^ I get your point. And there is definitely a level of preparedness for a generic superbug that we should have implemented. But one could also say we should be preparing for the caldera under Yellowstone to explode. We know it is going to happen, but we don't know when. Same could be said for a pandemic. 1918 is so far away now that it doesn't ring in anyone's ears. With our 24 hour news cycle, 1918 might as well have been 1718. And SARS and the swine flu wasn't bad enough to get everyone's attention.You say "but you can't compare something that happened 102 years ago to 600,000 years ago." But yes, you can, because everybody has really short memories.We are (or were) just so secure in the knowledge that our way of life can't possibly change that we're slow or unable to do anything about it.[Edited on April 1, 2020 at 12:22 PM. Reason : sdfas]
4/1/2020 12:22:25 PM
No, based on the progression of viruses in the past couple decades, not based on the flu of 1918.
4/1/2020 12:26:00 PM
I understand that the recent viruses are of more concern than the Spanish flu pandemic - I'm just talking about the public at large's shoulder shrugs to the warnings. Everybody feels like it just can't happen to them. Pandemics couldn't possibly happen with modern medicine. Pandemics couldn't possibly happen IRL - they're only plots in disaster movies.
4/1/2020 12:38:01 PM
People won’t want to hear this but the United States, sadly, is uniquely susceptible to this as a populace. We are taught (really indoctrinated) from a young age that rugged individualism is a far greater trait than collectivism. We are taught we are better, stronger, smarter, etc than everyone else. That we know better. That what happens to others can’t possibly happen to us. So when strong warnings are put in place we note them and move along.Truth is, if we acted collectively with strong guidance a lot of this could have been prevented. People did warn us about it in January. I specifically recall Senator Murphy sounding the alarm bells multiple times only to be ignored (I’m sure other did too but he’s my original home state Senator so he stuck in my mind).[Edited on April 1, 2020 at 12:51 PM. Reason : X]
4/1/2020 12:50:22 PM
4/1/2020 1:20:11 PM
Gov desantis just issued stay at home in Florida after saying for a while trump told him not toHopefully the people in Florida see how unfit trump is
4/1/2020 1:31:35 PM
Time for Trump to really start making good use of the Defense of Production Act and fire up all those bootstrap factories.
4/1/2020 1:37:43 PM
4/1/2020 2:09:55 PM
^Pretty much.But I can't tell....are you excusing why we didn't do anything earlier.
4/1/2020 3:30:53 PM
typically the response to that on social media is "well yeah trump did try to do stuff in january but democrats said it was all racist!"i assume they are referring to travel restrictions..?
4/1/2020 3:36:25 PM
:posts fake Chuck Schumer tweet:https://twitter.com/oknox/status/1245465882857476103?s=21Lol, taking the piss now. A re-started 80s style war on drugs. I know Trumps brain is permanently stuck in 1980s New York but this is ridiculous.[Edited on April 1, 2020 at 5:55 PM. Reason : X]
4/1/2020 5:51:08 PM
Another thing I don't understand. Why in God's name is Trump encouraging states to forage world supply chains for themselves? I don't get it. Competition among states should NOT be a thing right now. This is another area where there should be a centralized effort to get supplies into the nation and then distribute them as needed.I just saw where the governor of Colorado was talking to Chinese manufacturers for supplies. That's insane.
4/2/2020 8:35:40 AM
Because he's incredibly unintelligent, does not care, doesn't know what he's doing and is a traitor.
4/2/2020 8:55:19 AM
^^one day he said that the states should fend for themselves, and the federal government should be the last resort, then the next day when a reporter asked him about that he said, paraphrased "Look, I don't want them to compete against each other, that drives up the cost. Don't do that, call us and we'll help you"
4/2/2020 9:32:11 AM
4/2/2020 4:14:55 PM
4/2/2020 4:43:56 PM
Anyone who complained about dynastic politics because Hilary ran in 2016 as they watch Jared fucking Kushner address the country during a pandemic deserves a fiery, horrible death.[Edited on April 2, 2020 at 6:50 PM. Reason : But, but it’s the system not the POTUS!!!! Fuck off and die.]
