Okay, I guess I'll just drop it if you have nothing to say. Enjoy your drifting.

It mostly seems like you've just bought into the progressive tic of equating "bad thing done by government" with fascism.

You are missing the point though.

I think you should be free to make your decision re vaccines, etc and that is fine. You decide what risk you think is acceptable.

But do you think a private business should be able to make the same decision for their staff, their business and their clientele.

Sure you can say 'the risk is minor' but how many small restaurants have you seen close when they have a covid outbreak amongst the staff? Does that have a knock on effect with people then avoiding that location after?

Can the restaurant owner control that risk or do you think you or I should be able to dictate to them 'they must take us regardless, since we are comfortable with the risk'.

Your view seems far closer to your casual fascism definition then the business saying no to serving you.

Oh. It used to be because...

Its 100% positive the fatalities are under reported. 2020 flu deaths were down MASSIVELY over 2019.

Those aren't different things. They are different ways of expressing the same attitude.
And actually the last one is barely even germane.

Sir--for the safety of our employees etc. we can't provide service to that address until all inhabitants have their docs on file.

Fine where's the needle

Not sure if you're serious or not, but if you are, one can just take the numbers from the Worldometer link I provided earlier and divide total deaths of 566,611 by the population of 332,457,943. Some sites have different numbers; I see John Hopkins, which is oft-used, has the deaths at 554 K.

While I think they probably are, I'm not sure what flu deaths alone tell us. If overall non-Covid deaths are at a similar rate to other years, then yes, Covid would be an explanation. But I think we need total death numbers, not just flu death numbers, to come to any conclusions.

OK. So that being said, I'm not sure why you said no to my earlier post. It sounds like this was very valid:

US population is around 332M. Estimated deaths from Johns Hopkins is 555K. So around 0.167% or roughly 1 in 600 Americans have died from COVID.

I don't know if you're a full-fledged believer in this all being a government and/or "1%" plot to control everyone, and/or the "Great Reset", but I expect elements of those beliefs ring true with you, and wouldn't be shocked if you were all-in on them.

I interpreted that to mean "you probably think the vaccine isn't safe" and I gave you a bit of a non-responsive answer. I do think the vaccine is safe though. I mean I know people who have gotten it obviously. Tons of people have at this point.
But yes, I think there is an agenda behind covid and that it wasn't the result or some guy eating a bat and changing the world. And if there is going to be an element of dividing people who go along with new restrictions/vaccines/whatever against people who oppose them, then I'll choose my team like I said.

No, that actually never entered my mind, or at least wasn't the thrust of my question. Thanks for the clarifications.

My dude, if you have to appeal to semantic drift in your use of the word "fascism," you're sort of already admitting that you're not using the normal us of the word. You can't really have it both ways here.

People were calling Trump "literally Hitler". The semantic drift when it comes to all things fascist happened a long time ago. You just want to revert to some technical definition because you don't like being called a fascist, which is understandable.

Out of the ~3m people that people that are dying per year these days--that seems like a pretty good whack.

Yes, that's wild exaggeration/hyperbole, not semantic drift. It's very similar to how you're employing the word "fascism!"

What is fascism though? Was it just a 1930s political movement or can we still use it today to describe things?
And does it need to always come from government or can it be private sector as well?

Notice how I never have to pretend I don't know how words work? "Who was Hitler, though? Was he just a guy from the 1930's-1940's? So confusing!"

I think most people would agree this is not it.

The word is also not needed here. There are plenty of terms for government interventions one does not like or that one feels tramples certain rights. "Government overreach", for example.

Ok instead of "fascistic" I can use "authoritarianistic" in order to help with the fragility.

Stuff like this is definitely still fascism though. So we can't really stop the fact that it's always going to be creeping into this discussion.

AFAICT, 100% of the vaccine passport stuff is private industry. The gov't is taking an entirely hands-off approach.

Which is great because private industry always does a great job. Good thing we're not letting the government get involved. What could go wrong with private industry formulating a system for who is allowed to do what?

What things have you not been allowed to do without your vaccine passport?

Good point. I guess we can all just wait until it grows before worrying about it.

I think the administration has at alluded to an effort to consolidate various government agencies and their medical databases, and make this accessible.

I think this reasonably raises privacy concerns, and also the discussion of whether it is a good approach to begin with. To be clear I think calling it fascism is silly, but I'm still not a fan.

I can see the risk in creating an A team and B team, exacerbating already existing differences in access to healthcare. I also think national health efforts should be aimed at creating a reasonably risk level overall, not rely on medical checkpoints.

I also think it is an effort aimed at the wrong pressure point. We are at critical risk for more pandemics in the future. This is down to how we manufacture our food, how we cultivate the earth, how we reduce biodiversity, how we travel and how we live. I fear this will be another cushion to excuse not doing anything about it, just like we tend to push private pollution as an excuse not to pass necessary regulation at the macro-level.