Two years....well, that sucks...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.blo...rs-report-says
And really!?!? Cops try to hunt down someone who is dressing up as 17th century plague doctor. What???
https://nypost.com/2020/04/30/cops-h...octor-costume/
Sorry if this is annoying, but I hate the title of this thread. I do not understand why where a new (human) virus comes from ends up being stigmatized, but for some reason it does, and the relevant thing about this virus is not so much where it comes from but what it is doing to people. I don't like communism, but I also acknowledge that what China did in response to this virus saved a lot of lives. Meanwhile, in the US with something like 1/3 the population of China, so far over 60k people have died. The current US admin is trying to scapegoat China for their failures, and it's hurting a lot of people with ties to China. I hate it. Trump is a narcissist and he cares more about his image than people and that in part is why the current US admin wants to make sure the virus is called something directly linking it to China. If they really gave a fuck they wouldn't quibble over this crap.
Hi, Ouro, I've watched this. Constructive. My problem is I'm mad at my country, the US, because it's my country and it's supposed to do better IMO. I don't see it as acceptable for the federal govt to do a crap job and then blame China for their own actions. I don't like what China's govt does, and I'm worried about their influence in the US and the world. But IMO the Trump admin is actually ceding power to China through their awful management of the crisis. So they can say that China's suppression of what was going on with the virus in their country is a serious problem, and it's very possible it had a major impact (deaths, pandemic), BUT that does not exonerate the US fed govt from what they have done (or rather neglected to do) within the US and the world. And it isn't right to discriminate against people who appear east Asian in the US due to the origin of the virus. The "Spanish" flu supposedly started in the US, and apparently it was important not to call it the "US flu" to avoid a bad image...
The US Trump admin is also nationalist, also racist. Sure, China is nationalist and discriminates against people based on nationality, ethnicity and religious affiliation... But the US isn't sitting pretty here. "Build the wall," says the US admin. It's difficult for me to concentrate negative feelings towards China when there is a govt much closer to home that is doing a god awful job. They're not interested in the truth, they're interested in diverting blame for what they did (didn't do).
As for who the world should blame... I don't know... I absolutely do not agree that Trump has our best interest at heart. I think he's pretty heartless about the American people, as are many of his cronies. They can hide behind an Fe creative press secretary and it changes nothing (they seem to think no one can remember yesterday).
Basically, I'm done with them. I've had it with them and if I wasn't mad at them they'd be dead to me. I gave them the benefit of the doubt far longer than a lot of people. They deserve it no longer (they never did).
Last edited by marooned; 05-03-2020 at 04:09 AM.
come on, we live in a country where the sales for Corona beer dropped because it has the same name, where Trump suggests we inject disinfectant into our bodies and idiots either try to ingest it or call poison control to ask if that will work.
Google will provide. This was the first result I got:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/...virus-pandemic
They want to call it the Wuhan virus (or the like) as part of their nationalist racist agenda. They = Trump's admin. It doesn't matter what China is doing because we are saddled with these fuckers and until we defeat them, they, like the selfish self-involved jerks they are, take up all the attention and energy.
PS. I agree with you that both deserve criticism. I am just so pissed at the US I personally can't focus on China right now. I do not find over 60k deaths acceptable from idiots who can't read intelligence briefings warning them about this months ahead of time. The incompetence is staggering and if they had any shred of decency they'd all resign. Why don't they? Because they are leeches. (What do leeches do? Suck away the blood - life force - of those they prey on. Who is their prey? The American people whose deaths don't bother them nearly enough.)
It is not that they have a different perspective. It is that they do not care. They don't care if you die. They do not give a fuck. They only care about themselves. They are in the White House for themselves, and only themselves. And this goes back to my last post. China (if the numbers are right) did not allow this many of their people the govt cares about (Han Chinese) to die. Our government did because they flat out do not care. They will mitigate for the sake of their own image but if you want them to care, you are SOL. If you want them to do everything they can to prevent as many deaths as possible, good fucking luck. And the ramifications do not end in the US. With our high case load we are a detriment to the entire globe.
