Zooey wrote:

Coincidentally, I ordered a submarine from Bazooka for ten comics and a buck, or something like that.

It was a spring loaded submarine that fired a torpedo an inch or so when I pushed a trigger. I remember being pleased. I sank many a Nazi battleship with it.

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Seahorses. I loved them. They dissolved.
Thats when i became a leftist, i think.

Also, prettymuch every gadget and program that promised
to make me look like Charles Atlas in two weeks.

w
v

InvaderRam wrote:

wv wrote:

Well, let me know if you meet any centrists or Rightwingers who change their views.

voters or policy makers?

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Voters.

People dont change their minds for the most part. Leftist Friend of mine sent me this about her Rightwing Mom:
“My mom posted a meme on facebook. It said something to the effect of ‘Italy is refusing to treat its elderly Coronavirus patients. That’s what happens with socialized healthcare!’
After slamming my head into the keyboard several times, I had things to say.”

I’ve seen that kind of thing over and over and over in my life.

Granted some people change, and change does happen, etc.
But by and large people dont change and change does not happen 🙂

The Dem-Centrist-SuBSystem and the Rep-Rightwing-SubSystem are very effective at selling their stories.

There has never been a corporate-propaganda system like this before, in the history of the world. This is something modern, something new.

w
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Hedges on the shitshow.

Mackeyser wrote:

I couldn’t get through all of that… fucking Bill Maher…

As someone who’s VERY loud on twitter pushing the #NeverBiden and #BernieOrBust, I make it clear to every shitlib who makes the mistake of coming at me what’s up.

And it’s all your guys’ fault asking me if my principles matched my politics all those years ago…

Now I’m nearly a leftist… LOL

but for real, tho… I won’t vote for any Dem again. Period. Not even AOC if she runs in 2024.

That party needs to die in a fucking fire and the ONLY way that happens is if we stop acquiescing to this “lesser of two evils” nonsense… which it is because as we all know, it’s more accurate to say “the different of two evils”.

If anything, Trump’s incompetence has led him to do LESS harmful shit than Obama did… no new wars and very few legislative achievements unlike Clinton who woulda worked with McConnell to give the Republicans not only everything they wanted, but cover because it happened under a Dem President.

Nah, progressives and the left need a third party that actually represents what we want. Every time we vote for ANY Dem, we sabotage our own efforts and I won’t do it anymore.

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Well…damn. I’ve missed YOU, comrad.

I’m prettymuch in the same place as you, Mack, though, I am not exactly ‘at peace’ with where I’m at. I’m not ‘serene’ about it. I got here by thinking to myself…what do you do when every choice is a bad one, when every road leads to Hell? 🙂 My own answer to that was ‘vote yer conscience.’

But i totally respect any leftists decision to vote for Hillary/Biden/Gore/Edwards/Clinton/Whoever

Have you ever heard of Scott Nearing, btw? I’m reading a good book by him called Making Of A Radical

w
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————

An almost capitalist rags to riches story.

w
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==================================
purrell:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-purell-wipes-amazon-sellers.html
He Has 17,700 Bottles Of Hand Sanitizer

On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.

The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they’d lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer.

Coupla posts from the lifeboat board:https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1584129549.html

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More than half of UK needs to catch coronavirus to develop ‘herd immunity’, Government’s chief scientist says

” Sir Patrick Vallance told Sky News around 60% of the UK population would need to contract the deadly COVID-19 in order for society to develop “herd immunity”…”

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/coronavirus-latest-covid19-herd-immunity-patrick-vallance-a4386476.html

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Reply:
Dan
yup. if 60% of population has to get high mortality disease to become immune

Posted by dan on March 13, 2020, 8:45 pm, in reply to “Governments chief scientist claims 60% confers “Herd Immunity.””

then hundreds of thousands will die.

And then there’s the fact that it’s a mutating cold virus so we may not be immune anyway.

Apparently closing schools may knock 3% off gdp

Another Angry Voice is good on this – from facebook

Yesterday ITV reported that the favoured Tory Covid-19 strategy was to allow the British public to develop “herd immunity”.

In the absence of a Covid-19 vaccine this is a terrifying proposal: Mass exposure to the virus so people develop immunity to the strain, in the hope that it doesn’t just keep mutating into new strains like the flu and common cold do (incidentally – the more people who get exposed, the more likely Covid-19 mutates into a new strain that’s immune to previously acquired resistance).

Mass exposure undoubtedly means mass death (not just from the virus itself, but amongst other critically ill people who are crowded out of the health system), and Johnson was shockingly upfront about it when he warned the British public about the loss of their loved ones later in the day.

If the virus is allowed to spread to the point that the public acquire herd immunity, that would have to mean something like 90% exposure. With a death rate of somewhere around 2%-4%, that would require somewhere between 1.2 to 2.4 million deaths!

This strategy is completely out of step with the Asian countries that have contained the exponential spread of the virus, and with all of our European neighbours who have brought in measures like school closures, travel restrictions, and sports shut downs.

What the Tories are doing is playing another massive high stakes public policy gamble with potentially even more serious ramifications than their 2016 Brexit gamble.

If their gable pays off it means the virus will continue spreading across the world, with mass deaths in every country, but Britain will have avoided some of the more severe economic disruption experienced by other countries with stricter containment strategies.

If the gamble fails and Britain suffers mass deaths, while other countries manage to contain the crisis, or at least delay the worst of the carnage until after a vaccine is developed, then the losses will be extraordinary.

First of all hundreds of thousands of people will have needlessly died as a result of this Tory “herd immunity” strategy, but the economic losses could be absolutely enormous too.

Imagine other countries manage to contain the virus, but it runs wild in the UK and a few other nations led by hard-right ‘let the vulnerable die’ eugenicists.

It would obviously be in the other countries interests to prevent virus riddled British people keep reinfecting their populations.

We’d be looking at a travel ban to keep the virus in Britain and the other countries that decided to let the virus run wild.

And amazingly this isn’t even the worst case scenario. The worst case is that by letting the virus run through the population in an effort to develop herd immunity, the nation is turned into a breeding ground for mutant strains of the virus that can potentially reinfect everyone all over again, making the UK an absolute pariah-state.

Combined with the economic impact of all the deaths, the implications of becoming a virus-ridden pariah state are obviously far worse than the potential economic savings of delaying/avoiding economically disruptive containment measures.

In gambling terms it looks like the Tories are staking a vast sum on a bet with extremely short odds, meaning if they win they profit by a tiny fraction of the stake, but if they lose, they deliver not only mass deaths and NHS breakdown, but an economic crisis vastly larger than the economic disruption they’re seeking to avoid.

The really sad thing about this is that we all knew something like this was a possibility with the Tories in charge.

We know the Tories are prepared to let tens of thousands die as a result of their policies after their wanton cuts to the NHS and social care systems pushed huge numbers of people into early graves over the last decade.

We also know that they’re prone to taking massively risky public policy gambles, because of the way they allowed a Brexit referendum when the Brexiteers hadn’t even drawn up a plan for how to leave if they actually won.

We knew dangerous gambling, economic chaos, and unnecessary deaths were very serious risks when we reelected the Tories once again, but presumably those of us who voted for them considered these risks “a price worth paying” in return for whatever (probably imaginary) benefit they thought they’d be getting from Tories continuing to run the country.