Governors take heat for violating their own coronavirus restrictions
thehill.com
thehill.com
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-mayor-dining-... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ford-cottage-covid-19...
What shocks me is that that is your reaction; not that this indicates the rules are themselves ludicrous.
edit: I'm no longer surprised they act this way, but it still angers me greatly.
The man responsible for much of the policy in the west, a UK advisor l, was caught breaching the rules to have sex with a married woman.
That isn't a rational position. Someone's office (in modern terms more a "job" than historically was the case) is irrelevant to their behaviour, as with any and all people.
I do also however do not quite agree with your assertion of "costing lives", but that is another discussion.
Of course, it's super painful when you can't go to a funeral and they person that brought you this rule is a at a party the same day. But keeping super strict 1.5 m is just impossible some times.
And this why I consider displays of hypocrisy like these to be so dangerous. In order to function well, a government needs faith in its legitimacy, and a trust that it is looking out for the people's interests. And if that trust is lost, people check out and stop engaging with the government in good faith. And that is what creates opportunity for demagogues to rise and human rights to get trampled.
Why would you care of anyone if you take care your own life into your hands.
Everyone is human. Do what you what you want to do.
The schools thing is a just a stupid political twitter troll from that SD Mayor. Lots of schools in CA are (or were) doing hybrid in-person models.
CA is #2 in covid-19 cases statewide, but #41 in cases per 100k population. I credit, in part, the leadership of many state officials who are at least saying the right things, and modeling the best behavior helps.
The real issue is with schools is we have a perfect scenario for real education reform but we are doing everything but that. Instead we are leaving an incredible number of students behind because everyone is thinking of their political power under the guise of their health and that of the children. Parents are frustrated because many of them have to work because either their job is deemed essential or apparently not as much of a risk; as if the cashier at a grocery store is not more at risk than a teacher.
If anything the pandemic is further reducing the trust people have in their elected officials and one can hope it pans out in upcoming elections both local and national. This won't be gone even through the majority of next year.
It has certainly caused a loss of trust for me but I don't think it will pan out as change in upcoming elections because COVID has become a political issue, with political outcomes at stake. The leveraging of a crisis for political gain is a classic pattern, but we don't seem to be acknowledging it is happening right now. Some examples: COVID is being used as a vague justification for universal healthcare, for permanent closure of streets to vehicular traffic, for increased low-income housing, for increased taxes to fund safety nets (like homeless shelters), for normalizing deeper state involvement in business practices (like evictions), and so on. Obviously, COVID was also a big factor in the presidential election, since it hurt an otherwise strong economy, enabled the George Floyd incident to turn into months-long protests and riots (employed/busy citizens would not have the time or energy to do things like block highways daily), etc.
The political underpinnings of lockdown policies are clear when you see how heavy the pushback is against any transition to remote learning or decentralized learning or school choice. We're being told at once that even saving a single life is worth shutting down the entire country, but also being told that in-person public school education is an essential service (this is the position of the Biden COVID task force). Anything that might enable alternative education models is off the table since it goes against the politics of teacher unions and the Democratic platform, particularly with education increasingly becoming a vehicle for early political indoctrination (for example introducing gender politics or the factually-incorrect 1619 project into schools).
How can all this be taken except as partisan exploitation of a crisis? But in the US, with people as divided as they are, I expect everyone to just stick to their tribe. So it goes...
In-person public school education is an essential service because our society is not setup to allow every child to stay home all day with a parent or caregiver. 64.2% of married-couple families with children have both parents employed.[1] That's 33.4 million families as of 2019.
It's not an issue about alternative education models or indoctrination. It's about who is going to stay home with the kids and help them with their remote learning. Which parent is going to quit their job, and how to deal with the financial impact of that. Closing a school means that everyone in that district has to immediately adapt, and that hits some people much harder than others.
Additionally, 22 million children rely on free or reduced-price lunch at school.[2] Many schools made those same lunches available for pickup earlier this year, but they're not going to be able to reach all of those children.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/free-school-lunch-kids-summe...
They're now trying all sorts of policy changes, none of which have any effect on the real data. What's more likely, that them staying the course led to a drastically opposing outcome all of a sudden, or that their policies have minimal effect in the first place, and it's really about human social nature in the state?
