Open Thread and Link Farm, Happy Times Edition
- Who Was Elijah McClain? What to Know About His Death After a Police Encounter – The New York Times (And an alternate link.)
The three police officers claimed that all their body cameras fell off (what a coincidence!). They also claimed that five foot six inch, 140 pound Elijah McClain had “incredible, crazy strength,” and all three of them had to get on top of him.
- Opinion | America Didn’t Give Up on Covid-19. Republicans Did. – The New York Times (And an alternate link.)
“Covid-19 is like climate change: It isn’t the kind of menace the party wants to acknowledge. It’s not that the right is averse to fearmongering. But it doesn’t want you to fear impersonal threats that require an effective policy response…”
- The origin of “African American” | Arts & Culture | Yale Alumni Magazine
The author found the term “African American” used in 1782. There’s debate over if the writer was actually African-American, as they claimed to be.
- What the AI Behind AlphaGo Can Teach Us About Being Human | WIRED
A story about the first computer AI to beat a champion human Go player.
- The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking” – Vox
Includes a gorgeous vintage anti-jaywalking editorial cartoon.
- The Princess Bride Letters
In the novel The Princess Bride, there’s a missing scene, with an address to write if you’d like to get the missing scene mailed to you. I always intended to do that, and never did. But here’s the response(s) I would have received had I mailed them.
- It Can Happen Here | by Cass R. Sunstein | The New York Review of Books
A discussion of a few books about life for ordinary Germans under Hitler. “Decades afterward, memoirists referred to their ‘happy times’ in the Hitler Youth, focusing not on ideology but on hiking trips, camaraderie, and summer camps.”
- The (First) Time Nazis Marched in Portland
In 1936 – “As the cruiser arrived, Portlanders lined the waterfront, not to protest the already-publicized human rights atrocities underway in Germany, but to wave hankies and exchange “heil Hitler” salutes with the Emden crew…”
- I Am the Dad Who Installed Lava in the Rumpus Room Floor – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
- Addressing The Claims In JK Rowling’s Justification For Transphobia
Lengthy and thorough.
- Anti-trans group admits bathroom predator myth is made up
- A faster response could have prevented most U.S. Covid-19 deaths – STAT
- West Side Story, but 12 minutes long and Cher plays every character – YouTube
I’m honestly impressed that, at the point in her career where Cher could do virtually anything and get it on TV, she chose this.
- Free Speech and Marginalized People – Liberal Currents
“. Suppression of speech is not directed most intensely at controversial speech. It’s directed at speech by people who are controversial—that is, at marginalized people who lack power, and who are therefore easily silenced and ignored.”
- » 30 Rock Landed on Us
A short essay about how 30 Rock approached race.
- My Family Saw a Police Car Hit a Kid on Halloween. Then I Learned How NYPD Impunity Works. — ProPublica
Although this story is less tragic, like the Elijah McClain story, it shows how freely police lie, and how little fear of consequence many police have.
- New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified coronavirus – The Washington Post.
The three studies are suggestive, but of course correlation is not causation.
- Spray Their Names Aims to Paint Murals That Honor Lives Lost and Amplify Marginalized Voices – 303 Magazine
Both images in this link farm came from this article. The first image is a mural of Breonna Taylor painted by Detour, Hiero Veiga and Just. The second image is a mural of Elijah McClain painted by Detour and Hiero Veiga. Both photos are by Brittany Werges.
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AlphaGo is a computer program, with two main components, working together. One is based on machine learning, the other on tree searches. The latter is not A.I. by any means. Suggesting the former is A.I. will get you at least corrected, probably insulted, and possibly buttonholed and yelled at by both A.I. people and machine learning people. (At least, that was the case in the 90s, it may have changed since)
What can the the A.I. behind it teach about humans? About as much as the monkeys with typewriters who wrote Hamlet can teach us about Imperial Rome politics.
(The text editor ate my edit)
To clarify :
It is not A.I.
It does not play Go like a human.
It can make people contemplate ways of playing that humans usually do not even consider.
None of the above teach us anything about being human. But interacting with such programs can spur us to think about the way we think.
Your citation of Yale Alumni Magazine made me mindful of an essay I just read. There is a movement afoot to get Yale University to change it’s name. Turns out that there is excellent documentation to support the claim that Elihu Yale was a notorious slave master in India when working for the East India Company. Even for the time he was noted to be quite brutal towards his slaves, hanging and branding them at the slightest pretext. That and financial malfeasance led to his eventual removal from his post in disgrace. The university’s administration is resistant – for now.
I was surprised by how positively Wesley Morris saw 30 Rock’s treatment of race–I know the review was written in 2013, but even when that show was on I found its racial jokes alternatingly brilliant and tone-deaf, often within the same episode. For every joke that was poignant and cutting, there was another that was literally just “This person isn’t white LOL” and that was the whole joke.
That said, I am totally opposed to NBC removing the episode “Believe in the Stars,” which guest-stars freaking Oprah and contains some of the funniest moments of the entire series. The “blackface” aspect of that episode is one scene, is clearly critical of the practice, and could be removed from the episode without much trouble without tossing out the whole episode. (The other episode with Jenna in blackface has less justification for it, but it’s also a great episode and she only appears in blackface in one scene, though it’s one that would be harder to edit around.) But of course I’m not the final arbiter of these things and at the end of the day I’m complaining about TV, not anything real that affects me.
I also thought the Morris’s aside about Scandal was misguided; that show didn’t ignore race, it just handled it in a completely incoherent way. Olivia Pope is portrayed as a black female empowerment fantasy while spending nearly the whole show caught in a love triangle with two of the most abusive and entitled white male fascists I have ever had the displeasure of seeing on my television screen, and while at times the show made great points about race and gender–it’s Shonda Rhimes, how could it not–the fact that these men were never once labeled “abusive” by a single character on the show was incredibly frustrating.
Here’s one of those articles about trying to get Yale to change it’s name.
Why not rename Yale after its most famous alumni?
I have a family member who receives the Princeton Alumni Weekly. A number of years ago they changed the front of the magazine to simply say PAW (very clever, as their mascot is the tiger). There were a number of angry letters to the editor–after all, if the front didn’t say PRINCETON Alumni Weekly, how were the visitors who saw the magazine to know that they should be impressed with the person who received it?
