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Opinion: How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world | The Observer
(www.theguardian.com)
Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”
Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that.
He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.
- Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that.
We had the most severe rate of COVID deaths in the world outside of Eastern Europe. That shouldn't happen in the most powerful country in the world. We failed to do the things we needed to early on and created a culture of misinformation because our president decided to play politics in a crisis.
Had we reacted as well as New Zealand, largely considered to have one of the better responses, we theoretically could have had 280k deaths instead of 1.2 million. (If we matched their death rate) Obviously population density and our countries complex system account for some of the difference in death rate, but it doesn't account for the enormous gulf between us and other wealthy countries. We are the only wealthy country in the world that had a death rate as high as ours. He bungled the response and likely got an extra half a million people killed. It's amazing that this fact alone didn't end his political career, but Americans suck at interpreting data.
Sure, but the person I was replying to claimed that “Trump’s incompetence caused a million people to die,” and I was questioning whether all of that can really be blamed on him. Because I don’t think so. He was pro-vaccine from the beginning, and there were plenty of Democrat politicians saying they wouldn’t take “the Trump vaccine.”
And no, I don’t think the situation was handled optimally in the U.S. - but that was the case almost everywhere. Obviously, Trump isn’t without fault here, but placing all the blame on him feels disingenuous
I’m in healthcare and I didn’t hear anyone reference the vaccine as “the Trump vaccine”.
What I did see, what was part of the impetus that kept visitors banned for so long, even now, is the violence, treatment interference, and disruptions from people in full Trump regalia.
It is, in part, why so many visitor restrictions are still in play. Very few of us had encountered such and incredible level of spite, derision, and interruption of care from visitors, well, ever. There are still individuals who refuse transfusions because it might be vaccinated blood.
Doubt and such expressed by leadership encourages this bad behavior. Support expressed by leadership, especially by Trump to his MAGAs, would’ve helped quell it.
President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk. 'The buck stops here.' That meant he knew that he couldn't 'pass the buck' and say he wasn't responsible.
To put it another way. When Ebola was a threat, Trump said that Obama should resign if one American died of it. By Trump's own logic he's unfit to be President.
What strange land do you live in? In my corner of the US, being both anti-mask and anti-vaccine is very solidly a trumper thing. That’s regardless of the confusion very early in the pandemic or what one politician on a given side might have said once.
Oh it's definitely a right-wing thing but I wouldn't exactly blame Trump for all of it. He even got booed at his own rally for telling people to get vaccinated.
If I recall the order of events, that was after many months of peddling anti-vax ideas and getting anyone who would listen to him riled up at the prospect of there even being a pandemic. So I don't think it's much praise to note he tried, once, ineffectually, to push for people to get vaccinated, especially when he lets those booing him shut him down so easily.
That clip of him getting booed at the rally in August 2021, to me, especially shows why Trump deserves so much of the criticism. As president of the USA he was probably the individual with the most power and resources at his disposal to keep people from dying, from getting sick, from transmitting the disease. Not only did he actively make things worse for the first entire year of the pandemic being declared in the USA, when he finally does start telling people to get vaccinated it's once he's no longer in charge. On top of that, when he does it in the place with the lowest rate of vaccination in the entire country (according to this article published at the time: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-booed-alabama-rally-after-telling-supporters-get-vaccinated-n1277404) he lets himself get booed into a soft, non-committal "I recommend you take it, but still you need to preserve your personal freedoms, also I took it so haha guys if it doesn't work you'll be the first to know!".
Trump definitely deserves the most blame for repeatedly stoking the fire of an already bad situation. So much so that there are articles that exist titled "a timeline of how Trump failed to respond to the coronavirus" (https://www.vox.com/2020/6/8/21242003/trump-failed-coronavirus-response). Sure, if you want to be a bit pedantic, he's not responsible for "all of it". I don't think anyone here is exactly claiming that either.
He definitely downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic in the beginning. No disagreement there.
However I still don't quite agree with the suggestion that he's anti-vaxx. Operation warp speed was his pet-project after all. He has made some vaccine critical comments in the past but personally I never got that impression of him during the pandemic.
He literally mainstreamed anti-vax and anti-science and all you can say is no big deal. And oh look he said to get vaccinated one time so it's okay.
That is a lot of fucking apology with a big side of lies. Not to mentioned disingenuous as well. Have fun trying to gaslight more people.
You can say that but can you back it up with evidence? Because if not, it's actually you whose spreading lies here.
Where have I said "no big deal"?
What have I lied about exactly?
What anti-vax claims has Trump made during or after covid?
Trump leads, and his party follows, on vaccine skepticism
Trump doesn't rule out banning vaccines if he becomes president: 'I'll make a decision'
And he nominated RFK, Jr., a noted anti-vaxxer, for Health and Human Services...
That sounds wild. Could you provide an example?
Well apparently they didn't exactly say they'd refuse to take it but voiced their scepticism about it nevertheless.
Source
Hmm. I will say I think the skepticism of the vaccine that came out too quick was bipartisan, though, if not more among Republicans.
I don't think there's inherently anything wrong about scepticism towards new things like that. It's when the disnformation and conspiracies comes in that it turns kinda sinister.
Probably true that it's more common on the right - in the U.S. atleast.
Sorry you're getting down votes. I think you're giving your honest perspective and that doesn't deserve the dismissiveness. I do think you undersell how much Trump specifically had to do with misinformation though. I do really believe the culture around Trump really follows his lead, so when he was selling misinformation, you saw his followers parroting his misinformation which I do think was likely responsible for a lot of death.