Bison06

define "normal"

Genuinely curious as I’ve always viewed my political stance as somewhat right-libertarian though not extremely so. As a left libertarian what is your stance on personal property rights?

I’m tired of this narrative. Influenza can have long lasting and even permanent effects. This is no different than it’s always been, just more fear with no context.

Yet far more normal than so many others.

How nice for you to have your family be able to get back to normal.

I've never bought the idea that teams are actually scared in the literal sense of the word. From a risk/benefit standpoint though, NDSU is a clear example of risk outweighing benefit for most FBS teams. FBS teams schedule FCS teams for a practice game in most cases, especially in the case of the upper echelon P5 teams. They want a team that they can pound and have the starters play a few series' into the third quarter and sit down. NDSU will come in expecting to win and would play hard for 4 quarters even if they were behind by a large margin. This is a non-starter for most P5 teams that have a legitimate shot at the CFP. So I don't and have never believed that Alabama is afraid of NDSU, but there is nothing to be gained if you're Alabama so why even play the game?

Your two comments seem to contradict each other. Either your first paragraph is true and Bison fans are speaking truth about not being able to find teams, or your second is true and that makes your first paragraph unnecessary. I have no doubt that many schools were contacted. Why would you doubt that, it isn't exactly a fantastical comment.

What surprises me about people defending what happened in Minneapolis and now Portland is it’s people that say they love the city. I have many friends who work(ed) downtown Minneapolis and they’ve said they won’t be returning to work. Not because of Covid, but because they don’t have trust that they would be safe downtown Minneapolis and I can’t blame them. I haven’t been into Minneapolis proper since March and I have no plans to return until I have confidence that police will be allowed to do their jobs. “We don’t need you” they’ll say. Actually, you do. Without the foot traffic from people outside of a Minneapolis proper coming downtown for work, Minneapolis will be a ghost town in 3 years.

Where’s the part in the algorithm where you find out if you’re black or not?

That word annually might be pretty important as it pertains to obesity.

What about a parents influence on their children’s eating and activity habits? Can obesity not be passed to others that a person has influence over? Maybe parents who don’t teach their kids to exercise and eat properly should be held liable for their children’s health issues.

It’s not dumb, it’s different than infectious disease, but when comparing things the average American should worry about both obesity and diabetes are infinitely more worrisome than Covid.

I said covid long term effects will be no worse than other viruses, I didn’t say they wouldn’t exist. Influenza can have nasty long term effects as well, but we don’t shut down the world for it. We would all prefer not to catch covid or any other viruses, but the risk/reward of protecting yourself from the worlds negative things leads to a pretty meager existence. Let’s all take the precautions that make sense for each of our unique situations and move on. It’s the only way we move forward because cases aren’t going to get to zero. Ever.

Long term effects will be no different than the long term effects of other viruses. It’s easy to produce fear by saying “we just don’t know” that’s true. But we also have no reason to think it’ll be different than other coronaviruses in this respect. We’ve discussed this a lot the last two weeks, so you know my stance on the total death count.

I can’t agree with anything you’ve said here in my experience. Being obese is a death sentence, diabetes is a death sentence. Covid for nearly every person who gets it is a two week inconvenience, if that.

My point is to say, six months ago you didn’t care about your neighbors health. If we had cared enough to take care of ourselves previous to the pandemic, we would be fairing much than we are. Healthy people are far less susceptible and we are incredibly unhealthy as a country.

So the most important things to address are diseases that are contagious, not the ones that kill us at the highest rates? It’s ironic that our lack of giving a sh*t about our health in this country and our obsession with quick “fix“ pharmaceuticals has made us much more susceptible to covid-19 than other countries who are much healthier.

I agree, it’s important to allow protests and rallies. This topic is tricky for the reasons you stated. Protesting police brutality with violence and destruction of public and private property is going to be a self fulfilling prophesy. The police have a duty to take action in those circumstances and methinks that is the point for the instigators within the protests. “Good people” within the group of protestors have a duty to denounce and take action against those within their groups that break rank. Violence to protest against violence will never accomplish what they hope.

By policies I’m just referring to allowing the violence to escalate.

I’m sure everything you’re saying is true. I live in Minneapolis and the chaos and burning buildings were relatively isolated to a particular area, so it’s easy to write off the violence as a small problem. However, the policies that allowed it to take place are problematic in my opinion and I think Portland may be able to be described similarly to Minneapolis in that respect.

I just simply do not understand how the american people allowed this to take place. We have been lied to at every single turn, with the current goal post, do people not realize that we will never reach it? I mean never. So then what will change? A vaccine rushed to market over 5 years earlier than any previous vaccine?

Unless normal exemptions will be voided with the Covid vaccine, vaccine exemption laws are different from state to state. Minnesota for example still has three options for opting out of any vaccines. Medical, Religious and simply a conscientious objection. As another example, California recently took away all three of those exemptions. So my guess is it would be state to state with the Covid vaccine as well.

I think this is such an important point that nobody who is advocating for restrictions seems to be able to answer. When is it ok to return to our previous normal? If you don't have an answer to that, people are rightfully going to find it difficult to comply. People can manage the most unmanageable situations if they are given a finish line. Right now with no finish line to the pain, people are unwilling to comply and I don't blame them one bit.

This is a serious question. How legitimate is someone being "discredited" when they are being "discredited" by the very people or person who has the opposite viewpoint and benefit from people thinking the opposite viewpoint is invalid?

I consider both of these to be right in the center. They tend not to even write on controversial topics, which isnt necessarily a bad thing. My point in asking you is it seems as though you, like most of us, consume one sided news. So when the opposite viewpoint is presented(if you ever even get exposed to it) the agenda is to immediately discredit the writer of said opinion. Not a personal attack on you, just an interesting observation that if you consider reading WSJ and Forbes to be your version of "the other side of the story" I'm not surprised that you think conservative people are all extremist right wingers.