Again, I have no idea if the current coronavirus was created in a lab and leaked maliciously or accidentally, and with China’s intransigence, I doubt we will ever really know. What I do know is that combined with the venality and incompetence of the Trump admin prior to the vaccine releases, and the refusal by Americans of the right wing persuasion post release, this fucking virus has been hundreds of times worse than it could have been:
After an all too brief respite, the United States is again at a crossroads in the pandemic. The number of infections has ticked up — slowly at first, then swiftly — to 51,000 cases per day, on average, more than four times the rate a month ago. The country may again see overflowing hospitals, exhausted health care workers and thousands of needless deaths.
The more contagious Delta variant may be getting the blame, but fueling its rise is an older, more familiar foe: vaccine hesitancy and refusal, long pervasive in the United States. Were a wider swath of the population vaccinated, there would be no resurgence — of the Delta variant, or Alpha variant, or any other version of the coronavirus.
And what I also know is that the rest of the world has been watching this shitshow in the United States, most with horror and a curious fascination as they wonder how we could be this fucking stupid. Others, however, whether terrorist groups or malevolent state actors have learned that an easy way to bring the United States to its knees is with a virus. They just have to release it, and half the fucking country will refuse to react appropriately and they’ll have 100 million useful idiots fighting their fight from within. It doesn’t even matter when they release it. If we have a Republican, they’ll botch the situation either with incompetence or because they have already show the DOW is more important than the people. If we have a Democratic President, they’ll just fight any attempts to solve the crisis because if a Democrat wants it, it must be bad, in accordance with Cleek’s Law and the actions of Mitch McConnell.
And that’s fucking scary.
Ajabu – Making Music
Joe Falco
Osama bin Laden proved how easily manipulated half or more of the USA (including its leadership) was to getting itself into unwinnable wars. The 21st century will be written as the period the USA took every advantage it built in the 20th century and lit them on fire.
hrprogressive
At the rate we’re going, we won’t even need our foreign adversaries to do anything to us.
Between the willing Qult Hordes who want to die of COVID for Dear Leader, those planning Coup #2, The Trumpening, and oh yeah, the climate crisis literally baking, or freezing, or flooding our citizens to death…
Meanwhile, elected Democrats chase the bipartisan unicorn from their high horses
Not much hope left for this country, when you think about it too long and too hard.
For the record, I would love to be proven wrong. But I don’t have any optimism left right now.
Chetan Murthy
@hrprogressive:
FTFY
Ruckus
Money has long been the most important thing to conservatives. They used to be more hidden about it but it has been the basis of the party since I was a small boy, in elementary school. I believe it was a lot longer than that ago. The premise of conservatism is to retain their way of life, with no changes from the past, because that was always better for them.
Betsy
You said everything I’m feeling and I thank you, Cole.
Betsy
@Joe Falco: I never thought about it that way. True.
Nicole
@Joe Falco: A guy I knew once speculated that centuries from now, Osama bin Laden will be remembered as the guy who took down two empires- the USSR and the USA.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: That was conservatistism of twenty years ago.
What we’re seeing now is a conservatistism that years for the bad old days when white men were men, white women were chattel, and all Those Other People™ were livestock. That is the root of the new white supremacy, neo-Nazi, and other groups: the insistence that all the social progression of the last two centuries is one massive misstep, and white men – SELECT white men – are the only ones fit to govern.
Matt
Projections are somewhere around 60k more US deaths by November.
Not a goddamn one of those people has COVID right now. None of them have to get it, if we have a little guts.
Time to stop being cute – send the National Guard to Fox, OAN, and the rest and set them to 24/7 “GET A VACCINE AND WEAR YOUR MASK YOU FUCKING DIPSHITS” until this blows over.
Person reposting anti-vax crap on Facebook? Lock their account.
Person screaming at cancer patients outside a clinic for wearing masks? Send em to Gitmo.
