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Regarding the amazing failure of Trump virus response:

What seems to have happened is that in January President Trump appears to have taken a decision not to try to respond as vigorously and smartly as possible. In particular his understanding of the importance of testing in containing the virus is either at odds with the experts, or he understands the experts but is fine with allowing a much larger portion of the US population to die than would likely have happened if the US had chosen a different response path.

I am not sure this decision was really as clean-cut as that, but if I hypothesize that he made a decision something along these lines, then this hypothesis helps me a bit, I think, to understand his actions and inactions since then. This decision reflects what appears to be his sociopathic nature (if that is the right word), where basically he does not seem to care "that much" how many people die, or what long-term damage is done to the Constitution he is sworn to protect nor to the Economy, as long as he gets to maintain power. He did not seem to consult with anyone in a serious way on this decision, and while the net sum of US policy has been something different than what he personally would evidently prefer (thanks largely to heroic efforts from thousands and millions of citizens and elected officials, in some cases having to overcome Trump's obstruction and omissions) he has at times been able to implement further aspects of this apparent decision, such as by standing in the way of widespread affordable testing for everyone, and simultaneously encouraging the re-opening of states without adequate testing being in place.

The net impact seems to be that the US leads the world (by far) in reported virus deaths, and seems to be on a path of no-return where it will not be able to control the spread. If this were a war and Trump were a general, he would, because of the needless deaths of thousands and immediate needless endangerment of millions, be relieved of command without hesitation by any competent Commander-In-Chief. Does President Trump want to talk about President Lincoln? President Lincoln, among other things, was willing to step up and relieve generals of command if he thought those general were not getting the job done. President Trump is not getting the job done, but the only legal path for him to be relieved of command before the end of his term seem to be either the 25 Amendment or Impeachment & Removal. I don't think either one of those looks very likely at this point, so I think we (people in the US, but not outside the US) are left in a situation of having to try to survive (both medically, economically, psychologically and legally) a dangerously (fatally, if that's the right word) incompetent elected Commander-In-Chief until the next election.

I don't think I wrote these particular thoughts out with a focus on a specific constructive action that we can each take, but it seemed worth laying them out as I haven't run across a similar summary, and it's how I see things for now. Perhaps the constructive action is simply that for those of us caught in the US who see the situation in the way I've framed it, it can help our morale to know that others in the same situation see it similarly.

[Edit to add: I do think it might be interesting if one or more reporters thought through and refined and then posed questions to the President around whether President Trump has consciously chosen a path that ultimately leads to a much greater amount of virus death in the US than in many other countries.... and in any event, whether he has consciously gone in this direction or not, what he thinks about the fact that the US death toll is on a path to be far higher, per capita, than most other nations... does this show a failure of his leadership?.... It does, but it would be good to pose questions which start to put this topic on the table... probably some of these questions have already been posed, but I just don't have the stomach to pay attention to much of the news summaries of questions posed and how they were answered.]

Another thing that sometimes helps me keep broader perspective on trying to survive the Trump Presidency is to consult with how historians view the President. They may not always be right, whether in the short term or the long term, but in any case, sometimes I like to check in on this. Here we see how they presently view President Trump:

[en.wikipedia.org]

kmaz 7 May 4
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4 comments

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1

We may never know why Trump failed so utterly. As most notorious pathological liar in history, nothing he says can be reliable.

Either:

  1. Trump was continuing his treasonous dismantling from the inside under the directions of Putin; or,
  2. He imagined that it would be better for the pandemic to 'wash over the country' as he once said. He may not have know how a fully unleashed pandemic would undermine the economy and his reelection.
  3. He sought to profit off the the pandemic and skim testing contracts for domestic companies, rather than buy those available through WHO. However, his favored companies couldn't get their tests to work properly, and it became a fiasco that was so frustrating that he just handed the mess over to Pence (Who is equally incompetent). Other scenarios?....
1

