It almost seems like you’ve been asleep for the last 3 years or something.
STOP!
We’re lit to pop and nobody is gonna stop.
KEEEEED-1 virus has broken containment.
18 Likes
Is the something…coronavirus?
2 Likes
wrong.gif
5 Likes
Classifying the briefing out of paranoia that something they don’t like will leak to the press, with the unfortunate side effect of shutting certain officials out and decreasing the effectiveness of the government’s response is incompetence. That’s what I think the motivation for classifying the meetings was. I guess others think that the decreasing the effectiveness of the government’s response by shutting people out was the whole purpose? idk, seems unlikely, more likely it’s just Nixonian paranoia combined with Trumpian distrust of the media.
1 Like
They’re about to close the schools down in central FL. Got a call and an email asking if we have a laptop and Internet access.
I have previously endorsed the theory that there’s some free-floating CDC incompetence about getting flat-footed on testing that I don’t think should be attributed to Trump, but I want to explicitly disavow the idea that the administration isn’t slowing down the response now. They very likely are.
1 Like
Look at random stupid twitter or facebook. Trump is dumber than those people and he’s always sure he’s right about everything. If you stretch incompetence to mean that Trump actually believes only 15 people have this, that it will soon be zero people, and that all the people in the CDC are wrong and their information should be suppressed because it’s wrong, then maybe it’s incompetence.
A friend of mine works for a company in KC where they are sending everyone home because coworkers just got back from the RSA conference where multiple people were sick. Here’s one of them:
“one of the workers, a 45-year old man with an underlying heart condition, began experiencing symptoms after returning home after the conference. He is now seriously ill in a medically induced coma.”
RSA sent out an email to his company (which came long after he read about it in the news) encouraging people to wash their hands and denying culpability saying “no governing body said we should have canceled the conference”.
It’s bog standard for informed consent forms to say that privacy may be violated if there’s a threat to the patient or public health, and also that samples can be retained and used for subsequent research without new consent. The CDC’s privacy concerns were almost certainly bullshit they drummed up to try to have an excuse.
2 Likes
This is the exact same administration that is suppressing information about climate change but it’s simply conspiratorial to think they would do the same with the coronavirus.
18 Likes
Mostly just CYA, but the sentiment is terrible. People don’t take responsibility because they are told by most of the people around them that they need to count on the proper authorities.
I’m not sure if you missed the discussion earlier, but some folks didn’t think it was appropriate to discuss the market ITT and (the collective) we agreed to move it to the finance thread. If you saw that discussion and chose to ignore it, carry on.
1 Like
And it’s quite possible that you could call that incompetence as well. Trump is not the Exxon insider who has known about rising temperatures for a long time and puts together a concerted campaign to fool people. He’s one of the rubes. He probably really believes climate change is a hoax.
1 Like
I’m willing to buy that this began as incompetence and bureaucracy by the CDC with fuck all guidance from above and that the initial wave of Trump bullshit began as cover for this inept response. What i’m fearful of is how far this guy is now willing to go to prove his initial statements correct.
The starkest moment of the Trump presidency for me was him drawing a fake hurricane path and then getting some fuck in a suit to get NOAA to publicly undermine its scientists just so he could avoid the embarassment of being wrong. The triviality made it worse.
He’s already painted himself into a rhetorical corner by declaring this thing’ll magically go away; that the response has been just totally super-duper and that he’s the mega-expert that makes experts go “wow!” Traditionally when Trump’s perceptions clash with reality he tends to expect reality to bend and to pressure others into seeing that it does. That it won’t doesn’t seem especially central to his thought.
5 Likes