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.
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@Alan Robertshaw:
On the other hand, Trump might have ruined his base for “regular” Republican candidates, and if Trump wasn’t on the ticket most of them would stay home.
@Surplus
That’s what I had figured. Pence doesn’t have the charismatic cult leader nature that Trump has, and while he sucks, I don’t think he’d win re-election or have the same degree of popular support. Most anti-Trump folks would also be turned off of Pence by association and a fair number of pro-Trump types might not care about Pence enough to vote for him.
A mix of Trump Covid news from the last hour:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2020/10/03/trump-covid-live-updates/#link-JV5XHGUF3FG2XJ5US7C6VKODAA
TL;DR is that Chris Christie has it too, Mitch McConnell has cancelled all senate votes for the next 2 weeks, and Trump’s physician isn’t giving straight answers.
@ surplus
Hmm, Trump may have shifted the local Overton Window so much that Pence isn’t right wing enough for the base? Interesting hypothesis. You may well be right. If it gets down to that let’s hope so.
In general Trump news, this is apparently Mark “I really should check if there’s still a live mic” Meadows take on things:
“The President’s vitals over last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We are still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”
Supposedly Trump was having trouble breathing on Friday so he did end up on oxygen; notwithstanding that doctor’s dancing round the issue.
Tovius wrote, on Trump’s diagnosis:
I’ve been thinking about this.
Back in the spring, I thought it’d likely take a long time for him to catch Covid, if it ever actually happened. He seemed reasonably well protected, in terms of having the people around him tested extensively – that’s obviously a privilege ordinary Americans don’t have. Even now, probably only around 10% of Americans have been infected thus far, and honestly, I didn’t expect it to be much more than that at this point. He wasn’t that likely to be among the first ones.
I suspected he was probably deeply oblivious and unappreciative of how much the various government agencies (and perhaps even his own campaign) were working to keep him safe. Now, recently we learned that he was actually privately quite aware of how dangerous Covid is. Or then again, maybe not, as suggested by some other tapes with that same reporter. Recently, his social behavior seems to have been even more reckless than I expected.
In any case, I’d hesitate to say that this infection was entirely predictable and a long time coming. These things are highly random in pattern. A sensible administration would have very likely avoided this through the whole election year – not so much by using better masking and better contact testing, but mostly by better social distancing and by not letting the virus run so rampant in general population. Still, you could always get unlucky.
@Lumipuna
Under a sensible administration this would have been contained in the spring and we’d be in a similar place to other countries that handled it better, like Vietnam which has had less than 40 deaths. We probably wouldn’t be that low because the US is a bigger country than Vietnam and in a different geopolitical situation, but it would definitely be less than 200,000 people under a better government.
At the very least, Trump deserves whatever he gets from this.
@Nagflar : I don’t care that “it’s not a good look”. It’s *EXTREMELY* common, and a real problem everyone need to have in back of his mind all the time. I think you’re very, very hopeful in saying it’s rare. And the confidence given by that belief is dangerous.
Being oppressed don’t make you resistant to being an asshole. Being morally upright don’t make you resistant. Everyone have to ask himself all the time “Am I the baddie ?”, and be aware they could be the baddie without realizing it yet. You should alway inform every of your moral judgement with a way to mitigate damage if you’re catastrophically wrong.
@Ohlmann
I get your point, but it sounds a lot like you’re saying that it’s the fault of minority groups that they’re getting oppressed because some sell their people out. Candace Owens spreads racist propaganda against other Black people, does that mean that Black people are responsible for racism?
@Alan
I wouldn’t view this as a bonus, considering that Trump is a Nazi but at the same time an incompetent buffoon. With Joe and the Democrats trying to haul the country back to the status quo, that allowed the rise of fascism in the first place, there is a strong probability that whoever clinches the Republican nomination in 2024 will be yet another Nazi. Some people are speculating this might be Tucker Carlson and, given his propensity towards appropriating the class struggle rhetoric, he might even score some points among liberals.
If Joe and Pelosi waste the next four years supporting their donors, instead of rolling back Trump’s policies and, better yet, implementing actual policies aimed at helping the working class; then they’ll be sitting ducks come 2024 and we’re going to get an even shittier sequel considering we could have an intelligent fascist rise to power.
