Its all about breathing

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The main symptom of COVID 19 is the difficulty breathing.
The main thing George Floyd was saying is "I can't breath".
I guess breathing is the theme of the year

Breathing is important.

Are you sure that you want to launch into this as a topic?

What happened to George Floyd was a tragedy, and the 100 thousand Americans who have died of covid is a tragedy.

So its kinda tacky to put a smiley face emoticon in your OP when you talk about both things in the same breath.

Agreed. Comparing one violent death inflicted by a law-enforcement office to the millions of deaths world-wide inflicted by a mindless virus makes no sense.

Come on, it's called irony.

The other thing both incidents have in common is that they are the only ones that managed to make it into the news in 2020. Somehow we no longer hear about the war in Ukraine or in Syria or even about Perfect Phone Call. It all got forgotten due to the virus.

How exactly is that "ironic"?

The war in the Ukraine is not as hot as it wasat the moment. Both Ukraine and Russia are loosing more folks to the virus than to the war. The perfection of the phone call was important to the Impeachment proceedings. The impeachment proceeding is long over - for better or worse-the GOP voted it down- so there is no longer reason to debate about how "perfect" Trump's phone call was at the moment.

Atleast one major war in the world has actually been temporarily closed down (like your neighborhood barbershop) because of the Virus: the civil war in Yemen is on ceasefire specifically because of the global pandemic. The other mideast civil war-the one in Syria- still goes on-but there have been no particular developments lately. After Trump threw the Kurds under the bus- there hasn't been any story to equal that.

Maybe the opposing factions in Syria all maintain "social distance" while they slaughter each other (talk about "irony").

Our assassination of the Iranian general in Iraq is however, causing a rise in tensions among the US and Iran and the arab nations of the Persian gulf. And that does get some attention.

China is quietly cracking down on Hong Kong (and does appear to being doing it at this moment precisely because the world is distracted by the Pandemic). But that's kinda the point -that even when things are not related to the global Pandemic- they still end up being related to the global Pandemic.

And that brings us back to the US -the nation the leads the world in both Covid cases, and in Covid deaths.

We already had one innocent Black male jogger murdered even before the Minnesota thing. So America's fault lines are starting to show-and starting show just as we go into an election- and just when we are in the Pandemic crises.

There is plenty of new news without dwelling upon the perfect phone call.

So where is this "irony" that you see?

If COVID 19 didn't happen, they would have still be talking about it. Kinda like they were talking about 2016 election for another 3+ years, until COVID 19 stopped that conversation too.



Here you go. Thats the exact irony I was talking about.



You just confirmed my point here.



Probably a lot more than just one. If one looks at the racism statistics of any given country (and US is no exception) one typically finds a few racist indidents a year. So why didn't they have all these riots over any of the other racist indicents? I guess they just got tired of hearing COVID 19 all day long and wanted an adventure.



Everything I just said and -- on top of this:

coincidences are ironic. The fact that both COVID 19 and George Floid happened to be related to breathing all by sheer accident is ironic.

A coincidence by it's self is not enough to be "ironic".

Well, it sort of was "counter to expectation". We all expected the phone call to be discussed for another few years, and it didn't happen.

The whole thing is counter to expectation. If we were told that everything will be stopped in few months and asked to guess why, we would all say some type of terrorist attack or a war with North Korea or whatever. Nobody would have guessed it would be a virus.



Thats because I didn't know that the war in Syria was actually put on hold (although I suspected it might have). So, as far as my own knowledge is concerned, there were two possibilities:

a) The war was raging on, but nobody was talking about it, because COVID 19 was more important

b) The war stopped because they were too afraid to infect each other with COVID 19 (even though they weren't afraid to kill each other without the virus)

Both "a" and "b" are ironic, just in different way. But even though it would have been a different "kind" of irony, its "source" would have been the same. Now, I know the "outcome". The "outcome" was that due to one thing or the other the war in Syria wasn't discussed any more. So based on the outcome I knew that "one of" these ironic things must have happened I just didn't know which one.



The irony is in the behavior of all the "other" countries who couldn't care less about China's behavior due to their concern about the virus.



I didn't know about that. So I guess some victims get a lot luckier than others, since there are few racist incidents a year yet we don't have few more organizations on the level of "Black Lives Matter" pop up every year.



There is; see above



They are, just in a different way. I guess I have broader definition of irony than you do.

In the most superficial sense, this is irony. We all take breathing for granted because it's so involuntary and air is free and we all are breathing the same air. We never think of these things until we can't breath. 2020 will go down as a tragic year. We will be reading all about everything in history books when we are old and helping our grandchildren with their homework. We can honestly say that we lived it.

Here is another way of combining the two topics together: is the rate of COVID 19 going to increase due to all these crowds that gather together for these protests? I mean, if you look at the graph here, www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/cor ... and-cases/ you find that COVID 19 was plateauing past few weeks. Now, will the graph turn back up after these protests have started, and start getting steeper again? I guess nowthing appeared "yet", but maybe it just takes some time for the desease to show up, so maybe it will get steeper within the following two weeks or so.

It would be pretty ironic if the people holding "I can't breath" sign will, in fact, be unable to breath 2 weeks later due to COVID 19 they have caught during one of these protests.

Most of the demonstrators I see on the news are wearing masks. But that would be kinda ironic.

But lets say that your hometown, or home state, had an ordinance that you had to wear a mask in public, and that you violated that ordinance, and the police hassled you, and you gave them attitude, and then they went ape and beat you with billy clubs, and you died. But then the coroner who did your autopsy found that you were a corvid carrier. And then later three of the cops who beat you to death fell ill to corona because they had violated social distancing by ….beating you to death...then THAT would be "ironic" because the ordinance created to save lives and to contain the spread of a virus would have caused death, and aided and abetted the spread of the virus.

One of my facebook friends in India told me that, over there, cops do, in fact, beat people that are outside since everyone is supposed to be inside. And it is part of their job so nobody can complain.

What is even more interesting is that people who work essential businesses "have" to be outside as part of their job -- but then police beats them anyway, since its part of their job too. Some of them protested by refusing to do their essential services. So it serves two purposes: one is that they are safe from police and the other is that its a form of protest. The very fact that its taken to be a protest shows that they "want them" to be outside -- even though they are going to beat them for it. I have no idea how this whole thing evolved, I just heard of it a few weeks ago.

I just read the news that provided EVEN BETTER way of combining the two topics. George Floyd had coronovirus!! ! https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... si=8958771

Yes! I just saw that on the browser news page. And I thought of this thread. Talk about irony.

That thing about India: That is truly messed up!

Here is another interesting question. Did they count George Floyd death as one of the COVID 19 deaths? I read some people saying that anybody that "happened" to have COVID 19 that "happened to" die was counted as one of the "COVID 19 deaths" which made the number much higher than it otherwise would have been.

I am not sure to what extend this claim is true or not. I mean, its possible that the death was due to a combination of conditions (COVID 19 being one of them) in which case its hard to separate them and they erred in the direction of a "yes". But in case of George Floyd its very easy to separate the two. So maybe in his case they said "no" simply because its so obvious its a "no"? Or did they still say "yes" simply because the cops were trying to deny that they killed him and were trying to argue that he had complicating conditions?

One argument in favor of saying he died due to COVID 19 is that the report said that he said "I can't breath" while he was still standing. I actually was puzzled why would he say that. I was thinking maybe he wanted to repeat what the guy in New York said two years ago to show solidarity with him? But now that I know he had COVID 19, maybe he said it due to COVID 19. But that would be a really strange coincidence that he was assymptomatic until then and has shown his first symptom exactly then.