gehringer_2

No one is denying for a minute that the Chinese are being terrible in Xinjiang. It's still completely irrelevant to the question of how they are doing public health in the rest of the county. Just like in the ancient past of August 2021 we were blowing up civilians in Afghanistan at the very same time we were developing vaccines for Covid.

so is there is a statute of limitation on murder, burning villages and poisoning nations with defoliant? I don't find the 50 yr gap to be an justification for seeing the difference. How many civilians have we killed in the last 20 years in the ME? I don't think anyone in the US is even interested in figuring that number out. Beside, isn't 1950 the America the right wants to go back to? Great powers do terrible things - it's the nature of the beast. Some are better or worse on the whole than others, but none have clean hands and OTOH very few reach the territory of the Nazi Germany or Stalin's CCCP. You find most on a broad continuum. China is a mixed bag, they can be terribly coercive but are less likely to outright murder people than say - the Soviets were. That's just the reality in this world. You don't get anywhere demonizing every aspect of a billion people because their empire acts like every other empire that ever existed.

that would be interesting to see some data on - I wouldn't argue that's one factor.

you have don't 'have it straight." No one said anything is "OK", no one said one thing justifies the other, only that both things exist together in one complex reality, just like how the US does some great stuff and some shitty stuff. The Chinese today see Islam as exactly the same kind of existential threat to them that we saw Communism as 70 years ago and they are doing the same kind of horrible stuff in the name of those unfounded fears that we did 70 yrs ago in the name of ours. In fact we have a president not too long ago that wanted to 'ban Muslims'. Our sympathy for Muslim populations as a nation even today in fact tends to track inversely to the possibility of them emigrating here, which makes the Uyghurs a safe object of our political sympathies.

this is pretty funny. Video - about 8 min. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/opinion/boris-johnson-party-scandal.html

they didn't say it might not fall on you. Just remember before you jump on the China can't do anything right bus that if you emptied your house of all the things you bought from them you'd be living a very different life. There is plenty to knock the Chinese for, but for better or worse, we are now locked into an economic symbiosis with them. To the degree we have allowed China to make our lifestyle possible, we are complicit in how they have accomplished that.

Excerpted from Jamelle Bouie of the NYT on Whoopi Goldberg's recent 'misstep'' Interesting observation that 'race' doesn't even need to be real for 'racism' to be. A bit counter-intuitive but spot on.

better that than the oddness being incipient CTE.

this is about where I am. Harbaugh is just going to keep blowing where ever the next wind comes from, whether it's the job, the offence, the QB, whatever.

bars and restaurants have been the Achilles heal for Covid for the developed countries the whole way. Eating and drinking around a table appears to be the best way there is short of direct injection to spread the virus -- but just closing them all and paying everyone involved off for an open ended time frame was just a political/social bridge too far.

Ordinarily, the hammer would come because if you depreciate and asset and then sell it for more than its depreciated value, you get the tax hammer then, but with a sports franchise, the escape valve is just hold it until you die, then put it into a trust with your kid(s) as managing trustees.

born of cruel experience!

I like that.

Well, apparently Steven Ross wanted to tank. The problem is not that no team has ever wanted to tank, it's how do you punish them without punishing the teams that are bad but honestly want to get better? It's the 'better a guilty man go free than an innocent man be wrongly convicted" argument.

like I said, if you are incapable of seeing that China is a complex enough place to be capable of repressing the Uyghur's while still attempting to excel the West in public health, that is your limitation of vision. How many millions did we kill in Vietnam on the heels of eradicating Polio? Just so that the "communist" government there could be more of an ally than enemy to us today? (and there is almost nothing that Karl Marx would recognize in today's China as 'communism' either.). There are no simple nations.

The Red Wings are really the very best counter-argument. No-one, and I mean absolutely no-one believes the Red Wings org has even tried to tank. If anything they tried way too hard to hang on the dying embers of their previous run for too long. The Wings never suffered any lack of intention, they simple suffered too much of a guy that once knew how to win but apparently forgot in the form of one Kenny Holland. So now ownership has corrected that mistake and the result is that the lottery has totally hammered a team that wants nothing more than to get better.

we'll agree to disagree.

you need to read more press reporting from China. Xi's whole approach to Covid is to try to portray the Chinese model as a more efficient/effective form of gov and he has decided a good way to do that is to try to prove China can do a better job agains COVID and that means yes - the Chinese are trying harder to get a lower death toll. Of course it makes a virtue of the tools of repression, but that's the point for Xi. When you look beyond the borders of the US you should always park your Manicheanism at the door. The real world is not a black and white place.

If you are from Detroit you have the example that despite the efforts of the league that has done more than any other in history to insure parity - the NFL, a team can still be consistently bad for a long time. There is no cure for incompetent ownership. In the end, it's not of much value to say an owner 'wants to win' if he/she is clueless about how to.

well that is good! My student lab has run in person right through this all also. We took reasonable precautions that were a pain to live with but we didn't have any documented cases of transmission and the U was tracking pretty closely. But that's the thing, we didn't need to be China to at least be Canada ( 1/3 the death rate of the US). My complaint was the refusal of so many Americans to be even a little bit reasonable for the sake of their neighbor's parents. Sure, the epidemiological issues have become more nuanced with Omicron - but the basic "kiss my asz" attitude remains, and that is what disappoints me the most.

Your're not arguing from one anecdote that 800K+ Americans haven't really died are you? (!)

you're reading a judgment into a set of statements that are simply statements. My *judgment* on the question would be that what the Chinese have done would have been too extreme in the other direction for us, though I'm not prepared to say it's been a mistake for the Chinese - different culture, different expectations, different everything. OTOH, I do think as a nation the US has been way too cavalier about accepting the death rates in pursuit of some mythical kind of cowboy freedom. Probably because so many of the deaths were of the old, and as a society we'd rather not see the old at all if we can help it. American's don't like being reminding of their mortality - we'd rather spend our time being vicarious super-heroes.

but not to anywhere near the same degree. Example - Mike Ilitch was much more desperate to win when he started writing blank checks than the Cards were when they let Pujols walk.

5 cases/100,000 population per day. We were almost there in the dip after the initial surge but began to relax too soon before getting far enough to really keep it down. At that point we were facing the Chinese decision - clamp down the rest of the way and kill it or live (and die) with it. Political and ethical considerations completely to the side, any country could have tried to do what China did and I don't doubt they keep a better lid on it than we have. But whether to have pursued a Chinese style strategy is not in the end an epidemiological question, it's a political one about how much a life is worth vs how much you have to do to save it. We make that decision all the time in many different areas and for Covid the US has come down in an almost uniquely extreme position wrt not caring much about lost life compared to the 'cost' of saving it. So we get to keep our red hats and have one of the highest death rates in the 1st world. That's just been the way the cookie crumbled. The Chinese OTOH, have decided to value life extremely highly, not least in a politcal gambit to show that their system can produce a kind of favorable result the West can't. To each his own I guess.

right. 1st, you probably have some teams whose management does want to win but are just incompetent. The Tigers under Randy Smith probably fit that bill. Then you have the teams you cite for whom profits are more important than wins, and there is no question that doing the most you can to win is probably not the most profitable strategy, or worse, you have a team in the situation where losing a lot is actually the most predictable and financially lowest risk strategy. Clearly those teams should be moved or their ownership replaced, but there is no easy mechanism to get to those decisions.