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On December 11 2020 22:00 MWY wrote:Show nested quote +On December 11 2020 15:14 Biff The Understudy wrote:On December 10 2020 15:43 Uldridge wrote:
Let's get this straight once and for all: every Western country fucked up.
This is a combination of a government that's too caught up in its popularity, while its citizens are too entitled.
We don't see the sociological impacts in Asians countries (how has their younger population coped with lockdowns for example), but we should stop bickerig among ourselves about this country or that country or whatever weird kind of fucked up dick measuring contest you're all doing and just accept it's all fucked.
The best thing a government could've done is build a framework for future crises like this while also dissecting the shit out of every aspect of this.
Instead, we get patchwork and running after the facts. Every Western government should be collectively fired for gross incompetence. Either everyone is stupid and incompetent or the virus is very, very hard to deal with. It's true that we were all unprepared, but it's exceedingly hard to be prepared for something like that. I find that the norwegian government has done reaaaaally well to keep the country and its people safe. Granted the task was easier than elsewhere but imo they have been remarkably efficient (mind you I don't like them at all). Altogether the virus had all the ingredients to make an absolute carnage. The fact that it didn't (relatively speaking) is actually a huge success. I think the biggest issue is the liberty of the people in western countries. Basically I think as a politician you're very limited in what you can do because you need the support and understanding of the people. You're very limited in actually enforcing rules when the people dont follow them compared to less liberal countries, so you basically have to wait until it gets worse before you're able to act in more drastic ways. To be honest I think the issue here is more the people in western countries than the governments.
People being less pro-liberty is a worse public health crisis than Covid. Democide is a real thing and so is stuff like Uighur treatment or your own history of Governments treating their own people...with contempt. You don't want your fellow countryman to praise authoritarianism or to have authoritarian impulses that are easily taken advantage of. Yeah, having liberal republics and democracies make Covid mandates tougher (or a no go), but trust me you don't want the Governments of Southeast Asian countries. (People would not tolerate Singapore social policy at all for instance - look at their sentencing for basic shit we take for granted in the West)
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On December 12 2020 11:39 StasisField wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2020 11:18 WombaT wrote:On December 12 2020 10:52 StasisField wrote:On December 12 2020 10:47 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
So it started with 'Trump will stomp his feet like he always does, nothing to see here' but now it's: 126 House Republicans and 17 states signed support for an insane lawsuit to overturn the election, and after it was swatted down by the supreme court the Texas GOP is ready to secede from the union.
Where does it end? Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo? It was news to me that this was still rumbling on, been a bit of a hermit lately. Fucking hell. But hey Trump’s reign is just a few mean tweets and has no wider destructive impact on the political fabric right? I remember conservatives in this thread claiming Trump and his allies wouldn't put up such a fight if he lost. He'd just move on and that would be that. I can'y believe how naive us on the left were to believe Trump would desperately try to cling to power! /s
I really feel foolish for not listening to our forward-looking conservative friends when they lectured us on the pitfalls of being worried about an attempted coup on our democracy. In hindsight, it was never ever going to happen, ever, and no one with their head on straight was ever going to entertain the idea. We weren't even really basing it on anything, and had no idea whatsoever what was going to happen given the president's past behavior.
Yeahhhh.
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On December 11 2020 23:00 Uldridge wrote:
I think people studying historical sociology should be able to pinpoint where things started to deteriorate for us. Is it the post-modernistic influence sphere? Perhaps. I can certainly understand the arguments for it. Verifying them as a whole different thing.
Why are you so pessimistic and negative?
I think the way the world handled the pandemic was, considering the scope of the disaster, remarkable. In any other period of world history, millions upon millions would have died, and societies would never have been able to organize themselves in such a coordinated way to handle the virus.
The one that got fucked are poor countries. And they are the true victims of the pandemic. As for the West, I think that its handing of Corona will be judged by history as a success story.
Now, if there is a lesson to be learnt, it's that our main weakness lies in the lack of trust that plagues our societies. Our main problem is the cynicism and the defiance of our people towards their governments and towards each other.
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Nah. It's incompetence in the government. That's mostly the single thing that can be pointed at. This admin fucked up royally on a lot of fronts. Don't romanticize it.
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On December 12 2020 12:40 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On December 11 2020 22:00 MWY wrote:On December 11 2020 15:14 Biff The Understudy wrote:On December 10 2020 15:43 Uldridge wrote:
Let's get this straight once and for all: every Western country fucked up.
