Still think reopening was a good idea?

No, Libby. You can't twist these two separate concepts into one.

Idea 1. People are morally obligated to do what they reasonably can to stop from spreading communicable diseases, in this case that means staying at home and/or staying 6 feet away from others and/or wearing a mask. Protesters are no less obligated than anyone else to do their best to prevent the disease from spreading.

Idea 2. In fact, studies show that the protests did not actually produce an increase in the spread significantly according to study, because they provided an incentive for the public to stay away from the populated marching areas and residential areas nearby based on fear that the protests might get out of control, and curfews..

You can believe both and assert both. But you have to continue to argue that protesters need to follow the same rules as everyone else during the next march because fear of riots is ( hopefully) not going to be an incentive.

 

Counting on civilized people to stay home during riots is an asinine way to justify the COVID spread happening because of the rioters.

If 1000 rioters spread COVID, but 1000 civilized people stayed home to avoid the riots and thus could not have spread COVID, that does not make the rioters actions ok, nor does it mean we should just ignore the rioters case numbers.

You seem dug in with your defense of rioters. Have at it. I think your argument is foolishly misguided and I suspect we'll always land on opposite sides of this one, because I will always side with the civilized people and not the rioters, protesters, looters, vandals, and arsonists. Nothing you say will sway me, and I'm likely not influencing you either. Agree to disagree and good night.

 

The blame shifting to the people who were not out vandalizing, assaulting, burning, and looting is amazing. Just when you thought you've seen it all, this thread appears.

 

Wow. This is not about agreement. its about you totally misconstruing my point. . You actually have to calm down, and READ what I write, and assume I picked my words expecting you to do just that. I did not expect you to find something in there about 'counting on' people to stay at home, when I never said anything of the sort. It may have worked that way because of fear of riots and curfews, but because we don't want the riots and curfews either, its a disaster plan for anyone to 'count' on it based on the first week of these protests. Every word I posted in this thread is in support of protesters( not rioters/looters) wearing masks, and obeying social distancing as much as possible or staying home and not one word is remotely in support of riots or not having their case numbers counted. Shall I count the ways in which riots/looting are terrible, immoral and destructive, without concluding they did not happen to pass this disease for you?

My point all along was for you not to make assumptions about MrLegal's opinions or stances on whether protesters( not rioters/looters) were acting responsibly based on a fact based assertion in his post. If he is anything like me, he wants protesters( not rioters/looters) to do the same things I want them to do to protect each other and the public. He can do that AND try to correct what he sees as a myth about what has already happened.

Nobody in this thread is defending rioters or looters, they are, by definition not responsible because of what they are doing whether there is a pandemic or not.

 

Show me where it is them that is creating the increase in cases. No one has shown it in this thread. I do believe they are a oart if it but not the major part.

Some politicians are saying it's because of the parties happening. I don't see that but I see as people going back to work a, shopping more, going out again which is creating it.

 

How can someone show you such thing? Do you want names and addresses? I'm not sure what you're looking for. But the reality is that several weeks ago, tens of thousand of people were gathering in large groups, no social distancing, most not wearing masks, and now that we're having outbreaks, you seem to not understand why that is most likely a large part of it. Are any of us surprised at the blatant hypocrisy? Not at all. It's expected.

 

Should Trump be apart of this discussion too since he's had thousands of people together with no masks and no social distancing? It does sound like he is the biggest culprit.

 

Well the rally from this past weekend is not contributing to the recent outbreak so how is he the biggest culprit? Not the 100,000 non-social distancing rioters?

 

All I can do sometimes is and wonder if we're being punked.

 

According to the position of the united states federal government, less than the tax collected on a package of cigarettes. The value of a human life, as far as it is concerned, is nothing more than a few cents at most.

 

I tried to warn you.

Yes, blue cities within red states. In Texas and Florida, Republican Trump-loving governors ordered at the state level to make it illegal for cities to issue mask ordinances or to keep businesses closed.

Yes, cities are crowded (therefore more susceptible to virus outbreaks) and mostly Democrat for many logical reasons:

1. Jobs.

2. In some cases, cheaper rent or home (condo) prices.

3. The social instincts we evolved with, an inherent desire to gather, a "herd" instinct of sorts, stemming from prehistoric times where safety was in numbers and loners were very rare and usually didn't last long.

4. (This is the biggie) Due to the above, cities attract all kinds , all colors, and lots of immigrants. Very few immigrants opt to live in rural areas and tend to congregate in cities. The result is a diverse population that is less fearful of those who are very different from themselves. Once you become comfortable around people from many different cultures, you gain understanding and lose the prejudice and fear from which hate arises. That tolerance, that ability to relate to others and yet remain comfortable with your own culture, is at the very heart of liberalism. Of course, there are some times, rare, where familiarity breeds comtempt, but that is not the norm.

So yes, cities tend to elect Democrats, and mayors are often subject to the executive orders from Republican governors.

