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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Depending on how you measure, not as bad as the one we had a few terms ago. There was a pandemic, which should have been a unifying event the president just had to straightforwardly lead us through while letting the domain experts at agencies handle the details. But instead he must have thought he was still campaigning or something, and staked out some edgelord position that we should just ignore the public health emergency. Predictably, this caused a lot of societal chaos from people who weren't good at thinking for themselves following nonsensical direction from an authority figure. I'm sure glad that guy was only around for one term. I remember him being a pretty sore loser too.

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Idk. That loser still had guardrails on for 80% or his term. He might have even been re-elected if he didn't use his election year to pretend millions weren't dying.

A morbid part of me wonders if hisnl "advice" literally killed off enough of his voters to swing the election.

I personally think he would have had a shoe-in second term if he had simply led through Covid. Got on TV, told people things were hard but we'd get through it, then spend the rest of the day playing golf or hanging out at whatever the new spot is after the island got shut down.

But this rings quite true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586508

Did you mean to post this comment in 2021?

Did you mean to take that course on human sarcasm?

I can understand how a one or two sentence comment that is wholly sarcastic is readily misinterpreted, ala Poe's Law. But my context should have been pretty clear.

It didn't land well; and GPs quip was astute on how the tone and narrative of your comment is 5 years outdated, regardless.

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. And talking about what happened in the past is called historic, not outdated.

They're not mutually exclusive.

I don't see how talking about abject failures of leadership and policy response in the first term is "outdated" when the second term is essentially a doubling down on these derelictions of duty.

Are we just supposed to forget those past failures in favor of focusing on the current catastrophe? What tariff tantrum? What Greenland treachery? Don't you know we've always been at war with Iran?

Your wit is escaping the downvoters.

I salute you, nonetheless.

Conversely, arresting people going paddleboarding and filling skate parks with sand was a totally sane reaction. Good thing we didn't overreact to Covid and completely fuck up the economy and the education progress of millions of children.

Your "domain experts" are often chronically incorrect sociopaths.

Let's not even get into the categorical and coordinated censorship campaign.

Shocking that people even support the covid response that happened. Much less make light through smarmy sarcastic shitposting.

I'm a libertarian, but you've got to be honest with yourself about how much nuance you can actually expect from bureaucrats. If we didn't have a large contingent of social-media fueled rebellion against the idea of any sort of restrictions, there would have been more regulatory bandwidth to spend making exceptions for privately-owned outdoor establishments like skateparks and paddleboarding (which included the need to figure out things like equipment rental/cleaning protocols).

Note that only half of US states had any kind of "lockdown" (ie stay at home order with the force of law), and they were predominantly red states. I'd say that bigger crowd control problems caused larger overreactions. The state I was in merely had a firmly worded suggestion to stay home. I'd call that the sweet spot.

It's incredibly dumb to judge, with hindsight, the calls that were being made with the best data and intent at the time.

Next pandemic, come back from 5 years later with your time machine, and let us know what to do, mmmkay?

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