Bison06

So if everyone had an N95 mask from day one of this all, would you have been an advocate for zero locking down?

And to allow those in your family that are immunocompromised(I have a few in my family too) to be able to just live their lives normally without simply quarantining/masking/protecting themselves how they see fit, how many businesses must die, how many kids must have their education irreparably set back, how many abuse victims quarantined with their abusers, how many marriages must collapse, how many people turning to addictive substances to cope, how many suicides? How many people's lives is the appropriate number to be ruined for the immunocompromised?

Do you actually believe that if we had 100% compliance to mask wearing as country that the powers that be would open everything up? Open your eyes man.

Serious question: How did you feel about asymptomatic carriers of infectious disease before March? How can you not see that nothing has changed from February as it pertains to infectious diseases and yet here we are. For all of you science thumpers, where was the double blind, placebo controlled study to scientifically prove that we should respond in the complete opposite way as we have for literally hundreds of years with infectious diseases. Quarantine the sick and vulnerable, has been the way it's been done since the beginning of time. Yet this time we did it differently, can you answer why that is? Without any scientific study to back up that approach.

So heroic, it's all about educating the next generation with these teachers.

I'm sure there were some early days of the disease when they weren't sure exactly how the disease was spread. Out of abundance of caution they should have forced people into their homes and forced all non-essential businesses closed. Once they found out it was spread through intercourse, a prudent course of action would have been to force people all men to walk around with condoms on and force women to wear a diaphragm over their cervix.

No, no, no. What would have been best is to make EVERYONE lock down and shutter their businesses to stop the spread.

Whether it's been called that or not, I've never heard anyone refer to it that way in a demeaning way to anyone other than the CCP.

False equivalency. One is attacking a specific group with a pejorative the other is following decades of precedent with colloquially naming diseases by their known point of origin.

I've been wondering this since the beginning when shutdowns started to happen. What is the end game here, how does this ever actually end? The bar they have set for safety is so high that how does life ever get back to "normal"? New viruses won't stop existing, they will pop up from time to time and then we do this all over again? Will we respond differently next time? This all can't happen again. As a business owner, I can tell you my motivation to take risks and expand has been vastly reduced as a result of this. My business can be shut down at any point, what benefit is there to put my neck on the line if it can all be taken away from me tomorrow. This all has just made me incredibly sad for the future as this has been an awful precedent to set.

Gotcha, I misunderstood the spirit of your post. I agree with that. If kindergarteners are online, they might as well not even do anything.

Option B, yikes. a whole generation of children who set their education behind? Not a chance.

I'm not a poll follower or expert, is this poll highly regarded in that community?

I'll preface by saying I have been wearing a mask when in public. Why has it been so difficult for our public health officials to come to a consensus on this topic? Fauci has said masks don't help, Osterholm has said he actually opposes masks as they give people a false sense of confidence. Even the surgeon general told us not to wear masks in March. Now, some health officials have said they purposely lied to us so people wouldn't hoard N95 masks and save them for the medical community, but that just builds further distrust. If I can ask you as someone who I assume, based on conversations in the past week, leans left. Why are you so pro-mask when even the experts on this topic can't come to a clear consensus?

Non sequitur, but I'm actually of the opinion that Biden will win. Broad characterization of people who vote for Trump isn't helpful at all and IMO is the reason he got elected in the first place.

The stats I've read say it's 20% https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/10-facts-about-americans-and-twitter/

Apples and oranges comparison and that is the exact contention the president is making in the link I gave you. If you are going to censor actively, you are a news station and people should be made aware that they aren't posting on an open forum that allows equal rights to both sides of the conversation. Twitter has admitted to censorship of right leaning ideas. Did they fact check Obama the way they have Trump. You seem like an intelligent person. view it without your bias and it will become obvious they go well beyond fact checking. Again, ask yourself, if you'd be ok with this if it was turned the other way. If fox news wielded as much power as twitter, facebook and google, my guess is you'd have something more to say about their influence.

