As a non-American, why do you care about who is in the white house so much? How does it affect your life concretely?
Try watching less talking heads/browsing Twitter less, maybe, and you'll feel better?
Try watching less talking heads/browsing Twitter less, maybe, and you'll feel better?
Right now, he has tanked our country. We could have had a plan for the virus, and instead we are muzzling scientists.
And even if the president hasn't done anything to me specifically, I'm getting real tired of hearing all the stupid shit he does/says every night on the news or the next morning when my coworkers talk about it. If I could figure out a way to block the words "twitter", "hydroxycloroquine", "inject disinfectant", etc... I'm sure he'd make up even stupider things for people to talk about.
It's tiring. It's exhausting. And knowing that nearly half of my countrymen agree with what he says just makes it worse. But the worst part of all is having a president who is actively attacking my state and its elected representatives while we're in not one but MULTIPLE states of emergency.
Have you ever had your president declare war on your state? It's not normal. And it's really hard to pretend it doesn't exist.
He raised my taxes last year, rather significantly. So it's not just Twitter rants.
I'm personally paying more thanks to the deduction cap but I understand the principal of it.
The fact of the matter is that the federal government does not have a huge bearing on most Americans lives. I live in Colorado and therefore get to enjoy marijuana whenever I want despite the fact that it's not legal at the federal level. I like it that way.
Yet when we talk about this virus that is making everybody so miserable via lockdowns and for some killing them, suddenly everyone talks about it at a federal national level.
As if the United States is a small homogeneous country.
The virus hit New York City hard and nowhere else in the country. if you remove New York City from the equation the United States is at the top as far as low numbers of deaths per 100,000.
if you include New York City the United States is still doing better than the United kingdom Spain, Italy, and Belgium etc.
However the news media in this country is in the mode of if it bleeds it leads. they like to scare people to get them to keep their eyeballs glued to their screens and their prescription drug advertisements.
The most recent thing that they've been doing is focusing on absolute numbers rather than relative numbers with the deaths. Same for positive tests. The number of tests being administered has gone up radically and therefore more positive cases are turning up. The media in this country has conveniently left out the fact that the positive test rate is the number that matters and that has gone down all over the country.
I really really dislike Donald Trump like most of the people on this website. However I'm old enough to remember when a previous Republican president started a needless war that cost thousands of American soldiers their lives as well as trillions of dollars and I'm not even counting the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that were killed. The current president is incompetent and just says dumb s* all the time. That's honestly the extent of it and I have to constantly hear the whining and complaining as if the world is coming to an end. It's frankly very irritating and the media doesn't help.
Whose fault was it that Italy, UK, Spain, Belgium, Germany had to lock down?
This election year absurdity has warped the reality of this virus.
The virus is insanely transmissible with a long incubation period and high percentage of asymptomatic carriers. It couldn't have been contained in a free country.
The "had to go into lockdown" is debatable for most of USA. NYC needed a lockdown. Rest of US probably not.
Remember when Sweden was going to be a disaster a few weeks ago? Georgia and Florida? Yeah, they ended lockdowns, moron journalists pretending to be epidemiologists predicted doom.
All wrong. Sweden is fine. Georgia is fine. Florida is fine.
Why? Because they aren't the same as NYC and shouldn't be treated the same.
Meanwhile South Korea never had to resort to any lockdown. Both the U.S. and South Korea reported their first case on the same day (Jan. 20th), and Korea had tests available in a week while the U.S. took 5 weeks.
1 detail that I think is relevant to the US learning lessons from this:
As incompetent as Trump is (and boy is he incompetent), having worked in the Federal gov't for 8 years, including 6 years under the Obama administration (I left after the Snowden revelations on moral grounds), there is nothing in my experience that tells me the Federal gov't in the US is competent in any way to deal with things like this virus.
Obama tried, but the dude inherited a steaming pile of old bureaucracies that make IBM look like a hot, nimble start-up. It is beyond horrible.
If you think that Trump made this worse, I agree. However, if you think it was anything more than a drop of water added to an ocean of mediocre apathy, then you haven't seen the Federal government agencies and the talent they retain (if you want to call it "talent").
Americans (whether left or right) need to stop arguing over the size of government and start focusing on it's spending efficiency and efficacy. It really is a travesty. Every now and then, I encounter a random coworker who is highly ineffective, and typically on the edge of being fired. I think back to my time working in the Federal sector, and realize that said person would be above average in any of the agencies I dealt with. We deserve better. And it's going to take a LOT more than a new president to get it. Trust me, I watched Obama's executive orders (for example, an open data executive order) get ignored or partially obeyed in optics only by the various bureaucracies. The Deep State is real, but it's not some nefarious, coordinated conspiracy. It's just a calcified collection of old, dispirited, soulless agencies filled with people riding their desks and avoiding risk at all costs. They avoid risk in the easiest way possible: defer action in favor of deliberation and meetings to ensure that blame is diffused if any action results in something bad happening. The government isn't like "House of Cards." It's like "Veep."
This isn't a vaccuum in America. A lot of us have friends, family and coworkers affected by this.
Even if I ignore the president or the news I'm still trapped inside my house for the most part. If I leave my house it's an experience figuring out whether something is open or not, what their rules are, etc.
I mean I can go sit in my backyard and ignore the world but I still need to function day to day and right now I can't do half of my chores, errands, etc. So it's something definitely affecting my day to day.
And I'm on the lucky end, I can wfh and sit here and respond to you. I can't imagine having to go to work at some gas station to pay rent right now.
The guy in the white house isn't doing anything to calm anyones nerves or concerns. He's exacerbating them greatly. He has the largest microphone in the country, it's hard to ignore him or his affect on peoples mental health.
Everywhere we look is a reminder of our failure of a government. It's on everyones mouths. Now imagine going to work and fixing bobscars.com database while this stuff is in your face everyday.
I'm not too happy with the govt in my country either, but I realize 90% of my situation would have been the same under most possible govts.
We are literally in the polar opposite government than we were from 2008-2016.
I don't think we'd be at 100k dead today if our government was different and responded properly. Is this what we're debating? Why did Hong Kong only have 4 deaths the last I looked a few days ago? The government and societal response?
Maybe we're miscommunicating. Yeah, 90% of my life is the same but we all have friends and family affected by some part of it (healthcare or unemployment typically). The most mutual thing right now is our combined stress (except for the people partying at the beach).
Most of our Republican Govs will do whatever Trump tells them. That is the problem.
I just moved out of a red state that acts like this is nothing to blue state that is almost completely shut down until next week and has had FAR FAR fewer cases.
So yeah, I think government matters now.
The obvious counter-argument to this are China and India. Significantly larger populations, living in far greater densities, possessing fewer healthcare resources, yet far fewer overall deaths. Even if China had 10x the deaths they're reporting (which would be hard to cover up, but you never know), it's still lower than the US. Their lockdown wasn't for as long. Schools in Wuhan reopened this month.
> It caught everybody on the planet off guard.
It caught China, and maybe Italy and Iran off guard. Surely after learning that a Chinese province of 20 million people had been put on house arrest, the rest of the planet should have cottoned on.
Trump still being in office points to a systemic failure of our government, which nobody is really talking about changing. Sad to feel optimism in a country with a failed government.
It's sad to see the racist actions they take at borders.
Trump is riling up groups of people with the things he says.