Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Acidbaron]

So why are you freaking out when Trump suggests we do the same after a period of time? Nobody is saying we have to drop all restrictions today.

Reopening after the peak has been reached and a decline is visible, this is not the case for the US. Only trump and his following believe that.

[cubby]

Better than the USA will be. Italy has managed to bend the case curve and the number of new daily cases is dropping. Another couple of weeks and they'll have it contained like China has done and they can then slowly start to relax some restrictions.

https://www.worldometers.info/corona...country/italy/

China thought they had it contained, and relaxed restrictions, and Hong Kong flared up again.

We need Trump to resign or be put down with the 25th. He's going to kill the world.

[Acidbaron]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1242511421017030670

Common practice, when desperate you find all sort of weird reasons to justify your actions.

[cubby]

So why are you freaking out when Trump suggests we do the same after a period of time? Nobody is saying we have to drop all restrictions today.

Here, this is what Trump is suggesting:

Trump argues that reopening businesses and risking that the coronavirus spreads is preferable to staying home, because people who stay home get depressed and that can be deadly too

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1242511421017030670

[alexw]

So why are you freaking out when Trump suggests we do the same after a period of time? Nobody is saying we have to drop all restrictions today.

Because Trump isn't advocating following Italy. Italy is containing it and will follow the science to minimize casualties. That will mean in a couple weeks they can slowly loosen some restrictions.

Trump and his Trumpkins are saying the restrictions should be lifted for the good of the economy/stockmarket, completely. Doing that will result in a mass pandemic with over 200 million people being infected over a couple of months and god knows how many millions dead.

The two are not the same.

[Acidbaron]

If a lot of people end up dying does that not mean that the US needs more immigrants again to rebuild its economy? Wouldn't that be ironic.

(I know mass deaths aren't amusing)

[cubby]

Trump says he wants country open by Easter - whatever the fuck "open" means. All those states-rights fans must be thrilled beyond belief, because our only hope is the right-thinking Governors, who follow medical and scientific advice, and keep people home, with only essential businesses open.

[Paranoid Android]

Here, this is what Trump is suggesting:



https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1242511421017030670

Yeah, I'm not going to respond to the Trumpster but instead add comment to yours.

Trump basically wants the service industry, aka Trump hotels and business up and running. The places where the virus could spread the fastest. Part is yes, his ego, fear and narcissism of the economy. We all know it's Trump's billionaire people telling him to open up. This idiot is myopic and also only see's the stock market and if businesses are making lots of money.

[Bodonius]

Because Trump isn't advocating following Italy. Italy is containing it and will follow the science to minimize casualties. That will mean in a couple weeks they can slowly loosen some restrictions.

Trump and his Trumpkins are saying the restrictions should be lifted for the good of the economy/stockmarket, completely. Doing that will result in a mass pandemic with over 200 million people being infected over a couple of months and god knows how many millions dead.

The two are not the same.

So Trump want to do like Sweden, create herd immunity? Didnt know he was a lefty

[cubby]

And remember kids, Trump is denying testing kits be massed produced, so he can point to only diagnosed cases and claim "victory". George Orwell couldn't have written this better if he tried.

[Smitzelplix]

That article is from a month ago...

Facts matter, for both sides.

edit:
I see you edited while I was replying, so you already caught it. But anyway, this was a story from Feb. 28. Dr. Fauci has spoken quite freely since then, and there is no indication this is tied to his recent absence. Now that doesn't mean that Trump hasn't fired him, it just means this isn't proof of it.

There's this though.

Trump Has Given Unusual Leeway to Fauci, but Aides Say He's Losing His Patience

[cubby]

Yeah, I'm not going to respond to the Trumpster but instead add comment to yours.

Trump basically wants the service industry, aka Trump hotels and business up and running. The places where the virus could spread the fastest. Part is yes, his ego, fear and narcissism of the economy. We all know it's Trump's billionaire people telling him to open up. This idiot is myopic and also only see's the stock market and if businesses are making lots of money.

I think that is a good plan regarding responding and comments.

Agreed - Trump can only see "economy good!" as the myopic measure of his success. And IIRC, heath officials have also said that there will be multiple waves of COVID-19, so that should be interesting.

I am, on a daily basis, becoming more and more concerned about the November election. Which had been far enough out that with proper precautions, and a non-dipshit Resident, would have been fine. Now I'm not so sure.

[alexw]

China thought they had it contained, and relaxed restrictions, and Hong Kong flared up again.

We need Trump to resign or be put down with the 25th. He's going to kill the world.

