I really can't understand the majority of media in the United States being so dedicated to just one side of an issue. It is impossible to not look at the political implications of all of it and think that this might be a defining factor as to why it is that they seem to only want to be on one side of this discussion.
Trump and conservatives want to open society, Libertarians don't think it ever should have been closed, and therefore the media does all that they can in order to highlight only the negative aspects of any of this. It is frustrating to see.
And then there is the case of Sweden, a country that never fully locked down and had very little restrictions as far as the response to Coronavirus was concerned. It depends on how you look at the data on whether or not their response was a "good" decision but the media never focuses on the positives, only on the higher death rates - even though they are quite low.
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Are Sweden's death numbers higher than their neighbors who all locked down? Higher than most, yes, yes they are and there is no sense in attempting to deny that. However, they at the same time allowed something that a Libertarian like me believes is something that all nations should have done anyway, especially the one that I live in where it is constantly told to us that we have more "freedom" and "liberty" than the rest of the world - which obviously isn't the case. Sweden gave the population the opportunity to have some personal responsibility - which is what being an adult is all about.
The media will focus only on the negative about Sweden's decisions but when you look at it through the eyes of a Libertarian it makes SENSE to have done it the way that they did. They left it up to the population to decide how they want to handle the pandemic rather than playing big brother and demanding that they do it how they dictate.
In the meantime their medical system was never overrun and they had around an 85% survival rate for anyone who was hospitalized with Covid-19. The media never wants to tell that a vast majority of the people who actually did die were over 80 years of age and had at least one, and most of the time multiple other medical issues. Media disinformation almost doesn't exist in Sweden because there wasn't much incentive for the papers and news sites to blow things out of proportion. The population says they feel "well informed but not afraid" and honestly, this is what the job of the media should be.
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Compare that to how news stations that are not in Sweden will show Sweden's information. Lots of red, lots of scared looking people, and will select certain parts of the crisis in order to highlight the worst parts. What about the days after April 15th?
Well look at that, it started to go down didn't it? But even after that they have to throw some snarky comment in there about how it "could rise substantially."
In the United States the media will fiddle around with statistics in order to showcase what they WANT the message to be rather than what it is. A case in point would be where they show the "kill rate" of Covid-19 based on the number of confirmed cases in people that were hospitalized specifically for Covid-19 but when they talk about the regular flu they compare the number of people who died while hospitalized to a computer assumption about how many people they THINK actually caught the flu.
Obviously one number is going to be a lot larger than the other and this is intentionally misleading. Just like they say there are 3 tiers of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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In the meantime, the Swedish population is not experiencing massive unemployment or a massive diminishing in quality of life. People who were afraid to go to work were given the option of taking government sponsored sick pay and could stay home if they chose to. If you were afraid of the virus or are someone with pre-existing conditions that make you more susceptible to the disease, you would stay home while other people had the freedom to take the chance at going to parks, bars, restaurants and other NORMAL life things. If you did get sick, there was an extremely good chance that you were going to survive it anyway.
As someone who really really really wants to have actual freedom and not just a promise of it, I applaud Sweden's decision to be one of the only countries in the world that allowed their adult population to be adults and make their own informed decisions by their own accord - even if that decision ends up being the wrong one that results in their own demise. This is what real freedom is and the way that this pandemic has been handled by the government and especially the media in America, shows me that we don't really have that here.
Sure they are slowly allowing us to have it back, but in states such as the one that I live in (North Carolina) this is only because the population has had enough and are refusing to comply. It would have been nice if we didn't have to do that. I hope that the population can remember this when it comes time for re-election.
I don't know anything about their system. How many parties do they have? Is there had blood between the parties? Etc.
Here we have people that would do to out of their way to try to infect others with little to no consequence. Take for instance the videos we've all seen with people licking product in grocery stores. These seem to take place in densely populated areas. I think this is in part because people in small communities know if they did the same and were caught, they be taken into the parking lot and get their ass whooped.
Maybe this is partly why I enjoy living in a smaller community.
The tree of tyranny needs watering,...
Max, three days, iyam, and only then if they thought it important.
The 'news' cycle waits for no one.
unfortunately you are probably right about the news cycle and the spin doctors that work for the individual candidates will likely be successful in burying their missteps or blame it on someone else.
Sleeple never learn, until much later.
It will be old news before they wake up.
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I've been watching Sweden with great interest. The only "major" country to do what they did and ignore the mandates of other countries... they just did their own thing kinda like they are a sovereign nation. Imagine that!
yeah but the media seems to be very anti-Sweden now and highlights any perceived misstep on their part. I wish I knew some people in Sweden so we could know for real what they really think because the media is only going to highlight the people that say what they want their viewers to believe is the truth.