Well. how about THAT for an October Surprise?
I would point out the ironies here but there really aren’t any. It’s basically the opposite of irony: Dude downplays the danger, doesn’t wear a mask and hangs out with other people not wearing masks, all because he thinks he’s a genetically superior human who’s immune to disease. Well, turns out he isn’t.
I have no idea how this is going to play out. This tweet pretty much sums it up:
Yep.
Open thread!
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Kellyanne Conway has confirmed she has COVID 19. Apparently her daughter Claudia revealed this earlier today on TikTok. Claudia has been at odds with both parents for months now, and is trying to become emancipated from them.
I don’t want Trump to die. This will just spawn a whole new batch of conspiracy theories that will plague us for decades, and cause other problems.
And while we’re talking about catchy songs and disease, how about getting the Mono.
@Tim
Let’s be honest, Trump’s presidency has mainstreamed conspiracy theories. If anything, his death would help them fade into obscurity once more.
There is a reason why conspiracy theories are so popular among Right wingers. It’s because it allows them to externalize the blame for their failed policies unto minorities. Notice how conservatives control all three branches of government and, rather than diminish, the amount, exposure and spread of conspiracy theories has grown so large that not only has it become part of the mainstream, but politicians have become elected because of them. And these conspiracy theories in particular have a lot of common ground with Nazi ideology.
So no, the death of Trump will likely signal the beginning of the end for the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories. But the final nail in the coffin will not come so long as the Right holds power.
@Naglfar
I would not be surprised if Barron was the same as his siblings. None of them are decent people and I don’t expect him to be, given both of his parents and their entourage.
@Tim gueguen
IIRC this is because Claudia is bisexual and her parents don’t accept her for it.
@Diego
I think there would be one last burst of theories (which could likely be violent), but after that the whole thing would fizzle out without him to stoke the flames. I’m sure QAnon et al will stick around a bit longer, but they’ll have to make some major modifications if he’s dead (maybe something about faking his own death). I’m somewhat curious how the realization that he’s not immortal would affect his fans, that might shatter some of the delusions. Even if he survives COVID he will die eventually.
Re: Barron
Fair enough, I just don’t know much about him or the appropriate punishment for a teenage boy in his situation if there is to be punishment for him.
This talk of punishing Barron is really squicking me out. He’s just 14, he has nothing to do with the crimes of the rest of his family. What is he even supposed to be punished for?
I despise him and feel a great deal of schadenfreude over his contracting the same illness he’s denied and mocked for months, but I’m not going to wish death on him-it feels to me like caring about him enough to do that would be a waste of my own time and energy and I’d be better off spending it on other things. I just don’t think it’ll be good for my mental health if I do so.
What I really want is for him to be moderately sick for a few weeks, recover, finally take the virus seriously, and then lose the election to Biden anyway. After the election loss, I then want to see him get justice, in the form of a legal beatdown from Tish James in NY Superior Court, and live another 30 years in prison.
TL:DR-I’d rather see him survive and go to prison than die.
@Nikki the Bluth Wannabe
Unfortunately, I seriously doubt he’ll ever see the inside of a prison. Trump dying of covid is likely the closest we will ever get to seeing justice.
@Tovius : there’s three role to prison.
The first and most important one for me is to rehabilitate criminals and felons.
The second one is protecting society from harm caused by thoses condemned to it.
The third one is giving a just penalty to people who misbehaved. I believe it’s the less important of the three.
Depending on how toxic, entitled, and/or dangerous he is, he could get punished for that. The case would have be very strong to convince me because of how dangerous it is to start saying you can imprison people for potential dangers, especially minors, but the Trump family could possibly have that potential.
That also apply to everyone in the family but Donald TBH. Only Donald have done truly wicked and unacceptable shit, the other are moochers and profiteers but that alone isn’t worth prison. Preventing them trying to grift the USA again could however be a good thing.
@Naglfar
Exactly. If they’ve got nothing to hide, they’ve got nothing to fear, or so they keep telling us.
Well, well, well, time for Agent Orange to stick true to his own advice and chug down a liter of good ol’ 70% propan-2-ol.
