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This idea is ubiquitous. One of the point I realized this, was COVID era argument: we have to lock people down in order not to overburden healthcare system. It was one of the most stupid arguments I have heard - my purpose and governing principle in my life is now supposed to be not to overburden healthcare system? This amorphous system is actually more valuable than human life as it is embodied in my daily activities and pleasures. I exist for the benefit of this system - not the other way around. No more dangerous activities such as skiing or anything else. By the way the same goes for other similar arguments: smoking and being fat and chronically ill is terrible for the healthcare system, so you should stop doing it.
It reminded me of the old Monty Python skit.
I find your comment really strange.
The impetus to not overload the medical system during a given situation is not to benefit “the system” but rather to benefit human life.
E.g., if you get sick enough to need medical care then you’ll be likely to receive that care.
During the early days of COVID when it quickly overran hospital resources in places like Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, etc., this was a very present danger and the likelihood in some cases tipped towards being that no, you might not be able to get a lifesaving treatment had you needed one.
This was all fake unless you put up some evidence otherwise
Tone matters. The point of this place is to encourage discussion and let people test their ideas and conclusions, which means thinking can be challenged, but preferably in a way that invites dialog, not just seeing how pithily you can dismiss someone.
"I don't think that's true; do you have any actual evidence that that happened, because I think a lot of it was hysteria and false reports during the pandemic" would be perfectly fine to say. Essentially calling someone a liar or just summarily dismissing what they say as "evidence or it's fake" is not.
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You get it, if you reduce and equate “human life” with medical system in your assumption, then the rest of the stuff follows. You treat the system as human life, so everyones perogative is to serve the
human lifemedical system. I refuse this equivalency to begin with.But I am not surprised that for instance utilitarians think this way, it is the same idea to sublimate/identify values into something else like utils, and then just follow the calculation to its inevitable and logically sound monstrosity.
The medical system is human life.
How can you not equate those two?
If the medical system goes down, you immediately get loss of human life.
See, for me the human life is about enjoying life, meeting your family and friends, being able to grieve for your lost parents or even putting yourself through some tough events subtracting some supposed utils to achieve one of the myriad of goals you may have. Medical system is down there on the chain of what human life represents to me. I thought most people implicitly understand it, but that is apparently not the case.
I’m having trouble distinguishing your responses from just garden variety selfishness to be honest. Of course you like the good things in life.
The people who die due to lack of medical care usually like the same things too, so we don’t have to redefine the meaning of human life or anything here. It’s just that since they (in this example) have died due to lack of medical care that now they cannot enjoy those things.
Me behaving slightly differently for a few weeks during a triage event in the local hospital is a pretty small price.
A small bit of sacrifice for the wellbeing of others is a relatively common human characteristic, but there are definitively also a number people who don’t come equipped with that chip.
Of course you would have such a trouble, you worship the system. And now we are back to 2020 shaming, the modus operandi during lockdowns: "no, going to funeral of your grandmother and meeting with three or more people is selfish, we are now saving
human lifemedical system". The point is, I don't care about monsters trying to shame me anymore. That is what I realized. Some people just have different moral assumptions. I am sure that there were people in some Aztec village shaming their neighbors, who refused to offer their children to rain god Tlaloc. Do they wish drought and calamity upon good people of the village? We are trying to save lives here! Sacrifice to the system at once! It is a small price to pay.Oh, your moral highness deems it a small price to pay, so everybody should do the same. Please talk more about selfishness. I will not even comment on "for a few weeks" part, yeah the famous two weeks to stop the spread lie to drop-feed the measures .
Sometimes I wonder if part of this is that where I lived during COVID, the measures taken by the government were extremely lax.
Life wasn’t really disrupted all that much, we were told by the governor to go outside and enjoy the open air and hiking trails, although social gatherings were discouraged, I don’t think much of anything of the sort was ever actually banned. There was no curfew, nothing like this. Although there were some limits placed on in restaurant capacity for a while.
When I say “a few weeks”, I’m talking specifically about the period of time in which the local hospital was at max capacity. Since measures of reduction of community spread were mainly up to the individual, then the result here is just a simple question: my community is currently in a wave of a new pathogen and there’s a shortage of beds to treat people who got very sick.
