So “second wave” is kind of like the second stage of a rocket, and is going to launch us to an even higher altitude?
I think maybe our current academic year plans in which I teach all of my classes online, except for labs which have been halved in size to allow adequate social distancing, might turn out to be optimistic.
Why why why…
Florida WTF, “Karens gone wild” edition
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/06/24/mask-mandate-florida-anger-erupts-coronavirus-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/coronavirus/
CNN says “politicized.” Somehow I don’t think that quite covers it.
I mean the EU as a whole has a larger population, but I’m also pretty sure we’re much more disconnected over here, and so one would expect a lower overall infection than the US, so that graph is just one part of the story.
But good luck US. Wear the frickin’ mask (people here in CZ are ditching masks outside the state-mandate shopping rules).
“GLOBALIST PROPAGANDA!!! This FAKE NEWS is a bald-face attempt to convince Americans to adopt the totalitarian methods of the anti-gun, ant-freedom, anti-god, Muslim-infested, socialist, Euro-trash states run by limp-wristed, metrosexual, cuck, soy-boys! REAL AMERICANS–who love Jesus, family, the flag, apple pie, and their AR-15s–have discerned that this entire “pandemic” is nothing but a false flag operation to strip us of our God-given liberties and make us slaves to the inter-dimensional, technocrat, communist, demons! STOCK UP ON GOLD BULLION, SURVIVAL FOOD BUCKETS, AND AMMUNITION!!! THEY AINT GONNA MAKE ME WEAR A FACE MASK OR “SOCIAL DISTANCE!!! USA! USA! USA…!”
The preceding would have be hilarious parody… IF I HADN”T HEARD VARIATIONS ON THIS RANT COMING FROM LIVING, BREATHING HUMAN BEINGS!
Don’t worry, you can’t have a second wave until you’re over the first one.
Germany is having some huge troubles with places where marginalised people live and work in bad conditions, like a meat processing factory with 2000 new infections or an apartment building where many big families share little space.
But don’t get too smug, dear US, we have decided that after the summer break Corona will no longer be able to spread in schools because.
Who would have thought that reopening everything when the first wave was still going strong would lead to a new surge in infections?! (/sarcasm)
I’ve got one Facebook “friend” who is always posting rightwing memes about how corrupt, evil liberals want us to live in fear so they can take away our rights (presumably the “right” to infect all around us).
Perhaps Americans took “flatten the curve” too literally. The goal isn’t just to flatten the curve, but to turn the curve down a la the EU. Even with the caveats about EU cases, there’s an obvious difference in the progress of COVID-19 in the two regions…and the US is the loser.
Giliell @ #4 — Schools in the US in some states and districts are likely to reopen in the fall. There’s even Federal pressure to do so. Parents have to get back to work, you know, with US education a significant part of day care for working parents.
Parents have to get back to work, you know, with US education a significant part of day care for working parents.
That’s not different in Europe either. But so far in Germany schools have opened on a mix of home study and in class teaching. My youngest goes to school every other week and the older one two days a week. We have split all classes into two or three groups, all kids have their own fixed table (and it’s soooo nice to teach in such a small group) and they need to wear masks whenever they move through the building. Now, I’m the first to admit that this system kind of collapses at the door and it’s doing pretty little for parents who need childcare (we do have an in school daycare for parents who have no other possibility). I’m very happy that my kids are old enough and responsible enough to stay alone at home, although the pain of being a teacher is that you can teach every child how to calculate percentages except your own resident teenager because it turns into shouting matches within 5 minutes.
But after the holidays schools are supposed to open “as normal”, only that we cannot mix classes and should not change teachers often.
Urgh, sorry for that really failed bold tag. I’m not shouting, just clumsy.
I think much of the problem can be traced to the inability of white conservative evangelicals to comprehend data, which they consider to be either a kind of numerical opinion or an outright lie. Graphing the data helps a bit, but when comprehension begins to set in their minds quickly revert to something more in keeping with their anti-science belief systems.
I personally do not believe that such people deserve to live, but as a Christian I’m not supposed to think that way.
Data is just a liberal plot to embarrass The Donald.
Cambridge cancelled all of their in-person classes through AY 20-21 in March.
The NCAA is still trying to get team sports back and running for September.
This persistent fantasy that a single damn thing is going to be different in September than it was in March astounds me.
There’s no vaccine. Your immune system isn’t different. We now understand more about how this is spread: tldr-confined spaces where people are talking is Bad.
We’re down to eight weeks to radically rethink what school at all levels is going to look like next year, and so far as I can tell, there’s no national plan other than well, if you die, you die.
stroppy @1, my take was evangelical blathering has corrupted all three examples that CNN presented.
Or, mask kill, which is why every surgeon in the land collapses onto his or her patient, who is flayed wide open and the nurses and techs in the OR were unable to help, as they were killed by their masks.
