spiderman’s most impressive superpower is his ability to make a one liner or joke that perfectly matches the situation in under two seconds, without fail
this isn’t so much a wallpost as ‘miscellaneous ramblings that take up multiple paragraphs’ but I’m going to pretend it’s a wallpost anyway
spoilering it for reasons
Summary
We as a society are really bad at talking about tradeoffs that involve human lives.
This is something that’s been particularly obvious in recent weeks, as people start to talk about reopening. To be clear, I’m not saying that we should end the lockdowns, I don’t think that we (this is a slightly more restricted ‘we’) are in a place where the tradeoffs we’d be making are remotely worth it, but many people are arguing that we shouldn’t end them while doing so would increase the number of people dying of coronovirus at all, and – that is just actually not something that is ever going to happen, and the question we should be looking at is how many lives we’re trading off against, and what the alternative is.
But this isn’t, actually, a problem unique to our current situation. ‘We should equip all school busses with seatbelts and if you don’t want to you’re a bad person who wants children to die’ is an actual position that people hold despite the fact that even if your goal is as narrow as ‘save American elementary school students’ (substitute your own country as appropriate; the point here is ‘even if your goal is localistic’ not ‘even if your goal is America-centric’) there are vastly more effective ways to so.
And – by in large, the way we as a society have started to handle this is by pretending that the tradeoffs don’t exist, which is … one of the worst ways we could possibly be handling it? Like, the question we should be asking is ‘is the benefit we’re gaining from [x thing that trades off against people’s lives] large enough to outweigh the fact that [y number of lives] are being lost,’ and that’s not really a question we can ask if we’re pretending that y is 0 when it isn’t.
Hmmm… social experiment time.
Even though you barely know anything about me, do you think I’m creepy?
Problem that we try to pretend problem doesn’t exist is likely exacerbated by them vs us ideology, which has become significantly more prevalent in recent years
I’d also say the problem you’re talking about comes from the root of the US not having clearly defined goals on what exactly needs to be done
I don’t think anyone would dispute these two issues:
- Health care
- School expense
But we have this problem where we just don’t have an agenda to deal with it
It ends up looking like
FI’m xkyxkyfkydtjsjtjtsfncykulcktzrsktzitcpuvirRjsjtckyciyzrhdjctisnygorHgxoyditxyxrbxyisjtauslufiyayslyxhrg HA curSoydearsiydoydoysriitsoydyksuscuxiisyyc
Whenever you try to see what direction people are headed
This is in part due to the national government / state government divide
But also because we can’t compromise on anything
Are you sure about that?
I could post the list and see if that changes people’s opinion’s of me.
Would be an Interestingᵀᴹ experiment.