NotMax
Frankly surprised you would bring up that born in the RWNJ talking point as even the flimsiest of hunches.
It’s grassy knoll two-point-oh.
CaseyL
Things will get worse as GCC gets worse. You think the GQP is being obstructionist with the virus? Wait until drinking water becomes scarce.
Unless the Biden Administration takes off the gloves and stops trying to be reasonable with the Party and people who want to see us all dead, his Presidency will be seen as a last gasp interregnum before the destroyers took over again.
Starfish
Between the isolationism and the last administration being filled with people who were hostile to the mission of whatever they were in charge of, it definitely feels like they made it a lot worse. Someone shared this 30-minute talk is titled “The Next Pandemic: Lessons from History” by John M. Barry the other day. It was given in January 2018 and led me to believe that “humans, we are as stupid as we have always been.”
zhena gogolia
Okay, another “Democrats are so feckless” thread. Time to go watch Uncle Vanya.
hells littlest angel
Imagine how people in countries where vaccines are scarce feel about us. We’re the Marie Antoinette of nations.
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax: I don’t think that’s what John was doing. I think he was saying (and I agree with him on this):
Nick D
@Cole, it is indeed scary, and at the end of the day, we have so little control.
This video is beautiful and timely, tying together politics, literature, plague, fear, and control all in one. It uses Camus’ book The Plague as the backdrop for describing what we’re experiencing now, and it’s the best thing I’ve watched all year, if not decade. Give it 10 minutes of watching…
How to be Hopeless
https://youtu.be/iJaE_BvLK6U
Starfish
@zhena gogolia: If a Democratic government cannot pass very much of an agenda that is popular with the majority of the country while in leadership, something in government is very broken.
It may not be the Democrats themselves. It could be the rules or the various power brokers in the country that are not politicians.
“Oh look, the Democrats are being blamed again” is whiny and dismissive of a real thing that is happening.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Nothing exquisitely vulnerable about it. It’s a known known. Look at any mass outbreak of disease throughout history, any place in the world. The U.S. is not unique in this arena.
Mike in NC
Social media is a cancer on this country.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Yuppers. Now, where did I put those pearls from the last time they were clutched?
;)
Booger
There’s that old trope of alien attackers uniting the world to stand as one and fend off their attack…St. Ronnie even overtly referred to this. If we had an “Independence Day” moment tomorrow, half of these nitwits would embrace them with open arms, a quarter would deny their presence and another quarter would call them a liberal plot to take away their/guns/freedumbs/whatever.
We are so screwed. There is not concept of the common good. I’d like to punch Ayn Rand in her bony little nose.
bbleh
Oooh nooo, don’t SAY things like that about 50% of the country, omg, you’ll hurt their FEELINGS, and then they’ll start saying mean(er) things about us, and they’ll stop paying attention to mainstream media and buying their advertisers’ products, and NYT reporters won’t be able to report authentic dialogue from Cletus safaris to their Upper East Side readership, and THEN where will we be as a nation, I ask you?!?
Joe Falco
On a more positive note, however many of those in the US would have the rest be dragged back into a dark time of ignorance, bigotry and superstition, there’s been very loud, very present groups of people that raged against the dying of the light since the start of this century. And I’m certain we will continue to do so and make strides however frustrating and arduous the work will be.
Gin & Tonic
@Starfish: Every third thread here these days is “we’re all gonna die because the Democrats can’t do X.” That’s not whiny, it’s the truth.
bbleh
@Starfish: fair enough, but “in leadership” in this case includes a 50-50 split in the part of government best positioned to block nearly anything getting done, and yet Dems still managed to get passed a truly massive classic Keynesian relief program that benefited interests other than the very wealthy and corporations to a very substantial degree AND still have a very good chance of passing a similarly-sized “bricks and mortar” infrastructure bill and/or a considerably larger “human capital” infrastructure bill, so I for one am willing to hold off declaring defeat for a bit.
