General Politics Discussion VIII [ARCHIVED] • Page 851

Went to the bodega for coffee this morning, 5 people in the store all without masks. I feel like I’m losing my damn mind

 

Of course we would have been massively impacted by the virus, but we needed a competent leader who LISTENED to the scientists. We did not have that and way more people died.

IDPH is currently upping their messaging to stay home, WFH if you can, only go out for pharmacy runs, covid testing, and groceries. Even the local PD who has been vocally anti-mask is sharing the messaging. My area is so bad right now and I NEED to go grocery shopping today because my husband is working overtime (cant turn it down, my whopping $500/mo in unemployment doesn't pay my bills)

 

Ottawa-Peru area 9th most nationally in rising cases in the past week | The Times And this right here is why I can't go to work right now.

 

Acting like the deaths of innocent people due to Covid stems from “incompetence” and not the values of Trump/the Republican Party/much of America is such a cop out. It’s not that Trump was too stupid - it’s that he doesn’t give a shit, and his goals (rising stock prices) are better served if in fact you do let thousands of people die unnecessarily rather than, like, shut down the economy.

It’s not like Trump set out to respond to Covid and failed. He simply enacted a response in accordance with his values - IE sacrificing humans to The Line.

 

i was trying to explain the stuff unique to america itself since that’s what they seemed to be hung up on. but yes, absolutely, all this seems obvious haha

 

Sure, but even in a situation in which your broad assessment of Western capitalist values is the devil, incompetence absolutely played a major part in why the richest country in the world had one of the worst responses to a historic pandemic.

 

Nope, I don’t agree with this. I think had you had Obama in there, the wager they’d make is that they have to respond more forcefully because not doing so would threaten the legitimacy of America’s institutions. The wager Trump makes is that Americans won’t do jack shit if they’re forced to go to work in the middle of a pandemic, given next to no relief, and you take what little economic relief they’re given away in the middle of the crisis. In a certain sense he was wrong (it cost him the election) but in another sense he was right (Americans didn’t do anything to demand a specific, better response and in fact the only memorable demonstrations around covid were from people demanding to go back to work and die for The Line).

 

100 people could have died under Obama due to covid and Fox News still would have chastised him for it

 

I think this is an important distinction that I occasionally forget myself. I still think “fail” is a fair word to use insofar as the Trump ideology is itself a moral failing, but yeah.

While Trump is clearly often a bumbling oaf, the biggest issue he had in addressing the pandemic was his goals, more so than just “incompetence” (which is a mindset that, unfortunately, a lot of significantly less rich & less powerful people in our lives have also internalized, without realizing how much worse it is for them in the long run).

 

I don’t get what you’re trying to communicate with the bolded.

 

it was certainly incompetence that allowed them to spread it among each other like wildfire lol. you are giving him an insane benefit of the doubt. he is a very very dumb man surrounded by people that are either a) somehow more dumb or b) mildly less dumb but way more craven

and if those were his goals, it only shows how incompetent he is, since he failed so miserably. the economy is uhh not in a good spot right now lol

 

Could not agree more with the last point. Especially because we have seen that too many Americans think they are closer to being millionaires than being broke. Think when you talk minimum wage and then beyond that it can engage people more. Also, misses out on the idiots who think if you raise the minimum wage then the cost of goods goes up....which all of us here know is bullshit but its still a myth perpetuated by the right.

 

I mean, we knew that Trump was both an idiot, & someone who prioritized his understanding of markets/wealth over human life, before the pandemic even hit.

Don’t think it’s a stretch to say both were factors in how 2020 has gone. And, if you could only change one, I think removing the evil would’ve changed outcomes more than removing the competency (though obviously, if we’re gonna have a president, it’d be cool to have someone who’s neither).

 

A study of 186 coronavirus patients at the AZ Delta general hospital in Roeselare, West Flanders, revealed that a lack of sufficient vitamin D on admission can be linked to increased risk of severity and death from a Covid-19 infection.

Belgian researchers link vitamin D deficiency to serious cases of Covid-19

 

I think that the markets *looking* good was Trump’s only concern, and that’s why he was trying to talk about whatever bullshit a “V Shaped Recovery” was. Obviously the economy fuckin sucks right now for average people, but for the people Trump gives a shit about (IE very rich people), it’s been a boon. And to many Republican voters, they have internalized that the market being healthy was seen as the most important thing - it can override unemployment, even. If you look at the stock market from the past 8 months, the only time it improved was when things occurred that made it clear Americans were going to be forced to work, and the government wasn’t going to intervene with pesky relief measures.

 

*googles Alfred Herrhausen*

 

Look at MAGA Haberman cashing in, good for her

 

I feel pretty strongly about this. If you are the leader of an organization--whether it be a country, a web site, a club, whatever--you need to take accountability for what happens under your watch.

This doesn't mean that you can or should be taken to task for everything that goes wrong. But what it means is that you should be doing things to try and minimize the damage. Failure to do that just means you a poor leader. Straight-up.

Yes, COVID was unavoidable and regardless of who was in charge it was going to hit us hard. But let's assume that of the currently 72 million people who voted for Trump, 25% of these people look to the President for guidance and take him at his word. That's 18 million people. And I think 25% is a conservative estimate for that.

So because he didn't take it seriously initially, you had 18 million people walking around saying that the virus isn't a big deal, we should just open up and let people die, etc. And many of these people are still walking around with that mentality about masks not being effective, the "cure being worse than the disease," and so on. Because he refuses to make definitive statements about it. Or retract what he previously said.

Is COVID his fault? No. But he definitely actively contributed to its spread by sharing misinformation for months on end.

Which means that he wasn't doing his job as a leader. You can't always fix problems as a leader, but you need to do what you can to try and minimize them.

 

That without the government stepping in to address obvious problems, the fallout of those problems will undermine the credibility of that government. So if hundreds of thousands of people die, and hundreds of thousands are losing their job, and our healthcare system can’t address the challenge, etc etc it should in theory cause people to begin questioning the validity of the political system or the political figures that allow for those things to happen. That’s why neoliberalism is not libertarianism - neoliberals like Obama believe that the role of government is to aid and steward capital through crises like this.

Trump on the other hand just let the chips fall where they fell and wagered Americans were too housebroken to do anything about it. I think as of now i would say he was half right and half wrong.

 

people talk about the GOP grift but she’s grifted the hardest of the bunch