Yes, and that his actions many of which went against the expert opinions were even more detrimental.
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it's not that it's not specific enough for me; it's that it's clearly not specific enough to get by sj with a but for argument. and i trust you know that. so messaging. i agree his messaging has been horribly irresponsbile and likely influenced SOME people's behavior negatively.
No that's not what i said at all. I'm saying every culture had to deal with 20 somethings who party. So that cannot be the reason why we have failed so badly while others have not. It's probably not in the top 100 reasons .. Start at the top, there's more of a correlation between populist anti intellectual leaders and infection rate. Some leaders listen to experts for the benefit of all, other leaders co opted the message and lied about it for their own benefit.
Again crisis management 101
Admit there is one.
Tell the truth.
Nothing else matters until those two requirements are met.
i agree he could have done those things and i agree they would have helped. i disagree that we all would have been sold and rowed together. many folks would have continued to do their own thing. and again; it's not just trump: we had deblasio; cdc; cuomo; fauci; mayors; executives; gates; governors. trump is not the sole source of information for people; people have decided how they wish to behave based on a host of info from a wide-variety of sources. trump is one of many entities to blame; not the sole entity.
You’re missing that contact tracing has to be started immediately. That’s directly on Trump. The POTUS gets the briefings before the rest of us. This is a national security issue. Our economy is at stake. Trump screwed the pooch. We rely on our POTUS in moments like this, right or wrong.
you vastly underestimate the role of state and local government in local health affairs
TMP you are stuck in extremes. that's A reason; not the sole reason. and that's my point. our varied response to covid involves layers upon layers of failures = some of which fall under the ambit of trump; other individual decisions; other state and local gov.
Again, you’re missing the power of the pulpit. This was Trump’s and Trump’s moment alone. Here’s another way of proving my point: Had Trump done what a normal president would have done, his approval rating right now would be above 60% and we’d be the paragon of how to handle covid now and in the future.
One thing the US has always been known for is uniting in times of crisis. 9-11 the mist recent example. People if all ages could have been swept up in the groundswell.
Well, 20 somethings getting drunk is probably a infinitesimally small blip compared to Trump's glaring incompetence. fwiw - A major university study agrees with me and so does the New England Journal of Medicine. I know who listens to experts ... *eyeroll* .. what do they know. Let's all just stick uv bulbs up our asses and claim the crisis is over.
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You don’t know the basic essence of America — free will. In times of crisis Americans come together like no other nation for one simple reason — we have the freedom to choose to do the right thing. All Trump had to do was communicate it was time to come together.
Yeah, but we're not in court, are we? I was just using language I knew you'd understand. I don't know that Trump is responsible for any deaths legally, but he's certainly responsible morally, is the point. Not all of them, for sure. But the number is greater than zero.
we won't get anywhere with this because this is where we disagree. i think his words would have helped, but once summer hit JFK himself wouldn't have been able to make a difference
Then how in the f**k did other countries do it? Did they not have summer? Do they have better health services? Are they richer? Do they have some type of social exceptionalism we're not aware of? Or do they just have better leadership, that admitted to the severity of the crisis and then informed the public honestly.
You're reaching man .. the answer is simple, incompetent leadership leads to incompetent results. Everything starts there, the rest falls in place.
i read the new england journal etc. he was cited for pushing political agendas over following medical guidance. wholeheartedly agree. i agree in all ways that trump was a complete failure. where i disagree is the impact his words have/had on a significant portion of our population. and again comparing us to other countries isn't worthwhile because of our political structure/states/etc.
so would we be appreciably better off if his message was better? i don't know. i think the lack of infrastructure/equipment etc at the advent of this exacerbated deaths. but there too cdc is responsible/state and local gov too. I still posit that once summer hit all bets were off and his messaging would have been ignored. and again TMP, it's condescending to assume that americans can't think for htemselves; don't have access to information as well, and are simply automatons that follow a president. his messaging has been shit. he bears responsibility; but not all responsibility.
Summer??????!!!!! I’m talking about February. Remember? Back when practically no American had a clue about covid. Here at the WC we had Sglow entertaining us with info about Singapore. My sister was trying to decide whether or not to cancel her trip to Japan in April.