This is a combination of a government that's too caught up in its popularity, while its citizens are too entitled.
We don't see the sociological impacts in Asians countries (how has their younger population coped with lockdowns for example), but we should stop bickerig among ourselves about this country or that country or whatever weird kind of fucked up dick measuring contest you're all doing and just accept it's all fucked.
The best thing a government could've done is build a framework for future crises like this while also dissecting the shit out of every aspect of this.
Instead, we get patchwork and running after the facts. Every Western government should be collectively fired for gross incompetence. Either everyone is stupid and incompetent or the virus is very, very hard to deal with. It's true that we were all unprepared, but it's exceedingly hard to be prepared for something like that. I find that the norwegian government has done reaaaaally well to keep the country and its people safe. Granted the task was easier than elsewhere but imo they have been remarkably efficient (mind you I don't like them at all). Altogether the virus had all the ingredients to make an absolute carnage. The fact that it didn't (relatively speaking) is actually a huge success. I think the biggest issue is the liberty of the people in western countries. Basically I think as a politician you're very limited in what you can do because you need the support and understanding of the people. You're very limited in actually enforcing rules when the people dont follow them compared to less liberal countries, so you basically have to wait until it gets worse before you're able to act in more drastic ways. To be honest I think the issue here is more the people in western countries than the governments. People being less pro-liberty is a worse public health crisis than Covid. Democide is a real thing and so is stuff like Uighur treatment or your own history of Governments treating their own people...with contempt. You don't want your fellow countryman to praise authoritarianism or to have authoritarian impulses that are easily taken advantage of. Yeah, having liberal republics and democracies make Covid mandates tougher (or a no go), but trust me you don't want the Governments of Southeast Asian countries. (People would not tolerate Singapore social policy at all for instance - look at their sentencing for basic shit we take for granted in the West)
Respect for government regulations and your fellow countrymen during time of crisis has nothing to do with people being 'less pro-liberty.' If anything, the liberty crisis is in people corrupting the ideals of freedom and using their personal liberty as an excuse to avoid any and all civic duty or responsibility for the actions they take -- and with that, making a large number of people disillusioned with liberal ideas. You're talking as if it's impossible for a liberal, democratic country to deal with Covid -- but there are multiple examples of liberal, democratic countries doing just that. It's not as if only authoritarian states managed to deal with the coronavirus crisis; Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan are some of the most 'free' countries in the world yet they have all done better than Europe or the US have. And now as a result they can actually live much more freely than the covid-riddled yet 'free' Europe or USA.
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On December 12 2020 12:40 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On December 11 2020 22:00 MWY wrote:On December 11 2020 15:14 Biff The Understudy wrote:On December 10 2020 15:43 Uldridge wrote:
Let's get this straight once and for all: every Western country fucked up.
This is a combination of a government that's too caught up in its popularity, while its citizens are too entitled.
We don't see the sociological impacts in Asians countries (how has their younger population coped with lockdowns for example), but we should stop bickerig among ourselves about this country or that country or whatever weird kind of fucked up dick measuring contest you're all doing and just accept it's all fucked.
The best thing a government could've done is build a framework for future crises like this while also dissecting the shit out of every aspect of this.
Instead, we get patchwork and running after the facts. Every Western government should be collectively fired for gross incompetence. Either everyone is stupid and incompetent or the virus is very, very hard to deal with. It's true that we were all unprepared, but it's exceedingly hard to be prepared for something like that. I find that the norwegian government has done reaaaaally well to keep the country and its people safe. Granted the task was easier than elsewhere but imo they have been remarkably efficient (mind you I don't like them at all). Altogether the virus had all the ingredients to make an absolute carnage. The fact that it didn't (relatively speaking) is actually a huge success. I think the biggest issue is the liberty of the people in western countries. Basically I think as a politician you're very limited in what you can do because you need the support and understanding of the people. You're very limited in actually enforcing rules when the people dont follow them compared to less liberal countries, so you basically have to wait until it gets worse before you're able to act in more drastic ways. To be honest I think the issue here is more the people in western countries than the governments. People being less pro-liberty is a worse public health crisis than Covid. Democide is a real thing and so is stuff like Uighur treatment or your own history of Governments treating their own people...with contempt. You don't want your fellow countryman to praise authoritarianism or to have authoritarian impulses that are easily taken advantage of. Yeah, having liberal republics and democracies make Covid mandates tougher (or a no go), but trust me you don't want the Governments of Southeast Asian countries. (People would not tolerate Singapore social policy at all for instance - look at their sentencing for basic shit we take for granted in the West)
Frankly if people on a certain side weren't such idiots and if some politicians didn't frame obvious stuff like wearing a fucking mask as a political and "liberty" issue, the dichotomy between the messy and inefficient democracies that can't react and the efficient but awful asian authoritarian government wouldn't exist in the first place.