More likely, they’re mad because their government is stopping them from meeting their god via a premature death, not realizing inaction to prevent your own demise is quite the same as their mortal sin of suicide.
But there’s more people in the EU in less than half the area of the USA. Covid-19 case are rising in (geographical) Europe, but Sweden (new and unexpected darling of the “libertarian” right) is the only EU country contributing significantly to that, all the others are ex-USSR or ex-Yugoslavia.
Over here in the UK, of course, Johnson is doing his best to emulate Trump, but hasn’t quite managed it yet:
(Note: by “infection rate” this article doesn’t mean what you would expect, the number of people getting infected.)
An EKG line is a curve, right? The Trump administration is working hard to flatline that!
Nothing like choosing an explanation based on how well it fits in with your bigotries.
The explanation is much more prosaic:
People are scared, both by the danger of getting sick and by how little control they have over it. So they come up with theories whose main object is making them feel more in control and/or in less danger.
(Not all that different from the motivation of a lot of commenters here.)
It’s ultimately the motivation for many kinds of religion — people whose lives depend upon things they have no control over (and maybe no understanding of) basically try to come up with a way of looking at their situation that makes them feel like they have some control or that at least make the random catastrophies that threaten them seem less random.
(And ultimately, what is science for most people but a way of making the universe seem less capricious and dangerous?)
My county in Texas is requiring face masks everywhere indoors starting tomorrow. For the first time since the pandemic started.
“Dang, someone done stole our horses! Quick, close the barn door!”
Giliell:
Yep. Consistently as bad as it was back in March (if not worse) is definitely still bad, in case anyone has already forgotten what March was like.
If we were supposed to say to ourselves “oh, I see, the ‘first wave’ is over, although you wouldn’t know it and that doesn’t really change anything,” then probably we shouldn’t care much about the waves.
What is different here is that our government has chosen to leave a lot of people in very dire circumstances financially, as it normally does, but this time it comes with forcing them to shut down their businesses, offices, etc.
I’m not proposing that it was wrong to shut things down. In some cases at least, we should’ve been even more strict about it, and we definitely should’ve started doing it earlier. What was wrong was making it practically impossible for that to last long enough, since ordinary people didn’t have nearly enough support, while huge corporations remained very comfortable with their huge bailouts.
I spoke of it in the past tense. That’s still the case, and there’s no sign of it changing any time soon. What was in the past (at least at the moment) was the conjunction of that with government-mandated shutdowns.
That doesn’t expalin why it is predominantly right-wing Americans (not centrist or lefty Americans, nor right-wingers in most other countries) who think advice to don a facemask is tyranny, and Covid-19 was invented by Bill Gates in order to inject people with microchips.
cr
It’s true that we do have some financial support. But it’s also true that for many families the situation is bad. It’s equally true that we expect much better from our government than people in the USA seem to do, like the emergency child care groups and some kind of payment if you have to stay at home cause you have nobody to look after your kids.. It’s also equally true that I’m currently developing a stomach ulcer from job insecurity.
I have to go out on a limb here and suggest that some of the resistance to the safety recommendations is fanned by and has been encouraged by agent orange and other like “minded” opportunist politicians and parasites
the ignorant want to believe the simple story and simply refuse to look at things that are scary very closely.
I will stop now because I just get more angry which ruins my apatite
uncle frogy
KG, #19:
Right-wing people in the US are predisposed to think effective government action of nearly any sort is tyranny, unless it hurts anyone they don’t like, in which case it may be okay.
To spell out that exception a bit more…. Killing people with our military and/or police is just peachy, and generally, so are things that benefit the wealthy people who they want to stay in power. For the most part, that has been working out well for them so far. If it’s not seen as “conserving” their preferred way of life (which in actual fact consists of lots of tyranny against others), even if that change comes about through fair and democratic processes (perhaps especially if it does, because their input may not be decisive), then it’s considered (by them) a tyrannical abomination.
The religious spin some may put on it (“stopping them from meeting their god” and so on) is correlated with being on the political right, but it is distinct from the political ideology itself. They certainly don’t have a monopoly on bizarre conspiracy theories … in general, that is. They do seem to have a lock on ones related specifically to Covid-19.
@#22, consciousness razor:
Well, what do you expect? The right wing used to be able to differentiate itself by advocating for the rich and for war. Democrats decided to copy them on both fronts in the late 80s, so the choice was to become more radical or admit that they aren’t actually any different from the Democratic Party they spent decades portraying as The Enemy. Had the Democrats not pushed rightward, the Republicans would not have done the same.
I think a lot has to do with active dis-information.
Our family has been going to the same family of ophthalmologists for three generations. I grew up playing with the current practitioner. Even though he’s not the cheapest in town, we go to him because of the long friendship between his family and ours.