@tim gueguen
There will be conspiracy theories if he dies, or if he’s really ill, or if he shrugs it off. There’s literally no getting away from it.
We’ve already had the conspiracy theory that the chinese made it as a weapon, somehow anticipating that the incompetent right wing populist governments of the world would be afflicted with terminal fucking stupidity.
We’ve now got various right wing figures who see no mental disconnect between observing that we aren’t seeing any major dem figures getting coronavirus, and republican’s relentless downplaying of the severity of the disease and demonizing of the most basic and sensible measures to counteract it. Lets all forget the hand-rubbing glee at the thought of democrat-dominated states being the most severely afflicted, at least initially… now its a radical leftist bioweapon aimed at the president and his supporters.
If he has only a mild case and recovers fully and quickly, it’ll be evidence that the whole epidemic reponse was totally overblown, and measures to counteract it should be removed ASAP.
And so on. Saying that some possible outcomes are better because they magically won’t fan conspiracy theories is just wishful thinking at this point.
@Herbert West
Instead, he’s taking an experimental non-FDA approved antibody therapy from Regeneron, not something that any of the little people have much hope of getting.
If it works out, look for further weaking of the FDA and clinical trial requirements for new pharmaceuticals.
@ pie
I haven’t been able to find a more recent update than this; but I wonder if it can be extrapolated?
As to Trump; I don’t wish him to die. Not least because there’s a phenomenon here that if a politician dies in office then the electorate tend to reinstate someone from the same party, regardless of underlying trends that might come into play at the end of a politician’s natural term of office. Like there’s a sort of unconscious bias that it’s only fair. I’m not sure if that’s the same over there; but I wouldn’t want to see the risk.
Also, a big argument for swing voters or ‘moderate’ republicans is that Trump is a uniquely terrible man. A replacement might not carry the same baggage; or tempt non-voters to turn out this time.
Ahh, the schadenfreude.
OT but perhaps never entirely OT:
for UKnian mammotheers (I guess this kind of app is geographical-location-specific??) –
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/03/new-uk-app-records-police-encounters-and-saves-footage-in-cloud
@Lukas Xavier
This is one of the longest running reasons I’ve been suspicious of Trump. If he had nothing to hide, he would have released his tax returns and not obstructed justice so many times. In refusing to disclose, he made himself look very suspicious, even before his election.
@Alan Robertshaw
I wasn’t able to find a longer graph, but I was able to find a news source from about 2 weeks ago saying that although Trump claims it’s a blue state issue, 9 out of 10 of the most infected states per capita have Republican governors. The reason states like California and New York have high numbers has less to do with infection rates and more to do with being very populous states.
@opposablethumbs
For Americans there is a similar app from the ACLU, but it only works in some states.
Posted without comment.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akzx3g/qanon-believers-think-trump-got-covid-on-purpose-because-of-course-they-do
Indeed. Of course they do.
Thoses people have a serious problem. I know it’s a voluntary, self inflicted problem, but that don’t make them any less frightening or problematic.
@Diego : you go way too far, way too fast saying that wanting all nazi dead is the only moral choice. At least when defining broadly as nazi anyone who support a fascist movement. I would even say it’s the opposite of the moral choice, because it’s not robust to being wrong, which is overall one of the biggest problem of death penalty in general.
That being said, right or wrong, I do hope for Trump and his cronies to die horribly, because poetic justice is better than no justice, and because it mean they won’t be in the way. I don’t want his electors to all die, for a lot of reasons :
I am wary of people like you, Diego, because the people that feel the most righteous and who don’t doubt are also the one most likely to be blinded by that and end on the wrong side. Everyone should remember they could have been a collaborator in 1940’s France.
@Ohlmann
I don’t think its ever justified to lock someone up just because they might be dangerous. That’s the sort of thing that would be ripe for abuse, especially by the powerful towards the marginalized.
@Alan Robertshaw
Oh lord. Consistency was never their strong suit, but this is something else.