Also…hi everyone! I’ve found that the level of crisis happening right now about–oh, everything–has severely limited my bandwidth to think about political topics so I’ve been here less, but I’m happy to see many of the regulars still around and posting. My coping mechanism has been reading: I set my Goodreads goal for the year based on how many books I read last year (while unemployed–can’t remember if I said, but I moved cross-country and switched jobs out of academia into tech, and there was a 4-month gap between jobs) and yet I hit that goal in the first week of June. Mostly rereads. At the moment I’m doing the Vorkosigan books; the earlier ones are much better than I remember, which makes me wonder just how much the later ones are gonna knock my socks off.
Hi, Harlequin! Nice to see you.
If you’re inclined, you could check out Alas, a Discord – I think that might be more your speed right now. It tends to be… well, not apolitical, but less political than the blog.
I’ve never read any of the Vorkosigan books. Would “Falling Free” be a good one to begin with?
“Falling free” is not a Vorkosigan book, and while it shares the same canon/verse, there’s no real need to read it. Still, I recall it being decent. Just don’t expect any connection to what comes next.
Cool! I joined up. :)
Yeah, I wouldn’t start with Falling Free. There are two places people generally start–either with Shards of Honor or with The Warrior’s Apprentice. Shards of Honor and Barrayar are about Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith, how they meet and fall in love in the middle of a war and then navigate political turmoil, more or less, although it’s a political adventure MilSF story with romantic subplot more than a romance. Then The Warrior’s Apprentice starts when their son Miles is 17, and most of the rest of the books have him as a protagonist, with Aral and Cordelia continuing to play important roles. I’m not as fond of the duology about Aral and Cordelia, though it’s still good; but some of my friends like them better than the Miles books. I’d probably start with The Warrior’s Apprentice myself.
My wife is a huge fan. I really like some of the books, but for most of them, I am simply not the target audience. The early ones are leaning heavily into romance, and the military background is not particularly well researched. The later ones are back to being romance, and the last one is simply fan service.
But in the middle, there is some brilliant political commentary, mixed with very solid adventure and humor. Basically, the further the narrative stays from any real military action and personel, the easier it is for me to suspend disbelief.
As for Falling Free, it is not a Vorkosigan book, but it provides background for one of my favorite Vorkosigan books, Diplomatic Immunity. I would suggest that if you want to really experience the series, and if you have the time, follow the King of Heart’s advice: “Begin at the beginning, go on till you come to the end. Then stop.”
Well, maybe disregard the last two words, if you like it enough.
But without the first few books, you will not be able to appreciate the nuances on the later ones. You have to understand what makes Cetagandians tick, how Barrayar became what it is, and how Komar ended up where it is.
And how Miles can exist, at all, in his home society. If you start from the middle, you may think very little of the world building.
Return from the Far Side?
Yeah, I’ve never actually finished the latest Vorkosigan book. (Harmed partially by the fact that there is a very good fanfic series centered around the reveal of that book, but written years before it was canon and in a much more satisfying-to-me way.)
The two books that are way better than I reemembered so far were Cetaganda and Brothers in Arms. (I don’t know about and don’t particularly care about military matters, so their accuracy is not as important to me as I’m sure it is to you.) I can’t wait to get to Memory, to see if it’s as great as I remember.
Nobody, wow!! And it’s gonna take me a WHILE to get used to that coloring style.
Col. Nathan R. Jessup, A Few Good Men (1992)
Betsy Hodges, former mayor of Minneapolis, MN (2020)
Amp, here is an article entitled “Army Investigating Training Materials That Declare ‘MAGA’ Is ‘Covert White Supremacy'” that shows what I’m pretty sure is one of your cartoons. It’s not entirely clear that said cartoon is in the training materials the article is about, but I would make that presumption given the overall thrust of the article. Do you know anything about this?
The Mayor of Chicago – a black lesbian – was asked in a recent press conference about her reaction to the calls to defund the police. Her answer was “What I hear from people in the neighborhoods is that they want MORE police.” In the context of the press conference it was clear that she was talking about Hispanic and Black neighborhoods, as she had just spent time defending herself against charges that she had deployed the police during the recent riots in favor of downtown and let the nearby Black and Hispanic neighborhoods suffer.
(I moved Ron’s comment to this thread, since the cartoon he’s talking about isn’t the cartoon in the thread he initially posted it in.)
Ron, that is one of my cartoons! Thanks for pointing it out to me.
I don’t recall ever hearing from the “Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence” or giving them permission to use my cartoon. But maybe I did; I routinely give small nonprofits permission to use my cartoons. (If they seem big enough to have a budget, I’ll ask them about a reprint fee, but make it clear that if they can’t afford that they can use the cartoon gratis).
The fact that one of my cartoon made it into a flier that was briefly used in army training delights me.
Harlequin wrote
I thought _Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance_ was the fanservice one. It’s fine for what it is; but because the goals of the protags and antags are relatively politically aligned there’s not that opportunity for political commentary.
Not counting the most recent short story (“Flowers of Vashnoi”), _Admiral Jole & the Red Queen_ is the last novel, and I thought that one failed because Bujold forgot her own original goal, of having both cracking good adentures and character development: she didn’t put Jole & Cordelia through hard enough choices, so it fell flat.
But I would read good fanfic of either, so where do I go looking for that “very good fanfic series” please…?
The series is here. Written so early, in fact, that Jole didn’t have a canonical first name yet!
(Even the tags on those stories are spoilers in a way, so I wouldn’t click if you plan on reading the canon but haven’t yet.)
Even fatcats are looking forward to a Biden victory:
Here are observations from an AP reporter who spent a night at the Federal building in Portland that has been the site of violent mob actions over the last couple of months.
From the article, but not a quote from the AP reporter (as the above were):
Come to Portland, Ron, and I’ll escort you around town and to the protest site so you can see for yourself what’s going on. Those of us who live here and have watched the live streams or been at the protest know what’s going on.
For the rest of us, there’s the NYT:
J. Squid: I’d love to come to Portland some day, but in the (likely, unfortunately) absence of that happening – do you deny the accuracy of the AP reporter’s report?
nobody.really: I do wish that the NYT would make a distinction between protesters and rioters. Unless they don’t see a difference, which seems problematical to me.
Eh. I expect people might regard the distinction as a judgment call. I could imagine a protester setting off fireworks as a means to draw attention to a protest. But if the wind shifts and embers from a firework hit a federal building, is the protester thereby transformed into a rioter?
I expect the NYT reporter was seeking to describe events, and leave the reader to draw conclusions about the people involved in the events. “Protester” seems like a broader, more inclusive term. I expect that even rioters regard themselves as engaging in protest.