My wife went to have an exam and get a new prescription, and found that not only were they not properly wearing their masks, the ophthalmologist (remember, this guy has medical training) told her that masks do nothing, and are only to make people feel they are doing something. He also said that COVID19 was a made in a Chinese lab and nothing would convince him otherwise. He said his medical background convinced him of it.
When people in the medical profession (albeit tangentially) believe and actively spread miss-information, it’s not too surprising that there is a dis-inclination to wearing masks. He has two elderly parents with some significant health problems, and I really hope that he doesn’t pick up COVID19 from one of his patients and give it to his parents. But his own beliefs and actions are increasing that possibility. We don’t talk politics, but he is generally a rational person.
But that doesn’t matter, using his professional status to down-play the need for PPE and propagating lies about the origin of the virus overwhelms three generations of friendship. We are looking for a new ophthalmologist.
@1 I was half expecting them to start crying and call the cops.
well that ain’t actually how remember the last 70 years. It has been the center of the politics of the right fighting the evil of athiestic communism. It was easy when there was a Soviet Union and a Red China. It was easy to keep the fear up to attach the civil right movement with the threat of left wing tyranny though a little hard to attach it to atheism seeing how the leaders were a large part christian ministers.
the democrats fell victim to the fear of being seen as too liberal and have become progressively passive in the face of the right wing .
the republican right wings big problem is there is no communism of old, Russia is just another corrupt oligarchy led by a would be emperor. red china is still a one party state which was never a problem for the right wing but now does not want to conquer the world if it ever did but only take over as much business as possible. which is only a minor problem if the funders of the right wing can’t make any profit on the deal.
the ideas of socialism are no longer seen as the threat they once were by a lot more people
parties are just names they are not principles nor ideals just banners to follow. the movements we see today have banners made of cardboard and marker, efemora. the ideals are what is impelling
parties would be wise to follow that amorphous lead.
uncle frogy
@1- stroppy and &12- wzrd1
I watched the video on CNN this morning and as oddly funny (in a disturbingly twisted way) as it was it scared the shit outta me living in Florida and feeling forced by occupation to deal with the public and some oblivious coworkers.
I got a read of some bizarre end times cray cray going on which scared me but also the Mikovits featuring conspiracy video Youtube played whack-a-mole with. She has a book that was high in NYT bestsellers just weeks ago: https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/2020/06/14/hardcover-nonfiction/
I used to enjoy watching local government meetings for the unhinged stuff constituents say when given their turn but never expected something would get that surreal and disturbing.
If Governor Duhinsanity had a spine and independent existence outside the Trump bubble he would impose some sort of statewide mandate or better direction to local municipalities. We are seeing market failure at its dead worst. The invisible hand is wrapping itself around our necks.
“I think maybe our current academic year plans in which I teach all of my classes online, except for labs which have been halved in size to allow adequate social distancing, might turn out to be optimistic.”
It sure is.
I teach in Europe, and while most of the restrictions here have been lifted, I’ve just been told I should expect to be doing 90% of my teaching from home. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the idea that apparently you can safely fit 100 people in an airplane, but you can’t fit 30 people in a lecture hall.
Now, I understand the need for such restrictions. I also understand there will always be an arbitrary factor to such restrictions. It just sucks that that arbitrary factor happens to hit the most fun part of my job! Aside from the interactions with students (and online doesn’t count!) the only thing that’s left over is grading…
BTW I’ve seen recent articles alleging however rare people have contracted this fucking shit twice. I hope not. But I am beginning to fatalistically embrace my inevitable death. I hate Schopenhauer for his misogyny but damn he did pessimism well. Fuck! Amor fati? Fuck you too Nietzsche. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger unless you survive cytokine storm somehow with damaged lungs only to be less than fully protected from suffering again. Shit!!!! Say it can’t be so! I can only recall my dad with COPD then emphysema.
hemidactylus, ever heard of the concept of ‘post traumatic growth’?
(Well, fuck that — it’s so Nietzchean by your standard)
hemidactylus:
So much, so soon? Well, good to know you are a beginner.
“So “second wave” is kind of like the second stage of a rocket, and is going to launch us to an even higher altitude?”
This is the best analogy I’ve seen in a while…
Do you know how anglophones keep saying that German has a word for everything?
Well, we certainly have one for the Vicar: fremdschämen.
Feeling embarrassment on behalf of somebody else.
@#29, hemidactylus:
There are also very definitely multiple detectably-different strains of coronavirus, which means that people getting sick twice might be contracting a different strain the second time. I’m not sure whether that’s a better or worse prospect for the general outlook than a lack of long-term immunity — a second strain was confirmed around the beginning of March, at which point the number of cases was much lower, which means that if the second infections are permitted by the second strain we’re really in for it, because if a second strain could show up when there were around 100k cases in the whole world, there are pretty certainly a much larger number of them out there now with nearly 10000k.