As to things broken, I’m increasingly convinced by comments in various places that what is going on is a re-sorting of US parties into more ideologically coherent, more classically parliamentary organizations, which in turn will require some time for the body politic to process, and in the meantime — by design — the US system will coast in neutral. That bodes ill for crisis response but otherwise isn’t entirely a bad thing (although SCOTUS worries me…)
Wvng
I can’t imagine a state actor, with the possible exception of North Korea, intentionally producing and releasing a highly contagious deadly respiratory virus as a weapon because it hurts everyone, everywhere. I can easily imagine a death cult doing it. The only way an unstable state might consider doing it is if they used the new technologies to secretly produce and implement a vaccine for their population, but it is hard to imagine that happening covertly and, really, they would know that viruses mutate and their vaccine could become useless.
As for John’s basic thesis that conservatives blew it for everyone, that would only apply to our country, for now, which they have done. Much of the rest of the world, however, is going to be breeding variants for the next couple of years at a minimum, and some will likely bypass current vaccine immunity … and we will be off to the races again.
Starfish
@Gin & Tonic: My son is ten and has nightmares about climate change. He is like Greta Thunberg with much less clout and somewhat less autism.
Watching people negotiate away all serious climate change legislation for some electric-powered trucks and infrastructure legislation that is focused on creating jobs for men when women lost the most jobs during the pandemic is infuriating.
It is okay to be infuriated or depressed by this garbage, or mistrust a system where we have gotten very little done.
A lot of the focus has been undoing the mess, but every Democratic administration cannot be “just undo the mess that Republicans left.”
PsiFighter37
Isn’t most of the rise in cases coming from the unvaccinated assholes in the Confederacy? If so, fuck ’em. The least the media could do is report on the full context instead of earnestly saying that Alabama’s dumbfucker of a governor decided she could no longer lean into vaccine and mask denial as hard as she has.
Wvng
@bbleh: We are one death away from losing control the Senate. Senator Leahy looked so weak during the second impeachment and it scared me to death.
Starfish
@Wvng:
BREAKING NEWS: COVID-19 was created by the Republican Party.
NotMax
@bbleh
Indeed. The chasm between “in leadership” and “In control” is spanned by the thinnest of tightropes woven of adamantium.
bbleh
@Wvng: we barely won it to begin with, all praise once again to Stacey Abrams. More of that!
A Ghost to Most
Christian supremacists are willing to die to own the scientists, and willing to take children with them. This is my surprised face.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia:@Gin & Tonic: : Agreed the constant negativity is tiring and tiresome. In a short span of 6 months Biden administration has managed to turn things around but the whining on lefty blogs and leftie Twitter is incessant.
Elizabelle
Good thread to stay out of.
@hrprogressive: You are a really immature jackass. I don’t see how you have time to post on this little blog. Shouldn’t you be out throwing rocks at the firemen trying to control the Bootleg fire in Oregon?
Or hassling the doctors and nurses in the Covid wards. It’s been a year, and they don’t have it under control. Losery losers! Incompetent unicorns.
I hope you are not somebody’s sock puppet.
Martin
My city now requires proof of vaccination for indoor dining. We’ll see how enforcement on that goes. The goals of a Democratic mayor are not always shared by the police force that implement them.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: That’s great! Congratulations! And congratulations to your mayor and city council! And public health department!
[waits impatiently for SF govt to get on the stick]
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
Agreed. Those who expect the mechanisms of government and bureaucracy to turn on a dime are wolfing down pie in the sky.
Mike E
@Martin: the white man’s veto sure is a motherfucker
The Thin Black Duke
@Starfish: I don’t think that’s what zhena is saying. Problem is, Democrats can’t do too much if too many people on “our” side refuse to vote for them. Before it was John Anderson, Ralph Nader or Jill Stein. I wonder who it will be next time?
schrodingers_cat
Really? Now we are dabbling in RWNJ theories on this blog?