If you need convincing, just ask yourself, what would you have done? Would you have paid attention when the Obama admin ran you through a pandemic scenario? Would you have read intelligence briefings warning about this? Would you have considered the ramifications? Most people would have and these people didn't. They are supposed to represent us and they didn't. They failed us. They have been failing us all along, but at this time when it is really obvious the plight people face, it should be really obvious what they have done (not done).
Last edited by marooned; 05-03-2020 at 05:17 AM.
lmao
China's numbers are as believable as my imaginary friends from childhood. Anyone who believes them after what they've done to Doctor Li Wenliang, accusing him of being a 'whistleblower' and even arresting him for doing the right thing, needs a reality check.
Yes, they deserve all the backlash they get and so much more for letting loose, through an inhumane cover-up policy, a plague that ravages and WILL keep on ravaging the globe for many months to come.
People are not to blame for the government's actions and they shouldn't be chastised; I feel bad for them. But there is a collective responsibility here to never forgive and never forget.
“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”
― Clarice Lispector
China's one of the few countries that is profiting from this virus. Yesterday the news that they've sold thousands of defected respiratory machines to UK, they've possibly helped to kill many recovering patients.. :/ ugh. They've given machines to Italy too but apparently weren't as badly designed... still, no words. China's even the country that keeps selling their masks worldwide, and even in this business they're selling poor quality masks that are potentially dangerous, and freaking expensive. On top of that, China's low reports have helped them not to close the entire country so that their factories and production didn't stop as it did in the rest of the western world. Call it political agenda...
Anyway, this doesn't excuse the thousands of people who go down in the streets to protest against lockdowns, nor it excuses the governments who wash their hands about public health... I hear you here.
Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!
-Raskolnikov
China is no angel. But the US is no angel, and that is my point. How the US has failed its ppl and the world is inexcusable, and their attempts to shift the blame are just that. They are guilty and I do not accept their attempts to exonerate themselves of responsibility.
I agree totally. What Trump's been doing lately with his scapegoating China and WHO is meant to gain him votes at the coming elections. I think even that it is unfair to blame China for everything, as they couldn't know what was possibly coming, and doomsday whistleblowers are not always right, although in this case they were. China gave their alarm in the middle of January and none then took the measures to contain the damage. Definitely not Trump that by mid March was telling us how stupid we are to get worried about a flu; but after the occurrences proved him wrong it was his job to show how great he worked and the best tactic for that is to blame everyone else. Big news.
Be honest with yourself and tell me, if the virus instead originated from a place like the UK/New Zealand/Germany/France etc. and their government handled it in the exact same manner as China did, would you have still posted this exact post in regards to those countries? Or do you just not like China because they have a communist-lead government and would here bashing them about the virus regardless of how events have or could have unfolded? Does your hostility towards China and belief that they should pay reparations truly stem for concern for human rights, or because they are your political opponents and hold a relevant amount of geopolitical power? Be HONEST.
I can still respect people with people conflicting political views toward mine if they are transparent with their politics and are capable of engaging in intelligent, civil debate. What I can't stand is people who cosplay as saints and conceal their politics behind other things like "human rights". I know damn well you'd change your tune in a heartbeat if the tables in China flipped and communist dissenters starting getting repressed by pro-capitalist instead. You'd either ignore it or cheer it on wouldn't you? Like how the media pretty much ignored coronavirus tainted test kits coming out of Luxembourg while China would have been getting absolutely slammed had they done the same.
Apologies, I hate being confrontational like this, but I've grown tired of hypocrisy, slyness, and disingenuousness in politics. If you believe communism is bad then I'm willing to read and listen to what points you have to say, provided you show nuanced understanding of and just don't repeat the things teachers tell kids in high school like "X amount of people starved because of communism". Then we could start getting somewhere.
Last edited by Muddy; 05-05-2020 at 03:25 PM.
I don't think you are a regular on the chatbox, so I don't expect you to know this, but I mentioned how the UK's response against the pandemic was abysmal and just as bad as China's. I fled my university town as fast as I could because I knew things were going to get worse and worse, given how much disgusting inactivity was within WEEKS after other countries have ALREADY started closing down on social venues.