I do wish that the police would make a distinction between protesters and rioters. Unless they don’t see a difference, which seems problematical to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ_moOtDqvk
I should not think so, but I would say that they are careless – and are acting illegally – by doing so. From here:
And in any case, what the AP reporter stated was that fireworks in the form of a mortar were actually aimed at the building more than once and struck a Federal official on at least one occasion. That seems like a pretty clear-cut example of a rioter to me.
I would really like to hear the Mayor’s explanation why vandals and rioters have been permitted to gather outside the Federal courthouse and conduct the kinds of criminal acts that have been going on.
Chris, I’m not going to claim that the law enforcement personnel have been acting 100% as they should have through all this. But hundreds of people have been gathering nightly since May around a Federal courthouse and have been permitted to vandalize it, throw projectiles at it and the people there, set fires around it and on at least one occasions set a fire IN it. With little interference, apparently, from the City of Portland. On that basis I condemn any abuses by the law enforcement personnel but I don’t see it as the central issue here. The failure of the local authorities to put a quick stop to that is the proximate cause that seems to me to have forced Pres. Trump to send Federal forces in to stop that. It makes no sense to me that the local authorities didn’t stop this from escalating to this point.
“Permitted”? Long before the Feds came here, the Portland cops were violently clashing with the protesters (and others). A reporter was permanently blinded in one eye; another protester suffered brain damage when he was shot with “less lethal” ammo from across a street.
So what, exactly, are you calling for, Ron? There is in fact a limited amount that cops can do in these circumstances (which is what makes protests possible). Do you think they should be machine gunning protesters? Running them down with tanks? I assume not. But if you think the cops should be trying to disperse the protesters and try to stop the protests (first amendment be damned) and arrest people in a violent, aggressive but (so far) non-lethal manner, then they’re already doing that.
If you’re trying to tell me what’s going on in my city, you can just shut up.
Your comment about little interference from the city is a total fantasy that one can only get if they solely consume right wing propaganda as their news sources. As such it requires no further response or attention and deserves no respect at all.
I’ll just point out the remarkable coincidence that is a complete lack of rioting or violence that happened as soon as the feds withdrew. Fuck that right wing propaganda that you have consumed unquestioningly, Ron. The feds were ratcheting up the tension and then attacking peaceful protestors every single night.
I’ll take your apology off the air.
Huh. Two days without federal secret police guarding the building and two days without police riots. It may be that Ron’s trusted sources keep lying to him.
The protests are a response to police brutality. The protesters are demanding an end to police brutality. When police respond with even more police brutality, I have trouble seeing how police brutality is not the central issue, even if it’s true that some protesters are behaving violently.
It’s not a coincidence. The mob wanted the Feds out of the city, so they used vandalism and violence until the lack of action on the part of local and State law enforcement forced Feds to arrive.
That gave the mob the target they wanted and so they escalated their violence. Once the target they wanted left and the State finally stepped up to do the job they should have been doing all along the rioters left.
Somehow I don’t see the success on the part of the rioters in using violence to drive government officials out of a government facility as a good thing, or for that matter particularly legitimate or something to celebrate. The Feds had every right to be there and a duty to protect the property from the vandalism and assaults that had been going on for weeks before they arrived. The fact that the rioting stopped when the Governor did what she should have done weeks earlier on the very first night that someone vandalized the building is no credit to her or to the rioters.
Amp:
What? The fact that cops have a limited amount of available actions to oppose illegal conduct, to oppose vandalism and other property damage is what makes protest possible? Are you proposing that protests are only possible when such actions occur?
Video from Beruit. Not one of the usual ones you have seen ….
Your sources are lying to you again, Ron. The Governor did nothing different once the feds retreated than had been done before the feds arrived to start their nightly riots on overwhelmingly peaceful protestors.
I can’t say this to you enough times, Ron, but your sources are 100% lying to you about what has been happening in Portland since late May. Sometime very soon, I’m going to have to start believing that you WANT to believe these lies.
“I’m going to have to start believing that you WANT to believe these lies.”
I think most of us are already there
Looks like those overwhelmingly peaceful protesters are not committing violence anymore since the Feds left.
“The Governor did nothing different once the feds retreated than had been done before the feds arrived to start their nightly riots on overwhelmingly peaceful protestors.”
From the New York Times:
Had the Oregon State Police been providing security outside the city’s Federal courthouse before? No. They had not. In fact, the very lack of such security is why Pres. Trump sent the Feds there in the first place. So it seems to me that the Governor is – or has at least pledged to be – doing something different than before.
So you figure the New York Times is lying?
For anybody interested in what’s actually going on with the Portland Protests, may I suggest local sources such as The Oregonian, Willamette Week, and The Portland Mercury?
If one were to bother to do that, one might find articles like this. If one were interested, of course.
Well, that’s nice. That’s what happened there in Portland. It seems odd to praise people for not assaulting Federal officials or committing vandalism or arson on a Federal building – kind of a low bar, don’t you think?
Things were different elsewhere. I invite you to read it; it’s most definitely a local source.
Basically, two groups of people took it upon themselves to block traffic in the city. One group did that for a while and then dispersed. The other one marched onto a police station, shone lasers at the officers there (which is assault), attempted to tear down the surveillance cameras, spray painted their lenses to block them, smashed in the front door, set a fire, and shot fireworks and heaved projectiles at the cops.
So it seems to me to say that riots and violence stopped when the Feds left isn’t true. It may have stopped at the Federal courthouse – now that the Governor is finally doing the job she should have done weeks ago – but vandalism, assaults on police and arson seems to still be in vogue elsewhere on the part of people styling themselves as “protesters”. Tell me, did any of the sources you mention report on this? If so, was the coverage particularly prominent? Did they blame it on President Trump?
Look! It’s another riot in Portland!!!
1) Blocking traffic is neither violence nor is it rioting
2) The police station is not where the nightly police and then federal jackbooted thug riots were taking place, but if you want to move the goalposts, that’s one of your reliable tactics and I’ll ignore it other than to point out that you’ve moved the goalposts.
3) The governor is doing nothing differently. The change at the Federal Courthouse is that neither PPB nor Federal Secret Police are standing outside and then declaring a riot at 11 PM. The difference is the Oregon State Police are using actual, standard crowd control tactics and not confronting and escalating the way PPB and faceless Fed goons did for 9 weeks. Turns out attacking peaceful protestors isn’t actually an effective method of dealing with protests.
4) Disappointingly, the Oregonian, Portland Mercury and Willamette Week have reported on all known instances of vandalism, graffiti and rioting. You’d know that if you would read local sources.