@#33, Giliell:
I know you meant to apply it to me, but actually, that’s a great description of how I feel. I’m embarrassed that the Democrats fell for “third way” crap. I’m embarrassed that we fell for the Clintons not just once but twice. I’m embarrassed that despite every explicit centrist campaign losing the presidency since 2000, and the only successful campaign having been one which promised reform (even if it didn’t deliver), we’re still accepting centrism. I’m embarrassed that people who voted for the Iraq war and the establishment of ICE and the PATRIOT Act are still taken seriously, and get nominations for the presidency. I’m embarrassed that people are willing to give up every last remaining fragment of the moral high ground and support a racist sexist authoritarian rapist who has sabotaged them at every turn for decades. I’m damned embarrassed that I ever considered myself to be part of a voting bloc that is so entirely stupid and suicidal and unable to learn from its mistakes. The Democratic Party is deeply embarrassing — and it’s actually not any better to imagine that the people in charge know what they’re doing and keep failing on purpose.
Covid-19 cases are starting to go up on the west coast in general, and in my local area of it as well.
I read a few days ago in the local news that the nearby Assisted Living facility had an outbreak of Covid-19 virus.
My old (in both senses) friend lives there.
He is 80 and has multiple underlying conditions including a chronic lung problem.
If he get the virus, he won’t last long enough to even end up on a ventilator.
I called and he isn’t yet one of the cases.
However, at the rate things are going, this pandemic is going to start being not something to read about, but something that directly has some huge impacts on our lives.
Things are accelerating right now.
In the Fall, when the weather gets cold and people spend more time indoors, it is likely to get worse. That is also when we open up the children’s primary and secondary schools and the universities.
Supposedly.
From right now, it looks to me like even if they do open up the schools, they are going to end up closing them again shortly after that.
I hope you aren’t equating science with religion.
Religion claims to do the same thing.
There is one major difference though.
Science works!!!
Science is also the basis of our modern civilization.
It’s why our lifespans have gone up 30 years in a century and how we feed 7.8 billion people among its other accomplishments.
“The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
consciousness razor@22,
Yes, that makes sense (I mean your analysis, not the object of it!).
An <A href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy"elementary history lesson for you, Vicar. The Republicans shifted to the right in the 1960s, with Barry (“In your guts, you know he’s nuts”) Goldwater, and Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” (see link). Somehow I don’t think that can be blamed on the Democrats shifting to the right in the 1980s, but since for you, absolutely everything has to be the fault of the Democrats, I expect you’ll find a way to blame them for this too. You could try blaming LBJ’s shift to the left in domestic policy – you know, that “civil rights” thing you may have heard of, calling in the National Guard to protect black children going to previously all-white schools, which led to the switch in voting patterns in the South, black voters turning to the Democrats and white bigots to the Republicans, and his “Great Society” beefing up of welfare provision; but that wouldn’t really fit your narrative either, would it? OK, you can see Goldwater as an attempt to outbid the Democrats to the right on war – Goldwater wanted to nuke Hanoi – but that didn’t work, and Nixon promised to end the Vietnam War and indeed did so, by conceding defeat in action if not in rhetoric, as well as pursuing detente with the USSR and opening up to China, outflanking the Democrats on the left in foreign policy, while picking up the racist vote through the southern strategy. Reagan pushed the Republicans further to the right both domestically on race, welfare, and envrionmental issues and in his “evil empire” rhetoric; the Democrats’ shift to the right in the late 1980s was a response to that.
Continuing from #37,
Arguably, the rightward shift of both main American parties from the 1980s onward was caused by factors outside the USA. Difficult to grasp for someone like you with severe OWHITUSAC syndrome*, I know, but hear me out. The “oil shocks” of the 1970s brought an end to the “postwar settlement”, whereby all classes in the rich west (the “core” of the capitalist world-system) benefitted from high economic growth rates and an expanding state funded by rising tax revenues (the whole thing based in large part, of course, on exploitation of the primary producer “periphery” countries). The “free market” right took advantage of the oil shocks to push the ideology they had developed and ensure that it was the poor who suffered, not the rich. This happened not just in the USA, but to varying degrees in all rich countries (except the newly-rich oil producing states) and most of the poorer ones. The collapse of the USSR then exacerbated the process, removing the need for capitalism in core countries to compete with Soviet-style “communism” by offering a reasonable level of comfort and security to the majority of the population. Ever since then, politics in the core has continued shifting to the right, and the concentration of wealth and the precarity of the middle classes has increased.
*Only What Happens In The USA Counts
Don’t worry, you can’t have a second wave until you’re over the first one.
In trumpistan I’m confident hair furor and his dalekocrazy will stumble into a method of accomplishing that, probably by a series of lies and bugshite stooopid actions so bizarre no-one rational can actually believe they’d do or say that…
Wow! Just wow! Darth Cheney…you too Darth Cheney? Kudos!