I agree completely, and this is why I think it is futile to argue about aspects of the pandemic in Sweden, because the behavior of people is much more important than the policies of their government. So unless your state is actual populated by Swedes, arguing about those policies makes no sense. This also, in my opinion, accounts for the great variety of outcomes between jurisdictions within California.
Minnesota isn't looking so great right now.
Newsom was clearly not being completely honest when he said "we'll let the science dictate the reopenings" and then immediately turned around and said "science says we can reopen!" when folks in Orange County were threatening to execute their public officials.
Obviously you can poke holes in any policy; some of them were overly broad, some were overly narrow. Some exemptions made no sense. Some tradeoffs made no sense. The goal is to get it as right as possible, not to be perfect.
Compared to the rest of the US, where CA is 42nd in cases per 1M population with about 30,000, and 38th in death rate with 484 deaths/1M population, we don't look so bad.
On the global stage, if CA was a country, in deaths we'd be 32nd (where Luxembourg is); better than Sweden, France, UK, Italy, and Spain, but worse than Portugal, Ireland, Canada...
In cases (probably harder to figure due to testing rates), we'd also be in the low 30s in terms of places, but we'd be worse than some of those countries above; in particular, Sweden and Italy.
I don't see how this fits your description of a state that is doing awful on the global stage.
(worldometer)
And aside from politics, his bad example will definitely influence people who were on the fence about Thanksgiving gatherings. A human toll, for such a frivolous action.
I don't know why anyone would be disappointed by Newsom going to dinner with some lobbyists, unless they had simply adopted a default-neutral view of the man. Newsom only knows lobbyists.
He even dragged the CEO and a SVP of the California Medical Association to the dinner.
Along with his veto of SB-127 (2019), Newsom’s just killing people left and right through casual neglect.
I assume the AMA is going to deny all involvement, because they probably weren't involved, but I'm sure hearing the lobbyists justifications would be entertaining.
Just couple days ago an epidemiologist on NPR was talking that those summer beach restrictions didn't make sense as being outside is least risky situation. I suppose many other restrictions are the same "Do Something". Like the current curfew in CA.
Because it's entirely possible to be brilliant in one thing and ignorant in another, and seductively easy to forget that knowledge doesn't always transfer.
Whereas, more likely they dismissed concerns on the basis of their own knowledge, which in fact might be inapplicable to an epidemiological question.
Kind of like asking a meteorologist how they feel about climate change.
This is how we got Trump and it’s how we get him again. This stuff is truly galling.
Both sides point out the inconsistency between the stated value and the action, or, the "preaching" and the "practice". But the difference is in which side is favored.
In the more common usage, the charge of hypocrisy comes from someone who is in favor of the stated value, the "preaching", and is opposed to the inconsistent act or "practice". In this case, the belief that the Governors should follow their own coronavirus restrictions.
But you also see a lot of the opposite. People who rail against hypocrisy because they are against the stated value, and are more than fine with the "practice". In this case, people who are opposed to the coronavirus restrictions, but then are all too happy to scream hypocrisy anyway.
The latter case really aggravates me. It almost makes me feel their charges of hypocrisy are hypocritical somehow. At least, I wish the difference would be pointed out more often. It really is a different phenomenon. I think the former case has more moral authority, and the latter case is bad faith.
EDIT: Thanks for followup comments. After thinking about it more, I can think of plenty of other examples where I'm against the stated value and get aggravated at hypocrisy, so I guess I don't believe it is bad faith after all. The difference between the two motivations still interests me though and I wish more people would be clear on which side they fall on (when they charge hypocrisy).
You could look at the UK where several government officials have broken the quarantine rules. You can see that as meaning they don't really think the rules are needed, but politics demands they act like something has been done. Someone who thinks the lockdown rules are unnecessary would point this out.
It’s not bad faith at all. It’s a way of saying “look, even the governor doesn’t believe this is as serious as she says it is.” That’s a totally fair criticism.
To remove the narrow-minded political context in which you're probably thinking of it, imagine how a supporter of abortion rights would feel about a pro-life governor flying his daughter out of state to get an abortion.
But I don't agree that the latter is necessarily bad faith. A lot of the motivation behind the latter is to criticise the perceived sanctimony and condescension of the authorities/media/"elites" who don't pay the price of small business lockdowns but dish out snark at the conservative anti-lockdown protestors, while secretly disobeying their own prescriptions. I believe this to be the psychology behind it.
With politicians, there is also at stake the deeper value of they in particular supporting the rule of law.