@Lumipuna
Trump has always been a notorious germophobe. He might have joked around with the masks but behind closed doors he was having everyone in his staff tested each and every day to make sure he didn’t get it. I’m impressed he actually managed to get infected despite all of those precautions. Then again, you need to have precaution and luck to avoid the virus each and every day. The virus only needs to be lucky once.
@ Discussion of whether or not to genocide Trump supporters
Hey what? Is that a real discussion? Even when we fought actual Nazis, the supporters were not genocided. There was specifically an effort made to avoid a Treaty of Versailles situation and let Germany recovery, to avoid more war. The EU formed to avoid more war. Germany was not rid of all its Nazis in an ideological cleansing. Even at the Nuremberg trials only the worst of the worst got it, as a symbolic closing of the war.
I’m not saying let Republican or Trump policy makers get away without prosecution or run amok with legislation, but calling for a genocide of people who support Trump? For reasons you cannot know and may very well be uneducated as shit but not malicious? How are you not falling afoul of the comments policy?
Naglfar – If (and this is my fondest wish) Trump and his family get locked up, my hope would be that Barron could be placed with his cousin Mary (Trump’s niece, the one who wrote the recent tell-all book.) She’s a psychologist. That whole statement is wishful thinking, though, since Trump probably hates Mary nowadays.
My dental hygienist told me last week that she thinks that the virus was deliberate on the part of the Chinese government. I did my best to dissuade her of that notion by telling her about some of my military training (in Nuclear/Biological/Chemical weapons) and she appeared to really think about what I said.
One of the main reasons I said I hope no one (including the current administration) gets sick or dies is because they are all so cavalier about not spreading it. It even occurred to me that Trump might have been trying to infect Biden and his crew. At the very least, it would not surprise me.
@Big Titty Demon
Point the first: you are drastically misunderstanding and misusing the concept of genocide, in a frankly offensive fashion. Fascists going to a well-deserved appointment with the gallows is the precise opposite of genocide, as fascists will always commit genocide if they’re allowed to live.
Point the second: We just had an extended discussion of all the reasons it doesn’t fucking matter why any given individual chose fascism, because once they’ve climbed on board the genocide train they are the enemy of all decent people.
Point the third: If we’d gone through and hanged every last slaveholder higher than Haman after the Civil War, we’d be a lot closer to being a worthwhile society than we have heretofore managed.
Point the Fourth: the same goes for WWII. Denazification should have been carried out with a guillotine. We should all keep in mind the wise dictum of Lyudmila Pavlichenko: “If you don’t kill [fascists] at once, you’ll have no end of trouble.”
@Diego
The main group of liberals that would go for Tucker would be Tulsi Gabbard fans, they had no qualms when she was on his show and they appear to get on well. He also could get some of the “dirtbag left” who like his class reductionism while being rich á la Chapo Trap House. If he said a few words about “idpol” CTH stans would vote for him.
This is also why we need to investigate everyone connected to Trump thoroughly and make sure that Trump and his cronies face justice. Otherwise the GOP will only be emboldened as they were when Bush got away.
It was probably at his rallies. Shouting can make particles go further, aerosol transmission is still being investigated, and he doesn’t wear a mask at rallies and none of his fans do either.
@Hambeast
Of the Trump family members Mary seems the least evil, so maybe she could take Barron in that event. I don’t know much about Barron and if/how he could be deprogrammed after growing up as Donald’s son.
@Big Titty Demon
Because no one called for the genocide of Trump supporters. Ohlmann simply engaged in bad faith arguments and a strawman fallacy. My initial statement was that I wouldn’t bat an eye if all 60 million of his supporters caught COVID. Also that wishing Nazis dead was the only morally correct choice.
Wishing for the death of someone is an entirely different camp than trying to entice, incite, organize, and/or call for genocide. The only reason I’ve addressed the term “genocide” is because Ohlmann was incorrectly using it as if it could be applied to Nazis.
Also, regarding your point about people being ignorant and misinformed versus being outright malicious, I’d argue that intent can matter up to a certain extent. It cannot and should not be used as a blank check, especially in situations such as these that involve constant, pervasive and incremental crimes against humanity.
There’s my third tattoo. Now, where to put it…
I have found the death odds for 70 year old people. It’s 11.6%, or in other words Trump have overwhelmingly good odds to survive that, for any who still wondered. I was pretty sure of that, but it’s better with actual figures.
