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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

> The incumbent candidate wants to reopen. Because the election is near, it's especially important for the other side to portray whatever he does as wrong and incompetent and life-threatening. So you then have a major political apparatus pushing the argument that reopening is dangerous and publicizing any instance of any authority saying anything negative about it. They don't benefit from a nuanced or moderate position.

This same debate is happening in every country in the world, including ones that don't have an election in six months.

So, no, this is not just a bunch of political wankery that's aimed at making Orange Man look bad. It's a very clear consequence of what the two parties value.

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> This same debate is happening in every country in the world, including ones that don't have an election in six months.

They get CNN in more than 200 countries.

> It's a very clear consequence of what the two parties value.

So it's normal for the Democrats to be the conservative party banging the "save American lives at all costs" drum and the Republicans to be the ones worried about blue collar workers and people living paycheck to paycheck, is that it?

The democrats have always banged that drum on domestic issues, and the republicans have always prioritized businesses over public and worker safety, so, yes?

> The democrats have always banged that drum on domestic issues

So the Democrats are usually the ones in favor of authoritarian War on Drugs measures to prevent domestic overdose deaths? Mandatory employee drug testing? Having the police arrest inconvenient/"unsanitary" protesters?

> the republicans have always prioritized businesses over public and worker safety

Walmart, Pfizer and Netflix are doing fine. The airlines are screwed, but that's already done, they can't go bankrupt twice at once and people aren't going to want to get on a plane for recreational purposes anytime soon even if we reopen.

It's workers who are suffering the most from continuing to not have a paycheck. If you look at what labor unions are saying, it's more along the lines of "here's how we think we should reopen" and not "we don't want to reopen" -- is it normal for Republicans and labor unions to be on the same page?

All of the stupid, cynical partisan bullshit that America's press comes up with to try and kick Trump out of office is spilling over to other countries and screwing up our ideas about our coronavirus responses, though. For example, early on the CDC screwed up its coronavirus test, delaying the rollout of wider testing. The press saw blood and started blaming all the American deaths on the Trump administration failing to test for coronavirus. The trouble is, this was fixed some months ago, so in order to keep this narrative going publications like the New York Times took increasingly massive levels of testing that no country had managed, such as testing everyone with symptoms or testing 10% of the population a day, and made them sound like things all countries had achieved but the US had missed due to Trump. This worked on a massive scale - the narrative spread, and people in every Western country became convinced that their government is failing at coronavirus testing compared to the rest of the work due to not being able to manage those things, and that it was killing people.

I even had a discussion with a couple of Germans on here the other day who were convinced their coronavirus testing was abysmal, despite them having one of the biggest programs out there and being the country that the US and UK media currently point to in order to convince us that our governments are failing on testing.

To make matters even more stupid, the US actually passed mass testing success story South Korea - the country which supposedly proves all those deaths could be avoided if you just had proper coronavirus testing - quite some time ago, and people didn't realize because the media carefully avoided updating people's beliefs since this changed. I keep seeing people point to the US supposedly having less per-capita testing than South Korea in HN comments as proof they should be able to do better, even now. Astoundingly, when Trump debunked this widespread, false belief in a recent press conference, this is how the New York Times summed it up in a headline "Trump Misrepresents Testing Record". (The "misrepresentation" was that even though what he said was true it wasn't true two months ago, and also the US hadn't beaten every single country on the planet on coronavirus testing. Seriously.)

Also, the sides certainly aren't the same in all countries when it comes to the legal legitimacy of lockdowns. For example, in the UK our right-wing party is currently in power, which means that arguments that their lockdown rules are illegitimate and exceed their powers mostly come from supporters of the other, left-wing party. The justifications for why they're exceeding their powers actually look similar in many ways to the ones in this lawsuit.

> For example, in the UK our right-wing party is currently in power, which means that arguments that their lockdown rules are illegitimate and exceed their powers mostly come from supporters of the other, left-wing party. The justifications for why they're exceeding their powers actually look similar in many ways to the ones in this lawsuit.

Not convinced you’ve even been following British politics then. The main criticism coming from Starmer is about late decision making and inaction. I haven’t heard anything about abuse of powers or a clamour to reopen from them.

As I said, this is mostly coming from supporters of the party. Though Starmer has been pushing for firm reopening plans sooner than is perhaps advisable, he has indeed mostly been doing risk-free back-seat driving that demonstrates how much easier life is when you don't have to actually pull of the things you're calling for. (For example, his latest thing is expecting the government to have information on what exactly is causing excess deaths that actual scientific experts reckon they won't be able to pin down any time soon.)

Indeed British [and especially English] politics is indeed a good example of the lockdown itself being depoliticised. The UK politicians who want to end the lockdown sooner rather than later sit on the right of Johnson's party, so they make their arguments quietly, in economic terms, and mostly behind closed doors. Johnson's natural political instincts might be sympathetic to them, but he's also sympathetic to the arguments of his scientists against opening up. The left overwhelmingly supports the principle of a lockdown, so their criticisms of Johnson focus on the details of his decision making and communication. Public support for the lockdown isn't as universal as political support for some sort of lockdown, but only a handful of people turned up to London's anti-lockdown protests and nobody influential saw any political benefit to encouraging them.

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