If Trump gets his way the rest of the world will simply close its borders to the USA. There's no way they will allow themselves to en mass import cases from fleeing US citizens. It'll be tough for Canada and Mexico though.

Though in truth I don't think it will get that far. Once the Italy sized deathtolls start coming in a week or two things will change.

But on the bright side Trump has utterly destroyed his chances of relection in Nov now.

[starlord]

Trump says he wants country open by Easter - whatever the fuck "open" means. All those states-rights fans must be thrilled beyond belief, because our only hope is the right-thinking Governors, who follow medical and scientific advice, and keep people home, with only essential businesses open.

F's for Texas.

[Acidbaron]

Trump says he wants country open by Easter - whatever the fuck "open" means. All those states-rights fans must be thrilled beyond belief, because our only hope is the right-thinking Governors, who follow medical and scientific advice, and keep people home, with only essential businesses open.

Can they maintain that however with financial aid from the federal government?

Side note: I also wonder how many of all those pro-trump posters are actually american here.

[Breccia]

Combine

Trump says he wants country open by Easter

with

Looks like states are starting to follow Trump's orders to not release unemployment data according to normal schedules.

Texas
https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/n...tes-clamp.html
Ohio
https://www.dispatch.com/news/202003...administration.

So: let's wait 15 days, or whatever, and see which state governors are willing to "open" because Trump said so. Let's see who's willing to put other people's lives on the line and kill their own constituents, for Trump's ego.

[Thekri]

It is hard to be knowledgeable on anything when you don't listen to anything. I don't know how anyone can think Trump can possibly manage or control these virus when he blatantly ignores the facts that people definitely told him.

One relatively trivial example is the two navy hospital ships, USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort. The Mercy was originally supposed to go support Washington, but was diverted to Southern California to support there. Trump then announced he was immediately sending the Comfort, which is on the east coast, to New York.

But Trump clearly doesn't have the slightest idea what these ships are, what they can do, and when they will be available. For one thing, they can't deal with contagious diseases, they are far too open for that. They are designed for the sort of mass trauma situations that come out of warzones, so they are floating hospitals built to handle massive numbers of gunshots, burns, and blast injuries. Putting a pandemic disease on board of one will have worse results then on a Cruise ship, they cannot fight Covid-19. What they can do, and why the Navy sent the Mercy in the first place, is to take the load off hospitals by handling all the usual trauma, burn, and generally non-infectious stuff that fill up hospital beds, so that the actual hospitals can focus on Corona-virus. Trump doesn't get this, and keeps promising miracles out of these ships.

The second issue, and one he keeps getting repeatedly corrected on, is that the Comfort will not be supporting New York for at least another 2 weeks. The ship was in the middle of a several month long maintenance period, and the Navy is throwing every asset they can to get her seaworthy as soon as possible, but it will still take a while. The even bigger issue is staffing these ships though. Without a full complement of doctors and nurses, she is basically a floating warehouse. Normally the Navy would staff these ships with the Naval Reserve (These are actually reserve ships), but Doctors in the Naval Reserve are always civilian doctors that go train with the Navy once a month. So taking doctors out of their normal operating rooms and putting them on ships is not helpful right now, since the medical emergency is actually in America. Again, the Navy is doing its best to staff it with active duty naval medical teams, but this isn't quick or easy. It will be a while before the Comfort is operational and helping New York.

All this is publicly available information. It is isn't hard. Someone must have told Trump this. But he keeps promising some sort of miracles out of these ships, like they can show up tomorrow and solve all your Pandemic problems. He can keep calling them the biggest and bestest hospitals ever, but that doesn't mean they can do what he says they can.

But this is what you get when you elect a Reality TV star as President. He doesn't like reality. He likes that scene in the end of the movie where the Navy shows up, and all the problems are over, and the next scene is just happy characters wrapping up their arcs before the credits roll. He wants to be a wartime president, but he really only likes the medals and the victory parades. He can't stand the unpleasantness of all the struggle and ugliness that comes before those things.

At this point he might as well just sell these Hospital Ships for $19.99, and if you call in the next five minutes, he will throw in a second Hospital Ship for Free! Call Now! (Offer not valid in New York or California)

[Smitzelplix]

Combine



with



So: let's wait 15 days, or whatever, and see which state governors are willing to "open" because Trump said so. Let's see who's willing to put other people's lives on the line and kill their own constituents, for Trump's ego.

I bet 9001 imaginary internet points that Ohio will be one of the places to open up sooner than they should.

