Yes, I do remember the Trump White House making the decision to keep COVID guidance classified for what appeared to be political gains. I remember my boss at the time arguing against that decision and receiving retaliation, leading us to pivot our business strategy near the equinox.
(I was told that) the last Trump administration’s hires were so inept that they didn’t change the passcode to dial in to the situation room as I listened in to this meeting, live. I hope that Tulsi (or whoever the new DNI ends up being) will be smart enough to change the passcodes on day 1. It’s a matter of national security. My revealing this is intended to serve as a reminder to do better this time. Maybe it’s moot because I doubt that the situation room is still running Adobe Connect (I hope), and maybe the new system was designed help facilitate better opsec (I hope). I broke my brain a bit by forcing firefox to run Flash in March 2020, two months after its supposed EOL in January 2020, just to listen to that shitshow. Completely shattered what was left of my faith in our federal government’s ability to do anything.
I don’t remember any evidence that Trump himself was involved in that decision-making, but 1) that doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved in the decision-making outside of where I had limited visibility and 2) that doesn’t mean he isn’t responsible for the actions and decisions of those he nepotistically hired.
I’ll note that my perception of all this was filtered through a really weird job I ended up at under questionable circumstances and it’s hard for me to put much certainty behind any claims without external, corroborating, contextual evidence.
Thank you for the reminder… it’s been a crazy ride and that was a completely different life for me that’s genuinely hard for me to think about or remember much of until someone says something that brings back rushes of memories and leaves me shaking and a bit disoriented and I end up sleeping a lot to recover.
Please gimme a source on those calculations you’re talking about.
After thinking about these a bit more, especially The Lancet article, I have a hypothesis.
For wealthy neoliberal elites, COVID was babby’s first trauma, so they overestimate how badly it impacted the average worker. It was so much worse than anything that had happened in their privileged lives up to that point that by comparison it was a world-altering traumatic event that changed everything.
Working people are used to surviving hardships (especially medical hardships) while those in power ignore them. COVID and the Trump administration’s lack of response was just business as usual. Compared to other widespread diseases that get routinely ignored and for which poor people routinely get denied care, COVID was minor (albeit more infectious) and easily forgettable.
That’s my best guess for why the libshits can’t grok why the little people reacted with such indifference while they lost their fucking minds.
That is part of it, but there is also a long-running thread of medical denialism in society. People want to believe their home remedies, homeopathic cures, chiropractic adjustments, or bleach enemas can cure things just as well or better than certified doctors can. To be fair to them, it has only been about 130 years since doctors learned they should wash their hands before surgery. The average person isn’t educated enough to understand how safe, effective, and trustworthy vaccines are.
The other part of it is explained by the lottery. Millions and millions of people play the lottery regularly even though the odds of them winning are about the same as getting struck by lightning while getting bitten by a shark. The average person is shit at understanding odds. They think that they will be lucky enough to beat the odds.
That applies for avoiding Covid. They don’t understand that being harmed by the vaccine is far fat less likely than being harmed by the disease. They think they can beat the odds by not getting the disease and still avoid Covid. Some won, but most lost.
Yeah. Medical and science denialism is a big problem. It gets fed when medicine and science are presented as absolutes with no room for debate or discussion, just blind fealty to experts. As a trained scientist who has worked professionally as a scientist for 12 years, I don’t trust several disciplines because they project this attitude. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical of those who ask for blind trust in authority.
I’m a former scientist in the environmental field and we deal with similar denialism for similar reasons. As science and technology get more complex, the average person simply doesn’t have the background to understand the problem, let alone possible solutions. A certain amount of trust in authority is necessary unfortunately.
If you tell people to trust authorities about climate change instead of fostering critical thought and understanding, who is to say that their authorities will align with yours?
Your assertion is a recipe for pushing people to believe misinformation because they feel that they can trust their pastor or their employer or the guy on the news more than some nerd.
I get your point but there is a middle ground. You can apply critical thought to the selection of authorities you can trust. You wouldn’t trust an auto mechanic to tell you if your mole was cancerous even though you do trust them with your transmission, right? We need to teach people to recognize areas of expertise a person might have and reject opinions outside that area.
For me, Trump’s handling of COVID specifically and the COVID pandemic more generally were such a minor blip in the timeline of horrors and chaos that I witnessed and partook in and only barely escaped from between 2018-2022 that it’s hard to register the pandemic as a significant event in that timeline.
I work with elderly people mostly so the absolute terror was probably magnified for me. Regardless of their politics, they knew they were the most vulnerable and it scared the shit out of them.
I was unfortunately very separated from society from 2018-2023, so I’m reliant on written records and memes to understand how others responded to it. As someone who missed it, I really get the impression that it was mostly the wealthy who freaked out, either from trying to process that our society’s medical infrastructure is shit, or from being sociopaths who were selfishly upset that their workers wanted time off.
One of the groups that doesn’t get talked about often in regards to COVID is the reaction of the gay community, especially the older ones who lived through the worst days of the AIDS epidemic. They took it VERY seriously.
Yes, I do remember the Trump White House making the decision to keep COVID guidance classified for what appeared to be political gains. I remember my boss at the time arguing against that decision and receiving retaliation, leading us to pivot our business strategy near the equinox.