What puzzles me and so many non-Americans is not so much Trump himself. (There have been bad presidents before but maybe not this bad). Trump is Trump and for all the liar, narcissist, and fool he is, he has been a consistent one. Nor even the empowering GOP, whose self-interest and corruption is seen as a normal part of American politics. No, what we find so hard to grasp is the American people themselves.
Despite all the lies and incompetence, his support seems unshaken. Really what has this guy got to do before the electorate cry "foul"? Can he actually shoot someone in Times Square and get away with it? (He would have to be a good shot to find someone atm). When he tells you that things are great 50% of you believe him. Just as they believe anything that went wrong was all fake-news or (insert this week's villain here) fault.
There was a long opinion piece in the Irish Times last week that summed up the general feeling about how we view you now. "For the first time in history, we pity America". And that is true, we do look at you as if you were some banana republic or African dictatorship at the will of a deranged despot.
This would be sad enough if it was some small backward nation but the USA has put itself at the forefront of world economics. The capitalist system is so dependant upon America that should you fall? we all fall with you. If as it seems highly likely, you fail to combat COVID-19 due to rash short-term eco-political decisions. Then those walls will be to keep you in and we will all lose.
[msnbc.com]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply from outside the US, I appreciate it.

This appears to be a link to the excellent piece you mention.

[irishtimes.com]
Fintan O’Toole: Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again
The world has loved, hated and envied the US. Now, for the first time, we pity it
Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 06:00
Fintan O'Toole
The Irish Times

It seems to be subscriber only and so I couldn't read it. I did read it through a third party site where it was posted probably in violation of copyright. At first I posted a link here, but old habits die hard, and I am generally against violating copyright unless it's somehow critical to do so, so I'll just say if anyone really wants to read it, as far as I know, for now, the wording is out there.

[edited]
I had written that I think the US is going through intellectual and moral bankruptcy. But maybe this is too facile, not to mention inappropriately dismissive.

I don't know, I was just out of work and trying to write quickly. I'll try to return to some of this another day. I'll say the currency of political ideas that has been most commonly traded over the last few decades, from all sides of the aisle, has usually struck me as a currency whose value was suspect, and to that extent, as with any large bankruptcy, we've been building up to this point for a long time, and I don't think the situation will be easily remedied. I wonder if this is sort of how it felt to watch Germany imploding circa 1936-1939.

@kmaz I read it on a copy/paste post on FB.
It still beggars the question; "What does Trump have to do or say that will disillusion his base?" Everywhere else in the world, this crisis is seen as a referendum on their respective govts competency. (Can we have a clone of NZs PM please) Yet the US electorate seems utterly blinkered to his mishandling and politicizing the situation, at the cost of so many lives.
Note; We have not fared much better in the UK. The official death count so far is over 30,000. Boris talks a good game but results say otherwise.

@273kelvin

I think the base is fine with him, and I don't think that will ever change. One point to be made about this is that they were so enraged for so many decades by what they saw as the condescending assumptions of so many who opposed them, (or indeed they may simply not care what is right, and they may just like the power grab that a Trump presidency gives them?) that they take every word out of the mouth of Trump as speaking some emotional truth (regardless of its actual content) that can't be countered. Since we are on agnostic.com/humanist.com, there is a question to be explored of the extent to which this ugly anti-intellectual (and maybe amoral?) support stems in part from generations of US citizens drinking the anti-intellectual anti-human koolaid of theistic religions, and I think there is some of that, but it is not as clear-cut as that in my view. I think there are some secular folks out there who support not only Trump but the Republicans with whom he has worked, and there are some theists who have attempted excellent strong smart opposition to the Trump-led American decline.

[edit] I think the present situation is a measure (or "referendum" ) not only of the competency of the government, but of intellectual bankruptcy. Such bankruptcy assessment can't be applied to all individuals within a collective. However, The US is, after all, a "democracy" and while there is a sense that the voters and supporters of Mitch McConnell et. al. are the ones primarily or directly (in the near-term) responsible for this situation, there is also another (limited) sense in which one can criticize the electorate (or, as I like to call ourselves sometimes, ... .all of us on the hiring committee).

