because this is seen as an external threat and not an internal blunder. Similar to 9/11. Countrymen tend to band together and support the leader when faced with a crisis, regardless of the leader.
TBH, it's very difficult to look at that 538 chart and not come to the conclusion that a large portion of Americans are idiots. And I'm not even talking about whether or not they support Trump, I'm talking about how it is quite clear they are not able to make logical inferences of true cause and effect (e.g. what Trump is possibly responsible for and what he's not), instead they are just like reeds in the wind blowing whichever way their TV sets or friends tell them.
He said Democrats were politicizing it, which is fair. It's obvious he was just playing politics as well, and also trying to keep people from panic-buying. Meanwhile, the border was already shut down with China, before February, far earlier than many other countries.
You're running around calling Americans idiots just like Hillary called them deplorables. Meanwhile you obviously are buying false narratives and pulling at selectively chosen data that affirms your narrative... all I'll say is, the problem may not be "Americans".
> Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes.
> One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that.
So I'll just let his words stand for themselves. What is exactly is it that he is referring to as a "hoax" then? That the virus needs to be taken very seriously and is definitely not in the same vein as seasonal flu, as he's done multiple times, or directly contradicted actual experts like Dr. Fauci right on the same podium? Saying "your hoax remark is purely false" is total bullshit. Again, I'll just let Trump's words above stand for themselves.
Which is funny - because you’re literally trying to twist it right here.
The “hoax” is just him saying they’re smearing him either for things he didn’t do or did wrong, even refers to it in the next sentence when he defends his early action containing the virus. He never suggests the virus itself is a hoax. That’s just plainly obvious. If you aren’t catching that, I think you’re seeing things through a very narrow liberal lense.
The border was closed to China in January. That’s a pretty early response, a lot faster than many other countries.
Sure, hes made mistakes. But your quote doesn’t make him look bad like you think it does.
Many of these people really truly believe they are well informed and also believe themselves to be true patriots. How this dynamic can be changed is beyond me and it is deeply problematic.
Don't need a chart for that.
I wouldn't give it much weight for now.
Don't be rational when you answer that question. Remember back to what Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnel were saying, and remember that people believed them.
For the non-UK users reading this: almost all of the bullet pointed statements are either incorrect or exaggerated.
It's one of the few industries she didn't privatise.
Unlikely. I think we'll be back to business as usual (at least on the political side) within a year of the end of the pandemic.
I'm also afraid that this is going to be a major setback not just for Europe but globalization in general, which will leave us all worse off in the long run.
Backpedaling on globalization doesn't necessarily have to mean going back to no globalization. It just means now being away for the drawbacks and accounting for them. No every country doesn't need to produce their own medical equipment, but enough will that consider it important to do so and have the internal demand to support it and that will create supply-chain optionality for those that don't produce their own supplies.
Every country that doesn't manufacturer their own equipment and supplies will be far better off when they have several countries they can source from.
Not so. Pandemics travelled around the world before globalization. The black death, smallpox in the americas, syphllis.
This just increases the speed.
Under a less intertwined system, this likely would have spread heavily within each area, and that area would have little info form outside on what to do. Every place a potential Wuhan.
i hope many travel restrictions become permanent. ban cruises, make tourism difficult and expensive, cut off travel totally between the hemispheres. nature is being completely destroyed by human activity, this is an opportunity to reverse it.
Banning travel between large areas is ridiculous and wouldn't happen. Especially when a policy of quarantine during outbreaks would be equally effective with a vastly smaller cost.
PS: China’s case fatality rate broke 4%, though they likely undercounted cases by ~50% if not more.
I might have been unclear, but I was suggesting quarantine for everyone coming in, as an alternative to banning travel forever.
Quarantine set up once you already have an outbreak is uh, a different matter.
Saying they waited to long is true, but simply means it fails due to politics.
Edit: NM, misunderstood what you where referring to.
A total travel ban would also fail due to politics, so that's not a really helpful criteria.
Also, there's a lot more to environmental destruction than excess carbon.
Starting from the point of the great leap forward, yes there has been an improvement.
There's a legitimate discussion to be had about medical equipment supply chains, but describing China this way does a huge disservice to that discussion.
> They ... probably killed the doctors who blew the whistle on the cover-up. These are facts, not conjecture.
That's literally an example of conjecture.
There will be many unnecessary deaths as a result of both leaders' inaction. That doesn't make it murder on either of their parts.
In the US at least, the dismantling of the public health systems in the name of efficiency is something that occurred in several previous administrations of both parties, backed by a public who supported those cuts in order to receive greater investment returns and lower taxes.
Furthermore in what way was the US public health system dismantled? The US was best suited to take on Coronavirus because of its significant number of ICU beds and the number of ventilators compared to the rest of the West. The unfortunate fact is that CDC's tests failed and that left the US flat-footed when it was otherwise better positioned to tackle the crisis than most.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/timeline-trump-covid19-res...
Saying China covered up the virus is like saying US is poisoning its people because some Flint officials were incompetent.
Remember, China is a big country, and its political system is not a simple extension of an authoritarian leader like what media tend to portray.
I see little threads fraying already.
I have heard even normally fairly left-leaning people saying variations of 'this will kill more people from poverty'.
Whether or not you think 'left-leaning' is the correct ideology, I would expect more left-leaning people to reject the 'either-or'. But to think that the government should be enacting policies to avoid casualties from both disease and poverty, not choosing one or the other. I.e. distributing the financial damage across everyone in proportion to their existing affluence.
