Sam Lowry said:
Mothra said:
I took both the moral side and the constitutional side. Other countries experiences proved that all businesses did not need to be closed for weeks (as you suggested), vaccines did not need to be mandated (ruled unconstitutional) and healthy children simply did not need the jab. You let cowardice compromise your ethics and our freedoms.
And per usual, you claim regarding US responsibility for Russia's invasion is tenuous at best. We can agree that the US should not have taken the side of anti-Yanukovych demonstrators in 2013, and regarding who Ukrainians should choose to run the country, but the idea that such conduct justified an invasion of the country and incorporation of large swaths of territory is absurd. Even more absurd was the justification for 2022 invasion based on Biden's irresponsible rhetoric.
But no surprise you take away any Russian agency, and pretend we left it with no choice but to invade. Disgusting but par for the course. It appears war and death is ok with you as long as it's not the US waging it.
You have not even identified the issue correctly, much less taken the "constitutional" side of it. The vaccine decision was a matter of statutory construction. None of the justices questioned whether the mandate would be constitutional if Congress had duly legislated it.
The Court may or may not have decided that case correctly, but the immorality of your position doesn't consist in disagreeing with a vaccine mandate. Many reasonable people did and do. Rather it consists in your willful ignorance of the crisis that we faced and your callous disregard for the humanitarian purposes of masking, social distancing, etc. These mitigation strategies were never supposed to magically end the pandemic. As I've said from the beginning, and as you've never bothered to understand, they were meant to keep hospitals functioning and thus save lives.
I've listened to the stories of many local healthcare workers who dealt with the flood of critically ill patients. Patients from my own community who were healthy and would survive if they got Covid today. Who should have been in ICUs but instead were lined up on stretchers in the hallways. Who should have been monitored 24/7 but instead were checked once or twice a day. Who begged the nurses not to let them die, yet died because there simply weren't enough people to care for them. This is what hospital staff confronted every day for months and years. What they took home with them at night and still do. Meanwhile people like you spat in their faces when asked to wear a mask.
Good and decent people can disagree over the extent of lockdowns that should have been required. What they don't do is parrot cute phrases like "virus gonna virus" while turning a blind eye to others' suffering. That is real cowardice.
As for the war, I second Redbrick's point. You pontificate endlessly about Russia's depravity and seem to think you've actually said something. The only solution you've ever offered is to keep giving Ukraine money and keep prolonging the war, just not to give them too much or prolong it past...who knows when. Presumably whenever your self-righteous ecstasy subsides and you're ready to catch a breath before your next round of virtue signaling. Thanks, but no thanks.
And needless to say, you remain eerily silent on the real authoritarian threat staring us right in the face, namely your boy Donald Trump. For all your misguided flag-waving, no constitutional violation is too blatant for you to excuse as long as it's done by a Republican. Ethics and freedoms, indeed.
So many mischaracterizations and erroneous statements, it's difficult to know where to begin.
1) You were all for mandating vaccines under OSHA. As we both know, that was unconstitutional from the get-go, yet that didn't prevent your support of the authoritarian EOs mandating same. That was the subject of my post, not some hypothetical mandate from Congress that never would have passed (thank God). Yet, you want to move the goal posts - as you so often do when you argument is on shaky ground, as here.
2) At no point was I ever against a mask mandate. While we now know the majority of the masks worn by people likely made no difference whatsoever (and could have made it worse), and that some of the mandats among school children turned out to be completely absurd, I never took any issue with the mandate on this board. You seem to be confusing me with someone else.
3) Have numerous people in my family in health care. Two aunts are nurses. One was the lead ER nurse at Baylor Dallas for about 30 years until she retired 2 years ago. Grandmother was the head nurse at Garland Memorial (now Baylor Garland), and has a floor at Baylor Garland named after her. Have 2 nieces that are nurses. Best friend is an ER PA, and another good friend is a geriatric doctor at a nursing home. All of them worked through the pandemic. So I am not unfamiliar with their plight. I never made light of the virus. Recommended my elderly dad, who gets pneumonia following a cold because of the damage Agent Orange did to his lungs in Vietnam, get the vaccine. Recommended my elderly in-laws get the vaccine (which in hindsight was a mistake given my father in law was hospitalized with blood clots about a week after getting Johnson & Johnson's version). We socially distanced from them for months in the hope of keeping them healthy. And the irony is, despite all that work, they all three got COVID before anyone in my immediate family.
What I pushed back against, to you and others, was the illogic of it all. Your absurd idea that shutting down businesses and pretty much all social life for months, was going to make a dent. What I pushed back against was the cost-benefit of it all - the utter stupidity of jabbing children, who have almost zero risk of serious illness or death - with an experimental jab, the long term effects of which are completely unknown. I thank God I had the courage not to succumb to the pressure and fear, as you did. I thank God I don't have to worry about the long term effects on my teen sons, like you do.
4) Regarding Ukraine, how we should handle an off ramp is up for debate. Even Trump, who you seem to agree with on Ukraine generally, hasn't ended military support. That is because if he does, we all know what will happen. While toppling the leadership of a democratic, pro-Western country and allowing an authoritarian state to subsume it might be a good idea to the pro-Putin, pro-Just War crowd such as yourself, the rest of the free world understands that's not a good thing.
5) Discussing whether Russia is in the right or wrong may be silly to you, but it's worth examining when it's US involvement, apparently. You've often pronounced America morally wrong on your many years on this board. Yet, it's silly and irrelevant to ask whether Russia is in the wrong? That's an interesting position. I wonder why it is you are willing to discuss the ethics of a situation when it involves your country, but not in this instance? I suspect it is because you see the moral dichotomy and hypocrisy in your position. What little moral compass you still have likely makes you uncomfortable discussing same, because as we all know - your position, as usual, is not the moral one.
6) RE: Trump, as you well know, I have never been a Trumpist. I have regularly been critical of his decisions, both during his first term and now. The idea that I am somehow in lock-step with him is just absurd and not reality. My position on Trump is he's preferrable to Biden. That's it. He's always been a mixed bag, but he's not the disaster that was Biden. As for his authoritarian tendencies, while I am surprised you take issue with him, given your support and defense of a real authoritarian in Putin, the good news is that to the extent he does something unconstitutional, we have a system of checks and balances in place that check his power. Unfortunately, other countries, like your beloved Russia, don't have that. So, here in America, you're not going to see his opponents accidentally eating something that poisons them, accidentally falling out of skyscrapers, accidentally dying in prison, or accidentally having their planes explode in mid flight.
But we know you have no problems with such accidents, which is why your position on Trump is so ironic.