5) I was downtown at the County Courthouse on Monday – it’s across the park from the Justice Center – and everything was normal other than some boarded up windows and a bit more graffiti than usual. But since you won’t believe anything that locals report, you can translate that as the city has been utterly destroyed by rioting that required the Border Patrol and US Marshalls to bring under control. It’ll make you feel better.
6) The PPB is not a trustworthy source. When I was active in my neighborhood association around the turn of the century, the old timers in the neighborhood had stories of the PPB’s corruption and habit of planting evidence going back to the 70s. The PPB is a highly biased source of info on the actions of the PPB.
1) I mentioned blocking the streets just to introduce the group engaged in the subsequent events. Blocking streets is illegal, but I agree that it’s not violence.
2) In post #31 of this thread you said
You did not say “… at the Federal building …” A riot featuring an assault of a Police union building one night and a riot featuring an assault of a Precinct building the next night is hardly “a complete lack of rioting or violence”. And Mayor Wheeler seems to agree with me, not you.
3)
If the Oregon State Police are at the Federal building now and they were not there before the Feds showed up then the governor is doing something differently. If the Oregon State Police were at the building both before and after but are now using “actual, standard crowd control tactics” while having previously permitted people to vandalize the Federal building, throw projectiles, etc., then the Governor is doing something differently. One way or another, the Governor is doing something differently.
4) It’s quite true that I’m not reading those sources you named. But given that you apparently are reading them and did not seem to be aware of the rioting going on the last couple of nights I got the impression that they were not reporting them.
5)
I don’t know why I would do so. I certainly haven’t said anything of that nature up to this point. My attention has been focused on the action at the Federal building and that’s all I’ve talked about – at least up until you asserted that rioting and violence has stopped and I did about a 2 minute search to find out that wasn’t true, the rioters had just taken their act on the road.
6) I can’t speak to the PPB’s veracity, but there seem to be pictures and reports of gunshots in the vicinity.
And while we are on the subject of peaceful protesters:
If a group of people were outside the Federal building peacefully protesting outside an established perimeter and the Feds came out and started assaulting people I would agree that they were WAY out of line and committing something properly referred to as a “police riot”. Having been living in the Chicago area in 1968 I’m familiar with the term.
If a group of people were protesting outside the Federal building while people in the crowd were heaving projectiles and firebombs, crossing a perimeter to vandalize the building and set fires and shining lasers at cop’s faces; if they were warned repeatedly that they were now part of an illegal assembly and had to leave; if they instead stayed while the vandalism and violence continued – then they were no longer peaceful protesters, they were complicit in violence even if they did not commit a violent act themselves. In that case – play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I was of the generation that protested the Vietnam War. I’ve run from angry cops. I’ve seen a cop grab a kid standing in a doorway by the arm and deliberately break his leg with a nightstick. I’ve had tear gas fired at me. Heck, I helped organize a few demos. Got a bunch of angry people confronting me at one demo on the steps at MIT after we fashioned a bunch of crosses and put them all over the 77 Mass. Ave. steps. But at no point did we tolerate violence from people in our groups, and if someone did start throwing rocks, etc., at a demo we backed off and let the cops grab them unimpeded.
And yet another night of rioting last night:
Are you still going to attempt to support the claim that “a complete lack of rioting or violence that happened as soon as the feds withdrew.”? Are my sources lying? Are your sources reporting this?
This has absolutely happened. There are many, many videos of this happening.
This has also happened. There are many, many videos of this happening.
That said, “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” is not a legal principle. Police must use reasonable and proportionate force when dealing with citizens. This has not been happening. That is the problem that unites both the peaceful protesters and those resorting to violence. It’s the root cause.
Chris, I freely condemn the first scenario. Tell me, what do you think is the reasonable and proportionate response to the second scenario?
Open thread, so nothing is off-topic:
If Joe Biden is elected President, what do you think the odds are that a serious attempt will be made to invoke the 25th Amendment before the end of what would be his first term? And no, I’m not asking this to establish or argue a conspiracy theory. I’m just curious as to what your judgement is.
Also, given the tenor of my previous remarks, let me make it clear that I take no pleasure in what’s happening in Portland – and is still going on. So I won’t post anymore “See, it happened again!” links. I think what’s going on now is clear and undeniable. What I’m wondering is, why hasn’t the Mayor put a stop to it? When violent mobs have been surrounding buildings and committing acts of vandalism, breaking and entering and arson it seems to me that a somewhat more emphatic response is needed than has been used up to this point. It’s certainly being called for in Chicago, especially after last night. For those of you not familiar with Chicago, the “Magnificent Mile” is a section of Michigan Avenue in the center of the Loop (downtown Chicago) that has a high concentration of high-end stores and cultural institutions as well as more normal stores. It is a veritable Mecca for tourists and shoppers. Chicago gets massive amounts of both property and sales tax money from it. The city by no means can allow violence to slow that down or stop it. If Mayor Lori Lightfoot (the 2nd Mayor to be either female or black and the first to be both, and a lesbian to boot) doesn’t do something about this fast she’ll lose control of the City Council and also will be a one-term mayor.
According to a CATO article, given current life expectencies in the US, there’s a “79.2 percent for Biden; 84.8 percent for Trump” chance of each of them living through January 2025. (Biden is 77, Trump is 74). I doubt that either one of them would give up being President for anything less than either death or being in a coma. (As the 25th Amendment ever been invoked for anything less than death?)
But both of them are wealthy and have access to excellent health care, so I suspect their odds of living to 2025 are greater than the average for their ages.
Nonetheless, I REALLY hope that in four or eight years we see some younger candidates win their primaries.
@Ampersand#51- “As the 25th Amendment ever been invoked for anything less than death?)”
Well, there’s Nixon’s resignation. But other than that, according to wiki, there are 3 times when Presidents invoked it when they had surgery that lasted a few hours:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_president_of_the_United_States
But no, it’s never really been invoked to avoid an Edith Wilson scenario.
I kinda doubt we’d see people invoke the 25th Amendment. If we didn’t invoke it for Reagan, why for Biden? The federal government is supposed to be like a contemporary airliner: It’ll fly on automatic pilot under all but the most extraordinary circumstances. Our current pilot has been doing everything he can think of to crash it, so that he can invoke emergency powers to delay the election or something, and even he hasn’t quite succeeded.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden resigned for health reasons. Thus, about that VP pick….
@nobody.really#54- “If we didn’t invoke it for Reagan, why for Biden?”