“Dick Cheney says WEAR A MASK. #realmenwearmasks”
https://mobile.twitter.com/Liz_Cheney/status/1276591702321647616
Sith Lords make more sense than current POTUS. Brain freeze!
Seriously! Between batshit anti-maskers at a county commission meeting and responsible messaging by Darth Fucking Cheney who you think I would give a kudos to? We’re talking fucking massive death global event here. And Darth Cheney wins the internet today!
Giliell @ 33
Vicarious embarrassment, eh?
(I’ll show myself out)
@#37, KG:
Funny how you basically undermine your entire berating of me in your last few sentences, and don’t even notice. And you wonder why I despise the opinions of people like you.
Seriously, people like you and Giliell do the best possible job of erasing any worries I might have about who wins elections. Logically and by the evidence of the last several decades, I know the Democrats are just there to make sure no push rightward by the Republicans can be undone through popular demand, but viscerally, I don’t actually hate them until I interact with stuffed dummies who try to justify it the way you do, as though the candidates you helped normalize didn’t bring us Trump by first sabotaging all the resistance to rightward motion and then running unbelievably entitled, worthless campaigns against him.
Look around at Democratic-leaning forums online and you see people congratulating themselves about how smart Biden’s advisors are to keep him from talking too much in public right now, to limit the number of gaffes he makes before the election, and celebrating that even though Biden may be ridiculously horrifyingly dimwitted he’ll still beat Trump because Trump is even moreso. This is literally where the “lesser of two evils” movement has been leading — people like you are now seriously happy to support somebody who will explicitly make things worse. Four years ago I remember people saying “Trump is telling us who he is, we should be worried”. Well, Biden has spent decades telling us who he is, and he is somebody no sane, decent person wants to put into office. You can draw your own conclusions what I think about you for supporting him from that statement.
Vicar:
<
blockquote>Seriously, people like you and Giliell do the best possible job of erasing any worries I might have about who wins elections.<.blockquote>
Or, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Trump”.
Even though the only realistic alternative is Trump “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear” again. That’s who sane, decent people want instead!
(heh)
The Vicar@43,
Funny how you can’t stop lying even for a single comment – you much resemble Trump, who, let’s recall for anyone who has forgotten, you want to win in November, in that regard. You can’t produce a single comment I have made at any time indicating that i am happy to support Biden.
The Vicar@43
Also funny how you don’t even try to substantiate this claim. And since you were supporting Trump in 2016, it’s astonishingly dishonest even for you to try to blame anyone else for “bringing us Trump”.
Just to make my attitude to Biden absolutely clear, I’d be delighted if he withdrew his candidacy, or for that matter dropped dead, tomorrow, opening up the possibility of a better candidate to oppose Trump.
Ah, The Vicar:
I guess that explains why you’re a Trump shill
KG, #46:
It’s not clear if you two are really telling different stories. Or I guess I don’t understand exactly what you’re disputing about Vicar’s comment. Both of you were a bit vague at times, but I’ll try not to add anything of my own here.
You said Reagan pushed Rs to the right. Whatever else may have happened earlier (or in other places), that is something you attributed to Reagan. I don’t think anybody here disagrees that he had that kind of influence.
Vicar said that in the late 1980s, the Ds moved themselves rightward. Then, some time after the late 1980s, this led to Rs going even further to the right.
Alright, now getting to the point. You obviously can’t explain the entire political orientation of the Republican party (today or even in 2016) by appealing to what happened before or during Reagan’s time in office. Many other relevant things have happened since then, involving Gingrich, Dubya, teabaggers like Palin, Trump, and all sorts of other unsavory characters.
So, you aren’t forced to conclude that they’re in the same spot where Reagan left them, even if you think (correctly) that Reagan moved them to that spot. That’s also true, even if you have some additional account of how they got to be that way (whatever it may have been like) prior to Reagan.
So, you wouldn’t be contradicting or refuting Vicar’s claim, when you point to any of that. See what I mean? Where’s the disagreement supposed to be, or why do you think there is one?
~~~~~~
On to some of my own thoughts…. In some ways at least, Trump doesn’t represent a further shift to the right, compared to what we had just before 2016. He’s a pretty mixed bag, and there’s just not that much going on upstairs. His sheer stupidity, desperate need to feed his ego, and his total incompetence/inexperience seem to have allowed “standard” Republicans like McConnell to be the ones steering the ship.
That’s pretty much why he does lots of “standard” Republican crap, despite his bullshit about being a radical departure from them. And that’s more or less (leaving aside the stupidity) why he contradicts himself constantly and pretends like he’s not walking his statements back, once his handlers have tried correcting him. He’s an empty vessel, like Biden is, although stylistically he’s a lot more bombastic about it when he tries to conceal that fact.
