How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world | Carole Cadwalladr
www.theguardian.com
In the wake of Trump’s unnerving appointees, the investigative journalist and veteran of the libel court offers pointers on coping in an age of surveillance

  1. Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”

  2. Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that.

He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.

  1. Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that.

A fundraising banner from The Guardian, an indepedent British newspaper. The centerpiece is a serif block "For f****s sake", with the letters after the f sprayed over with "act '"

  • MonkRome@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    7 hours ago

    We had the most severe rate of COVID deaths in the world outside of Eastern Europe. That shouldn’t happen in the most powerful country in the world. We failed to do the things we needed to early on and created a culture of misinformation because our president decided to play politics in a crisis.

    Had we reacted as well as New Zealand, largely considered to have one of the better responses, we theoretically could have had 280k deaths instead of 1.2 million. (If we matched their death rate) Obviously population density and our countries complex system account for some of the difference in death rate, but it doesn’t account for the enormous gulf between us and other wealthy countries. We are the only wealthy country in the world that had a death rate as high as ours. He bungled the response and likely got an extra half a million people killed. It’s amazing that this fact alone didn’t end his political career, but Americans suck at interpreting data.

    • Free_Opinions@feddit.ukEnglish
      16·
      5 hours ago

      Sure, but the person I was replying to claimed that “Trump’s incompetence caused a million people to die,” and I was questioning whether all of that can really be blamed on him. Because I don’t think so. He was pro-vaccine from the beginning, and there were plenty of Democrat politicians saying they wouldn’t take “the Trump vaccine.”

      And no, I don’t think the situation was handled optimally in the U.S. - but that was the case almost everywhere. Obviously, Trump isn’t without fault here, but placing all the blame on him feels disingenuous

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.orgOP
        5·
        4 hours ago

        Democrat politicians saying they wouldn’t take “the Trump vaccine.”

        That sounds wild. Could you provide an example?

        • Free_Opinions@feddit.ukEnglish
          23·
          4 hours ago

          Well apparently they didn’t exactly say they’d refuse to take it but voiced their scepticism about it nevertheless.

          In September, Harris, then the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate, hesitated when asked if she would take a vaccine that was approved before the election.

          “I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump,” Harris said, “and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take his word for it.”

          Cuomo went further, suggesting he mistrusted not just President Donald Trump, but also the Food and Drug Administration under Trump. Asked about his confidence in the FDA, Cuomo indicated he didn’t have much.

          “I’m not that confident,” Cuomo said, adding: “You’re going to say to the American people now, ‘Here’s a vaccine, it was new, it was done quickly, but trust this federal administration and their health administration that it’s safe? And we’re not 100 percent sure of the consequences.’ I think it’s going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be.”

          Source

          • Aatube@kbin.melroy.orgOP
            2·
            4 hours ago

            Hmm. I will say I think the skepticism of the vaccine that came out too quick was bipartisan, though, if not more among Republicans.

            • Free_Opinions@feddit.ukEnglish
              3·
              4 hours ago

              I don’t think there’s inherently anything wrong about scepticism towards new things like that. It’s when the disnformation and conspiracies comes in that it turns kinda sinister.

              Probably true that it’s more common on the right - in the U.S. atleast.