Even when things started happening March/April most of us were slow to get it.
A serious message from Trump in February would have awakened us sooner.
But even if the citizenry was recalcitrant, the scientific and business community wouldn’t have been and could have been mobilized for contract tracing from the earliest cases on. That alone would have changed the course of the spread.
Yes, it would have required a massive mobilization but liberal states would have gone along and conservative wouldn’t have dared go against Trump.
Admittedly, Trump would have had to have been heroic. Oh well...210,000 dead and counting.
On the bright side, Trump screwed his golden opportunity so badly he’s getting creamed in 26 days.
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Comparing us to other countries doesn't fly because it makes your argument invalid.
SCOREBOARD!
Ha. no. because it disregards both our political structure and what makes America America
Canada has considerably less population than just tx/fl. We are unique. Regardless of what any gov rep tells a large swath of our pop they are going to do whatever they want.
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So far so good! I just looked it up and his last incident was end of august last year so fingers are crossed that it won’t happen this year.
The rot starts from the head.
As a person who has lived through the pandemic longer than anyone here in the WC ie since Jan, the folks here have been very consistent. It wasn't made political right from the start -- the face/s of the leadership for implementing the Pandemic Management plan was a panel of ministers from different ministries. (Led by graduates of UW Madison and another from Ann Arbor) And not the Prime Minister who we rarely saw -- despite being an election year.
The messaging was consistent and the measures were incremental in parallel with the situation.
The key motivating factor for adherence to the measures (mask, social distance or the lockdown) was to save & protect your neighbours and your elderly grand/parents. It generated a lot of empathy and yet responsibilities towards each other.
This is a do-able approach regardless of the size of the countries. They just need to find the right buttons to push.
In the States, I suspect the approach would have been to save your fellow Americans and businesses.
So the rot started when Trump removed any institutional memory within the system by sacking or reducing the budgets within the Health & Human Services and even within the CDC when he withdrew the people in China for political reasons.
Then calling it a hoax and that it would go away?
How would that trickle down to the minds of the plebs and especially impressionable age groups?
It's just something that will go away and isn't to be taken too seriously.
CDC wrote the global playbook on infectious disease and Pandemic management. Everyone in the world looked up to them on setting the standards. When Trump interfered, the cache of the CDC has fallen so much. They now don't trust them as much and are likely to follow other organisations including the Europeans.
The US isn't that unique -- hundreds of countries have their own Constitutions, many have a federated structure including Germany and her scientist leader.
One thing that's unique is that concept American Exceptionalism.
Exceptionalism has to be earned and not be some entitled, chosen race.
Marv brought it up too. If you want to blame people's poor behaviour, I think you can address this issue. So special that it wont affect them.
What this pandemic has shown/illustrated has been:
1) Leadership matters and poor leadership kills.
2) The healthcare system is fecked.
3) People need to grow the feck up and realise that having this Exceptionalism gives you confidence. But it has to be backed up by knowledge and discipline. No point shouting how great you are when the results aren't even close to reality. This pandemic has really knocked the brand Made in USA many, many notches who.
yeah we're going to have to mostly disagree. singapore is the size of kentucky with a far more homogenous population. as for gov i understand gov. i have a bach in poly sci and a master's in public administration. our structure of gov, our history, our culture, our size, our racial makeup, make comparisons to other countries of limited benefit. and as for the cdc we'll disagree there too. the cdc has been around for almost 75 years. it has a budget of 8 billion dollars. full-time federal employees who have ostensibly been preparing for this moment for 75 years. as administrations change they continue on as all federal agencies do. sure they are susceptible to idiotic interference like they had from trump in messaging; but their preparedness had nothing to do with trump. they should have been ready. they weren't. they bungled this grossly in the most rudimentary of ways. and they did so repeatedly. my hope is biden performs a fleecing of all of these agencies that we come to rely on that failed us. because they get an obscene amount of tax payer's dollars.
Homogenous? We have Chinese, Malay and Indians here. Four major religions. If you take the subway here, you will have messages in 3-4 languages. Try shutting down the Muslim mosques? They already feel persecuted around the world and you are telling them that they cannot pray at their mosque?