Besides, honestly, I just don’t see how they’re appreciably different from the Rs we had in the Obama years. (It hardly needs to be said that they were awful then too.) Many of them are the exact same people, of course, and their whole deal has been to not budge an inch and to do as little as possible with the government. The only thing they want, the only the thing they work for, is more power/control. (As an aside, it’s pretty scary when Ds act the same way. That’s one of many “lessons” we don’t need to learn from Rs.) If you have anything specific in mind, about the R’s political outlook now as compared with several years ago, I’ll certainly take it into consideration; but nothing really sticks out for me.
I won’t be surprised at all if someone has a problem with that. Let me make another claim which shouldn’t be controversial and may help a bit: we shouldn’t confuse being “worse than person X” with being “to the right of person X.” That’s because there are a lot of ways someone can be “worse” (as a candidate, as someone working in the government, as a human being, etc.) which have nothing to do with the left/right distinction.
Some simple examples: Trump is stupid, ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and reckless (among other things). Those qualities aren’t about left vs. right, and yet there should be no real problem understanding that they’re undesirable.
So, if you simply tell me that he’s worse (or much worse) than some other R from a decade ago, let’s say, then you may be correct about that. (It depends on who the other one is. I remind you that they all seemed unimaginably awful then too.) However, like I said, that’s not saying enough to make the claim that he’s to the right of that other person. It may just be that he’s more of a corrupt asshole, is worse at his job, is less likable, makes you angrier or more annoyed any time he speaks, has positions you don’t like regarding some subset of the issues that you happen to care about … Or who knows. You could mean all sorts of things by it.
It’s not that those aren’t good reasons to complain – sometimes they are, although not when it concerns superficial crap like his appearance – but you still have to ask whether those things define a right-wing political ideology. If they don’t, like the things I mentioned don’t, then don’t waste your time and get to the real point.
consciousness razor@49
Really? The Vicar said, and I quoted:
This is just a bunch of stupid crap, at best reflecting complete ignorance of anything that happened before the late 1980s. The Republicans had, as I pointed out, been moving right since the 1960s and Nixon’s “southern strategy”, deliberately appealing to racists, and taking it further with Reagan in the 1980s. In the 1960s, there were still many “liberal” Republicans while probably a good third of the Democrats’ voters were outright segregationists. It was the Democrats who launched the USA into the Vietnam War (and before that, the Korean War), and tried to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and the Republicans who got the USA out of south-east Asia, and pursued detente with the soviet union and China. So it’s obvious tosh that the Republicans could distinguish themselves from the Democrats by being pro-war. As for doing so by being pro-rich, The Vicar seems to have the bizarre notino that there was a time when the Democrats were against the rich. True, as I said, LBJ shifted them left in domestic affairs, but it was in response to this, or at least following it, that Nixon pitched for the racist vote, and Reagan took the racism further, and began the serious attack on welfare, as well as moving sharply right on foreign affairs. That was all before the Democrats moved right, so it’s obvious shit to claim that if they hadn’t done that, the Republicans wouldn’t have gone further right themselves. Why the fuck not? Neither The Vicar nor you have produced any evidence or argument at all for the claim that the Democrats’ rightward shift led to that of the Republicans. Get it now?
Jesus wept. Where the fuck have you been for the past 3 1/2 years? Sure, the far right were increasingly dominant in the Republican Party during Obama’s administration. Where have I said otherwise? The difference between now and “several years ago” is that Trump and the Republican far right are in power. Have you actually noticed that at all? Have you noticed the overt linksbetween the federal government, and whackdoodle conspiracists, religious fundamentalists, white supremacists and fascists? The calls for the arrest of and violence against political opponents? The packing of the judiciary and federal bodies? The sucking up to Putin? The shameless corruption? The increase in vote suppression? The brazen encouragement of armed militias to intimidate elected state governments? You can somehow look at all this, and not see that the USA is in a proto-fascist condition? That if they win again, there will be little if anything to stop them completing the process? I never thought you were stupid until now, but you’re on the verge of convincing me.
My point was exactly that this doesn’t entail that they weren’t moving further to the right in the 1990s, the 2000s, or the 2010s. You can say that they had also made such a move earlier, perhaps more than once and for various reasons. So what?
To plenty of opposition from Dems (not to mention many other liberals/progressives) who weren’t the ones making those particular decisions.
To no opposition whatsoever from Democrats, as far as I’m aware, which is why I dispute your claim that Nixon flanked them from the left on that issue. Also, in neither case did it have anything to do with a broader, peaceful, progressive agenda from the hearts of fucking Nixon, Kissinger, et al. You’d have to be extremely naive to believe anything like that.
And when they lost quite a bit in the Reagan era, they thought they needed to make a course correction (to the right), as you apparently recognize. At least that isn’t in dispute.
If they had to face real opposition from the left, by the only other major political party in the country, they might have needed to spend some actual time countering it. But without that, they clearly didn’t. It became very normal to be a politician in the right-wing, no matter which party you were in.