Geoduck
A whole lot of the rest of the world is being nearly as stupid as the US when it comes to COVID. I mean, even Japan is having problems dealing with this thing. I’m not sure how much pointing and staring there is going on when your own backyard is on fire.
bbleh
@Wvng: yeah, bioweapons are lousy compared even to chem, not to mention conventional and nuclear — pain in the ass to manufacture and store, hard to aim, harder to control, uncertain effect, difficult to clean up, possibility of blowback, yadda yadda.
@Starfish: lol, now THAT’s thinking like Republicans! I heard that ransomware is just a big Republican scam too, actually run by the Koch Brothers and their Euro banker friends! Oh and they’re secretly putting chemicals in our food that keep us from losing weight.
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: All the more reason to ignore them.
I am grateful for President Biden and his competent administration. I am grateful for Nancy Pelosi.
The Select Committee begins its investigation this week. Maybe that will distract some of the disparagers and unicorn abusers.
Oh. Clouds.
Lead of the WaPost story that just went up:
The House select committee envisioned to be the ultimate arbiter of what led President Donald Trump’s supporters to invade the U.S. Capitol in January is scheduled to begin its work this week under a cloud of controversy that threatens to compromise the investigation from the outset.
…. Nevertheless, on Tuesday, four police officers — two from the Capitol’s protection squad and two from D.C. police — are set to provide the first public testimony before the select committee. They are expected to testify about their experiences of both physical and verbal abuse on Jan. 6, as they tried to protect the Capitol from a swelling horde of demonstrators determined to stop Congress’s efforts to certify the 2020 electoral college results and declare Joe Biden the next president.
Someone who can’t tell a “cloud of controversy” from a metric shit ton of squid ink thrown up by Republicans. Lucky us. Some reporter I have not yet heard of. Auditioning for the FTF NY Times, perhaps. (Young woman who was a Moscow correspondent for the Post.)
Those officers should have a lot to say. Will be gripping.
The Thin Black Duke
@Elizabelle: Old white men yell at clouds.
schrodingers_cat
@The Thin Black Duke: They are still unhappy that the old Yeller lost presidential primaries twice.
NotMax
@Martin
How do restaurant owners feel about being turned into enforcement agents? From what I’ve scanned about the same in other places, not pleased*, and the policy is more honored in the breach than in the observance (in the non-Hamlet, colloquial sense).
*For one thing, it increases exposure by them and their staff to risk of actual physical harm from looney tunes. Is the city going to pay for (FSM forbid) hospitalization of any put there by dint of enforcement?
Jay
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/robert-moses-civil-rights-activist-obit-1.6116905
smedley the uncertain
@CaseyL: GCC ?? Secret code.
Ric Drywall
We’re bad, but the US is hardly the only country with RWNJs not doing the right thing now. France and Australia are just two of the countries with recent anti-lockdown and anit-vax protests.
Starfish
@The Thin Black Duke: I am focused on the psychological aspect. We have all been living in a pandemic for a year and a half and need to understand that people are having all sorts of feelings about this nonsense.
Everyone is tired.
Just because some people are impatient does not mean they are radical lefties. Just because they want something better does not mean that they do not understand how things work.
The way that the comments want to split into “silly lefties” and “true serious people who understand politics” is not great.
Starfish
@smedley the uncertain: Global Climate Change or Gnu Compiler Collection if you are a programmer over a certain age, but I am pretty sure it is the first one.
Jay
@NotMax:
once it is “mandatory” most people go along.
if it’s a law, with penalties, more go along.
As far as “enforcement”, really depends on the “enforcer”.
chased a fair number of Maskholes out of the store, when masks were manditory. One, 8 blocks, where upon he tried to hide in a dumpster. I zip tied the lid closed.
And that was running in work boots.
