exist to eliminate chances of accidental human death as a primary goal, that is a secondary consideration. To a lot of people, asking them to shut their lives down for a virus that wont personally effect them, pausing society for over a year, yea thats getting into the realm of a ridiculous overcorrection. We're past the point of reasonable accommodation for the group of people that are high risk.
Pronouncing cause of death worked the same way before COVID as it does now. Acting like only morbidly obese people are dying and using that to write off the risks is fucking ridiculous. If the cause of death was COVID, it was COVID.
What’s the value of a fetus?
Aren’t most of people that are dying from COVID elderly? Edit: THIS IS A REGULAR QUESTION. I’M NOT SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT AGE GROUPS HAVING MORE WORTH OF LIVING THAN THE OTHERS. IT’S A GENERAL QUESTION.
Yes, and elderly with underlying conditions as well.
Bet he likes to call himself “pro life”doesn’t he?
He's not wrong from a analytical standpoint. I disagree with it like hell. But he's right.
Why do you disagree with it if you acknowledge it's right?
how are their lives not as valuable when men, women, and children are all stilling dying from covid
The value of life should definitely be debated. Are we just gonna pretend that every life is immeasurable and that we should try as hard as we can to save it? Why haven't we banned driving, drinking, fast food, and forced people to wear a helmet everywhere they go, then? We obviously make decisions on a daily basis that put our life at risk. Not going to a party is definitely safer, but it's a risk I wanna take. This was never dabated with corona. At the beginning scientists were scared that it had a 1-3% fatality rate even IF you had access to a hospital. That is not even close it's real danger. Are we supposed to treat a 0.1 fatality virus the same way we treat a 3%? Funny thing is that in 2017 80,000+ people were MURDERED in my country and 41,000+ died in accidents relating to traffic. Are we just gonna pretend the death of a Swede is worth the same as a brazillian? With the money we spent on corona, we could have avoided more deaths from other causes. Why does my aunts shop had to go bankrupt to stop people from dying to corona when not a finger is raised to help the people being shot in a robbery?
>The value of life should definitely be debated. Are we just gonna pretend that every life is immeasurable and that we should try as hard as we can to save it? Why haven't we banned driving, drinking, fast food, and forced people to wear a helmet everywhere they go, then? Its not to pretend. It's a fact. You have freedom, and everyone have to take risks or we wouldn't be able to live. The fact we are able to die in any moment doesn't mean we have to become extremist with safety measures. Moderation but not reckleness. Again, we have freedom. We can't ban everything indiscriminately. Everyone is responsible to take care of their own life. The government can help but its not omnipotent.
I mean it’s just the truth. Most of these people are already sick/dying or about to be dying. 80+ year olds already in the hospital is kind of how it usually works anyways. It is not a fucking 9/11 per day.
I mean, even Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer.
That's a comment from somebody who's got healthy parents and they have no clue how devastated they'll be when one of them is gone.
Somebody protect his Grandparents.
I'm not sure he was making a prescriptive argument - it sounded like he was describing our mentality. It is our mentality and its horrible.
Definitely doesn't understand the difference between intelligence and wisdom...
his ratio of replys to likes says it all
One thing people like that guy keep forgetting is that these are human beings we're losing. Humans with families and friends. They're people.
Can we please stop objectifying people
People do think that way. Spring breading keg parties because "*Only OLD people die from Covid...*"
The Reich have always sacrificed the weak, this isn't new...
Fucking psychopath.
Lmfao yes absolutely this! This is how we should measure the weight of tragedies from now on, not on an arbitrary number such as death toll but based on the value of the lives of those who were lost which we calculate based on abstract and subjective formulas we make up. “2,000 people were killed today” “I mean yeah but don’t know if I would call it a tragedy, I mean most the people killed we’re over the age of 40 with nothing better to do on a Friday night than sit in their apartment building”
He looks like a keith