Doesn't UBI directly result in inflation and cause currency devaluation? If the money that you hold loses its value (because everyone has at the very least the same amount of money as a basic, consistent income) then it is worth nothing in the end. It is as good as having no money in my humble opinion. Money has to be valuable for it to be useful in trade. Giving away money to everyone devalues the currency.
https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-...
It addresses a lot of concerns about UBI in a very accessible way. UBI isn't a new concept and it has been well studied. (It was almost implemented in the USA as a more streamlined alternative to the byzantine welfare state, but the Democrats sunk it.
The goal is to make sure everyone is housed, fed, and educated. One option is to just give them housing, food, and education. Another is to give people money and let them choose. Yet another is to loan the money and to put them in debt forever.
It's a noble goal. What about exercising the option of personal responsibility and agency of choice? (D) none of the above.
Good luck. Their base doesn't care. I was speaking with my father a couple days ago, who is a US Board-Certified surgeon and ran his own practice for 40 years. He's a smart guy, but firmly lives in the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh bubble. He was saying how he was hoping this crisis would put the final nail in the coffin ... for the corrupt democrats. It's insanity.
Any bill that is a response to a crisis should short and specific to the crisis at hand with no permanent changes to how business is conducted long term. Politicians taking advantage of a crisis is how we get disastrous policy like the Patriot Act, no-fly lists and FISA courts.
Any long term policy changes should be debated and decided upon months and years after the crisis has been averted.
The Democrats are trying to include things like vote-by-mail, since this crisis is already affecting elections and will likely have an impact on the ability to conduct a fair election in November. They want better unemployment and healthcare to make us resilient against this exact situation. These are all good things, and the Democrats would be fools to waste an opportunity to do the right thing for the country.
This is not about the current state of politics. People are dying. Immediate measures to fix this need to be taken to save their lives. This is not the time for politicians to push their agenda, even they believe it makes the world a better place.
It makes sense to talk about all the things that you mentioned you liked after this emergency is over, so that we can be better prepared for next time. But right now, the bills should be hyper-focused on what to do now, to deal with the emergency that is happening now, so that we can resolve it now, so people don't die tomorrow.
(FWIW I agree with most of what was included. It's just not the time to discuss it)
not if they keep getting steamrolled by the opposite party when they insert their partisan clauses into an emergency bill
> if you have leverage, you use it
Again, people are dying. This is not the time to use leverage.
How have they gotten steamrolled? The Senate Dems won a ton of concessions, and the House Dems will win a bunch more. Getting steamrolled would be giving the Republicans everything they want just to get table scraps, which is what has happened in the past.
> Again, people are dying. This is not the time to use leverage.
People die every day. These "partisan clauses" will save more lives in the long run. Its silly to pass a bad bill to bail out the Cruise lines just to say we did something when we have the opportunity to help people. It's definitely not on the Democrats to reduce their demands on behalf of working people. The onus is on the Republicans to do right by the people of this country, fund the emergency measures we need in the short term, and pass the "partisan clauses" that will make sure people can survive and operate quasi-normally in the long term in case this isn't a quick fix.
If I worked at a company whose SRE leadership responds to crisis and failure the same way that our Congress does, I'd quit and find a company that is far more rational and disciplined.
> the Democrats would be fools to waste an opportunity
This is the problem with politics and something no one should endorse. Both parties are operating as if a crisis is an opportunity instead of a problem to be solved. Abusing a crisis to ramrod long-term policies changes is corruption in my book. Again, this is exactly how we ended up with the Patriot Act.
- 35MM for the JFK center in DC
- 300MM for migration and refugee assistance
- no voter id
- early voting
- emissions stuff regarding airline industry.
That's not quite what's happening. https://www.railwaygazette.com/uk/uk-train-operators-offered...
I was watching CNN last night with my Canadian wife (I'm English) and I couldn't believe the BS being thrown around when all we really want to see from the USA is concrete action like what many other nations including the UK has achieved.
Saw your tweet about boycotting companies btw, you'll like this: http://www.whencovidisover.co.uk/
Private Eye on "24 Hours to Save the NHS https://twitter.com/KulganofCrydee/status/833654730849136641
No evidence for this whatsoever, but is just the usual Labour dog-whistle claim against every Tory govenment.
I'm not in the US or an America, but my (retired), Father is and for the sake of the people around him and his family I hope this is the point where the American political system - and Republicans in particular - realise that their ideologies are dead.
In the UK we saw an Old-Etonian Tory Prime Minister in the space of a couple of weeks:
- Effectively nationalise a huge chunk of private industry by offering to subsidise 80% of all salaries up to £30k/year
- Delay tax payments for businesses, and offer up to 15% of GDP in loans and grants to help keep them alive
- Renationalise the train industry (privatising it and others was a hallmark of Thatcher's period in power)
- Accept that their planned immigration policy post-Brexit is now probably dead in the water because who knew that "low skilled workers" like cleaners and agricultural workers would be useful?
- Severely curtail free movement and enterprise by shutting every pub, restaurant, cinema, theatre and cafe across the UK as well as almost every shop that isn't a pharmacy or food shop
- Become champion supporters of an NHS they were - until recently - trying to sell bit off of
Politics here has changed forever, and likely for the better (assuming the sanctions on free movement and enterprise are temporary and not a back door for more draconian measures). For the sake of the most vulnerable in America, I hope it's the same there too.
And maybe - just maybe - it's time everybody took another look at the UBI debate, again.