Look at any group of people during this pandemic. You will find that those who insist on wearing masks, and are urging others to do so, are mostly liberals, while those who refuse to wear them, even to the point where they scold those of us who do and verbally attack us if we implore them to mask up, are virtually all conservatives, or what passes for conservatives in the era of Trump, who leads them by example of never wearing a mask himself.

So you can go on and on about blue cities and Democratic mayors, but this huge spike in hospitalizations and deaths come right on time according to the science, and results from the reopening on Memorial weekend and the crowds in protests and counter-protests. And the reopenings were pushed by conservatives, not liberal mayors like the mayor of Miami who wanted to stay closed down longer but was overruled by DeSantis.

 

Actually, in spite of the close quarters, most of the BLM protesters were at least wearing masks, while the "It's a free country and I shouldn't have to wear a mask" contingent who packed themselves and their guns into state capitals were not taking any precautions, but I still think that reopening on Memorial Day weekend was a very bad idea in most states, and many of those states where there are resorts and beaches and other amusements are the states with new, high numbers of infections and hospitalizations.

 

Granted, wearing masks while looting and burning stuff is still wearing masks even though they did it to defeat facial recognition softwear; but we are supposed to believe that the animals who did this stuff also practiced anti-covid-19 protocol while assembling into groups before appearing before the camera lenses and afterwards when they were divying up their loot and trading war stories? We are supposed to believe that these sweaty thugs did not touch one another while handing off Molotov coctails, and so forth and so on?

 

DeSantis delayed the reopening of Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties by about three weeks, if I remember correctly, until their numbers came into line.

Whatever the exact delayed timeline was, DeSantis was very clear that South Florida would NOT be on the same schedule as the rest of the state of Florida with regards to reopening. You have to remember that at the same time as South Florida was one of the nation's hotspots for COVID, there were also multiple counties in Florida with only a handful of cases. DeSantis had to come up with a plan which was fair to everyone, and his plan largely mirrored Trump's phased reopening proposal, and was based on numbers, and was very clear that South Florida's reopening would have to be handled differently.

 

After the rioting-looting-burning-murdering which was encouraged and coddled by the same governance that forced other people not to work, go broke, and to stay under house arrest, the law abiding people who have now broken out of their imprisonment can just say F government and do what they want and be fully justified.

 

Did you just say the very people who have attacked their fellow citizens, burned their property and in general made the US look like a war zone have tolerance, empathy and like to live together? ROFL, LMFAO. It's just not true and never was true. In reality, we can replace segregation with forced integration and it wasn't any better.

In reality, the gays are in conflict with African-Americans, the Hispanics are in conflict with African-Americans, they made Whites their whipping boy as a means of distraction for all of this and it's only a matter of time before that whiplash is prominent even among Liberals. Also, the affirmative action policies kick Asian-Americans in the ass but they're too small to matter so they don't really give a damn.



And none of this is touching the gravy train that is the unions, if the Republicans are bound to military contractors, the Liberals love to brag about that long list of unions but what that really means is that individual voters are next to nothing to them. That is the true, actual state of the Democratic Party and the Democratic parts of the country.

I blame Democrats for the entire state of affairs in our country. Conservatives aren't much better, but Democrats are the reason for our social strifes and our economic malaise. Their programs which promote stagnation and conflict. Going back to FDR's New Deal, we've been under the yoke of Democrats and their propaganda.

 

No he did not, and it was exceedingly dishonest to say so.

 

And you, stop replying to me in general. You have nothing to add, and it's the most annoying type of posters.

 

This may be the biggest denial of an obvious fact I have ever seen. If not the biggest, it must rank in the top 5! Left logic (an oxymoron, I know) never ceases to amaze me.

 

There's an easy solution to that.

Now how can I say it politely...

 

The rioters themselves are to blame for their behavior

 

If it was an obvious fact, then studies on the subject would have found evidence to support it. They found no evidence of a link.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408

 

The hypocrisy. It burns.

 

This is a nice looking study, but I cannot agree with it. The virus spreads like wildfire, we all know that for a fact. Clusters and clusters of groups of hundreds or thousands, all over the country, closely grouped, disregarding social distancing. You know as well as I do that the virus would spread like wildfire in those groups. And then those folks go home, to others, and so on and so on.

So, all this was completely mitigated by some other folks staying home? And the upswing is actually caused by businesses opening and having social distance policies in place? Yeah, that makes way more sense than hundreds of thousands of people getting together in close groups.

I can only think that this study was done, in an effort to shift blame away from the protestors, as a political move. Sorry, it's only worthy of serving as TP. But I knew stuff like this would surface, as the left was so vocally quiet about the disregard of social distancing while all these protests were going on. Whereas the day before the first protest, they were bashing anything that had to do with gathering. Yep, saw this coming a mile away.

 

Things should have never been closed in the first place. If we focused 100% of the efforts on the elderly and high risk and left everyone else alone, we could have saved many more lives.