Morzer
I don’t see any credible evidence that the virus was created in or leaked from a lab. It’s much more likely that it made the jump from some other species to humans, as previous viruses have done. I know that it wasn’t Cole’s intention to amplify RWNJ talking points on this issue and his focus is on the epic screwup perpetrated by Trump and his enablers/cultists, but I really don’t think we should entertain a spurious, dishonest (howdy, Rand Paul!) debate on this matter for as much as a millisecond.
Elizabelle
@The Thin Black Duke: They do.
2.2 thousand reader comments on the “clouds” story. The most liked:
Following on:
debbie
@smedley the uncertain:
Global climate change.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
Old Yeller, now that’s much better than Wilmer!
Jay
@Starfish:
SWMBO, is a very social person working alone most of the day, zoom meetings hadn’t made the cut, and physically navigating Covid world has been traumatizing, so she’s on medical leave from work.
Me, who hates people in the abstract, and many more when I get to know them in person, is front facing, in an extreme customer service job, and a “Covid Captain”, in a Box Store that has seen a 75% increase in traffic since covid started.
Elizabelle
More from the WaPost’s “cloud” story:
The Thin Black Duke
@Starfish: I understand where you’re coming from, but try to understand it from my end. For most of my life, the great changes I’ve seen has been incremental. Ten steps forward, nine steps back isn’t just a bumper sticker; it’s the way it is. And there’s a big difference between being patient and remaining stuck in neutral. I don’t think “stuck” is what is happening in the Biden presidency.
NotMax
@Jay
FYI. There’s a difference between requiring masks and “show us your papers” rules.
“Let’s hear it for service industries! Oh, by the way, here’s a mandatory order to deny service.”
Which speaks less than well of you, to be frank. Once he is outside the establishment he is no longer subject to the rules in place regarding occupancy.
Martin
@NotMax: They’re not thrilled, but they want to be open. We don’t have a lot of restaurants that aren’t part of some kind of shopping center that almost always has a security guard on duty.
I think they’re out of patience with the unvaxxed as well.
Martin
@NotMax: There’s also a difference from an opt-in program and a city ordinance. We’ll see how it goes.
Mike E
@Elizabelle: I was listening to the npr weekend news show this morning on the topic of vaccine hesitancy and who pops by but good ol Mara Liasson to presumably bothsides the fuck out of the story and a miracle happened…each “but then” pivot opportunity in her spiel she stayed on the repubs and TFG. Sunday must be her day of rest.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Conservatism’s current motto is “fix no problem. Thinking is hard work, and whatever is wrong will fix itself.”
Obvious Russian Troll
@Morzer: Supporting that, there have been reports of COVID in cats and dogs. The damn thing does seem pretty good at jumping from species to species.
I personally don’t find the lab leak theory to be very credible.
Sister Golden Bear
@The Thin Black Duke:
Word.
Progress toward LGB, and especially trans, rights have moved at lightning speed by comparison, but it’s the same thing. Yes, things definitely hit tipping points, but that’s thanks to the long, less visible, and patient efforts of activists steadily pushing for years. Plus for every advance we’ve made, we spend a lot of time playing defense against the inevitable backlashes.
Wvng
@Elizabelle: I think the Post’s new editor has brought back both siderism with a big republican slant, with a vengeance. Really appalling stuff.
Jay
@NotMax:
he coughed and spit in my face.
Don’t care, he fucked around and found out.
At the time, masks and social distancing were “mandatory”, indoors and outdoors.
Elizabelle
@Mike E: Amazing. Good to hear.
NotMax
@Martin
Just curious but what about supermarkets? Lots of them now include indoor sit-down nosheries (be it Starbuck’s and the like or their own mini-cafes).
Besides supermarkets, for example, Target here includes indoors a Starbuck’s and a Pizza Hut, with sit-down dining areas.
Obdurodon
@Starfish: “Undo the mess” is exactly what every Democrat administration will be unless and until we implement effective election reform and make the f*ers irrelevant forever.