Given that, should I hang back and not go to a big party right now?
For me that’s a simple yes, it’s relatively easy for me to put myself in the place of not having enough beds to treat the sick.
Does that mean I behaved like that during all of the year or so of COVID times? No, I more or less lived normally during most of it.
I do also empathize with people who had their lives severely restricted by the government too, and I do believe that given the nature of the disease what we did was overkill. I remember I visited Peru in late 2021, and wow, in the capital they had implemented a whole host of very strict measures. (To be fair to them, they did have the highest morality rate in the world). Overall our response may have been more appropriate for a Spanish Flu type scenario but COVID ended up being much milder.
My perspective may be biased somewhat in that during COVID for me, I pretty much lived normally and very little changed or was restricted for me. So to the question of “hey the hospital is currently at capacity, would you modify your behavior a bit to put a damper on community spread of this new virus until the surge starts to fall a bit?” … my response is pretty much, yeah. Not much of a problem.
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You can make anything sound stupider if you stop halfway through the reasoning. Preventing the collapse is valuable if it prevents massive amounts of unnecessary suffering. Doesn’t that sound like something people might want to avoid?
I observe that skiing is not actually banned. Neither is smoking or being fat. There is legislation to make them more difficult, especially smoking, but the reasoning is more “to reduce the bad thing itself” than “to prevent healthcare collapse.”
One of those things was banned during COVID lockdowns, the other two were exempt. Maybe somebody thought through it stupidly, stopping halfway through and other stupid people ate it.
I mean, I agree, but that’s because I think you’re the one stopping early.
Do you think the average lockdown enthusiast would have said defending the healthcare system was their purpose and governing principle?
Yeah, the whole "flattening the curve" slogan by measures such as social distancing and lockdowns was based on not overburdening the healthcare system as the primary argument. Were you living under the rock? Elective surgeries were cancelled, medical screenings were postponed and more - all in the name of "the system". I had a friend working in a hospital during lockdowns, when self-isolated people were beating on pots from their balconies, giving praise to heroic doctors, while she was sitting in empty hospital doing nothing. She thought it was stupid. And I really think that the system was the primary concern, stupid halfway-thinking people just substituted "human life" with "healthcare system" and then went from there.
So yes, I do think that "saving the system" was the primary concern, with some vague nod to "human life" to justify it. And as I said, this thinking is now pervasive and it will get worse.
I saw the same actions you did, but I don’t believe people stopped reasoning at the vague nod. It was all “one hopes, resulting in fewer deaths” and think of the children. Those are pretty explicit substitutions for human life!
Saving lives was used as an underlying assumption, I freely admit it. But in the end this intuition was equated - or if you will sublimated into the form of serving the healthcare system. Then it took life of its own, the discussion revolved around what was good or bad for the system, human life was subtracted and extrapolated from in these discussions. That is why we got into the monstrous results of lockdowns.
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Only in the UK would it be the modal response. But it was common in the US as well.
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The idea is that overburdening the health care system risks other people's lives, so you're actually still comparing your life to lives, not your life to an amorphous system.
Of course, even this version can be criticized in the way that socialism in general can be criticized.
Sure, but there is more to the life than just your pulse. Should we ban kids skating, because they can break their bone and thus be the burden on the system? What I found more scary is how readily this thing was accepted without question. Ask not what the healthcare system can do for you, ask what you can do for the healthcare system. And again, this is nothing new, I just realized it at that point. For instance in the UK there is heated debate if immigration is good or bad thing for their National Health Service. The NHS is like a sacred cow, people accept it without thinking and put such an importance on it, that it is almost as if NHS has agency of its own, and we need to think what will harm NHS. It is just weird.
It’s just a garden variety situation where you’re asked to pitch in so as to avert larger scale hardship.
Was that so alien to you beforehand?
For example, during the world wars people had to ration their goods so that everyone can eat and so that the soldiers could be supplied.
Would you have pushed back and eaten a second sandwich at lunch because you’re not going to sacrifice your personal enjoyment for some “system”?