There’s considerable debate about whether or not Reagan was suffering symptoms of Alzheimer’s while in office. See Snopes’s discussion here:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ronald-reagan-alzheimers-disease/
The problem- and this relates to Biden too- is that a certain amount of memory loss is normal in people in their 70s, so laymen should not try to diagnose Alzheimer’s in the elderly using their degrees from the University of Google.
Hm. I hadn’t seen that. Nice spotting, Michael.
Some additional info for those of us who don’t track dementia news: Incidences of dementia continue to grow in China, Japan, Nigeria … but have dropped in Europe and the US: “In 1995, a 75-year-old man had about a 25 percent chance of developing dementia in his remaining lifetime. Now that man’s chance declined to 18 percent,” even though 75-yr-0lds live longer.
Many theories–Less smoking? Better blood pressure control?–but no one really knows why. Perhaps, in the era of Donald and Boris, symptoms of dementia have become so normalized as to evade detection? (Ok, ok, no more Google diagnosing….)
I saw someone on Twitter saying that her feed right now is a mix of people reacting to the choice of Kamala Harris for VP by saying “wow, this is groundbreaking!” and people saying “bah, what a safe choice.”
Of all the credible Democratic 2020 candidates I disliked Biden the most, followed by Harris. I am not surprised that they formed the final team. After all, I hated both Trump and Clinton in 2016. (I hate both more today than I did then. Clinton for losing, Trump from being exactly what it says on the tin)
I just hope Biden&Harris are as electable as people believe they are. I certainly cannot think of a single attribute on which I rank them higher than the people ahead of which they came. OK, I can think of one, but that would be in bad taste.
Fun editorial in the NYT about protests and riots leading up to the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party was, after all, blatant destruction of private property. Still,
“If we didn’t invoke it for Reagan, why for Biden?”
Reagan was just shy of 78 when his last term ended. Biden would be just over 78 should he start on a first term.
“… laymen should not try to diagnose Alzheimer’s in the elderly using their degrees from the University of Google.”
I am so stealing “University of Google”! That’s great.
Having said that – I would not dare to diagnose any particular medical condition that Biden may or may not have. But having observed both it’s my impression that – without speculating on the cause or nature of what I see – Biden now is about at where Reagan was towards the end of his 2nd term. I’ll reserve final judgement on that until after I watch a debate or two.
That’s crazy talk, Ron. I fear you are forgetting how degraded Reagan’s faculties were after the assassination attempt as compared to his mental acuity beforehand. By the 1984 general election, he was contradicting himself from one day to the next and his delivery of his speeches was notably worse than it had been earlier in his presidency.
In contrast, while Biden’s voice is noticeably weaker than during his terms as VP, his manner of speech and his coherence is at roughly the same level. This is a politician, after all, who has been known for his gaffes and misspeakings for 30 years.
Well, and ‘diminished faculties’ or not seems sort of beside the point. The guy in office right now is responsible for 160,000 preventable American deaths, tens of millions unemployed, and an entire nation confined to their homes for months on end.
I doubt anything Biden does in office could begin to compare, even if he becomes completely incapacitated.
It’s like arguing that one candidate isn’t personable enough while the other side’s candidate is Charles Manson.
And hey, neither Biden nor Harris were my first (or second, or third) choices, but I’ll happily vote for the ‘not a mass murderer” ticket.
It’s more like over 200k excess deaths due entirely to Trump’s denialism and his pathological refusal to ever do any work.
(Yes, the promised name change is finally here.)
And my comment about it being over 200k deaths has disappeared. Possibly because of the name change I attempted
I fished it out of the spam trap, thanks for letting me know! Hopefully, now that I’ve approved a comment under your changed name, from now on you can use that name and it’ll auto-approve.
This is why my old home town is such an idyllic place to raise your kids.
(noose-found-painted-outside-black-familys-home-in-chappaqua)
I posted on an alumni fb page a response to the many, many posts of articles expounding the idyllicness of Chappqua in which I described, among many other horrible, terrible things about the place, the rampant anti Semitism. I have other friends better placed to recount the explicit racism of the community during our shared childhoods.
J. Squid, is it your contention that every death due to a Wuhan virus infection was avoidable and that the ultimate responsibility for it is due to actions (or lack thereof) on the part of the Federal government in general and Pres. Trump specifically?
Ron, the official and common names for the virus are “covid,” “covid-19,” and “coronavirus.” The only reason to call it “Wuhan virus” is to signal that as a matter of culture wars, you prefer to use the term that many people find racist.
Consider “wuhan virus” like calling people “illegals”; you can do it in your own spaces, but not on this blog. Thanks.
P.S. This is the second time we’ve asked you this.
I need to see your response to my rebuttal of your ridiculous claims about Biden and Reagan’s relative cognitive abilities before I’m willing to move on to other reality denying claims of yours about the Trump Pandemic or any other subject.
As of today, 167,546 Americans have died of Coronavirus. Somewhere between 117,000 and 165,000 of those deaths could have been prevented if our government had reacted as quickly and effectively as Germany or Australia. (A similar analysis is here).
This article is a chronology of all the denials, lies, and bad decisions Trump made regarding Coronavirus. Trump isn’t the only person who bears responsibility, but he deserves a lot of blame.
Seems like I’m not the only one who remembers late stage Reagan… You’ll notice a number of comments contain fond reminiscences of the Dribbler’s cognitive acuity by ’84.
Amp: I missed that first instance. Sorry about that. Had I seen it, I would have posted that we do not call Ebola virus “Filovir-76”, West Nile Virus “Flavi-99”, or any one of dozens of viruses currently commonly called by their place of first encounter a construction made out of part of their scientific name plus the year they were first encountered. It has been the practice for over a century or more to call (sometimes inaccurately) viruses such as the “Spanish flu” by where they appear to have come from and in all that time nobody said a word. Until Pres. Trump did so. At which point news commentators and other leftists who for days or weeks up until that point had called it some derivation of “Chinese” or “Wuhan” seized upon it because that way they could push a specious claim that this was an example of racism on his part. It has nothing to do with actual racism, it’s just pure politics. If they really believed that such a thing is racist they’d be pushing to change what we call existing viruses – but since Trump isn’t talking about them I predict they won’t.
I’d like to see some factual examples of “leftists” other than news commentators (who are mostly rightists) calling the #TrumpPandemic virus by names referring to East Asia once epidemiologists had formally named it because I think you’re making that up. While I certainly heard and read news about a new illness centered in Wuhan, China, I never heard the virus actually called by names that incorporated those proper nouns. But I don’t watch FauxNews or OANN, so I would have missed the earliest attempts at using the #TrumpPandemic for racist purposes.