The real thing that I find interesting about QAnon is how literally none of what they predicted has come to pass (they originally predicted Hillary and Barack to be executed on national television for March 2018) yet they still believe it because they keep making up deeper and deeper subtheories to explain it. It really is a case study in cult building and how deep people can knit mutually exclusive and nonsensical theories.
@Ohlmann
I’m not sure everyone could have been a collaborator. For instance, I’m Jewish so I don’t think I could have been a collaborator. Nor could people who were gay, disabled, Romani, socialist, or other minorities.
Re: Barron
I don’t know much about him or his situation, so I don’t know what would happen to him if the rest of his family were to be locked up.
QAnon has some overlap with believers in various forms of Rapture theology, so a lot of them have plenty of practice rationalising why the Big One didn’t happen this time.
@tim gueguen
Indeed, I seem to recall last year an article about churches starting to incorporate QAnon into their sermons and believing Q to be a prophet. In many ways QAnon seems to have superseded the religious right, as more conservatives seem to be talking about Q than Jesus or God, or at least in conjunction.
Sorry bad link but don’t know how to delete.
@Tovius : preventing someone from doing future harm is common practice. That’s exactly why you can negociate an early exit from prison if you can convince the system that you won’t transgress law again (because the sentence is partially here to prevent you from doing it again), and it’s by far and away the main justification toward prison existing at all.
Of course, in the case of that child, he didn’t do anything yet, and didn’t show inclination toward doing bad thing either AFAIK. Which is why one would need to be really convincing.
@Nagflar : that’s actually pretty wrong. There have been jewish and gays people selling other to the nazis. Hitler absolutely had 0 calms about allying with communists. IIRC there even were some homosexuals rather high up in the nazi party. At some point, that kind of dalliance end badly, but they absolutely exist.
That’s a bit disconcerting to see that position given that we’re on a blog that regulary showed women who are on the side of the MRAs. You absolutely, definitely does not need to not belong in the out group to find a place in thoses hatefuls movements.
One of the reason for that is that one of the strategy to cope with that kind of oppression is saying that the stereotype is true but you’re the exception. Framed that way, it’s very easy to justify oppressing and belittling other women | POC | romani | ronins despite being one. And that also work to justify having your spouse, friend, or whatever being in the outgroup and not cutting link with it.
@Ohlmann
Fuck right off.
This administration is deliberately committing genocide against people of my ethnicity, and their supporters are cheering them on and helping accelerate it. As for “broadly defining someone as a Nazi because they support fascism” that is bullshit.
I call them Nazis because they have literally appropriated the cornerstones of Nazism which are:
1- The conspiracy theory of “Cultural Bolchevism”, rebranded as “Cultural Marxism” as a medium to paint social justice movements (feminism, BLM, anti-racism and progressive causes in general) as efforts to destroy “Western civilization”; with the added and/or implied thought that it’s the Jews behind these efforts.
That theory was penned by Adolf Hitler and has only been used by him and the Nazis, as a way to drive hatred for vulnerable groups. Nowadays that theory has been popularized and mainstreamed not only by the likes of Alex Jones, but also more “acceptable” mainstream journalists such as Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Ben Shapiro, among others.
2- Using propaganda and spewing lies after lies after lies, with the sole purpose to discredit demonstrable truth, whilst affirming more power and accelerating policies designed to destroy any and every democratic institution put in place to rein in such abuses.
3- Creating and spreading narratives against vulnerable groups with the exclusive and deliberate purpose to enact incremental policies and laws, specifically designed to disenfranchise said groups and ultimately exterminate them.
“Nazi” is not a word used loosely to describe Trump and his supporters. It’s the only honest term that fits them and their ideology. And wishing them dead is no less than what the world found acceptable, after their crimes could no longer be ignored in 1939. In the face of horrifying injustice, neutrality is nothing short of complicity.
Also “genocide” of Nazis is a dubious if not outright dishonest claim. Genocide includes national, ethnical, racial or religious groups; not political affiliations created with the express purpose of disenfranchising and exterminating other groups.
@Ohlmann
This happens, yes, but you seem to be implying it’s much more common than it is. Telling minorities that they, too, could be just as bad as Nazis because some people sold themselves out is not a good look.