Kentucky is a cakewalk by comparison.
S'pore is akin to NYC incl. the burroughs. We all live on top of each other. It's so easy to spread since we all live in such close proximity.
India has similar conditions -- a large country with huge urban populations. Look how they are faring?
Comparisons are a good gauge on how governments manage. Otherwise, why bother with GDPs etc or any global barometers. Then why claim the US is the richest country in the world?
Or on a micro level, comparing companies performances. Or even schools?
Something worth listening to:
How should governments adapt to the post-pandemic world?
We ask CNN’s Fareed Zakaria and John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg
The Economist Podcasts: The Economist Asks: Fareed Zakaria & John Micklethwait on Apple Podcasts
Show The Economist Podcasts, Ep The Economist Asks: Fareed Zakaria & John Micklethwait - 8 Oct 2020
podcasts.apple.com
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you have 5 million people. we have 10x more hispanics than that alone. over 350 languages spoken in US homes. trump's messaging was bad and he's doubtlessly complicit but our agencies from county health departments all the way to the fed cdc were ill-prepared for this despite having ample resources. and our culture; and our selfishness. the cultural mores are too impt to discount and make nation comparisons of limited value. the shutdowns china enacted would never fly in the u.s. we are close friends with a lady from wuhan. she came over here and married an old goat. what she shared that her family was going through re lockdowns bore zero resemblance to anything americans would ever do. to pin the entire thing on trump demonstrates little understanding of american culture, federalism, agencies, and state and county health departments. maybe we'll learn from it.
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I'd like to change one thing I said. It wasn't just incompetence, it was also intentional malicious intent. He made choices to benefit himself only.
Now you're blaming the agencies that he purposefully silenced and subverted ..getting warmer though so that's a good thing. Keep climbing the mountain, the partiers are in the valley, the agencies are somewhere in the middle, the answer is at the very top.
it was malicious intent. agreed. and of course the agencies are also responsible. this is literally what they were created to handle. cdc was and is a blundering mess despite an 8 billion dollar budget. their laundry list of mistakes is widely publicized. our response has been an epic failure that implicates countless people, agencies, and the public. from the president through congress all the way down the line to us.
we've belabored the shit out of this topic. in no way do i wish to absolve trump. he's 100 percent culpable. not just an abdication of leadership but a willful attempt to do harm. but there were and are countless checks and balances in place to mitigate same; including people's own ability to understand and think for themselves. the failure starts at the top and bleeds throughout all of gov and much of our society
I have to say it but now do China and Europe.
Also don't forget that we got it last and in a crisis time is critical. We had a week or so head start on this and spent that time sticking our heads up our asses and hoping that it wouldn't be so bad.
This is why covid is so damning to Trump, because it's global. We have an easy scoreboard to compare and contrast to....and we're playing the first game of the Big Ten tournament.
I don't blame Trump for covid. It's always been about his response and how it has impacted our execution.
I also agree with you that there are things that happened that are unreachable, one being the confidence of youth.
However I can directly point to messaging that have been not just counter productive but dangerously misguided.
We might not being giving the power of exponential compounding it's due.
For every person who we convert from 'this is a hoax' to 'holy shit, this is serious' that has an exponential ripple effect of messaging.
If Trump had the proper messaging then Fox News would be hammering, every day, on the seriousness of this, converting millions of people into truthers which would be a phenomenal impact.
As it is my conversations have gone from its a hoax, it's a flu, it's a left wing political ploy (a plandemic), to only old people are affected to now f#$k it, nothing is going to stop it so lets all get it.
When a major part of our country has followed that Trump and Fox messaging.....there's a reason why we're just a hot mess with the worst numbers in the world.
Which should be damning.
The Trumpian political approach is to divide and conquer.
The British East India Company managed to control a country, India with a population back then of 300million people --- with 20,000 troops only for 200 years.
They worked individual deals with each individual Rajs, playing one off another. The local populations loved the perception of the British pomp etc.
There are parallels here -- Trump made the Republican leaders sign a Faustian pact. The Trump supporters think he is a successful businessman and a billionaire.