Do you watch CNN? Here are dozens of their commentators calling it either the “Wuhan coronavirus” or the “Chinese coronavirus”, which pretty much incorporates those proper nouns. And if you think that CNN commentators and news readers are “mostly rightists” then I have a bridge to sell you.
Here is a report of a man and his wife in a truck who were surrounded by a mob in Portland with the result that the man was pulled out of his truck and beaten unconscious. I was wondering if anyone can add context to this from a local Portland source that might shed light on how it all started. Did the driver run someone down or attempt to plow through a crowd? More on it here.
Ron –
The Ebola River wasn’t the “place of first encounter” of what we now call Ebola. Quoting Wikipedia:
So it’s exactly the opposite of what you’re claiming. The reason it’s called “Ebola” isn’t because that’s where the first identified instances of the disease were; it’s because people were trying to find a way to avoid stigmatizing Yambuku by naming a disease after it.
So are you now going to start leading a charge to rename it “Yambuku Virus”?
Utter nonsense, Ron. People had these concerns back in 1976, when Ebola was not named Yambuku. Lots of people (especially but not only in Spain) have argued against the term “the Spanish Flu,” as in this article from 2018.
In an earlier thread, in response to a similar question, I wrote:
Ron wrote:
I’m pretty certain I’ve never used the term “Wuhan virus” outside of discussions like this one, where I’m arguing against the term.
Trump and his administration didn’t start pushing the term “Wuhan virus” until around March 7th (although, like many people, they had used the term prior to then), and their really big push began in mid-March.
Before that point, it was a common term – but both “corona-19” and “coronavirus” were used more in the media. A Google News search of all mentions up until March 1st returned 12 pages of results for “Wuhan virus,” compared to 20 for “coronavirus” and 29 for “Covid-19.” If there ever was a time when “Wuhan virus” was the most common term – and I doubt there ever was – then it was brief.
Regarding that truck driver, I don’t have any inside info on it, and I don’t claim to know what happened.
But I do notice that the Washington Post’s coverage mentions some details that the NY Post article Ron linked left out.
– People have claimed that the truck tried to hit protesters. AFAIK, there’s no video showing this one way or the other.
– The truck had no license plate. Which might mean nothing at all, but might mean that the driver was planning to hit or at least threaten to hit protesters, and took off his plates to avoid being ID’ed.
– The person who kicked the driver of the truck in the head, was then pulled away by another person there.
– Some people in the crowd wanted to help the man, calling 911 and calling for a medic.
No, I never watch CNN or MSNBC or Faux or OANN or any other cable news channel. Calling CNN talking heads “leftists” is only done by folks who are deep into right wing fantasy lands. CNN may be centrist at its most liberal. Just because it isn’t a propaganda organ like Faux or OANN does not make it “leftist” by any reasonable definition.
While it’s cool that you’ve found clips purported to be conservative talking heads on CNN calling it by those proper nouns, I’m pretty sure that this was not a common thing for any length of time.
On a related note, why is it so important for you to validate a term that has been used in only a clearly racist manner for months? What is your investment in this particular racist phrase?
(It would have been a much better video if it had date/time stamps with the clips. As somebody who never watches CNN, I have no idea if these are real or fake and I have no reason to trust the MRC on this as they have a long history of heavily biased claims. It would have been cool if you could have linked to a nonpartisan, credible source. I’m going to assume that all of these clips, if real, happened in the 3 day period before consensus on COVID-19 was reached, absent other evidence. But I appreciate you responding with a link, so thanks for that.)
I really, really, really don’t understand this craving to be able to use this particular racist term. In the 70s, 80s and even 90s, I’m sure I used the racist term “Indian Giver.” Once I understood it was a racist phrase, I stopped. I don’t try to validate the term as “not racist” even though I used it for decades. I was wrong. I used it out of ignorance, not malice, but I was still wrong. Throwing up a video of me saying that phrase 142 times over 20 some years doesn’t make me a hypocrite. It makes me somebody who stopped saying a racist thing once I knew better. You know better now, too, than to use the racist term for COVID-19.
Why should I believe, assuming the CNN clips are all real, something different about CNN and its talking mannequins? Perhaps they started with that term, were told it was racist and, because they’re not ALL monsters, went with the name the epidemiological community had agreed on.
Whatever their reasoning for the change, they stopped using a racist phrase that you really, really, really want to keep using even after learning that it’s racist. Given the fact that it’s a racist phrase, the fact that mainstream media stopped using that phrase quickly due to the racism inherent in the term, and the fact that you won’t stop using it, what am I supposed to think of you, RonF?
I’m just curious: Cuomo has been calling the corona virus the “European virus” and, in fact, did it again last night in the Democratic Convention (online all over YouTube, just move ahead to his speech).
How do you feel about that?
I’ll be honest, I’m not a Cuomo fan – I think he’s been a terrible governor and he really fucked up New York’s initial response to coronavirus. (He eventually learned and improved, so in that way he’s better than Trump.) So it’s possible I’m biased here.
But listening to the first minute of Cuomo’s very tedious speech, he called it “covid virus” four times.
Then, at 1:42, he said “European virus,” and didn’t seem to mean it sarcastically. After listening to it twice, I think I know what he was going for. He was drawing a contrast between when the virus was coming over to NY on planes from Europe, while Trump was focused on China, so he was trying to emphasize the Europe part – but calling it “European virus” is not only stupid, it actually made it harder to understand his point.
For the rest of the speech, he called it “covid.” Which makes it seem like maybe he got his words jumbled; he certainly isn’t using the term “European virus” preferentially, if this speech is any example.
Either way, he shouldn’t have used that term; he could have said the same thought, but been much clearer, by just calling it covid.
If there’s some movement to spread prejudice against Europe by calling it “the European virus” (which is different than using the term sarcastically to point out how stupid the term “Wuhan virus” is), I haven’t run across it, but I disagree with it.
Amp, @77 – I did not advocate that the article I read on that incident gave a full story. In fact, just the opposite – I saw that none of those stories started until the crowd allegedly pursued the truck, which then crashed, giving no report on what had happened before then. Since so much emphasis here has been made on looking at local sources I thought someone here might be better positioned than I to do just that. It’s entirely possible he rammed into the crowd first and they sought revenge; it’s entirely possible that a violent mob decided to come close to killing him because he was white and driving a truck down a road they were near. I was wondering if anyone here could shed more light on the incident.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis @ 78:
Those are clips of liberal talking heads on CNN. There might be a conservative talking head on CNN but I am not personally aware of one and would not want to risk any quantity of money that more than one or two can be found there. If any.