(I was told that) the last Trump administration’s hires were so inept that they didn’t change the passcode to dial in to the situation room as I listened in to this meeting, live. I hope that Tulsi (or whoever the new DNI ends up being) will be smart enough to change the passcodes on day 1. It’s a matter of national security. My revealing this is intended to serve as a reminder to do better this time. Maybe it’s moot because I doubt that the situation room is still running Adobe Connect (I hope), and maybe the new system was designed help facilitate better opsec (I hope). I broke my brain a bit by forcing firefox to run Flash in March 2020, two months after its supposed EOL in January 2020, just to listen to that shitshow. Completely shattered what was left of my faith in our federal government’s ability to do anything.
I don’t remember any evidence that Trump himself was involved in that decision-making, but 1) that doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved in the decision-making outside of where I had limited visibility and 2) that doesn’t mean he isn’t responsible for the actions and decisions of those he nepotistically hired.
I’ll note that my perception of all this was filtered through a really weird job I ended up at under questionable circumstances and it’s hard for me to put much certainty behind any claims without external, corroborating, contextual evidence.
Thank you for the reminder… it’s been a crazy ride and that was a completely different life for me that’s genuinely hard for me to think about or remember much of until someone says something that brings back rushes of memories and leaves me shaking and a bit disoriented and I end up sleeping a lot to recover.
Please gimme a source on those calculations you’re talking about.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/01/03/trump-to-be-sentenced-jan-10-as-judge-upholds-hush-money-conviction/?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00804-3/fulltext
I read another recently but can’t find it. Any search with the words Trump and COVID is a tricky proposition.
After thinking about these a bit more, especially The Lancet article, I have a hypothesis.
For wealthy neoliberal elites, COVID was babby’s first trauma, so they overestimate how badly it impacted the average worker. It was so much worse than anything that had happened in their privileged lives up to that point that by comparison it was a world-altering traumatic event that changed everything.
Working people are used to surviving hardships (especially medical hardships) while those in power ignore them. COVID and the Trump administration’s lack of response was just business as usual. Compared to other widespread diseases that get routinely ignored and for which poor people routinely get denied care, COVID was minor (albeit more infectious) and easily forgettable.
That’s my best guess for why the libshits can’t grok why the little people reacted with such indifference while they lost their fucking minds.
That is part of it, but there is also a long-running thread of medical denialism in society. People want to believe their home remedies, homeopathic cures, chiropractic adjustments, or bleach enemas can cure things just as well or better than certified doctors can. To be fair to them, it has only been about 130 years since doctors learned they should wash their hands before surgery. The average person isn’t educated enough to understand how safe, effective, and trustworthy vaccines are.
The other part of it is explained by the lottery. Millions and millions of people play the lottery regularly even though the odds of them winning are about the same as getting struck by lightning while getting bitten by a shark. The average person is shit at understanding odds. They think that they will be lucky enough to beat the odds.
That applies for avoiding Covid. They don’t understand that being harmed by the vaccine is far fat less likely than being harmed by the disease. They think they can beat the odds by not getting the disease and still avoid Covid. Some won, but most lost.
Yeah. Medical and science denialism is a big problem. It gets fed when medicine and science are presented as absolutes with no room for debate or discussion, just blind fealty to experts. As a trained scientist who has worked professionally as a scientist for 12 years, I don’t trust several disciplines because they project this attitude. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical of those who ask for blind trust in authority.
I’m a former scientist in the environmental field and we deal with similar denialism for similar reasons. As science and technology get more complex, the average person simply doesn’t have the background to understand the problem, let alone possible solutions. A certain amount of trust in authority is necessary unfortunately.
I have to disagree.
If you tell people to trust authorities about climate change instead of fostering critical thought and understanding, who is to say that their authorities will align with yours?
Your assertion is a recipe for pushing people to believe misinformation because they feel that they can trust their pastor or their employer or the guy on the news more than some nerd.
I get your point but there is a middle ground. You can apply critical thought to the selection of authorities you can trust. You wouldn’t trust an auto mechanic to tell you if your mole was cancerous even though you do trust them with your transmission, right? We need to teach people to recognize areas of expertise a person might have and reject opinions outside that area.
For me, Trump’s handling of COVID specifically and the COVID pandemic more generally were such a minor blip in the timeline of horrors and chaos that I witnessed and partook in and only barely escaped from between 2018-2022 that it’s hard to register the pandemic as a significant event in that timeline.
I work with elderly people mostly so the absolute terror was probably magnified for me. Regardless of their politics, they knew they were the most vulnerable and it scared the shit out of them.
I was unfortunately very separated from society from 2018-2023, so I’m reliant on written records and memes to understand how others responded to it. As someone who missed it, I really get the impression that it was mostly the wealthy who freaked out, either from trying to process that our society’s medical infrastructure is shit, or from being sociopaths who were selfishly upset that their workers wanted time off.
One of the groups that doesn’t get talked about often in regards to COVID is the reaction of the gay community, especially the older ones who lived through the worst days of the AIDS epidemic. They took it VERY seriously.
The only time I’ve ever been to a gay bar was the one at the Pentagon in Feb 2020. Surreal experience. Didn’t stop the karaoke, though.
Gay bars are so great. I’m straight but I used to go with several of my gay friends. I’ve never been hit on by more women than at gay bars lol.