Say you’re in a house with 3 other people. You all want a hot shower because you just got back from a long trek. You get the shower first. Are you really going to use ALL the hot water just because you like long hot showers? Or do the preferences of others enter into the mind at some point? Because if so, well it’s just the same logical process.
I know where I was at during COVID, the hospitals weren’t at capacity, but there was a time when it stayed right at the edge of capacity for a few weeks, and they had to roll up a few mobile morgues during that time (air conditioned shipping containers) to process the extra bodies.
I did personally see it as valuable for me and the community I was in to take at least some small sacrifices to make sure that those morgues didn’t fill up too quickly during those few weeks.
Britain could have just not fought the world wars and not rationed, next
Why am I in the house with three other people? Are they my immediate family? If yes, then obviously I will let them shower and skip my entirely because I love them.
If no, then I will pay for my shower and everyone else will pay for theirs, as befitting our agreement. Next.
I know where I was at during COVID (WTF is that? who came up with that? It's like Kyiv) and it was trying to get my dad an "elective" surgery that they cancelled because all the doctors wanted to televisit
Then he died.
Think about him please before the next time you start lovin' on 'the system' -
Ah, diseases used to be named by places where they are first discovered (Ebola, Marburg, Spanish flu, West Nile virus, Zika, MERS, Lyme, etc.) But when the deplorables started using "Wuhan flu", the left declared it racist because naming anything bad after anything non-Western is clearly white suprematism, so they renamed it to COVID (which is an awful name since it means "coronavirus disease" and there are tons of coronaviruses which can cause all sorts of diseases, but anything not to be racist). They also renamed "monkeypox" to m-pox because mentioning monkeys is somehow racist too (don't ask, I have no idea).
BTW can confirm denial of medical services during the pandemic panic. Fortunately, in my wife's case we were able to find a less insane provider and also the services we needed didn't require a lot of personal attention, most of it could be managed by email, so it ended up well, but the state of utter panic and disarray which was everywhere among people who were supposed to know better and serve as guardians for the masses (I know, way too naive) is something I will never forget.
Okay, I'm with you, Ebola river
Not the same as Ebola, because it wasn't 'discovered' in Germany but rather scientifically categorized. But okay, still with you
No! No God please, no!
Don't worry, I know the story of the Spanish flu. Still, it was named so because people thought it came from Spain, even though later it was found out not to be true. So, again the tradition was supported.
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That's why they renamed it to COVID-19, after the coronavirus identified in the 2019 outbreak.
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That’s a shame to know that your father died due to inability to access medical care
However it’s illustrative that the medical system is obviously important, and of what happens when people cannot access it
That presumes the people who received medical care in lieu of my father would not have been better served by staying home. Which the official corona statistics seem to suggest because the average age of a corona fatality was above the average life expectancy and the survival rate of those who sought treatment was lower than the rate of those who didn't
('Ackshualllyyyy that's what we'd expect since sicker people would be more likely to seek treatment.' Fair enough, but it holds true if you normalize for presenting symptoms)
Also but importantly, it's weird that I have to say it again, but it's not like there was a binary choice between my dad and someone else. This was not triage after a battle. I had multiple zooms with the surgeon while he was on his couch in his sweatpants.
Lastly and not for nothing. I would have gladly paid whatever had I that kind of money but it was 7 figure stuff to bring the surgeon here. Had travel been 'permitted' for him then he'd also still be alive
Well, to me the whole point of this conversation is “if there’s a risk of overloading the medical system, should we alter our behavior to reduce that load?”
Your argument is that it wasn’t justified in that case because the system wasn’t truly overloaded.
Whereas the original comment seems to be about even in the case that the system is overloaded.
No man I just acknowledge a healthy middle-aged man had a near-to-zero-as-makes-no-difference chance at getting seriously ill, much less dying, from corona. And that therefore the surgeon who could have saved my dad's life should have not zoomed in from the couch.
And perhaps more to the point, it is not swift to deny dying people even oddball chances at survival when the official paths have been closed. For whatever reason.
I am the one advocating for more access to 'healthcare.' You are advocating for more compliance to the 'healthcare' system.
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