If Darwin Awards can sort of be awarded to collectives as well as to individuals, then the US is going for a Darwin award of historic proportions, and has arguably been laying the groundwork for that, particularly with bad philosophy and thinking pervading our society, for a very long time.

@kmaz Oh, you are right about some atheist Republicans. They do have their rather small group on here

@273kelvin

To me it's an open question how many of the folks here are US folks who generally support ... what should I call it... not so much Reagan Republicanism from decades ago, but modern/day full-blown insane Trump/Trumpism.

I can say that I'm wary of any assumption that the US folks here on this site would be dramatically different in this respect than US folks in general. I'd sort of like to think that, but I don't know. A lot of the folks who supported and voted for Trump in 2016 were might in some ways mirror some of the demographics here (not that I really know what the demographics here are. Fwiw, here are the demographics from the 2016 election:

[en.wikipedia.org]

In any case, a harsh lesson or fact-of-life here in the US over the last 3 years has been: No, it was not just 3 people in [fill in a given state here] who voted for this guy and are proud of it. Many of one's friends, family and neighbors, including otherwise capable people, were and still are good with him. Yes, some of the people who voted for Trump might say they were more voting against Hillary, just as I would say that several of my recent Presidential votes were more of an emergency vote, in my view, against the categorically hateful / awful candidate the Republicans put up. Still, I wouldn't be completely shocked if the numbers here reflected a percentage more for him than one might want to guess.

fwiw, a couple of points I use to keep this in perspective:

  1. you're not here, and I don't know if you would have run across this story.. the famous basketball player Charles Barkley said about 15 years ago: "....I was a Republican until they lost their minds...."]

  2. In my view, many US citizens, going back to the 90s, invested so much time listening to, and to some extent buying into, right-wing radio, print and TV, and so much of this included making a cottage industry of hating on Hillary Clinton and the Clintons in general (since the early 90s) that by the time she ran for President, and by the time there was arguably manipulation of the Democratic primaries to help her win the primary in 2016, millions of Americans (my wild guess) had in effect backed themselves intellectually into a corner which involved them absolutely not voting for her. If someone has told me, for 25 years, that they utterly hate or despise or dislike or distrust a given person, and will never vote for that person to be President, .... then, whether I think they are right or not to distrust that candidate.... when it comes time to cast the vote, I should not be surprised if that voter does everything in their power to vote against the person whom they have declared they oppose so strongly. Democrats who at the time wanted to argue some of this ... (that it was unreasonable to hate Hillary, etc.) were missing the point - the point here I think was that they were very much not listening to their fellow US citizens. I hate that so many of my fellow Americans invested 25 years in such pathetic shallow thinking and muddy waters, but they did, and that was the reality of it, and I dislike Democratic party decision-makers and thought-leaders for not reflecting in their key decisions a better understanding of this reality.

@kmaz My impression of the political demographics on here is that it is a-typical of the US in general. The lack of religious thinking automatically removes not only the alt-right Christians but also a broad spectrum of "God and country" flag waivers. The few Trumpers left are heavily outnumbered and as such can be popular as a pork pie at a bar-mitzvah. So I think many tend to leave.
The 2016 election was a huge foot-shooting exercise for the Demographic party. Whilst Trump's slogan was "MAGA" Hillarys was "It's my turn".

@273kelvin

It was interesting to me how the US had a last chance to get rid of its historically disastrous and awful elected head of state just before and as the key early pandemic decisions needed to be made - decisions that could so obviously (to many thinking people in that moment) have saved so many lives and so much capital and public health) - and yet we decided not to get rid of that historically awful head of state - and so we in the electorate in effect added to our responsibility for his actions and inactions. I'm not an expert in US history, but the President who has been coming to mind since it became apparent that the Republicans were not going to put up for election anything other than a nasty pretext at a freedom-protecting person .... is Andrew Johnson who I believe came after Lincoln and was impeached but not removed. It seems to me a long time ago that I heard that the remainder of his Presidency amounted to Congress largely ignoring him and going about the country's business, but at other times I've heard differently, so I'm not sure. I'm not trying to say the parallels here are that strong, I'm just saying my probably botched understanding of the Johnson Presidency has come to mind here and there.