When a situation like this occurs, the side of the people who are pro-stated-value are disincentivized from critiquing other pro-stated-value people who are being hypocritical (not in the least, because it feels like hurting "your team"), while people who are anti-stated-value have absolutely no downsides or disincentives to criticizing hypocritical pro-stated-value individuals. So it makes sense why, given two opinion groups of about the same size, there will always be more of the anti-stated-value people being outraged and and doing criticizing.
It plays so infuriatingly perfect into the “the virus severity is a hoax made to profit big pharma and give more power to the government” conspiracy. I’m beginning to see how people could become convinced of things like this and then jump to even more extremist conspiracies
From the _same incident_, we also lost a minister, a senator, and the EU trade commissioner. Those all helpfully resigned without too much shoving.
Maybe if they actually had to live by the rules they make, they'd be a little less drastic in the rules they make...
The US will soon have a new administration. I'm trying to select relevant metrics for:
- Covid handling - Black shootings from LEO - Employment statistics - Real wage growth - Insurance coverage - etc.
It will be very interesting to see how things really go.
Never mind that the vaccine has not been shown to do anything to help people who are deficient in vitamin D or zinc or any other kind of malnourishment, nor to help deal with the darkness that happens the same time every year.
Some people think the Asian countries did well because they're mask ninjas. Another theory is that the countries that have done well just have more exposure/cross-immunity [0] to coronaviruses (from bats/etc), or there may be some protection from TB/pneumonia vaccines that are commonly used in Japan/South Korea/etc.
I'm more likely to believe those who say the response to COVID-19 is much more of a problem than the virus itself: https://twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013/status/133150652391538278...
Governors are more likely to be skeptical than their plebs, but they have to balance managing their party's partisan hysterics with their actual risk factors (less likely to be malnourished, etc).
> Fewer Republican governors have been caught violating their own orders — in large part because they have not implemented the same kinds of restrictions that public health experts say are critical to curbing the spread of a deadly virus.
Floridians and North Dakotans and Swedes are fortunate to have more enlightened leadership that question the supposed "public health experts".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-reactivity#In_immunology
Source?
>nor to help deal with the darkness that happens the same time every year.
I'm not sure whether this is a joke or not. A vaccine can't help with the orbit of the earth around the sun ...well no shit?
>Another theory is that the countries that have done well just have more exposure/cross-immunity [0] to coronaviruses (from bats/etc)
Do you think east asia is some homogeneous group that all eat bat soup or something?
>there may be some protection from TB/pneumonia vaccines that are commonly used in Japan/South Korea/etc.
I'm not sure what you mean by "TB/pneumonia vaccines". Searching up "tuberculosis vaccine" on wikipedia leads to me to this[1], which says it's administered in russia. Given the size of the outbreak there, it doesn't seem like it's working very well.
It's not like Americans are known for taking particularly good care of themselves.
I'm not sure of any scenario once community spread was rampant across the nation where substantial numbers of Americans wouldn't have died.
Let's not forget this nation has been supposedly battling an "obesity epidemic" for pretty much my entire adult life (I'm >40), and the fact that Dialysis centers have become a common sight throughout the nation. These problems existed prior to COVID-19, in many ways this is Americans sleeping in their own bed decades in the making.
Or perhaps you're you're interpreting the parent comment overliterally? I understood it to mean that Coronavirus restrictions are safety theater, not that the virus itself is a fantasy.
"we can do a little political theater..."
Instead, I would rather they acknowledge that they should stop at educating the public, encouraging best practices, and making resources (testing, PPE, etc) broadly available. I would rather individuals and businesses decide for themselves how they will act. Those who are very risk averse can self-isolate for as long as they want (indefinitely if they want zero risk exposure in life), or can wear full-body coverings when they venture out, and so on. Those who are comfortable with [working, dining out, going for a hike, whatever] can do so at their own risk. I feel especially bad for the children and young adults affected by lockdown policies, as they will be set back socially, emotionally, and professionally despite the risk to them being almost zero. With the median age of a COVID death in the mid-high 70s, we're stealing from the young to accommodate the very old.
Ultimately, the coronavirus is a background condition like a weather event, and individuals should be allowed to make decisions about the risks they are willing to accept as part of living their life. Forcing particular tradeoffs between risk and reward on society is the same as forcing everyone to have the same value system. I don't think that makes sense in a free society.