Liberty

Exactly, it shouldn't involve politics at all, and it doesn't in other places, afaik. Just like the virus, it's a medical/scientific question. We should make the best decisions with the best data available at the time, the things with the highest probability of mitigating negative effects of the crisis because it's so incredibly expensive that even tiny improvements will be worth billions and save thousands of lives... But it has been politicized, just like the virus. When the most powerful, most visible person in the world spends weeks calling something a hoax perpetuated by his opponents to hurt him and downplays it (and then all his surrogates at Fox News amplify his message 24/7) and tweets in all caps LIBERATE and says "masks are totally optional, I won't wear one" and then doesn't wear one for weeks as his medical advisors clearly are wearing masks behind him, that makes it political, and it weakens greatly the call for citizens to wear masks. Which is stupid because it's such a low cost, effective way to help us reopen quicker and save lots of lives. In 10 days the whole Czec Republic made cloth masks and it helped a lot. Austria similarly, iirc, like pretty much all successful countries. But I'm pretty sure Trump tried one on, looked in the mirror and thought "that looks weak", so his narcissism is keeping him from doing the obviously correct thing.

Politicizing masks further:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/us/coronavirus-distancing-deaths.html?referringSource=articleShare

Of course masks are good. I was also highly in favor of masks early in this thread. You just can't keep saying that masks aren't being pushed because of WHO. It's also because of Trump, who won't even wear one, who won't use his influence and reach to convince people to wear them (one of the main powers of the presidency is explaining things to citizens and persuading them of something), and who didn't order emergency production of PPE months ago despite talking about it repeatedly, and has greatly contributed by his words and actions to politicizing them (should seatbelts and condoms and vaccines also be politicized? so stupid). It's not like other countries can't and haven't pushed masked whatever the WHO said early on, or if they listened at first, haven't later course-corrected rather than kept going in the wrong direction.

Article on states hiring contact tracers. Better late than never, I guess: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/what-is-a-coronavirus-contact-tracer-and-how-to-get-hired-as-one.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/coronavirus-cdc-quietly-releases-detailed-guidelines-for-reopening-us.html CDC still seems paralyzed and not playing its role, either because of incompetence or fear of angering Trump. They all saw people getting fired or attacked for contradicting him, and since he himself contradicts himself all the time (from on day to the other it's "shelter in place" to "reopen America"), it's hard to know where to stand to be safe. Of course, Trump is in charge of the CDC as head of the federal government and picked CDC leadership, so all this is his responsibility.

Nah, he doesn't have the introspection capability to update. He'll just keep saying the same thing over and over again, forever, smug in his belief that he's the smartest and most correct and we're all dumb idiots.

You're such a cliché. I don't think everything is Trump's fault. Just the things that are, and I point out what they are and why. If you ever have an actual argument to make to support any of your positions, go for it. It would be a nice change for you from the classic gambits of "I'll act like I won the argument so others may think I did" and strawmen arguments ("you think everything's Trump's fault".. what does that even mean? I also think that a lot of things are Putin's fault (or Harvey Weinstein's fault), because he did them, but I don't think everything is Putin's (or Weinstein's) fault, but it also doesn't mean I should think nothing is his fault..? What a silly line of thought to do down on..). As for having opinions about people, it's life. We all do it every day. I don't know where it got started that people shouldn't have opinions about the mental states of others. I guess because psychiatrists have a professional code that they can't diagnose people they haven't met, which others have turned into something quite different, which is that nobody else can have an opinion about someone else's mental health. That's interesting in itself, because plenty of mental health professional have come out to say that they think Trump is sick -- they think it's so bad that they had to override their usual restraint in such matters to warn the public. You can't have a solid opinion from just meeting someone, but when you observe someone over years and years and hundreds and hundreds of hours of talks and interviews and reports from those around them about their behavior, the picture becomes a lot clearer. I mean, when I look at Tom Cruise being interviewed by Oprah that time, I think there's a high chance he was heavily depressed. It's just pattern matching and looking at the facts. When I look at Trump, I see all the signs of a sociopath with narcissistic personality disorder. Those signs are codified, they lead the observable behaviors. They mean something. For borderline and subtle cases, it can be hard to know, you have a high degree of uncertainty, it's a probabilistic judgement call. But with Trump, it's clear as day. I'd be way more surprised if he wasn't these things, that would raise a lot more questions, because he's certainly not behaving in a neurotypical way.

You just can't make up your mind, can you now Liberty - one day Trump is a dictator, one day he is powerless - keep the stupidity coming bro... That's you attempting being clever, right? I think it'd play really well on the primary school yard. The man clearly has authoritarian tendencies (I never said dictator, but clearly he wishes he was), and he's making a lot of stupid and incompetent decisions. At the same time, he plays the victim and keeps blaming everybody else as if he was powerless and not actually president of the US. It's Obama's fault, it's China's fault, it's the governor's fault, it's the WHO's fault, it's the democrats' fault, it's the CDC's fault, the media's fault, nobody could've done anything (while clearly others have), etc. There, both things can be true at the same time. I know it's a complex thought for you, but I'm sure others get it.

Coming from you, it's the greatest compliment. If you agreed with me, I'd know there's something seriously wrong and I'd get a MRI.

More than 70,000 of them, sadly. :-\ Thank your savior Andrew Cuomo and DeBlasio for most of them in the US! Oh, yeah - and don't forget, the spectacular job done by WHO... Dude, we agree with you others made mistakes. We also see Trump's mistakes, but you don't. You're the one who's putting his hands over his ears and going "lalalalala" The man is president of the US and he acts like he has no power, there's nothing he could do, it's all someone else's fault, he's a victim... What position should he have to be able to do something if president isn't good enough for him and all he can do is be a crybaby about his impotence?