No, I won't argue with you because there's no point. I've seen you on this forum before and I avoided any direct interaction with you because I know how much of a Communism fanboy you are, I doubt you actually want to hear any well-structured arguments because they won't even change your mind. You simply want to come on top and say how Communism is the vastly superior system with no flaws and how we understand it all so wrong.
I vaguely recall Alonzo (not sure) or Uncle Ave raising some points against communism ideology at one point; I agreed with their arguments wholeheartedly. Yes, it's personal, as someone who grew in a post-soviet country that got fucked up, and I hold a grudge against such ideologies and people like you. And I will never stop doing so. It's something that I cannot put feelings aside for, and since you are, I assume, an American, very disconnected from /my/ own history and heritage, you would never be able to understand. Just as I will never be able to understand why you adhere to such ideologies.
It's a dead zone.
“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”
― Clarice Lispector
Whenever most people are out to screw each other and get everything they can for themselves, life generally sucks for most people. It doesn't matter what political ideology you call it. If the communist government is out to enrich itself, life under it will suck. If the capitalists are out to enrich themselves, life with them will suck. Life will generally be better in places where people actually give a shit about the well-being of other people.
“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”
― Clarice Lispector
I like the Nordic systems and Germany mainly. America is broken. It's been broken for a long time if not since the beginning. Some people don't know this, but life expectancy in some parts of America is lower than Africa and South America. Some people on the gulf coast poop in latrines, and there's been a resurgence of parasitic infections in that region as well.
I'm not very politically sophisticated and probably more opinionated than is warranted given my ideological inconsistency in recent years and my sort of tearing apart my ideas from before when I was ideologically stable out of some possibly pointless re-examination... (massive disclaimer) The way I view it is that humans live like a lot of animals strikingly similar to us, like chimpanzees or monkeys. We end up forming this pyramid structure in which power is concentrated at the top with the very few. The challenge is to try to figure out how to stop re-creating this same pattern. When people end up with a lot of power and end up as one of those incredibly powerful people at the top, the temptations are apparently quite severe because so many of them just become these vacuums up there sucking everything from the rest of us. I think that capitalism is definitely doing this and I think it's a system that isn't sustainable and if it can't become less selfish it is going to fail because it will collapse the entire world with its practices, and possibly this will happen very soon. I don't however want to compare it to communism, a system I know less about other than its failures in USSR, China and North Korea... I consider failures things that result in mass suffering and death for a lot of their people. I know only basic things about Chinese communism, like how there is no right to freedom of speech or privacy, the massive atrocities committed against people doing anything the makes the government look bad, the massive "re-education" and labor camps, the horrifying treatment of ethnic and religious minorities, the massive use of shaming as a social control, the oppression of neighbors (like Hong Kong). It goes on and on. But I don't really understand the new collective polarized mindset it feels is now so pervasive... For instance, the statement "X is bad, but I'm personally really angry at Y and not even X did what Y is doing that so angers me" - I don't know how that is really saying that means that X is good because Y is bad. X and Y are both bad in their own "special" ways, and one of them is personally affecting me more right now. It's really annoying how every time people criticize Y to their faces for what they have done, Y says, "Yeah but X did this and that and this other thing." I'm tired of hearing it. I want the US federal government, these frauds in the white house, to at least admit they screwed us all over rather than finding a way to avoid all criticism and trying to divert our attention to China. It's frustrating also because their party is holding more power in the US largely because they interfere with the voting process in actual efforts to suppress the vote. So even though more of us want these people out of office than want them in office, that doesn't matter. It's just been a very long several years of these awful people in the white house shitting on the rest of us, it feels twice as long as time usually passes, it's basically being in a highly abusive relationship with your government.
Last edited by marooned; 05-05-2020 at 05:24 PM.
That last part reminds me of some thoughts I have had on multiple occasions. Trump is basically gaslighting the entire country and using textbook abuse practices to drive people crazy. The constant shocks let him get away with everything. There's a lot more to what he does than that stuff, but I just wanted to mention it at least.