(the COVID is dangerous because a combination of middling mortality with extremely fast speed. Truly lethal disease like Ebola or rabies don’t spread too well, in no small part because carriers die before spreading to other. On the other hand, it’s somewhat likely that at least one person in the White House cluster die, since there’s like 15+ people infected)
@Dalilama : your point about slavers might be true or not, but it’s entirely insuffisant to justify killing any slavers. Once again, there’s three reasons for that :
That kind of rhetoric leave me extremely cold, because it don’t stand up to thinking about it 3 seconds. Being incendiary and extrem don’t make your argument more convincing.
Trump may well survive and his odds are good, but he’s off the campaign trail for a while and that’s not nothing! This is a critical period in the election cycle and Trump is out for the count.
@Ohlmann
I don’t know if that accounts for heart disease, which Trump appears to have given that he has high levels of plaque in his coronary artery. So his odds might be a little worse.
@PoM
Does that really affect his base though? They are cult like in their devotion to him, and I doubt there are many fence voters.
I find myself reminded of the bit in The Man Who Would Be King; when Sean Connery gets cut and his worshippers realise he isn’t a god after all. I wonder if some of Trump’s virus-denying sycophants might now waver?
@ diego
I don’t want you thinking I’m being rude by not addressing your post. You raise some great points that have really got me thinking. It’s just my response would be a big stream of consciousness thing.
@Naglfar
Even so, I would think his odds of survival are greater given that he’s the president and doctors know more about the disease now than they did six months ago. Nothing is off the table for him and they will do whatever is in their power to keep him alive and well. This is still likely to shorten his lifespan but I severely doubt he will die from it.
@Dalillama and Ohlmann
Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with Dalillama’s views, there is such a thing as “Colony Colapse”, whereupon if enough members of a society die or disappear, the whole thing collapses because there aren’t enough people to replace their jobs.
In modern society this could range from people manufacturing, storing, delivering life-saving medication (such as insulin) to less trivial things, such as road maintenance or such.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t hang or imprison Nazis after a fascist regime implodes. The most realistic way to go about delivering justice would be to send the leaders to the gallows, and the pundits spreading the propaganda straight to jail.
In terms of criminal justice there is no such thing as a retroactive punishment, but moments such as these should be an exception. Hate Speech (strictly defined as speech designed to incite hatred or violence against vulnerable groups) should be criminalized, and everyone who engaged in it should be criminally prosecuted.
Everyone from Stefan Molyneux to Tucker Carlson should be in jail for spreading Nazi propaganda. Making sure Hate Speech is criminalized is really the most effective way to prevent fascism from rising ever again.
Eh, I’m pretty sure that was Patrick Stewart, and the episode title was “Who Watches the Watchers”. 🙂
@ diego
You probably already know this, but at Yalta, Churchill favoured just using an Act of Attainder to sentence the top Nazis to death. It was actually Roosevelt and Stalin that argued for a public trial. Britain supplied Albert Pierrepoint though.
The colony collapse idea (although not named as such) was part of the reasoning behind how the ‘de-nazification’ process was organised. Hence categorisations like ‘young follower’ etc. Then of course you get into things like prepping for the Cold War and Operation Paperclip.
Your ‘retrospective justice’ point was raised at Nuremberg; especially in the “Judges’ Trial”; but the way it was determined was by applying common law principles (in the technical sense of the phrase) to establish it wasn’t actually retrospective.
(Bizarrely the US Justice Dept are currently running an argument in an art restitution case that totally goes against that well established principle.)
@Alan Robertshaw
It’s possible, but I think they’ll just rationalize it away. I’ve already heard them claiming that it’s a deep state assassination attempt (while simultaneously being a hoax) or that it’s a cover for a secret mission. At this point, no matter what happens they are convinced he is a god and will rationalize away any evidence otherwise.
@Diego
For sure, I was just pointing out one factor amid a sea of many influencing his outcome.
This seems a much better idea than mass executions. Collective punishment is forbidden by the Geneva Convention, so it seems better to instead put the leaders and propagandists on trial rather than attempting to try and prosecute millions of people.
In the US, I think the only way to effectively do this would be through a SCOTUS precedent or constitutional amendment given that it has to do with the First Amendment.