NotMax
@Jay
Once that zip tie was applied it provided a rudimentary case for his bringing kidnapping charges.
Elizabelle
@Wvng: Sally Buzbee. Arrived at WaPost from the Associated Press. I am concerned about her, too.
Ksmiami
@Morzer: agreed – it definitely looks like a classic zoonotic virus that jumped species possibly with an assist from wet market opportunities
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Starfish:
Let me tell you about this thing called “the Senate”…..
CaseyL
@smedley the uncertain: Global climate change. Aka AGW (human-caused global warming). Honestly, it is hard to keep up with the changing acronyms.
Jay
@NotMax:
don’t care. He committed under BC Law felonious assault with menacing on a coworker, and me.
jumping in the dumpster saved his life.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Ksmiami
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: dissolve the senate- decrepit and useless… the whole system is outdated and decayed
NotMax
@Jay
You be you.
For this old coot not something about which I’d be proud, much less care to share.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ksmiami: that’s not going to happen
the only solution is to win more seats
Amir Khalid
@Jay:
What you did to that guy was as harmful, and arguably as criminal, as what he did to you. Do you not understand that?
hrprogressive
@Elizabelle:
Not real sure what your problem is with me in particular, ma’am.
I have had a “blogosphere” presence in leftish circles since about 2009, and you can do your own research to review my persona if you wish. I’m one person, from one portion, of one state, who is sick and fucking tired of watching elected Democrats act as if the country is going to implode if they deign to govern.
You’ve called me out multiple times, and I don’t understand it. I don’t post here all that often because I’m too busy these days with other “IRL” ventures, but I think you’re the one who needs to open their eyes.
I’ve been fully vaccinated since May. I’ve been isolating more or less since last April. I wear an N95 when I go in public if I need to.
Kindly leave me the fuck alone, eh?
Starfish
@Jay: How do you do front facing customer service while hating people? Does this make you even more of a misanthrope?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NotMax: @Amir Khalid: I don’t think it actually happened. I don’t get it, but I’ve always thought that poster was some elaborate role-playing
NotMax
@Jim, Foolish Literalist
There certainly are past examples which have raised that suspicion. I’ll leave it at that.
peteandsun
That you tube was amazing. Had to watch the whole thing. Thanks for that.
peteandsun
I was commenting on “How to be Hopeless”
Brachiator
Coming a little late to the proceedings…
The United States is not alone. In fact I would suggest that the country which had the greatest expertise about viruses, pandemics, etc., combined with the dumbest reaction was Great Britain.
Other countries squandered their initial advantage in containing the virus.
And the vile impact of rightwing media in developed democracies undermined every rational attempt to deal with the pandemic.
Uh, no. We have a global pandemic. There is no easy way to target a specific country for a virus and expect it to remain there.
And yeah I know that countries have developed biological weapons, but that is also a stupid idea, whether focused on a battlefield or a country.
Looking at the virus with a US-centric lens misses the bigger picture. The world can learn a lot about what we need to do next time by looking intelligently into how we did this time.
SFAW
Or just randomly turning lights on and off on Maple Street, and so on.
Brachiator
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Often the motto seems to be “Tradition means that nothing ever needs fixing.”
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax:
Oh, bullshit. Fucker needed a night in jail. The only issue I have is that Jay might have endangeredhimself.
RaflW
Most of these mouth breathers don’t understand the most basic cause-and-effect (“you mean to tell me I can’t just drive drunk? What!?”)
So the idea that they will be responsible for the next surge, mask requirements, people cancelling trips or dinner reservations, no way they believe it. And GOP politicians and media accomplices will heavily reinforce their sense of victimhood/non responsibility. Dammit.
Mary G
@Martin: At least Irvine has its own police department. We are under the OC sheriff who has steadfastly refused to enforce anything related to COVID19.
Irvine PD Chief has a nice message on the front page that doesn’t mention any crime at all, and the index goes from Community Police to Coyote Information. Very positive!