In a strategy game like chess, you don’t just make moves which are strategically good, independent of all context. There just aren’t moves like that. You have the board position in front of you, and you make moves based on it (preferably good ones).
Would it have made strategic sense for them to move even more to the right? Well, remember that this is in fact a radical/fringe set of positions they’re moving themselves toward, which is not generally how you’d characterize a safe (or relatively risk-free) political choice. Yet they felt pretty comfortable doing it.
I don’t know what you might have in mind when you think of Dems not moving to the right. But you should have something in mind, since that’s the hypothetical situation we’re trying to imagine in this alternate version of the 90s. I’m picturing a party which genuinely countered the right-wing shit, doing what it could to ensure they wouldn’t be able to do all the crap they wanted to do (and in many cases, actually ended up doing).
If the Dems hadn’t decided to side with them on tons of issues but had actually fought back, then yes, I do think this would be a very different country now. Why wouldn’t it be? That’s a very different board, and you’ll probably make different moves, if you have idea about what you’re doing.
I never claimed you said otherwise. I was expressing my own thoughts, that’s it.
I noticed that Trump won an election. It’s not obvious how you think that’s supposed to be different from some other Republican winning an election.
I’ve noticed it my entire adult life. You should try actually living here. Sucking up to Putin, specifically, is somewhat new of course. Sucking up to various right-wing assholes from around the world certainly isn’t.
Don’t put words in my mouth. I think we’ve been in this fucking condition for a lot longer than you either realize or want to admit. I remember George W. Bush being quite the fascist around twenty years ago, and that’s only because I didn’t know much about him before the election.
@50- KG
Actually Kennedy had inherited the CIA plot that became Bay of Pigs from Ike, no? And Guatemala and Iran coups happened under Ike. Under Ike we watched the French failure at Dien Bien Phu, partition under Geneva Conference, and Ed Lansdale as advisor to Diem. Vietnam didn’t magically arise under Kennedy and Johnson though the latter did preside over BS Tonkin pretext for escalation. Plus you ignore Operation Linebacker and incursions, tragic incursions, into Cambodia under Nixon.
Republicans have tended to run on a persona of being militarily strong whether or not they got us into or out of war. Nixon’s withdrawal from Vietnam was bloody, btw. And the blathering, conventional sound bite at the time was that only Nixon could get away with going to China etc. because he was a tough guy Republican, and Democrats were just a bunch of lilly livered, do-gooder weaklings.
…and Reagan et al… gah!
Todays Republicans (Trumpicans) are a little different in that they choose their stances based solely on how they can make themselves the biggest possible assholes, no matter what.
Why don’t you try actually reading what I wrote? The point I was making is a simple one, but you are apparently unwilling to understand it. Once more: since the Republicans have been moving right since the 1960s, it is completely otiose to claim that their continued movement to the right has to be down to anything the Democrats did. But to The Vicar, everythnig bad has to be the fault of the Democrats. As I noted @38, the rightward movement of both main US parties from the 1980s onwards is part of a broader trend across much of the world, resulting from the oil price shocks, the consequent end of the postwar settlement, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Hayekian “free market, small state” ideologists who were prepared to take advantage of those events. The rise of this ideology produced a positive feedback loop with the concentration of wealth among the very rich, boosting their political power, thus accentuating the rightward shift, and in turn leading to further wealth-concentrating measures.
Completely irrelevant to The Vicar’s idiocies, since those were not the Democrats running the party or, when in ooffice, the country.
Your hypotheticals about what the Republicans would have done if the Democrats had not moved right are evidence-free speculation. I wish the Democrats had moved left, but there’s simply no way of knowing how that would have affected the Republicans – they might have moved right even further and faster, they might have moved left on some issues and right on others, they might (and most probably) have done pretty much what they did anyway. Politics is not a chess game, there’s very little evidence AFAIK that political parties behave in the strategic way you assume rather than in response to the concerns of their members, voters and those who fund them.
Nixon promised to end the war in the 1968 election. He could do that more convincingly than Humphrey, who was deeply implicated in extending it. By the time of the 1972 election, American ground troops had mostly been pulled out, which was what most of the domestic opposition cared about. Nixon had also visited China and signed the ABM Treaty with the Soviet Union. If you want to say he neutralised the Democrats’ appeal on war-and-peace issues rather than outflanking them, fine, and of course it wasn’t about any commitment to peace or anti-imperialism. Nor did the mainstream Democrats have any such commitment, and the Democratic left, who did to some extent, suffered repeated defeats, despite The Vicar’s absurd belief that there was some time the party was fundamentally different from how it is now on these issues.
tbc
continued from #54:
Well you might think about a hundred thousand (so far) entirely unnecessary deaths from Covid-19, for a start. Right-wing and even far-right governments have not necessarily done badly in limiting the number of deaths from the pandemic. Trump’s ludicrous incompetence, narcissistic detachment from reality, and personal corruption have certainly made a difference, as has his subservience to Putin (see below). But as far as the proto-fascism is concerned, some of the alternatives (Ted Cruz for example) might have been worse. The point is that the racist, nativist, conspiracist, white evangelical, tending-to-outright-fascism far right has taken over the Republican Party. Trump has tied himself to them, they have tied themselves to him. But if Trump were to drop dead tomorrow, leaving Pence in charge, defeating him and the Republicans in November would be just as vital.