I agree.
I can blame China for trying to suppress information for a month. I heard something similar happened with SARS. I think in a lot of ways the virus is incredibly sneaky because there is so much asymptomatic spread, it's so infectious, and it can takes weeks for the disease to develop, and it's less lethal than something like SARS which also helps it avoid detection. While I was reading news about it in January and hoping China could stop it, it was probably already in the US, and early deaths it caused could be easily attributable to other things. But yes the US admin was warned and they didn't take it seriously, and even when it became pretty apparent to most people that it was very serious and already in the US, Trump was still lying and downplaying, and he currently pretends he never knew anything (that's after his phase of saying he always knew it would be a pandemic). It's simply that it never ends. It's like they don't learn from their mistakes because they won't acknowledge they made mistakes and when people tell them they are still making mistakes, they don't listen because those people are oh so mean to them boo hoo.
Look you're not alone, everyone's lying, I live in Italy and we've been the first western country having to deal with this shit seriously and we've been scapegoated too for reporting big numbers. Good joke that what they blamed us for had the boomerang effect to get back at them. Honestly I admire US' numbers because they're close to reality, while some European potencies are having the same economic-filled agenda and still hide the dirt under their carpet, just to save their faces and dictate on economical laws.
Now the world is not only China, Us and Europe, and the biggest part of the world is openly ignoring what's going on and so.. even despite our own personal shits, we're lucky to live in our very imperfect societies.
April unemployment report.
https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2...0000-jobs.html
Check out the second graph in the link.
I've always felt a bit of guilt over the fact that my generation never got to experience its own great depression.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate...loyment-charts Here's a fun link
The government has been cooking the books with unemployment numbers for a long time. For instance, IIRC, who are able to work but aren’t looking for it aren’t counted as “unemployed”. But fixing the way unemployment is measured would mean whoever’s in office sees a spike in official unemployment rates, so it will never happen.
They are pushing their agenda with COVID-19, vaccine obligatory incoming.
The real reason is to implant digital ID with this one. And we won't know about the vaccine.
Contrary to other drugs, there is very little control on the substances used.
This is heavily pushed by Bill Gates.
The guy who made vaccine in poor countries where ppl got worse because of that.
In his words, he wants to diminish the population (saying it's because the vaccine correlates to better health and so lower natality, but before he heavily pushed WHO in this direction, WHO was focused on increasing global wealth level with education, health, infrastructure which is a way better way to achieve that, especially when the vaccine brings weaknesses and letality... so it sounds like bullshit).
Sorry for my probably chaotic (-poor-) english it's not my native tongue as i think you guessed.
If you check the link I posted in this thread, you'll find an explanation that basically agrees with what you're saying. In 1994, there was a major modification of the definition of the unemployment measurement that coincided with the passing of NAFTA. This change allowed the BLS to hide the loss of jobs due to the agreement. The basic change is that long-term unemployed workers are not included. If you've been looking for work, get discouraged, and stop, you're no longer counted after 6 months. There have also been changes in their sampling methods. I'm not sure how it works anymore with so few people having landlines.
The most reliable indicator we have now of who isn't working is the labor participation rate, which is currently at 60% I think.
I like to follow this American progressive economist who was one of a handful of economists to predict the 2008 financial crisis. Good blog post RE restaurants shutting down due to Covid-19: https://cepr.net/hot-tip-for-cnn-peo...n-restaurants/
Some of his books:
> About how liberals can stop losing the debate / how conservative framing of economic issues is misleading: https://www.amazon.com/End-Loser-Lib.../dp/0615533639
> About the conservative nanny state: https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-.../dp/1411693957
> About how globalization is rigged (by law) to favour the elites and hurt the poor: https://www.amazon.com/Rigged-Global.../dp/0692793364
wuhan virus wuhan virus wuhan china china haha its from china hihihihihihi
What do you know about Coronavirus?
https://coub.com/search?q=what%20do%...%20coronavirus