I already admitted I misspoke. But that doesn't nullify that fact that free speech and the foundations of this country are absolutely under attack. BLM is chanting abolish capitalism at all of their rallies. If you don't think that undercuts the foundations of our society, nothing I say will convince you so I'll stop wasting my time. Twitter and facebook and google have the ability to influence elections based on their censorship, would you be ok with that if a right leaning company wielded that power? It doesn't bother you because it isn't your ox being gored...yet.

1. You're correct, I misspoke, it is protected by the first amendment. But if it is up to our left leaning friends that will soon be a thing of the past. 2. Public college campuses do not get to decide who speaks beyond time, place and manner restrictions. This is public property, absolutely a first amendment issue.https://www.aclu.org/other/speech-campus#:~:text=Of course%2C public colleges and,campus on their own initiative. It is people who have been invited by students who have been not allowed to speak, to be clear. 3. This assertion is being rightfully challenged vigorously. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-preventing-online-censorship/. They have far too much power as a 'forum' to be allowed to censor in this way. 4/5. Though they may not have been arrested they were treated very differently than the protests involving BLM. A better example would have been churches being forced closed and pastors arrested during lockdown.

First amendment has already been nullified with the use of the term "hate speech" being legally enforceable. Public college campuses have become bastions of censorship. Twitter, facebook, instagram and google are knowingly and admittedly censoring conservative posts. During Covid, the right to peaceably assemble has become a crime, unless you are protesting. But you have to be protesting for BLM, if you protest for being able to open your business at the state capital it's against the law. There is a reason they wrote this one down first, without this one, the rest don't matter.

I realize the "just leave if you don't like it" comments in our country have been vilified as racist and xenophobic over the years, but I believe it's important to discuss what most people I've heard say that actually mean when they say that. The United States is flawed, but it is also the most prosperous, equitable, self improving, welcoming, innovative(I could go on) society in the history of the known world. Note that I didn't say perfect, but what other country would even try the way we do? Our system of governance was developed by geniuses who saw the flaws in each and every other system around the world and built the United States to be different. Fast forward 250 years later and we have people who seem to want to change our country into a type of system that the people who built this country specifically avoided because they simply don't allow the types of freedoms they hoped to create for citizens of the United States. So why are we allowing people to dismantle our country from within when a free person who wants to live under certain types of laws or have a certain way of living can move there. Those systems already exist elsewhere. Live there if you want to live that way, don't ruin this amazing country. People scrimp, save, pinch every penny and scheme for generations figuring out how to get to the United States and live in this great society so they can change their life and the lives of their descendants and we are allowing it to be absolutely ruined from within. It's awful.

As if in today’s society any serious politician would be allowed to propose such a sensical plan. They’d be labeled a racist for even suggesting such a program and we both know it.

Level the playing field means get rid of any overt racism written into law, as was the case in the past. If anything is done beyond that to further any one race than it is by definition racist against the groups that are not included in the program to help. It makes the faulty assumption that because a person is white that they come from a situation where they don’t need any help to rise. People in poverty need help, period, end of sentence, no qualifiers. They need resources, education, they need options.Take race out of it.

We can agree to disagree on who would be better off, but no problem. So if these problems are relics of the past policies as you say, what can be done to correct them? Society seems to think the answer is to give advantages to the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people who suffered these injustices.(College admissions, federal loan programs earmarked for minorities etc) But by definition, an advantage can’t be given without disadvantaging someone else. Why not just level the playing field and let it play out?

Let me try to clear it up with a question. Does a white American who grows up in poverty and with drug addicts as parents have an advantage over an African American in the exact same circumstances? The ultra wealthy, old money in our country is mostly white people. But ALL white people get somehow lumped in with this “old money, waspy, Ivy League” persona that simply isn’t reality. What I’m saying, is money is what buys privilege in our country. Not skin color.