Vaccines, Infrastructure, and Kids In Cages: US Politics April 2021

lol

― bulb after bulb, Thursday, April 15, 2021 4:22 AM (seven minutes ago)

damn I missed how Biden closed the borders to non-residents and instituted hotel quarantines and established track & trace for travellers, thus eradicating import and spread of the virus and variants, and adopted the VP's policy of paying people to stay home! guess he should have tweeted more about it after all, my mistake.

And when it comes to dealing with the ongoing deaths from the pandemic, let’s not forget the Republican governors, state legislatures, etc. who have gone full Trump and are making the situation worse just so they can show how Trump-aligned they are! Not sure how Biden can fix that situation other than by telling them to stop fucking around and get things back under some level of lockdown in their states, and by making the vaccines as available as possible.

The problem is there are a number of regular posters here who assume the rest of us are morons who can't handle having more than one thought in our brains at the same time, so they feel compelled to respond to even the mildest complimentary post towards one of Biden's moves with a laundry list of "what abouts" for the bad things he's done/continues doing, as if we can't possibly be glad he ended a shitty Trump-era abortion policy while also, at the exact same time, being disgusted about his terrible handling of immigration.

xp my mental health does not depend on pretending anything.

TBF some of the counterexamples in will's post (e.g. the fentanyl thing) sound like the administration is buying time, not actively seeking to continue Trump's policies. still awful obv, but nothing that makes me come anywhere close to regretting my vote.

Dismantling the United States’ standing and reputation in the world, and our relationships with allies. Cozying up with nations/regimes who are not our allies, and who are committing atrocities and human rights violations.

shocking & unprecedented behaviour for an amerikan president

nearly the exact same policies

Trump actively subverted the expert dvice of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx. He constantly claimed hydroxychloroquine was a miracle cure. He promoted conspiracy theories about a 'plandemic' and 'China virus'. He told the nation the pandemic would disappear, then it was about to be over, then it was getting better, then the numbers were being "fixed" to make him look bad.

I could go on, but why bother.

seems like one hell of a huge exception to me

Vaccines started going out while Trump was still in office, though? Doesn't seem like the timeline has changed much for any of us on that front.

if the abortion thing was celebrated w/o the crowing about unpleasable lefties then the reaction would prob have been different

Cozying up with nations/regimes who are not our allies, and who are committing atrocities and human rights violations.

Incredible.

i don't really there's anything policy wise biden can do (aside from vaccines), a federal mask mandate would be a clusterfuck of court cases, a bunch of governors would ignore it and tell em what are you gonna do about it?

basically, there's just a ton of people who won't wear masks or take precautions and there really isn't a hell of a lot you can do about it

Good presidents on both sides afaict

I am very glad that Biden did the bare minimum from a pro-choice perspective. I have no idea why that would impact anyone's opinion about anything else he's done or ever will do, of ourse.

Or shitty presidents if you will

Or just shit, shit everywhere you look, both sides, inside, outside, shitty shit shit

milo - you don't think the vaccine distribution would be more disorganized and fucked up with trump? cmon

Congress should give Biden a gold star every time he doesn't fuck up, he could trade them in at the end of the month for ice cream.

There would have been basically no difference in the public-private partnerships with CVS/Walgreens that have started out as a shitshow and smoothed out over time as supply caught up.

And when it comes to dealing with the ongoing deaths from the pandemic, let’s not forget the Republican governors, state legislatures, etc. who have gone full Trump and are making the situation worse just so they can show how Trump-aligned they are! Not sure how Biden can fix that situation other than by telling them to stop fucking around and get things back under some level of lockdown in their states, and by making the vaccines as available as possible.

otm

Man I love it when people grab little quotes from my posts and take snipes at them while doing verbal eyerolls.

you don't think the vaccine distribution would be more disorganized and fucked up with trump? cmon

question not directed at me, but the trump administration didn't even bother to put together a vaccine distribution plan. it was the same as the test "plan" - just let the states figure it out

xp hope that's not at me, epistantophus! i was on-the-money-markin you

We cornered the market on vaccine supply under Trump, that's why all of us early middle-aged assholes get to have the jab already.

Trump probably would have been a much louder asshole in refusing to loosen IP protections for the vaccines, though - Biden's doing that pretty quietly at least.

No not you Karl! That was an xp <3

hey I’m extremely glad I don’t wake up everyday and grimly open my browser to see what horrors have unfolded, but I just don’t get the angle on pursuing actively *bad* policies that virtually no one who will ever vote for you supports in any meaningful way. And in fact, millions of people who did vote for you oppose vehemently.

Obv defense spending could be the exception here (which is fucking pathetic, but both parties’ greasy little hard ons for the Trooops and empire is sadly as absolute as the sun rising).

But a lot of stuff he actively ran against, and the other bad stuff (shoveling resources towards cops which they will 100% use to murder more brown people) is never ever ever ever going to sway someone who’s a blue lives matter idiot.

