[conspire] (forw) Re: [skeptic] Now that's what I call win-win

[Rick Moen]

Forwarding because of the bit about Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts, and the
bits about Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button.  (For the record, what Kevin
France is responding to is alleged Attorney General Bill Barr's
obviously humbug and toothless threat to get protestors in American
cities Federally indicted for 'seditious conspiracy' under a basically
never-used McCarthy Era law, 18 U.S. Code § 2384, against trying to
violently overthrow the US government.)

The observations about New Zealand tie into matters on Ruben Safir's
'docs' mailing list, which he ludicrously promotes as "This mailing is
for professional discussions on the Wuhan(covid)19 SARS disease by
medical professionals and selected invited guests."  I observed from the
beginnings of that mailing list in May that there appear to be -=zero=-
medical professionals participating by any reasonable and relevant
meaning of that term.  It appears there are some subscribers working in
very vaguely related fields (as with Ruben being a pharmacist), but it's
essentially yet another Dunning-Kruger hothouse, comprising cranky
NYC-area ideologues convinced, e.g., that face masks are an Antifa Soros
Commie Bengazi conspiracy against Our Freedumbs.

I popped in there, and several of the resident lunatics including Ruben
were -- upon noting the renewed August outbreak in New Zealand of
(eventually) 58 new cases in a nation of 5 million (bringing total
_cumulative_ cases to 1,811 including 25 deaths) -- pretended as if I'd 
said it couldn't happen.

And that is of course not only _not_ what I said, but the opposite of
what I said.  My commentary was that, yes, a renewed outbreak is
possible at any time from unexpected sources or a violation of
quarantine, but under PM Ardern's leadership the national response has
been _competent and effective_, such that life returned completely to
normal after the initial outbreak had been defeated through doing the
totally obvious: isolation, contact-tracing, face masks, testing, and
quarantining for two weeks all arrivals without exception.  NZ actually
has everything open, including public sports events, and LUGs (to my
knowledge) actually never ceased holding in-person meetings -- as they
didn't need to.

And the damage that's happened from the renewed (August) outbreak has
been limited to 58 new cases, and the temporary lockdown (again) of
Auckland.  Medical detectives are investigating the cause:  It's
suspected that it was a failure of procedure at border facilities.
(This is a new virus strain, not seen in NZ before August.)

Of course, my implied comparison was to the Toddler-in-Chief's
comprehensive and historic failure, held alongside PM Ardern and staff's
competence and effectiveness.

USA:  200,000 deaths (and counting), 330 million population.
NZ:        25 deaths, 5 million population.

Using mortality as the metric (but remembering Rich and Deirdre's point
that it is _hardly_ the entire story), I make that to be national
leadership one hundred twenty-one times as effective as the Toddler's
gang.  Or, to put it a different way, if we'd been able to borrow Ardern
in February and send the Toddler back to Queens, we'd probably have had
1650 deaths rather than 200,000.

The so-called medical professionals on 'Docs' cannot even face this
truth honestly, and probably in the future I'm not only leaving my
subscription set to "nomail" (which I did a couple of months ago to 
reduce the noise) but also ignore the thing completely.

Oh, and Ruben, having been the biggest practitioner of unauthorised
copying I know for long years, persists in his habit of lobbing many
people's writings without their knowledge or approval to his mailing
lists, and, e.g., has lobbed many Conspire authors' postings over to
Docs so that his bunch of semi-literate groupies (and Ruben himself) can
complain about and misrepresent them behind the authors' backs.  This is
scummy behaviour in my opinion, so frankly I think it's just as well
that he unsubscribed from Conspire (for the second time in a row) in a
fit of pique about a month ago.



----- Forwarded message from Kevin France <kevinfrance0a at gmail.com> -----

Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2020 13:18:57 -0700
From: Kevin France <kevinfrance0a at gmail.com>
To: Skeptic <skeptic at linuxmafia.com>
Subject: Re: [skeptic] Now that's what I call win-win

On Sat, Sep 19, 2020, 10:33 AM James H.G. Redekop <
james.hg.redekop at gmail.com> wrote:

> Though it may have a chilling effect on the (c) group, especially if
> they make a few arrests and threaten to use the sedition charge (20
> years in prison) to get people to accept a plea bargain for a lesser
> charge that might still have been hard to prosecute.

That would take a really dumb lawyer to agree to, I think.  Like, I wore a
black hoodie and bandana and threw rocks at the city police, therefore I'm
actively supporting the violent overthrow of the US government?  I have a
feeling most prosecutors would really, really not want to try that in front
of a jury.

> I've seen interviews with people who are supporting Trump this
> election because "he got healthcare done, which is more than the
> Democrats ever managed!" (as close to a direct quote as I can manage
> from memory).
>
> I'm not convinced that any of the people who supported Trump before
> this latest Barr idiocy will notice the obvious.

No, probably not.  My fiance's family are super sweet, nice people...but
yeah.  They think mask-wearing is due to some sort of never-really-defined
hoax and the Biden-Harris campaign is literally anti-America.  Her mom
actually asked her if she knew about the Biden 2020 sign "someone" put in
my front yard.  Yeah..."someone" = "me".  Lol

....and this is in California.  I shudder at what it must be like in deep
red states.


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----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2020 15:51:00 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: skeptic at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Re: [skeptic] Now that's what I call win-win
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Kevin France (kevinfrance0a at gmail.com):

> ....and this is in California.  I shudder at what it must be like in deep
> red states.

I offer an anecdatum:

Some friends of mine and I have finally started rallying the Linux
technical community to adapt to pandemic realities rather than sitting
back and doing nothing while waiting for something to change.  I
specifically refer to the many (remaining) volunteer-run Linux user
groups ('LUGs'), which worldwide (except in New Zealand) ceased holding
monthly in-person meetings around February.  Most are now inactive
except for via their mailing lists.

That's missing the obvious alternative of moving meetings _online_.
Some LUGs have taken that step a lot earlier than others.[1]  One of the
earliest of them was Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts (ALE).  I recently
dropped in on one of ALE's videoconferenced general meetings and
participated in the conversation afterwards -- and one of the regulars
told me a startling bit of backstory:  ALE has suffered something of a
split:  Some of the members have insisted on belligerently continuing to
hold in-person ALE meetings, while another faction (those I was
encountering) had been holding regular videoconferenced meetings over
the Internet instead.  The startling bit:  Pretty nearly everyone in the
in-person faction adamantly refuses to participate in the online
gatherings.

That's a pretty epic degree of fanaticism:  Rationally, someone who
sincerely feels in-person meetings are safe ought to be willing to also 
join online meetings of the same group, as there is no downside.  But
apparently these folks think online meetings are covered with sticky
Antifa Soros Commie Bengazi sauce, hence cannot be tolerated.

I boggled.  One of the online regulars replied 'Well, this is Georgia.'


[1] No, that doesn't automatically mean Zoom, Inc.'s
buggier-than-the-Smithsonian-Natural-History-Museum proprietary software
and related online service.  Superior alternatives include Jitsi Meet
and Big Blue Button, both of which are entirely open source and have
server-end code that can be easily self-hosted if you wish.  FWIW, I 
set up and administered Jitsi Meet on Amazon EC2 for the recent World
Science Fiction Convention that was supposed to have been held in
Wellington, New Zealand, before the world broke.

Yes, it's grimly ironic that one of the few places to so effectively
deal with the pandemic that they have it functionally gone from the
country except a recent mysterious outbreak of 58 cases that required
shutting down the city of Auckland a second time, was prevented from
hosting the World Science Fiction Convention because almost everyone
_else_ was screwing up.

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