While at times I have wondered to what extent the views and level of thinking on this site, on various issues, may speak well for atheist thinking (to the extent that some of the people on the site will cop to atheism), at other times I am disappointed (though not surprised).

Focusing for a moment on the issue of widespread US voter support for Trump and, by extension, for historically deficient pandemic response that has resulted in dozens of thousands of extra deaths so far, .... and which has arguably resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars, in extra damage to the economy so far, ... I'm wary of the extent to which I need to learn the lesson of the 2016 vote. There are more voters of that sort around than some of us sometimes want to admit to ourselves, and some of them are not theists. They may tend to quiet down in the face of what they see as unlistening tone-deaf progressive or liberal nonsense, but they are there. I'm going to guess that there are a few more here than I sometimes want to believe. It's not just a matter of Trump voters, but also of folks who may have had the sense to vote against him, but who still buy into a fair amount of the right-wing pseudo-liberty-loving agenda. I've said to folks many times over the last 20-30 years, and I'll repeat here for any atheist that might find it of use to think over (though I've had to block three of the folks here, so I"m not sure how many it would then apply to) - if you are voting for the Republicans and think that you are voting for such principles as:

  • some way of looking at things that is opposed to welfare statism and supports a "stand-on-your-own-two-feet" approach to life,
  • basic protection of property rights and individual liberties and rugged individualism and Constitutional Rights.
  • basic protections of free markets

.... if you think than in voting for such Republicans as Mitch McConnell that generally you are supporting these things, then I'm sorry, but I have to be blunt: How stupid can you be? This is not to say that those principles are to be taken as assumed correct or perfect, and it is not to ignore that sometimes US voters casting votes for Republicans are actually intending to convey more of a disgust with the Democrats than a support of a Republican (just as I in voting Democrat am often to some degree attempting to convey somewhat the opposite). However, it is to say that I know that this is part of what is on the mind of some US voters going with Republicans, and I know that appealing to these principles and related ones is part of the pitch of many Republican politicians, and I just want to get across to some of my fellow US voters if they are of a mind to consider it, that for the most part many Republican elected officials at the federal and sometimes at the state level are several parsecs away from standing up with real consistency for what those voters think of as good principles.....

At the same time I would have to admit that part of it is also that whatever good I myself may have found in those principles at one time has in my view, in some ways, been subverted or evolved or mangled away in various intellectual bankruptcy proceedings at both parties and elsewhere.

0

CNN and Jake Tapper had a very excellent hour and half program last night outlining the time line of the COVID response (Covid and the President - available on podcast.

To those of you would reject it out of hand because it was produced by CNN, I reject your responsr, your judgement, and your conclusion. He reported facts and times. If you intelligent to understand it, you are intelligent enough to filter any conclusions he may have made that you may not like.

Ok, but how does that relate to what I've written? I don't automatically reject anything from CNN, but could you provide a slightly better summary of what they say and how it relates?

I can't quite figure out if it's here or somewhere else.

[cnn.com]

@kmaz you were outlying aspects of the events. Just another source that addresses events.

@t1nick

Ok, thanks, I"ll keep my eye out for a link or maybe on one of my internet radio stations.

@kmaz

I looked for one and couldnt find. My not be released as a podcast yet. But should be in a week or two.

@t1nick

Ok, thx.

3

I empathize, but try ranting more succintly. Let me give you an example that takes only 1 minute.

@Fred_Snerd not advocating for ads, instead I prefer honest and direct as you but coupled with brevity, like most members here we don't have too much time in our hands to read long winded rants that can be edited to be sharp and to the point.

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