So, like, just don’t.

iirc there was literally no vaccine distribution plan when the biden admin took office

if i could go back and change my vote milo i would you convinced me

xp phew! i was like, have i fallen so far that even when i otm it is perceived as a slight?!

i'm high as fuck, getting ready for a 3-week self-funded fake residency (tentatively titled The Purple Haze "Second Chances" Residency Series) in the woods. the way forward for US democracy is for everyone - and i mean every single person - to quit their jobs

OK. I'll go on. There seems to be some very bad memories here.

Trump attacked Governor Whitmer for trying to impose restrictions on public activities, approved of the mob that stormed the Michigan Capitol, and remained silent about the kidnap and murder attempt on her life. He never wore a mask, taunted those who did, and held rallies in places where there were hotspot outbreaks. He decided that the pandemic was a 'blue state' problem. When warned about it in January he decided that preparing for it would adversely affect the stock market and did nothing. He loudly complained that he wasn't being personally thanked effusively enough when he sent respirators to NY. He put Pence and Kushner in charge and when the Biden team arrived on January 22 they discovered there was no written plan for moving forward.

He politicized the pandemic at every turn and always ok the side of the worst possible public policies.

Who said anything about regretting or changing votes?

i think it's less that i want to give biden a cookie for being a good boy and more than i'm really annoyed at the total flattening out of everything via self-impressed discourse

iirc there was literally no vaccine distribution plan when the biden admin took office

yrc, iirc

if it's any consolation i have not given joe biden ANY cookies or gold stars

I regret starting this thread

Aimless otm

will's post upthread is otm to me without any willful distortions, it's good stuff

If I believed that everything that Biden was doing (or not doing) was worthy of outrage, it would be hard to imagine that *any* U.S. president would be tolerable. And I understand that a lot of people actually do feel that way (I recall Dr. Morbius labeling all presidents as "war criminals"). But I don't have the stomach to go through life in a constant state of outrage, so I choose to believe that there are some things that are "good," even if they are not perfect. I absolutely recognize my privilege in saying that, but it feels necessary when the alternative as never-ending anxiety.

I mean the 23 or so people in DC/ NoVA/ NYC who actually like this dumb cop and troop and wall shit and all write op eds for the Post or the Times are going to drop you the second the GOP manages to lock down Nicki Haley as their nominee

i bought biden some thin mints with my stimmy

will's post upthread is otm to me without any willful distortions, it's good stuff

xp times 1000: imo the one thing that people need to keep in mind is that our political system is designed to move very slowly, especially when one party's entire M.O. is now dragging everything out as long as possible to run out the clock. it's shitty but the truth is that it's much easier to break things than it is to fix them, especially when you literally have the slimmest possible majority and it consists of dipshits like Sinema and Manchin who would be considered hardline conservatives in a sane nation. like as much as I would've loved a President like Warren or Sanders I'm not convinced they could fix even a fraction of our many, many urgent problems all at once either.

as far as Covid goes, obviously what Trump was doing 13-14 months ago is exponentially more important than what Biden could do now, and it goes well beyond just his lack of action. he willingly spread misinfo and convinced half the country that we should trust him over the doctors who have been preparing for this their whole lives. he perpetuated a culture that turned a deadly pandemic and any efforts to mitigate it into a political issue. if he just shut the fuck up and let the doctors speak for him we'd probably have saved 200,000 lives. Biden can't exactly put that genie back in the bottle, especially when most prevention measures are going to be run by individual states.

This 'whatabout' tendency among some posters itt drives me up a goddamn wall.

'Thank goodness factor x is better under Biden than it was under Trump.'

'Yes, but whatabout factors a, z, and w, HUH, MAKES U THIIIIIINK'

Your points may be valid. You may find a lot of agreement here with your points when the discussion is centered around those particular points. But when your hand is just twitching over the buzzer, waiting to lob a barely-related bad faith retort back in someone's face, it seems clear that you aren't interested in actual discussion.

Lots of things are bad, we can all agree. I don't know why some of y'all insist on ensuring that others feel bad about the things that are bad literally every second of the day. I mean, have fun dying of a coronary at 46 if that's your bag but maybe allow some of the rest of us to relax our cracks just a touch now and again.

froggy otm

frogbs otm

so it comes down to personal comfort, I get it, I wish ppl were generally more open about that instead of doing the whole I'm a sensible grownup posturing

as if what you are doing is not posturing

that's the fucking point. the I'm a reasonable moderate who understands nuance shit looks like posturing from this side too

Man, some of you would be exhausting to live with.

"Oh, I'm so happy, my COVID test came back negative!"

"Oh, you are happy? What about the 1,000 people who died from COVID yesterday? Are you happy about that? Sounds like you don't care about those lives lost."

xposts It doesn't 'come down' to anything. Your intransigent ability to see any shade of gray is your own shit, and it's frankly fuckin' repugnant and (imo) nearly inseparable from hard right 'YOU'RE EITHER 100% WITH US OR 100% AGIN' US' bullshit.

Your refusal to recognize how many people here are mostly with you on most things? It's straight-up fucked. There you go.

Mom, Dad, are the white dude arguing again