Norway has been incredibly efficient at dealing with covid, but then again we don't have Donald Trump undermining trust in science and politicizing everything - and people who think that masks are useless, that it's better to let people die than hurt The Economy or that the government asking you to take certain steps is literally Hitler.
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On December 12 2020 17:43 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Nah. It's incompetence in the government. That's mostly the single thing that can be pointed at. This admin fucked up royally on a lot of fronts. Don't romanticize it.
Oh I'm not talking specifically about the US, but the West as a whole. The US is doing comparatively terribly, but that was to be expected.
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On December 12 2020 10:52 StasisField wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2020 10:47 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
So it started with 'Trump will stomp his feet like he always does, nothing to see here' but now it's: 126 House Republicans and 17 states signed support for an insane lawsuit to overturn the election, and after it was swatted down by the supreme court the Texas GOP is ready to secede from the union.
Where does it end? Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo?
Why have a civil war about it? Just let the republican states with their broken economies secede, and have a union of sane states left over. Offer unconditional asylum for anyone fleeing the broken backwards republican hellhole.
At some point you have to stop fighting people from digging their own graves. At least in the resulting states you can have a sane party structure, because you no longer have to care about republicans. You could have a democrat party and a progressive party, or maybe even reform the broken shit FPTP system.
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On December 12 2020 19:21 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2020 10:52 StasisField wrote:On December 12 2020 10:47 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
So it started with 'Trump will stomp his feet like he always does, nothing to see here' but now it's: 126 House Republicans and 17 states signed support for an insane lawsuit to overturn the election, and after it was swatted down by the supreme court the Texas GOP is ready to secede from the union.
Where does it end? Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo? Why have a civil war about it? Just let the republican states with their broken economies secede, and have a union of sane states left over. Offer unconditional asylum for anyone fleeing the broken backwards republican hellhole. At some point you have to stop fighting people from digging their own graves. At least in the resulting states you can have a sane party structure, because you no longer have to care about republicans. You could have a democrat party and a progressive party, or maybe even reform the broken shit FPTP system.
As a progressive who lives in this "broken backwards republican hellhole", this is a disgusting way to look at other human beings. No one is "too far gone", and even though I hate the politics of my state, I love the people and I love the land and, unless under threat of death or oppression, I would not leave. What you're suggesting lacks compassion and empathy for tens of millions of people. It's shit like this that serves to further divide people. What a fucking terrible mindset to have, my god.
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On December 12 2020 17:34 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Why are you so pessimistic and negative?
I think the way the world handled the pandemic was, considering the scope of the disaster, remarkable. In any other period of world history, millions upon millions would have died, and societies would never have been able to organize themselves in such a coordinated way to handle the virus.
The one that got fucked are poor countries. And they are the true victims of the pandemic. As for the West, I think that its handing of Corona will be judged by history as a success story.
Now, if there is a lesson to be learnt, it's that our main weakness lies in the lack of trust that plagues our societies. Our main problem is the cynicism and the defiance of our people towards their governments and towards each other.
The world where everyone can basically have instant communication with anyone else is one that can't be compared with previous eras. Even though, as you say, the virus probably would have wreaked more havoc in those other times. I don't see the lack of trust and compliance of citizens and government running on egg shells to appease the different pillars a success story. I see it as a system that's become overly comples for humans to deal with and we're not mature enough to accept that fact.
I think we live in wonderful times in a sense, where technological feats are awesome, but our social capabilities, which might be just as important, as it's some lizard brain part of us that we need to function correctly has been sorely lagging behind in all of this. We don't know how to behave anymore. I don't want people in future generations to become apathic robots simply because we've become desentisized to everything without actually experiencing trauma. I'm basically afraid we're heading towards the fate of Universe 25. But it's just a fear. I like to express it on here because then I can hopefully get someone witty enough to slap some sense into it!