The excuse back in then was it was a highly 'federated' political structure so each one was in their own box and never saw outside their own respective loci.
America First would also play into similar hands -- keeping people looking inwards and subdividing their locus. No comparisons so that they only know what they are told.
Trump F’d up messaging big time. Intentionally. But this is a delicate issue too. Imo the endless so and so has it nonstop media coverage of infection rates given where we are with hospitalization rates/survival rates swings the pendulum too far the other way. In the end I disagree with our far left friends on the board in that I think blame spreads wider than they believe. Even the New England journal. If doctors ran the country we’d have 20,000 deaths instead of 200,000 and an economy that would make the depression look like a blast. The unintended consequences would be far worse than the virus. Doctors don’t consider policy implications. Anyway. It’s all opinion. Interesting to think about
Yup ... but gotta add ..
They brought three other things to control India .. lawyers, guns and money. I know it's a song ,.... but ..
They gave the guns and money to the Indians that were more than willing to take them and used the lawyers and more money to steal India's natural resources for 2 centuries.... "legally" but it was the tribalism among the Indians that was the Brit's greatest asset.
I have given up arguing about this with McMurtry. He's on autopilot.
There is, however, another factor. Trump has done more than just refuse to wear a mask in public, to ridicule anyone who does wear a mask and to host large maskless events He has pressured governors and mayors to lift lockdowns and restrictions. That's not just a stupid absence of leadership or effort but amounts to intentional efforts to undercut the authority of state officials to regulate the business licenses of all those restaurants and other businesses hosting large gatherings in violation of state law.
And another thing. McMurtry has posted several times today that young people don't pay attention to Trump. That's a silly generalization easily disproven by all the photos taken of that incident at the Lincoln Memorial between Native Americans and Kentucky high school students in 2019. Go look up the photos and you'll see many of the high school students wearing red MAGA caps and Trump T-shirts.
the silly generalization is speaking in extremes. for every ten kids wearing trump t-shirts i can find you ten thousand kids partying who don't give a shit about trump. "young people don't pay attention to trump." of course some young people pay attention to trump. some don't. google street parties and covid. you think those folks are republicans? you think they're worried about trump? kids are going to be kids. even when they know the right thing to do they're still going to do what's fun and feels good. street parties; campus parties; etc. and as for state govs bowing to trump. he doesn't control the country. people can think for themselves. hell i live in an area like many do where we have three adjoining counties all doing different things. why? because the local execs have decided what our covid response will be; not trump. your hatred and obsession with all things trump colors your ability to think critically about how we govern and how decisions are made at state and local levels. every single action that has transpired in terms of what masks i wear, who i can see, whether i can open my business or not, has solely been the decision of my democrat county exec. i think this fact is lost on many. he has been far more important in relation to me and covid than any president
college kids are partying because they are in college and that's what college kids do; covid or no covid. not because of what the president says. the rest of our F'd up response again starts at the top with idiot trump and flows down to fed agencies; congress; govs; local leaders; sheriffs' departments; and our own selfish selves.
Partying seen at Florida State, University of Kansas as college football resumes
Videos showed what appeared to be unmasked FSU and KU students partying as campuses around the country struggle with coronavirus outbreaks.
you think those kids are all in maga hats?
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Lol hardly. That’s a county decision here. Do you get that? Trump can’t tell the exec in broward county to stop parties.
Again (and again) trump’s sole authority is his message. That’s it. Everything else is done at the state and local level. Do you understand that? So if anyone wants to party and the local exec doesn’t enforce anything oh well. Comparing Germany to anything makes zero sense. Testing, tracing, to wear masks, to lockdown, all local decisions. You are struggling bc you refuse to grasp that. Trump has zero authority beyond his message. Your local exec decides everything.
You have the temerity to say I’m struggling? Let me make it plain. Trump. Has. No. Authority. He cannot mandate masks. He cannot make us quarantine. He cannot do a thing unless we are in a fed bldg or a national park. This is civics 101. His words. That’s it. The guy running your county controls all things Covid in your life. So if we want to stop kids from partying in b ton or anyone else it’s up to the Monroe county exec. Comparing US to Germany is of no moment.
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Good essay on cancel culture and free speech from FIRE
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