It was common until the Chinese government/Communist Party (the same thing) started to complain, at which point I’ll guess that upper management at CNN and other media corporations took one look at how much money their entertainment divisions make in China and decided to toe the Party line.
False premise. It has not been and is not now racist to use the term “Wuhan virus” to refer to what is also referred to as COVID-19.
How do you know CNN talking heads are not leftists if you never watch CNN?
Amp @76:
O.K., so they named it after the closest river instead of the nearby town. It was still roughly tied to the location instead of calling it “Filovir-76”. You’ve also got Marburg disease named after Marburg, Germany that’s not called “Filovir-67” or Lyme Disease named after Lyme, Connecticut instead of being called “Borelli-75” and, heck, Legionnaire’s Disease which actually IS named after a particular group of people. Yes, “Spanish Flu” WAS a misnomer – but I haven’t heard any claims that it’s racist (that would mean you can be racist against white people), just that it’s inaccurate.
I didn’t claim it was. I claimed that referencing “Wuhan” was *a* common usage – and it was. And I hold that it was never racist, and still isn’t.
Given that violent mobs are still vandalizing and damaging government buildings and assaulting police in Portland (despite claims now shown to be absurd that were made even by people here that the violence stopped when the Federal agents stood down) do you think the present status quo should be allowed to continue? Do you think that the violence should be stopped – and if so, how? Because right now there doesn’t seem to be an endpoint that I can figure out. The tactics and logistics of the mobs seem to be escalating somewhat – from my vantage point they seem to be getting more organized. Some of you on here are local. What’s the local opinion (or opinions, since I imagine they vary)? What’s yours?
Full disclosure; I use COVID, I’ve never used anything other than COVID, it’s common parlance in my area. But I understand the pushback against calling the “Wuhan Flu” a racist term.
I think we all need to remember recent history, specifically China’s actions around COVID pre-April. We now know that China knew about the virus back in October. The doctors who tried to announce COVID’s existence were thrown in prisons where they were allowed to die in obscurity while the virus ran basically unchecked for months. Up until early 2020, when the coronavirus was being positively tested in labs across the world, China refused to even call it a coronavirus, referring to it internally as the “Wuhan Pneumonia” (which, it also bears saying, was not seen as a racist term). When those foreign labs finally said, “No, this is a coronavirus, and it originated in China” China then tried to blame the virus on an American military bio-weapon.
Around the same time, The World Health Organization was operating in a very strange way for an organization dedicated to health; Between January and April, they published more articles tone policing the world about calling the virus the “Chinese Flu” or the “Wuhan Flu” than they did information about the flu, and at every step of the process they seemed to be trying to downplay the effects of the virus. This is also almost certainly grounded in Chinese interference; Even if you choose to believe that the WHO was not purposefully disseminating Chinese propaganda, they were at least doing it; If you assume that the information given was the best information they had, they were getting that information from the China, rigor was not being applied, and it was wrong.
We believe some of the things we believe today because of lies: We believe that “Wuhan Flu” is a racist term because China won the propaganda war on the term by leveraging the good intentions of American Democrats against the exceptionally soft target of an administration they already loathed. And while I personally won’t use “Wuhan Flu” because it sounds so tinny and forced in my ear, I at least understand why some Republicans dislike the restriction… There is a rebel spirit in America that chafes against letting the bad guys win. And make no mistake: The Chinese Government was absolutely, unequivocally the bad guy in this scenario.
Welcome, Corso.
Citation, please?
Thanks!
The argument could be made either way… It’s going to be subjective. If you look at the WHO’s timeline of COVID events:
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/interactive-timeline#event-29
They list dozens of interactions with the public on the topic of COVID, but is a tweet “published”? Is a mission summary “information about the virus”? And does the length of the documents matter? The usefulness of them? The accuracy of them?
At the same time they were producing information that said that your pets were a possible vector for the virus (something the CDC almost immediately contradicted as absurd), they were printing several versions of their stimga guides, this one is from mid March:
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/covid19-stigma-guide.pdf
Well intentioned people can disagree on whether the CDC produced more ink on COVID information than word policing, I wouldn’t even fight them too hard on it. I think at the minimum I would say that during a pandemic that they knew almost nothing about, got almost nothing right on at the start, and that people were dying in, that they spent a disproportionate and inappropriate amount of time on word policing.
Just to put this into context… I believe that this was the first time in the history of the WHO that they even made an effort to adjust the public’s perception of the name of a disease. Can anyone give an example of the WHO telling us not to call any other disease something other than its common name before COVID?
Thanks for the link to the timeline. Looking through it, it doesn’t seem that “the argument could be made either way.” Your claim that “between January and April, they published more articles tone policing the world about calling the virus the “Chinese Flu” or the “Wuhan Flu” than they did information about the flu” is unambiguously false, and tons of hand-waving about mission summaries and the length of documents won’t rescue your false claim.
(And of course it matters if statements are accurate – but it’s irrelevant to the specific claim you made, that I asked about).
I do agree that WHO was far too nice about the Chinese government response in their public statements. I don’t know if this is because they were easily fooled by the Chinese government, or if they’re really fans of the Chinese government, or if they made a judgement call that sucking up to the Chinese government was a lesser evil compared to the Chinese government forbidding WHO staff from entering China or communicating with doctors in China. But no matter their motivation, they published bad information, and it’s right to criticize them for that.
1) Is there any reason to think anyone here would know, if they had? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
2) Neither “Wuhan flu” or “Chinese flu” were never Covid-19’s “common name.” At best, they were two of a bunch of common names, and never the most common name.
3) Who cares if WHO has done it before or not? If it’s the right thing to do, then it’s still the right thing to do if they’ve never done it before. If it’s the right thing but they’re doing it for the wrong reasons, it’s still the right thing.
Articles published around March 13th (I was looking for “around mid March”) don’t seem to support your claim.
WHO says pets are generally safe from being infected with coronavirus — Quartz
Can Dogs Get Coronavirus? Here’s What the World Health Organization and Experts Say
Generally on this subject, it’s clear that Trump hasn’t merely been using a common term; he’s consciously tried to promote the use of “China virus” over other, more common terms. For example:
Photo of Trump Remarks Shows ‘Corona’ Crossed Out and Replaced With ‘Chinese’ Virus
Ampersand,
You write that as if it’s a bad thing.
