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I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
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People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax either so I'm not sure how that's a relevant analogy. The response to Covid was far more disruptive to my life than the disease itself, which would obviously not be the case with starvation.
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> weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax

Have you treated many patients with COVID? I’ve heard the opposite of your claim from those who have.

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People with first hand experience offering counterpoints like Dr Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi did but unfortunately their videos explaining their side of the story were conveniently removed from places your YouTube -- while conveniently leaving the videos remaining to hear the kind of stories you heard.
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Step back a moment and ask yourself,

“How exactly would Dr Dan Erickson know if someone else’s patient said this?”

There was massive regional differences in how different parts of the country and even different parts of the same state responded to COVID.

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many people i know personally who, to this day deny covid was real, they personally knew people who died or were hospitalized and ventilated. yet they still deny it was real.

one of my family members who was in a coma for over a month and in the hospital for months still denies it was covid despite multiple doctors telling him otherwise. some people live in a very real state of denial entirely separated from reality.

sadly i’m not sure the person you replied to is too far off.

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> People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax

There were actually lots of people doing exactly this. Perhaps "largely" is the key word here but there were plenty of people dying of covid and refusing ventilators because they believed it was a conspiracy theory.

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Apparently the virus was able to ruin cognitive function that people struggling to breathe thought they're fine. (Ok, it seems too convenient that the virus can do this...).
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I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks.

Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.

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>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad.

Propaganda works.

The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than they are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.

Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.

Since the government harnessing that discontent has no real desire to fix that problem, all they need to do is maintain the perception that they're the solution, while not addressing the problem itself.

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Of course MAGA folks would be affected if the whole country starved. The question is how they would react to starving. They might just blame Hillary Clinton.
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I had the same reaction. I thought things were getting bad before COVID, but I thought that, generally, when push came to shove, sanity would prevail.

Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.

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Could also say that over half the population finding such ridiculous mandates justifiable: lockdowns and demands that employers enforce vaccination compliance for all employees, ordoned non democratically by a senile; in a country with constitutional rights likely meant we would not see activists engaging in vandalism anytime soon.
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Are you calling Trump senile? Because you are correct.
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2 of you folks died from COVID for each 1 of us.

> My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.

Intellectually dishonest polemics. The mandates were not "ridiculous", nor were they "ordoned non democratically by a senile" ... that doesn't even get the timeline right--Trump was President. As for whether he was senile ...

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I was probably one of "you". My comment is simply calling out the liberticide episode we attended rather quietly.
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>> I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.

We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.

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The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.
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Three critical differences the American Revolution had: (1) the middle class had some extremely well educated people, (2) the communication technology among the colonies was pretty fast whereas the comms between the colonies and the British rule across the Atlantic was slow, and (3) the empire tried to clamp down on the colonies ability to export to any market other than the mother country, killing lots of profit which previously made those markets strong.
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(4) the British navy was busy raiding the carribean for prize money and abandoned the army in america.

I recommend the book "The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire"

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> until food runs low and the economy stalls.

Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).

Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.

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> You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls.

These are no longer impossibles.

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Boy is he trying on the latter. Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.
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It's like when management does something stupid and then engineering works overtime to keeps the system working. Of course management learns nothing and all outside observers don't even notice something went wrong.
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There is a limit to how much engineers working overtime can do to offset management stupidity and when you reach the limit the bottom falls out. Of course then everybody blames the engineers...
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It's being heavily supported a bubble. We'll see how resilient it is when that pops. As it is, the average person's finances and future prospects are getting worse all the time regardless of whatever the stock market is doing.
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Yes, tbh I would not have thought that you could take a sledgehammer to the economy as if you're say Elon Musk buying a communications platform and yet, here we are, 1 year in and we're still hanging on.

But I wouldn't bet on another three of these.

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> The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_Rebellion

Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.

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It's also rare to just "discover" an entire continent that is basically free for the taking since Europeans annihilated native populations through disease and technological superiority.

Much of what makes America unique is tied to this essentially once in a generation event that will never happen again on this planet, a contingent confluence of Earth's parallel geographic and biological evolution... it's fairly easy to rebel or become a superpower when other powers have to contend with peer conflicts right on their borders. A break with England was inevitable why take orders from people an ocean away in the age of sail?

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That's one of the core plot points in The Mars Trilogy - Why take orders from people on another planet in the age of sub-light-speed space travel?
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It's worse than that; within a few generations our linguistic and biological systems will begin to diverge under conditions with little cross-pollination and different selective pressures. We will become aliens in the sci-fi sense very rapidly if we attempt to create a foundation-like diaspora of settlements.
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This sounds like lysenkoism.
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Back then most taxes went to Britain.
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Now they go to Bezos

Where there’s an opportunity to be the 1%, folks will find a way to be the 1%

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Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation."

The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.

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Even if the needs of the American people weren't being ignored over the wishes of corporations and the ultra-wealthy in terms of numbers alone we have less representation than ever before because the number of people who are supposed to represent us hasn't kept up with the growing population.
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America ended in 1861 when the era of political bargains transitioned to the era of the government and the subjects.
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We need to change it to 'no representation without taxation' and ban lobbyists for any industry/company/interest that doesn't pay an equal percentage of their income as the average 'taxed on labor' American.
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No, lobbying should be banned even if they pay tax. The only way corporations should have access to representation is by having their role formally defined by an amendment to the Constitution. As in, this government is formed by citizens who have these rights, and corporations that have these rights. Make it official and open, not the subversive manipulation where we act like they aren't there.
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"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy."

- Alfred Henry Lewis

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