4/2/2020 6:49:35 PM
Can someone decode this:
4/2/2020 7:19:53 PM
Talking and acting are two different things. He uses those conferences to give optimism. Just like twitter, his hyperbole is often idioic but doesn't necessarily indicate his policy. Those 15 very well may have gone down to 0 but it doesn't even matter because the virus was seeded many times through tourism. Thats what happens in a pandemic. You either shut down everything before anything happens or you get an outbreak.Kushner is just talking and has no power and even though your point isn't applicable here, I still disagree with it. Neither are ideal but I'd MUCH rather see family members over positions being sold or awarded based on influence/corporate connections (even though Trump is doing that too)
4/2/2020 7:21:41 PM
Fuck off. Sincerely.
4/2/2020 7:26:29 PM
4/2/2020 7:55:37 PM
his level of trolling must take a monumental amount of effort
4/2/2020 9:07:14 PM
And yet y'all keep feeding him
4/2/2020 9:49:24 PM
Again, I’m curious what would it take for certain leftists (again not the real ones like adultswim/daaave or scahill or the like) to admit that Trumpism is uniquely toxic and not just “the system” at work. Earl is a troll but he is not dissimilar to a brand of online that is simply toxic to what this country desperately needs.
4/2/2020 10:44:10 PM
Claiming Trump is just a symptom of unfettered capitalism is true. But it's like saying organ failure is just a symptom of Covid-19. Technically it may be true, but it's a trite observation in a time of legitimate crisis.Congrats, you diagnosed the symptom. The country is still on life support, though.
4/3/2020 1:01:29 PM
I'm still trying to figure out why all non-essential domestic air travel hasn't been grounded.And when I say non-essential, I don't mean "I have to go to go to Atlanta for business." I basically mean anything non-commercial. That should have been done so much earlier. And the list of essential services is a joke, written by lobbyists. Gun stores, office supplies, churches, etc.
4/3/2020 1:53:11 PM
^^^,^^Change doesn't happen by reasoning with people - it also requires circumstance. Hence why M4A is gaining popularity at a faster rate now than it was before. So I think it's important, especially right now, to express the fact that while Trump is uniquely terrible, he is president because of the inherent instability of capitalism, the media being owned by those who profit from this unstable system, and the lack of political leadership willing to address this.The Jimmy Dores of the world are just contrarians who are more interested in proving their historical correctness rather than taking the message a step forward and tackling the present threat. That manifests in defending Trump as "normal" and allying with crypto-fascists like Tucker Carlson because he tells them what they want to hear.[Edited on April 3, 2020 at 2:00 PM. Reason : .]
4/3/2020 1:55:34 PM
^Change usually occurs during momentous events, agreed. A unique problem that Trump presents is that the people in power now are all hard-right, so they will grab the ideas that are just "floating around". With the hard-right in power, these ideas will all be market based and handouts to corporations. The end result being more extreme privatization and increased inequality, with more and more militant methods of maintaining that power imbalance. One nightmare that seems possible is seeing a shift in language, where the "infected" (i.e, poor, minorities, etc) are deemed a threat to public safety, granting state actors the ability to use increasing levels of force against them. Our prisons and ICE concentration camps are tinder boxes right now. If those populations are left to die during a pandemic, then I think we can say that we've jumped the gap from extreme hyper capitalism to outright fascism.So if you're on the left, the opportunities for change to occur within the electoral arena are increasingly limited, if not outright non-existent. This is the dilemma that the left is currently grappling with. Even though ideas such as M4A all gaining popularity among the public, the public's ability to influence policy is evaporating. The hard-right is in power, and the center is collapsing, which is comically evident whenever Biden is trotted out for 2 minute clips at a time.We are already seeing what Naomi Klein refers to as "Disaster Capitalism" (if you can't read her book, at least watch this):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG9CM_J00bwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFqNAEx1lm4The left is in a difficult position, because it does not have the institutional levers of power to enact change, even though their ideas have broad support among the electorate. The question that the left will have to ask themselves after this (assuming Biden gets the nod, which seems likely), is if playing within a tilted electoral system is even a tenable method of achieving change, or if movements and agitation should occur outside of the electoral sphere (i.e, disciplined trade unionism, organized work stoppages, eviction non-compliance, mass civil disobedience, etc).[Edited on April 3, 2020 at 2:33 PM. Reason : ]
4/3/2020 2:19:09 PM
4/3/2020 2:41:48 PM
it's a great book. Highly recommend to anyone who suddenly has more quarantine time. I'd also recommend Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy Incorporated"
4/3/2020 3:01:12 PM
The alternative to entryism isn't pleasant to think about so I consider that to be pretty nihilist unless Don Jr takes us fully into eco-fascism. But agree that our focus is off. At least Bernie tried to build a movement not centered around him - it's a step in the right direction.[Edited on April 3, 2020 at 3:35 PM. Reason : .]
