RobbyB1982 wrote:Ghilz wrote:but the fact that basically their entire people are willfully walking into oblivion out of pride sort of numbs me to the tragedy.
And then you look at things like the American health system, everything they do to restrict women's bodies (with no input from women) lack of gun control laws, and stance on global warming...
The difference is that these things you site are not as cut-and-dried as a disease's host choice.
A study was done in the 1990s to find the average wait time for surgeries that were elective, but life-threatening (things like bypass surgeries, cancer removal and the like) through English-speaking countries. Only the United States had a sub-double-digit waiting time; Australia had the second best if I recall correctly at 13 months. While socialized medicine may be cheaper for individuals, the actual quality and speed of medical care may not be as good or better and evidence suggests it is significantly worse in most cases. It's not a simple matter of "government pays for everything == everything is better!"
I don't know what you're referring to as far as "restricting women's bodies". Is this an abortion thing? Because abortion is and has been legal in the United States for a long time.
The US Government stance on global warming has been pretty clearly in the "support" side for decades. It's only recently that convention has been challenged. This is a good thing, as it's revealing a lot of the problems in the methodologies and studies (one of my favourites is using evidence from ground sensors in urbanized areas to discount evidence from plant studies and satellite data). Surely you can't be against that, yes? Surely being
accurate is more important than being
ideologically pure, yes? This is exact thing the episode is talking about, in fact.
Gun control laws don't actually fix the problem. First of, there is very little correlation between availability of guns and violence. Secondly, gun control laws have not proven to actually restrict the use of firearms in criminal acts -- criminals, unsurprisingly, are perfectly capable of breaking gun laws to get their hands on firearms if they want them. This also means that the common claim that "an armed society is a polite society" is also wrong, by the way.
The fact is, if one has a violent society, then people are going to use whatever means they have to cause violence. If guns aren't available, then they'll use knives or bombs or cars or whatever else they can.
One
can make the claim that gun controls are meant to restrict
random violent acts -- like the one guy shooting up Vegas -- since guns are tools that are specifically designed to cause injury and death and if someone just snaps then their ability to kill people is going to be a lot more limited (suddenly crazy people aren't likely to have the patience to try and plan the way to kill the most people rather than just go do it as soon as they can), but it is hardly as black-and-white as you seem to imply.
Contrast this with a disease. A disease isn't going to care about the "morality" of a host it infects; at most, there might be a correlation between certain behaviors and infection rates. This could be due to the infection vector or, in extremely rare cases, a genetic presupposition for infection that also affects behavior. I don't know of any disease that actually has that, though. Leprosy does have a genetic component; most of the human race can't get the disease. It requires certain genetic markers to be able to infect a host. That's the closest I can think of. Maybe rabies, too? Though the change in behavior is not genetic to my knowledge and a result of the infection itself.
The point is that there simply isn't a known mechanism where morality would affect disease infection rates, while the other things you cite as examples are not nearly as manifest.