Here’s a really alien (as in “extraterrestrial” / way out) way of looking at things:
Picture you are back in school and have a Republican / Conservative principal and Republican teacher. And lots of Republican co-students.
Everyone is telling you to call the Civil War “the war between the states”. Just because you don’t like the political leanings of everyone telling you to do that, you specifically call it the Civil War. Because you are sick of people telling you to say what you are going to say, and how you are going to say it, and how you are going to be punished and canceled and ostracized if you don’t exactly follow their commands.
I’m being serious here. Can you kind of understand that?
Please don’t nit-pick or ask for links — I’m asking that you try to understand what I am saying.
@87 Like I said, I won’t fight it too hard. I remember following the WHO releases at the time, and it felt like they’d completely lost the narrative. That might be bias on my part based on what I was consuming. I don’t really think that this point was critical to my overall point though, and I could line by line cite everything else.
China did throw doctors who tried to announce COVID in 2019 into prisons where they did die.
China did call it the Wuhan Pneumonia until that was untenable (around early January, as I recall), despite knowing very well that it was a coronavirus.
China did try to shift the blame to America by suggesting COVID was an American bioweapon.
All of that is important because researchers estimated that if China had acted a week earlier than it had, we could have cut global spread by 66%, and if they acted three weeks earlier it could have been as much as 95%. They had three months.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/research-finds-huge-impact-of-interventions-on-spread-of-covid-19
As to your questions;
1) No… I asked the question because I realize that I might be wrong, and I don’t have better information. Someone here might know. I don’t believe that the WHO has ever acted like that before, I could not find evidence that they had, but it would be much easier for someone to prove that I was wrong than for me to prove that I was right.
2) Absolutely fair… I know that a lot of people in my area were calling it the “Wuhan Flu” before the propaganda campaign against it started, but that’s purely anecdotal. Even people using variations on “Wuhan Flu” were inconsistent in their use, changing between “The Wuhan Flu”, “The Chinese Flue” “The China Flu”, “The Chinese Virus”, ect. ect. ect. It was bound to consolidate to a single term eventually, but I don’t think that people would have naturally settled on COVID-19 without some severe prodding, which we certainly got.
3) Mandate creep? I’m not sure that the WHO needed to concern themselves over the political outcomes to terms people unrelated to them were using. And I’m not sure that they were right. I think this had more to do with toxic dictator machismo than concern over the well-being of Chinese people, generally. Remember that China’s efforts to suppress information about the virus and distance themselves from it happened before it even had a name. If at the end of the day, some kind of quality of life increase could be had by calling it COVID, and doing away with regional names in the future, than maybe it’s the right thing to do going forward. like I said, I use COVID, I just understand the people who insist it isn’t a racist term.
@88 To be fair to me, the same website that published your first citation, also published this the same day:
https://qz.com/1818227/the-who-says-that-dogs-cats-and-other-pets-can-get-coronavirus/
I’d mark it up to the rapidly changing information that was coming out at the time. It’s hard to find sources directly from the WHO when they’re wrong because they, to their credit, scrub their site as information becomes obsolete. So we’re left trying to find third party articles talking about what the WHO said. The thing is, in searching for that article, I was able to find articles starting around June that said that the virus that causes COVID can actually be found in pets, so apparently it wasn’t as absurd as I was led to believe.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/positive-pet.html
@89 Yeah. I’m not going to defend Trump’s use of language. He’s bad at it. I do think we have to be fair and consistent though; Trump has a very colorful history of attacking people that he perceives to be hostile to him, and his response to foreign leaders he dislikes is consistently bad and inappropriate. It seems like Democrats tend to see racism when the person receiving the abuse is BIPOC, misogyny when the person is a woman, and merely plain old incompetence when those factors are absent. That’s not healthy. I don’t think his drive to label it the “Chinese virus” (or whatever his name of the day was) was racially driven, so much as it was politically driven, and it probably didn’t help that China was trying to tell the world that the virus was developed by the American military.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-china-conspiracy-theory.html
Heh …
Corso is intelligent and reasonable and shows up Ampersand for what he is (not very intelligent, superficial and extremely biased), which means …
… that sooner or later he is going to be banned. And then maybe mocked, because that’s pretty much all Ampersand can do.
That’s not fair, he’s caught me being wrong twice. I’m enjoying the conversation.
Thanks, Corso. Don’t worry about the troll. :-)
Hello,
I noticed that my posts are met with a very long delay and “awaiting moderation”.
Is that the norm for this board? Am I being singled-out for whatever reason? I have not experienced that on any other message board.
If you don’t want me on this board for whatever reason, I would appreciate a direct statement and not game-playing.
Edited to add: It may just be a technical glitch, so I don’t want to come across as being nasty.
A: We have a troll who has a habit of coming here with new identities, pretending to be a reasonable newcomer, before going into some tedious personal attacks on me.
As a result of that, I’m now keeping new folks here on the “awaiting moderation” level for a while, until I’m certain that they’re not the troll pretending to be a regular poster. (There’s a little more to it than that, but I don’t want to go into detail, since it’s likely the troll will read this.)
I’m sorry about that; I hope you can stick around, and be patient. You are definitely not being singled out, I’ve done this with others too.
Korso: “We now know that China knew about the virus back in October.”
I haven’t seen that from any source other than speculation from random people who insist they had COVID-19 back in November (in the US), and googling now turns up nothing to support that claim. Where have you seen this claimed as known?
The timeline on this Brookings Institute article from two days ago, says China found out about the virus in December.
Let’s end the COVID-19 blame game: Reconsidering China’s role in the pandemic
And here’s a claim that Covid was in France as early as November (they’re using retrospective examination of chest x-rays to find earlier cases).
France had Covid-19 in November, hospital says after analysis of chest scans | South China Morning Post
I’ve just been looking at that study, and that’s not what it says. What it says is that the number of cases in China could have been cut by those amounts, depending on how much earlier they reacted. Which is important! But it’s not the same as global spread.
In the study’s best case scenario, China puts in place all the measures to prevent covid spread starting on February 7th. But by February 7th, Covid was already in Europe and New York and probably already in Seattle. (Alternate link.) Once it’s here, whether or not it spreads depended on how our government responded – and our government responded very badly, unfortunately.
Edited to add:
According to the CDC:
Sorry, Corso, not Korso.
(also, just curious, but is your pseudonym a reference to the poet?)