4/3/2020 3:30:22 PM
But at the same time, hundreds of thousands of people dying from a deliberate lack of state preparation is nihilistic. 10 million (and rising) people instantaneously finding themselves unemployed, uninsured, and housing insecure during a global plague is nihilistic. Millions more being forced to carry on, alienated in their own homes is also nihilistic.Something has to give. Millions of people can't carry on like this for much longer. The alternative to entryism isn't pleasant, I agree. But neither is our present reality.
4/3/2020 4:06:33 PM
4/3/2020 5:07:59 PM
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/us-edits-national-stockpile-website-after-kushner-claims-its-not-for-states/
4/3/2020 5:51:26 PM
fired intelligence community inspector general for doing his job
4/3/2020 11:36:05 PM
I'd be interested in his opinion about the navy captain that got fired cuz of his "letter" about a ship full sailors that were dying although they were not at "war" with anybody.
4/4/2020 2:40:58 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/05/worst-president-ever/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most
4/5/2020 2:19:52 PM
I'm frustrated because too many people have concluded that this is only bad because of Trump which means replacing Trump will be the only thing that changes after this whole thing. The media is sensationalist (of course) and misleads people into thinking the problem is uniquely bad here by cramming stat totals down our throats. I wish more people could see stat comparisons.(below)The UK waited much much longer before doing anything. Sweden hasn't done anything. I just found out from Jeh Johnson today that the president doesn't even have the power to issue a national stay at home order but you'd never know that from the media. Its a hindsight 20/20 situation to say that "We knew about this in January and did nothing". Yeah we knew about it but we didn't know it would be a pandemic. Even knowing about it, theres a lot of different ways you can approach it.Deaths per 1MUSA 29UK 73Sweden 40Belgium 125Spain 266France 124Italy 263Netherlands 103Denmark 31Switzerland 83I've always looked up to countries on the list for how they take care of their people and most of these countries outperform the USA in every other metric. If the USA response was failing relative to the rest of the world, you would not expect it to be outperforming any of these countries but somehow it is outperforming most of these countries. Sure, these numbers will shift as Italy and Switzerland are much further along but the UK is not as far along as we are. I know most people don't have access to these numbers because the media doesn't show them (you have to go get them yourself), but given these numbers I don't see how anyone, at this point, could say the USA has definitively failed at responding to COVID-19. I use this same kind of logic when saying if every other country can provide healthcare/education etc, then we should also. Well that logic should work both ways. If sufficient information was out there to prevent all of this, and every other peer country failed to respond adequately, then our failure is not unique and more indicative of something happening amongst leadership throughout western society and not at all unique to Trump.
4/5/2020 4:39:47 PM
4/5/2020 5:48:11 PM
Earl is frustrated because COVID-19 hurts Trump, who he actually likes.Anyway, this is just one example of many I’ve read on why in still early stages of outbreak per-capita is actually not the best way to measure how a country responded and/or was prepared or where we’ll end up.https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1242904596856614912?s=21And of all Earls bizarre takes, arguing why American media entities are focusing on America and not Sweden or Switzerland is just galaxy brain stuff.
4/5/2020 6:16:23 PM
Notice how as soon as facts are presented that don't go along with the preordained narrative, its straight to ad-hominem. Anyone who shows facts that don't condemn trump HAS to be Earl AND a Trump fan.
4/5/2020 7:13:04 PM
It’s not actually. And it’s in the tweet chain.If you don’t want to read it that’s fine.
4/5/2020 7:56:40 PM
Trump stepped in front of fauci and told him not to answer a question on chloroquineThis us such a strange hill to die on... why can’t they just say let the decision be between a doctor and patient? So strange
4/5/2020 8:51:08 PM
It’s obviously a grift. Whether it’s only Rudy or Trump and Rudy who are profiting we will eventually know.
4/5/2020 9:06:48 PM
I think it's Sharpiegate 2.0 and not a grift.
4/5/2020 9:20:56 PM
The New York Times: Has Anyone Found Trump’s Soul? Anyone?.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/opinion/trump-coronavirus-empathy.html
4/6/2020 9:27:25 AM
4/6/2020 11:07:00 AM
Posted this in shitshat too:
4/6/2020 11:43:53 AM
what data can you point to that supports your claim of Trump winning re-election “partially due to the governments perceived response”?
4/6/2020 1:43:47 PM
set em up
4/6/2020 1:45:00 PM