In what world is wearing a mask while walking around in a setting where there are guaranteed to be undetected COVID cases, and guaranteed to be people who will be vulnerable to exceptionally bad impacts if they catch COVID, during a COVID spike, no longer necessary?
I’m aware they are following the hospital’s guidelines. I am saying that those guidelines are killing people.
It is not an emotional argument to point out that the MAGA bullshit of people wearing masks or getting vaccines making them the enemy is purely a Trump-world invention, with aftereffects continuing to and beyond the present day. Same goes for that stuff being of a totally different and explicitly malicious kind than the simple errors that some government body might commit that was trying to address the crisis, instead of using it simply as another way to pursue its overt policy of going to war with all sensible people everywhere, in any way they could find.
And it happens that I have an example directly and personally relevant to me, but there are plenty of families all across the country who have the same. Quite a lot of them have lost family members. I know some of those families with dead members. It's not just an anecdote.
I think I've spent as long as I need to on this. If you want to say that Trump didn't kill a fuck of a lot of people, as a direct result of prioritizing his culture-war bullshit over literally saving lives (or that that killing of people more or less on purpose is not a problem), I don't know what to say to you.
You’re right, we should start throwing them in the river while they bleat about how they are too important for things like that to happen to them, and then start holding publicly funded elections.
I am sure it is no coincidence that after Biden raised corporate taxes significantly and spent 2 trillion dollars on working people and climate change, they are suddenly so eager to switch to someone else (without particularly being bothered about who that other person should be and how they might fare in the election against Trump and playing up signs of weakness from the Biden side to argue for replacing him).
Tell all that to my family member. Once he’s out of the hospital and not in danger of the exact procedures Trump pushed hard for giving him some kind of currently-life-threatening infection, we can rap about jurisdiction and industrial numbers.
Sure, it’s hard to be precise about the outcomes what some theoretical more competent administration might have done differently. But yes, Trump’s measures killed some number of people, and gave some number more disability that lasts to the present day. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Like I say, once my family isn’t actively directly being endangered by the lasting after effects of his malicious policies, we can have a calm debate about it.
Infinitely worse. It’s hard to calculate, but there were countries where they literally had single digit covid numbers during the pre vaccine days, just because they gave the situation the gravity and strictness it deserved
I have a family member who’s in the hospital right now, in a part of the country where practically no one including the hospital staff is wearing a mask. It’s hard to even find them in the hospital to put one on. There are rooms clearly marked with mask and droplet precautions on the outside of the door, and the staff will take a mask from a box next to the door, go inside to deal with that person, and then when they’re done they take their mask back off and go back to walking around treating patients with no mask. What do the people in those rooms have? I don’t know but I can confidently say the hospital is fucking up in a fashion that is actively killing some number of patients and that politics are involved in that.
I am constantly worrying whether Trump’s bullshit will wind up adding my family member, individually and personally, to that 1.5 million surplus deaths
I'm gonna put myself in the shoe of some absurdly rich person who is donating to the Democrats who is on this call.
“Please help us turn down the volume on this conversation publicly,” Melissa Morales, founder and president of Somos Votantes, said on the call, according to a transcript obtained by NBC News. “It’s time to stop the leaks and the rampant rumors. Your message has been heard and received. But every day that we continue this publicly chaotic conversation, we come closer to a loss — no matter who the nominee is.”
Well... I can understand feeling a little cynical about "your message has been heard." Like, has it? It doesn't feel like it has. But I do have to say, I don't see how any person could disagree with the logic that yes, talking to the media about how much Joe Biden sucks and you can't support the Democrats anymore is (a) unlikely to lead to the Democrats suddenly embracing a winning strategy and (b) going to hurt the Democrats in this election. I think the way she said it gets pretty directly to the heart of what these people need to hear.
That didn’t sit well with some on the call.
“These are donors who are not used to getting admonished and told what to do,” the source said.
Those donors can go straight off and fuck themselves. "How dare you point out that I am fucking things up, I'm too important to have to listen to that" is exactly what the DNC has been doing for years. We don't need more of it in the equation.
That’s a pretty indirect way of saying that you want me to shut up and not speak. I plan to continue tho
Higgeldy piggeldy
Two things can be true 🥲😢😭
Arguing gives them a chance to look useful and wise when they are not though
The Republicans are scary, talking about real strategy is hard and messy, and Biden is old and safe to attack
Because the product is wonderful
Okay
I’m gonna channel all the anger I just felt in a productive direction
Trump did not “fuck up”. He succeeded at what he was trying to do, which goal was horrifying. “This doesn’t mean it’s Trump’s fault” is a load of horseshit, because a large part of the catastrophe was very much his fault. I feel like I’ve spent enough time breaking down why and how. If you want to pretend something else happened in the conversation, so you can keep a disagreement going with me for literally no reason at all, I have no plans to engage with it further.
Productive effort in a productive direction is incoming.