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On December 12 2020 19:36 StasisField wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2020 19:21 Simberto wrote:On December 12 2020 10:52 StasisField wrote:On December 12 2020 10:47 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
So it started with 'Trump will stomp his feet like he always does, nothing to see here' but now it's: 126 House Republicans and 17 states signed support for an insane lawsuit to overturn the election, and after it was swatted down by the supreme court the Texas GOP is ready to secede from the union.
Where does it end? Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo? Why have a civil war about it? Just let the republican states with their broken economies secede, and have a union of sane states left over. Offer unconditional asylum for anyone fleeing the broken backwards republican hellhole. At some point you have to stop fighting people from digging their own graves. At least in the resulting states you can have a sane party structure, because you no longer have to care about republicans. You could have a democrat party and a progressive party, or maybe even reform the broken shit FPTP system. As a progressive who lives in this "broken backwards republican hellhole", this is a disgusting way to look at other human beings. No one is "too far gone", and even though I hate the politics of my state, I love the people and I love the land and, unless under threat of death or oppression, I would not leave. What you're suggesting lacks compassion and empathy for tens of millions of people. It's shit like this that serves to further divide people. What a fucking terrible mindset to have, my god. I agree not to shove the actions of some on everyone but these few people are for all intents and purposes trying to destroy democracy and instate a dictatorship.
There is only so much "love thy neighbour" they deserve, at some point they need to take responsibility for what they are trying to do.
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On December 12 2020 19:36 StasisField wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2020 19:21 Simberto wrote:On December 12 2020 10:52 StasisField wrote:On December 12 2020 10:47 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
So it started with 'Trump will stomp his feet like he always does, nothing to see here' but now it's: 126 House Republicans and 17 states signed support for an insane lawsuit to overturn the election, and after it was swatted down by the supreme court the Texas GOP is ready to secede from the union.
Where does it end? Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo? Why have a civil war about it? Just let the republican states with their broken economies secede, and have a union of sane states left over. Offer unconditional asylum for anyone fleeing the broken backwards republican hellhole. At some point you have to stop fighting people from digging their own graves. At least in the resulting states you can have a sane party structure, because you no longer have to care about republicans. You could have a democrat party and a progressive party, or maybe even reform the broken shit FPTP system. As a progressive who lives in this "broken backwards republican hellhole", this is a disgusting way to look at other human beings. No one is "too far gone", and even though I hate the politics of my state, I love the people and I love the land and, unless under threat of death or oppression, I would not leave. What you're suggesting lacks compassion and empathy for tens of millions of people. It's shit like this that serves to further divide people. What a fucking terrible mindset to have, my god.
The problem is that your republican assholes continue breaking the rest of the US and trying to institute their fascist hellhole everywhere. Any attempt at getting them to be reasonable has only made them double and triple down on their insanity. I absolutely think that one should attempt to save the people who want saving.
But your state (and other like it) keep reelecting the people who make stuff worse for everyone else. It is exhausting trying to fight them for their own good. At some point, one has to simply let them have their hellholes and save the people who want saving, or they drag the rest of the US into their hellhole with them.
Just imagine the US without even one of these republican hellholes. Gore instead of Bush in 2000 (probably meaning no Iraq war). No Trump. No senate deadlock during Obamas term.
The sad fact of the matter is that in part of the country, a majority wants stuff which is really, really bad for them and really bad for everyone else. And they are also completely fine with turning fascist to get those things. I say if they want to secede, don't fight a civil war over it. At least it stops them from having any influence on the rest of the country.
Of course do anything you can to save the people who want to get saved. But apparently large amounts of the population really, really want to touch the hot stove and will punch you in the face if you attempt to stop them from doing it.
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I don't think Texas is seriously considering leaving the US, they just want to act tough to save face from this embarassing failure.
I actually expected some Dem-heavy states to threaten to leave the union if any of those court cases got some headway in the SC, but it surprised me the first hints at that came from the Trump camp.
The divide is becoming even deeper, it will take decades to bring the country back together if it is it even possible.
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Norway28561 Posts
On December 12 2020 17:47 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2020 17:43 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Nah. It's incompetence in the government. That's mostly the single thing that can be pointed at. This admin fucked up royally on a lot of fronts. Don't romanticize it. Oh I'm not talking specifically about the US, but the West as a whole. The US is doing comparatively terribly, but that was to be expected.