Brachiator
@NotMax:
As an aside, despite years of watching Hawaii 5-O and Magnum PI, I am extremely ignorant about Hawaii. I don’t know how many islands there are, which is the largest or which the most populous, or the degree to which people move among the islands during the course of business or daily living.
Also used to work for a company with CPA clients in the state, but rarely had the chance to shoot the breeze.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
In the Los Angeles area, most of these indoor dining areas remain shut down.
Another Scott
@Brachiator:
1) Elect more women leaders and listen to them.
2) Study what other countries did right with testing, contact tracing, cranking up PPE production, and restricting travel (inside and into the country).
3) Come down hard (somehow) on bad actors who are pushing dangerous nonsense.
We’ve had (as a species) hundreds of years of demagogues railing against new things. The printing press, public sanitation, science-based medicine, automobiles, vaccinations, cellular phones (Oooga Booga BRAIN CANCER!!), and all the rest. We didn’t let the nut-jobs control public discourse and prevent what needed to be done. We need to go back to basics and stress that Freedom is always one side of a coin that has Responsibility on the back. Nobody can have one without the other.
The Declaration of Independence doesn’t end with IGMFY, or Come and Take It, or Don’t Tax Me Bro, or FYF. It says:
(sigh)
[/soapbox]
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
Germany is having problems, but New Zealand is doing well, and I take your larger point about women leaders.
But this also reminds me of the incredible hostility directed at female public health officials. This makes me crazy.
Ironically, between the Declaration and the Articles of Confederation there was a fair amount of this stuff. “We Got Ours, Fuck You, King George!”
But again, I concur with the latger sentiment of your points. Absolutely.
Elizabelle
@hrprogressive: My problem with you is that you are insufferable. You show up like clockwork to disparage Democrats who are trying their hardest, and face a lot of challenges of which you seem blithely oblivious.
Have you met our pie filter?
glc
Well, details aside, an expression of frustration and disappointment seems timely. Coincidentally I think Dr. Fauci has just expressed something similar in his own measured terms. The power of magical thinking is impressive. And not by any means exclusively in the U.S.
On the other hand, the president is sane. That’s a good thing, and not to be taken for granted.
Jay
@Amir Khalid:
don’t care.
before Covid there were certain classes of deplorables who made “making retail workers lives miserable” as entertainment. Sunday, after 11am was particularly bad when Church let out.
During the Covid shutdowns it became even worse, as we were one of the few places open.
For a few deplorables, it became a “sport”.
When Trina, ( 4’3”, 95lbs) politely refused a covidiot, then walked away when he refused to not endanger her, he grabbed a 4 foot chunk of black iron pipe and hit her in the head 9 times before I got there. She spent 6 months on Compo at 60% wages, so the rest of us ponied up our meagre wages so she could pay rent and feed her family.
Finally, over a year and a half later, we have big signs up everywhere that abuse and assault on staff won’t be tolerated.
Do you have any idea of how bad things had to get, to get Corporate to put the signs up?
I am a nice guy. The most knowledgable in the Store, provide excellent Customer Service to the point that other departments send customers in to see me. I work with a majority of customers for whom, “English is another language”, or none. I still manage to convey the information they need to know, ( because used wrong, 3/4’s of what we provide can kill or cripple you, or destroy your house) through a multitude of different communication techniques to address different learning styles. I am trained in deconfliction techniques and passive restraint.
Somebody has to really cross the lines to earn a basic “fuck off”,
You have no idea how many lines they have to cross for me to throw them out of the store, let alone chase them for blocks in 2lb each steel toed safety boots.
glc
And also: https://twitter.com/WHCOS/status/1419370785714626568
Jay
@Starfish:
I like dogs, cats, birds, fish, horses, goats, ducks, sheep, etc, spiders and I have a detente
I have a few really good human friends.
I am the guy who shows up, if I am in your social circle, on moving day at 8 am with a truck and coffee, and it’s not for the “free pizza”.
