General Politics Discussion VIII [ARCHIVED] • Page 850

Yeah I mean Trump actively does not give a fuck about the virus and his rhetoric leaves millions of people thinking it's a fake virus or nothing worse than the flu. Genuinely believe that if covid hit us during Obama's years it would have been much less catastrophic

 

I get it but nah. Having an entire administration openly fight facts with falsehoods and convincing their own supporters that the virus is a borderline hoax? That’s done irreparable damage. All I can think of is that Justin Sane song, “if it’s good for the economy”.

what a goddamn shame.

 

i would say this weekend pretty decisively showed that people like kamala lol

i get she exited the race early bc her campaign never had a clear direction. almost all of the celebratory joe victory stuff was focused on her though. those can both be true.

 

No I get the outrage, but it has to be far more constructive. Covid is not only an American issue. It has a fucked a lot of countries. I'm not saying for one moment that Trumps handling wasn't disgusting, but you have to realise your country is not going implement and adhere to all the things that help. You can't even make any big leaps in your gun laws. USA is different to/behind a lot of Western countries in a lot of ways, and those ways do not leave you well set up for a pandemic.

 

there are numerous reasons why COVID has been specifically bad in the US and you hit on none of them

 

Did you know we hit 50k deaths yesterday here in the UK? Our PM maybe waited a few weeks/a month too long to put lockdowns in place for both the first & second waves, and that reflects in our numbers, but we've still had an awful lot of time with lockdowns and tight restrictions in place.

Its wishful thinking. This virus, with all the measures in the world, is not easily stopped. You have to literally shut everything down to get a handle on it, which is what we did in the UK, and we got our numbers down for Summer, but now they're starting to sky rocket again.

My point is just that no one should be under the impression that any American president would've prevented this pandemic hitting in the US in a serious way. Obviously it fucking sucks knowing tens of thousands of people probably did die due to Trump's administration, but in my opinion, the US was never going to be able to avoid a tragedy.

 

What are they then? This is what I'm talking about.

 

Thinking it’s at all minimizing the impact by calling him funny is truly absurd.

 

Hmm what could be at the top of the ticket that people don’t particularly like

 

it’s a massive country of state by state legislatures. many of the governors of the states have plainly said (or indicated through incompetence and blind trump loyalty) that they were not prepared for something of this magnitude and didn’t know what to do or where to look for an example. as it is, a lot of states never adopted a mask mandate. a mask mandate at the federal level, which is something any president other than trump would have done, would have quite literally saved countless lives. at bare minimum

you tried to equate the US being behind on gun control as a metaphor for us being behind on COVID when the comparison couldn’t be more off. we are “behind” on gun control bc certain people (see: ghouls) have determined it is fiscally beneficial for the country to be owned by the NRA. they’re wrong, but their argument at least stems from “if we have guns, at least a portion of the economy will be stimulated.” there is no argument in any country by anyone anywhere that letting COVID spread is good for the economy lol.

our numbers absolutely would have been large with whomever as president: that’s the product of being a massive country. not having trump would have saved tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives by just doing the absolute bare minimum. it’s kinda wild how many people not from here seem to come in this thread and miss that. it seems abundantly obvious

 

We’re headed back to the 90s - racism can be solved if we all just listened to each other dammit

 

Also worth mentioning that the UK has the NHS, as strained as it is. At least people over here don't risk going bankrupt for getting hospitalised.

 

"It'll go away"

"It's going to disappear"

"It's really just like the flu"

70 million people voted for that

 

Is this a coup? Home of the Coup-o-meter

 

America has the 8th highest per-capita infection in the entire world.

Bahrain: 48,793 per million
Qatar: 48,127
Belgium: 44,399
Czehcia: 40,948
Armenia: 38,000
Israel: 34,936
Panama: 32,831
United States: 32,283

Yeah, I'd say the administration of the richest country in the entire world has fucked up.

 

Of course there’s no President that could’ve prevented a significant amount of lives lost, but someone competent (you know, not talking about COVID press conference ratings during said press conferences, encouraging mask wearing, not spewing conspiracy theories or peddling meds that don’t work for personal gain, not allowing it to hit places that don’t vote for you harder) definitely prevents tens of thousands. Anyone doing the bare minimum would’ve saved lives; he actively cost lives.

 

Yeah, that post is largely bad, but...

“Your country has a shitty healthcare system, and the USA is founded on principles that are in conflict with what is required to keep this virus at arms length.”

These are both accurate critiques of America’s readiness to handle this pandemic. They just... don’t have anything to do with Trump’s horrific failings. But, if not treated as THAT, they’re good observations in & of themselves.

 

You’re not even really hitting on the obvious points. A competent president would have:

- immediately told the American citizens how dangerous this was
- better coordinated individual states to help NYC with medical equipment in the first wave
- activated the federal emergency production act to create needed supplies and ramp up testing capabilities
- set up a system to track where Covid is
- not actively undermined public health officials daily

This isn’t hard.

 

Which, speaking of healthcare, it’s really fun having to get a COVID test because at least a couple people in my immediate orbit have tested positive this week. And, having to go through Walgreens instead of Medexpress because you don’t have insurance to offset the cost, which also means you couldn’t get a rapid test. And, being stuck in that limbo of missing out on days of work because, even though you feel no symptoms, you’ve been too probably exposed to be able to wisely risk it.

At least I’ve gotten to read some Grant Morrison Doom Patrol & watch Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!