[jonnysensible]

snip

I think the wider point here is that bullshit cant save him this time. I saw something the other day that was better than most of the drivel ive read recently :

It is incredible that something so small, so insignificant, and aggressively stupid as COVID-19 could be upending the world right now. But it is doing so. As tiny as it is, the virus has the power to inflict significant human harm. It reproduces, it kills, and those it does not kill it may nonetheless leave with lasting injuries. But the virus has another power, a power that makes it uniquely dangerous to Western society: it is utterly stupid. Scientists and philosophers debate whether viruses are even properly counted among the living. But whether it is alive or dead does not matter.

It exists, and the only thing it wants is targets.

It does not think, it does not feel, and it lies totally outside the elaborate social nuances humans have carved out through patterns of communication, representation, and discourse. And this, above all else, makes it a lethal adversary for the West. It has exposed how much of Western society – but American society in particular – is permeated with influential people who have deluded themselves into thinking that their ability to manipulate words, images, and sounds gives them the ability to control reality itself.

They implicitly or explicitly assume that by attaching labels and names to things, they can control them. They implicitly or explicitly behave as if control over narrative is control over the things narrative is attached to. The virus therefore was a problem of psychology before it was a problem of microbiology, because people did not have the “right” attitudes and words for something that in and of itself was incapable of having attitudes or making words. And from the President on down, politicians behaved (and are still behaving) as if it was something that could be spun or narrativized away.

The “reality gap” is often blamed on postmodernism, but this is unfair. Postmodernists were among some of the first to predict the descent into fantasy. One of the core lessons of Theory is that the appearance of reality glitching out is actually reality imposing itself on fantasy. In the 1979 version of Westworld, the guests enjoy a fake world full of robots that pretend to be vicious killers. When the robots actually become capable of lethal violence the guests devolve into raw panic. This wasn’t supposed to happen!

More to the point, it is a pity that Jean Baudrillard did not live to see Gavin Newsom exempt Disney theme parks from a ban on public gatherings, as the cultural utility of places like Disneyland featured very heavily in his theories. As he said “it is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere.” So what is the problem, then?

There is no one “problem” because watching so many things fail in real time makes it obvious that the failure is diverse and cumulative. We could talk about the primacy of advertising or something closely related to it in shaping our political and media environment. We could go on to examine how decaying legacy institutions projected their own sickness and incompetence onto their rivals rather than living up to their responsibilities. And we could debate the various dueling theories of social and institutional decay that have been bandied about since 2015-2016.

But I would like to return to the obsession with using words to control reality. There were endless attempts early on to compare it to a less-threatening entity, the flu or even the common cold. In doing so, institutional actors tried to take something new and uncertain and fit it into a tame pre-existing mental model that they preferred. Acknowledging the virus as a creature of fate – of fortuna – would be to admit that it could collapse the elaborate machinery for making narrative and reveal the narrative-makers as utterly impotent.

Managing public health and disease was one of the core tasks that helped build the legitimacy of industrial era government in the 19th and 20th centuries. When civil servants are too burdened by bureaucratic red tape and the need to perform political face-work to properly pursue this endeavor, it is a sign that Western society has traded the substance of political competence for its appearance. And more generally, a society that cares more about declining trust in institutions than what institutions have substantively done to deserve trust – and which devotes far more effort towards managing the behavioral psychology of risk than actually reducing risk – is engaged in narrative-making as a singular pursuit above all else.

Which is where our virus comes in. It is a very simple creature, unburdened by all of this discursive weight. To the extent it can be said to have desires and needs, they are very humble. It only wants targets. We lack a working vaccine and estimates vary about how fast we can get one, but it was born with a natural immunity to our capacity to distract ourselves with our silly little language-games. As this seems to be the most powerful weapon our society had up to this point, we will have to go to Plan B: actually doing something to alter the situation instead of hoping that things will change if we come up with nicer-sounding words to describe it.

[PhaelixWW]

No I think 25% of the nation becoming unemployed at best if not worse is worse than 2 to 4% dying yes.

This is just... I don't even...

Let me paraphrase what you said:

I think 25% unemployment is worse than 13,000,000 dead.

13 million people, man. That's more than the population of NY City and Los Angeles combined. No, wait, despite the fact that those are the two most populated cities in the country, you might not care about them because they're "blue" cities.

13 million people is also more than the populations of Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska, and Kansas combined. There, 9 Trump states, slaughtered as sacrifice on the altar of the Trump economy. Does that still sound okay to you? Or does that make you rethink your pandemic calculus a bit?

Because I, for one, am disgusted by the idea.

- - - Updated - - -

Italy is containing it.

It is far, far, far too early for you to be repeatedly saying this.