This is just trolling. You never say anything concrete, contradict any evidence with other evidence. You just assert things and hope nobody notices the tumbleweeds blowing throw the gaps in your logic. You basically are Beavis and/or Butthead. This impeached president will go down in history as one of the worst presidents ever. He lacks intelligence, character, skill, empathy, or even an understanding of what the US is and what makes it great, clearly. He's an anti-capitalist who's constantly trying to have the government play a bigger role in the market by picking winners and losers, trying to help certain industries and hurt others and increasing deficits and spending. He only cares about himself, and his biggest accomplishment is convincing others that the heir to hundreds of millions (a lot of it from tax fraud) who sits on a kitsch golden throne and never has shown any inclination towards regular people in his 7 decades on Earth (even his charity was a ridiculous fraud, spending on portraits of himself) is a "man of the people who loves America". His only other accomplishments are things that any republican president with control of both houses would have done (tax cuts, some regulation cuts), and almost everything else that is truly his is a failure or stupid in the first place, just like in his personal life and business life. A rapist with two dozen accusers, who has tabloid friends 'catch & kill' stories and pays hush money to a porn star because he's cheating on his third wife, trying to enact racist policies while hiding his tax returns and business interests and massive conflict of interests and debts to who know what foreign entities, as all his entourage is either in prison or fired for incompetence (often blamed for things he did), as he fires inspector generals who start digging into his dirt and puts his son-in-law in charge of everything... is now the cause of America having one of the worst responses to a pandemic around the world despite being the richest country with the most resources and months of advance-warning compared to Asia. Great success. I can't imagine how it'd be if he had been a failure in your eyes..

It's interesting how people who initially support human garbage out of self-interest (he's cutting my taxes!) or just by default (he's the guy of my side/I don't like the other side so I guess I'll hitch to him) eventually can't help but have to defend the indefensible because of their commitment bias. It's amazing to see what people can be blind to when they decide to just support everything their tribe does. Trump is quite literally an imbecile with no morals and a malfunctioning brain who's only skills are bullshitting and bullying and they'll twist themselves into pretzels trying to defend him against all evidence. I guess he's played them well. Poor patsies. Too bad independent thinking is so rare.

Are you sore that he spoke out against racists? It never bothered me. Trump is WAY WAY WAY more playing identity politics than Obama ever did, but somehow it doesn't seem to bother these guys. I wonder why?

Balanced and pushbacks have nothing to do with it. Things are either true and supported by evidence, or false and not supported by evidence. They make logical sense, or they don't. Reality isn't up to a vote or a committee and not every side is automatically equally to blame for everything all the time, not all scandals are equally bad, etc. If Trump's a corrupt narcissistic sociopath who's not very sharp and way over his head, the "balanced" thing to do is point it out, not to go 'well, he's half good and half bad like everybody else".

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180226122548.htm "Vitamin D can't be metabolized without sufficient magnesium levels, meaning Vitamin D remains stored and inactive for as many as 50 percent of Americans." Something to keep in mind related to the previous vitamin D stuff I posted...

This is part of Trump's M.O. He says a thing and its opposite all the time, depending on how the wind is blowing that day, so that later he can cherry pick something he said and say "see, I was right" and then gaslight us about the other thing ("I never said that, I didnt mean it, it was sarcasm, fake news, etc").

Ha! Ive been waiting for them to try to bridge this. The playbook is all too obvious by now. Protestors = white supremist Trump supporters. Thats where they'll take this. Just wait. No amount of evidence would convince tribal magical thinkers like you, so it's moot. These guys can come out and say that this is who they are and why they do what they do and you wouldn't believe it if it was inconvenient to you. Obviously this doesn't mean that everybody who protests or agrees with the protests knows about everything or is part of the same clique, but it's still interesting to look at the leadership of these groups and see who organized things, right?

Snopes looking into the anti-lockdown protests: https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/05/20/michigan-lockdown-protesters/

Life comes before Liberty in the Constitution. Selfish assholes won’t wear a mask to save lives of others. I see it in my own county. Few are wearing masks in a busy store and these guys are the ones screaming the loudest about the California governors orders — they fail to see that they are driving R0 higher and freedom further away. People generally aren't bad, they tend to have good intentions. But when there's as much disinformation and mismanagement and confusing communications about the issue as in the US, and when a health issue gets politicized, people end up believing what they're told (by their tribe, now that it's political) and act accordingly. It was the most obvious thing in that world that a crisis like this would unite everybody and give them common cause and shared self-interest, but this was squandered in the US.

Thread on FOX News' coverage of COVID19 over time:

I also thought it was very interesting what Cuomo said. Why is the administration only ordering proper masks to be produced for front-line workers? Trump is visiting one such plant this Friday, and Trump had to be told that he must wear a mask (and this no doubt is because Pence showed up at Mayo without one, and claimed he didn't know about their mask requirement). What people who talk about places without lockdown fail to understand is that that boat had sailed for the US. If you had strict hygiene and masks and people who understood things very early on, did good contact tracing, R0 will stay low enough that you can contain things. But if you don't and it just runs wild and exponentially double and double and double for a while, you are past the point where you can compare yourself to Japan or South Korea or Taiwan or New Zealand or whatever. You don't get to just decide you want these countries' results without having done what they did.

So that's Georgia and Florida this week... Chances there's just two cockroaches in the kitchen?

Russian COVID19 numbers being faked:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/19/mps-hear-why-hong-kong-had-no-covid-19-care-home-deaths We should just copy what these countries do. No need to reinvent the wheel.