My nickname, when I worked at a Fortune 100, was Mr.Dependable.
Most people aren’t, don’t live up to my standards for personal conduct, although I still hold compassion for the human condition.
Other than my few friends, and the Love of My Life, I like animals better.
Jay
@glc:
great news, hope it’s a trend.
sab
@Jay: That is sad. Thanks for noting it.
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
You are right, but.
This you write is nothing new at all. It is no different from the right wing 50-60 yrs ago, it was just not shouted from their rooftops. This is what conservatism is and was and the only damn difference is that it is way out in the open now. When they were less obvious and there was less/no TV/internet to show them off people didn’t really know how shitty they really are. Now they broadcast it. Add in the money that a bigger economy brings, their tax BS of the last 2-3 decades, faux news and you have the perfect storm. But that has been brewing for a very long time.
WhatsMyNym
@john: We’re not the only country having problems with vaccine hesitancy, general idiots. Check the news in France as the latest example.
AxelFoley
@Starfish:
Thing is, we’re always at that point because TOO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE ON OUR SIDE DON’T VOTE IN EVERY DAMN ELECTION.
If voters kept Republicans out of office, Democrats wouldn’t have to spend time and political capital cleaning up Republican messes.
Chris Johnson
We’re not the only top 10,000 blog having trouble with bad actors and bad-faith posters. Courage.
As an old super-progressive lefty I can tell the difference between real ones and troll farms. We’re getting some troll farm action. Doesn’t make us special.
HACKER NEWS is getting heavy troll farm action. The BBC reported on some social media influencers getting directly paid off by Russia to push anti-vax bullshit and it appears to me the Russians freaked the hell OUT and have been scrambling to cover it up. I guess that’s one of those stories that is too close to real for their taste.
So, over on Hacker News they suppressed several discussions through manipulating the voting systems. God knows what they’re doing on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook. Over here we have no voting systems to suppress, so they gotta cry out WE’RE ALL FUCKED AAAAAAAH HONESTLY I AM AN AMERICAN.
Fuck’em.
My gut reaction is that we are doing a lot better than it appears, hence the full-court press to create chaos while there is still time. FUCK them. Wear your mask, wash your hands, vote. Our shit is not that goddamn fragile. Stay alive and as sane as possible. This is war and we ain’t losing.
Obdurodon
@Chris Johnson: HN is also very heavily into the lab-leak theory, in a way that sometimes seems less than authentic. In many ways it’s a worse place for COVID info than even Facebook.
Freemark
@Starfish: It’s actually BECAUSE he is front facing. Nothing will make you hate people more than working a customer service job. It is even worse if they are on the phone.
Obdurodon
@Elizabelle: FWIW, I read through this exchange and the only Democrats @hrprogressive seemed to be disparaging were those high on bipartisanship – e.g. Manchin and Sinema, not people “trying their hardest” at all, and that’s a sentiment many of us share. Then you *immediately* came in calling them a jackass, making up a bunch of stuff, and accusing them of being a sockpuppet. History or no history, that seems like a gross overreaction and hardly makes them seem like the one being divisive here.
Starfish
@Chris Johnson: What you are saying about the anti-vax stuff is happening on Twitter too. There are some anti-vax bots replying to people. I saw it, and then one of the security engineers pointed it out.
A person with zero following will spew anti-vax stuff in your comments, and another bot will respond to that one to make it look like a real conversation.
leeleeFL
@Nicole: Remember the night before Election Day, 2004. When that malignant prick did an announcement like a World Leader? I knew then he would be remembered for the damage he did to Empires. Even dead he’s a fucking menace, because he’s useful to people who have agendas that do not help us at all.
What a shitty way to begin my morning!
Also too…..
John, you are probably correct about a virus being used against us. This Country is half-occupied by Absolutely Ridiculously Stupid People who would rather die than be told they are wrong. Fucked, we are.