While a country like Norway has something like 7% of the deaths per capita you see in the US, countries like France, Italy, UK, Spain, are at similar numbers. Belgium is higher. Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Portugal, Czech Rep, Switzerland are all at 60% or more of US numbers.
I'm definitely happy with Norway's response, overall. The recent revelations about justifications for allowing workers from countries with high infection rates to skip mandatory quarantine are a bit damning, but even taking that into account, it's mostly been fine. I'm also not too critical of Italy, specifically.
Other than that though? I definitely think the countries that are outliers are the ones that handled it well, not the ones that handled it poorly.
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On December 12 2020 20:32 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2020 17:47 Biff The Understudy wrote:On December 12 2020 17:43 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Nah. It's incompetence in the government. That's mostly the single thing that can be pointed at. This admin fucked up royally on a lot of fronts. Don't romanticize it. Oh I'm not talking specifically about the US, but the West as a whole. The US is doing comparatively terribly, but that was to be expected. While a country like Norway has something like 7% of the deaths per capita you see in the US, countries like France, Italy, UK, Spain, are at similar numbers. Belgium is higher. Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Portugal, Czech Rep, Switzerland are all at 60% or more of US numbers. I'm definitely happy with Norway's response, overall. The recent revelations about justifications for allowing workers from countries with high infection rates to skip mandatory quarantine are a bit damning, but even taking that into account, it's mostly been fine. I'm also not too critical of Italy, specifically. Other than that though? I definitely think the countries that are outliers are the ones that handled it well, not the ones that handled it poorly.
Well, I don't know. I look at France and everything the government has done is perfectly reasonable. I think they handled it well. Could some stuff have been better? Sure. But we have a traditionally and culturally unruly and contrarian population, and we get out of it more or less in one piece. I don't think the french government did that much worse than Norway's. It just happens that no one trusts the government (any government) in France, and that Norwegians are both trusting and disciplined. Altogether, both countries did well, adjusted to their respective situations imo.
The problem with the US is that a whole party sabotaged every piece of scientific advice because they are cynical pond scums, and that their supporters don't see through it. The third wave should not be what it is and many parts of the country have suffered unnecessarily. Regardless the comparative numbers, those self inflicted wounds disqualifies the country from "having done well". When your leader voluntarily kill people because politicizing the mask is good for his reelection chances and his twisted ego, there is a problem.
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Wanting to cleanse the nation of the wrong thinkers is never going to win you the points you think they will. On top of that its fucking stupid. When the wrong thinks economy explodes (alongside yours as the economies are interdependent) it'll just lead to a giant war that would end up with tens of millions of dead in the best of cases.
You're literaly no better then GH's "gee the revolution won't be violent but violence is to be expected so it will be violent"
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On December 13 2020 02:02 Sermokala wrote:
Wanting to cleanse the nation of the wrong thinkers is never going to win you the points you think they will. On top of that its fucking stupid. When the wrong thinks economy explodes (alongside yours as the economies are interdependent) it'll just lead to a giant war that would end up with tens of millions of dead in the best of cases.
You're literaly no better then GH's "gee the revolution won't be violent but violence is to be expected so it will be violent"
If you civil war instead, you get that war immediately.
I was just saying that if the republican states want to secede, let them. No reason to fight a war to force them to stay in a position where they can ruin your politics.
That is not "cleansing of the wrong thinkers", it is letting them make their own decisions. At some point if someone constantly fights you because they want to touch the hot stove, maybe you just need to let them touch it while keeping them from also grabbing your hand and forcing it onto the hot stove, too.
And if that person then tell you they want to leave to get their own place with their own stove so they can touch it without your interference, maybe you don't fight them over it anymore. No reason to keep getting punched in the face by them because you try to save them from their own stupidity.
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I wonder what kind of pivot Mitch McConnell and his ilk would make if the cries to secede became loud enough. Though morally bankrupt they aren't stupid, and surely they wouldn't just quietly trade their current power for rulership of an impoverished, third-world hell hole.
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On December 13 2020 02:59 Starlightsun wrote:
I wonder what kind of pivot Mitch McConnell and his ilk would make if the cries to secede became loud enough. Though morally bankrupt they aren't stupid, and surely they wouldn't just quietly trade their current power for rulership of an impoverished, third-world hell hole.
Yeah taking a quick gander at GDP per state, secession is a very lol idea from salty republicans
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Might finally get that Judge Dredd universe in real life. MegaCity 1 aka tri-state Texas.
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EPT