So you actually admit a difference, then promptly minimise it. The key is that the “various right-wing assholes” were America’s various right-wing assholes. Trump is Putin’s right-wing asshole. Putin, not Trump, is the effective head of the informal neo-fascist international. This is actually a potential weakness of Trump in electoral terms.
OK, let’s have actual examples – and we need a pervasive pattern of such behaviour for at least some of them, since that is what Trump has demonstrated for all of them – from any previous administration. I should, by the way, have mentioned attacks on the press, and the blatancy of the constant lying, without even any real attempt to make the lies plausible, because the point is not to have them believed so much as for adherence to them to act as a badge of loyalty. Because the passage i’ve quoted from you looks to me like complete crap, a willful failure to understand the difference between standard “free market”, anti-welfare, tax-cuts-for-the-rich conservatism – even in the neocon variant of the GWB administration, which focused on foreign policy – and fascism. The shift toward the latter in the Republican Party began, or at least greatly accelerated, in 2008, with the financial crisis and the election of a black President. The former energised far right, nativist, authoritarian proto-fascist parties around the world – as well as, to a lesser extent, left Social Democrat and Green parties, as the holes in the “free-market” ideology became evident. But in the USA, because of the party duopoly and the election of Obama, this took the form of a far right, overtly racist takeover of the Republican Party, which poses a direct threat to what democracy exists in the USA that has no parallel at least since McCarthyism. Fascism is not wedded to particular economic ideologies, and may incorporate welfare policies, provided they can be limited to the “right” people – see PiS in Poland for a good current example. It’s above all a cultural ideology, of “national renewal” and scapegoating. Even in the USA, it’s notable that Trump has embraced protectionism, and state support for weak industries – more in rhetoric than reality, but even the rhetoric is far from the “free market” ideology that dominated both parties pre-2008 – alongside the scapegoating of foreigners, immigrants, people of color, “liberals”, LGBTQ+ people, and women who fail to conform to their assigned role. Shoulder-shrugging “It doesn’t matter who wins in November” – let alone The Vicar’s actual preference for a Republican victory – is a shameful betrayal all those who have fought for civil and democratic rights worldwide over the past three centuries and more.
hemidactylus@52, stroppy@53,
Try looking at what I was responding to: The Vicar’s claim that the Republicans, pre-late-1980s, had been able to distinguish themselves from the Democrats by being “pro-war”. Being “pro-war” has been at least as consistent in Democratic administrations as in Republican ones, throughout the period since WW2. Indeed, when it suits them, this is a key theme of the: “It doesn’t matter who wins” idiots.
One more feature of fascism I should have mentioned: the personality cult of the “Great Leader”, far above his followers or advisers. The adulation of Trump, the attribution to him of superhuman status, has no parallel I’m aware of in American history. Reagan perhaps comes closest in my lifetime, but his appeal to his followers was as a “regular guy”, who thinks like the “average (white, male) American”. No-one refers to Trump in those terms. In this respect, Trump dropping dead would be a serious blow to the Republicans: there is no cult of Pence.
@55- KG
The Republicans had splintered into hawkish neocons and dovish paleocons. The former are exemplified by Project for the New American Century who were itching to topple Husayn in Iraq. And far more influential. The latter are exemplified by Pat Buchanan who harkens back to the isolationists who wanted to stay out of WWII. Trump in some ways seems torn but sometimes leans toward withdrawal or nonintervention, but had hawkish neocons such as Bolton to contend with.
The Democratic arc, to bring more electoral success was with third way pro-market Democrats such as Bill Clinton who benefited from the chaos nationalist/protectionist Perot threw at the GOP. Paleocon Buchanan himself had run against GHW Bush in primaries.
As President, Clinton was itching almost as much to topple Husayn. And Hillary herself has a problematic relation to 2003 invasion leading to regime change:
https://jacobinmag.com/2016/05/war-iraq-bill-clinton-sanctions-desert-fox
Not exactly dovish.
As I see it Civil Rights and Goldwater inspired reactionaries started the interparty resorting that shifted the Rs rightward as the Rockefeller establishment backing Nixon eventually gave way to Reaganism though GHW Bush too was a moderate compared to Reagan.
The Democrats became infused with a watered down Thatcher/Reagan neoliberalism, the main difference being over tax rates and investment in the future. Clinton’s “law and order” response to “superpredators” and welfare “reform” also became pressing issues the latter part of the infamous “contract on America”.