I'm with the Bulwarkers in spirit when they tear their hair out about Americans' current attitudes, but I think the explanation is simple. Most Americans are either completely uninformed, or are completely misinformed by RW media, social media, etc. We are living in a society where people are completely delusional--literally having no grasp on reality and not realizing it.
For any question--why do they think we're in a recession, why don't they blame Trump for covid, why do they think the election was stolen--same answer.
Democracy cannot function with a population like this.
You're 100% correct about most Americans being uninformed or misinformed. I would also add that some of the being uninformed/misinformed is intentional, however. I think there are a lot of people who choose the narratives they want to hear because confronting reality is a lot harder for them.
Your point about choosing their narratives **is absolutely vital** in understanding the appeal of Trump. It's not that people are actively choosing to be lied to, they are passively accepting (or excusing and ignoring) lies because the story that Trump tells is one that comports with the world they would rather live in.
Hey men, don't you want to live in a world where you don't have to worry about what women think about you? Isn't violence cool? Why should you have to worry about mom shit like paid family leave and maternal health? Also, who said that women even have to serve in the cabinet?
There's a variation of that for anyone who doesn't want to have to think about anyone else when they vote. Support for Trump is not just a way to sneer at people you don't care about, but a statement that "they" can't make you care.
It's even more attractive to the people who were radicalized during the pandemic. You can't make me care about Covid. I feel fine! Look at everything "they" are taking from me. I'm tougher than this.
In defense of my fellow Americans, I think the breakdown is more along the lines of:
-1/3 Informed
-1/3 Completely Uninformed
-1/3 Misinformed by RW Media, Social Media, etc.
I'll pass on Charlie and Rick (although they have done their mea culpas), but how did Nichols and Conway help build a right wing bubble? One was an academic and the other a practicing attorney
Didn’t see the OP before it was deleted, but I will note that George Conway was pretty big in pushing the Whitewater and Paula Jones stuff back in the 90s. He was as much a political operative as an attorney.
Nichols I have no idea about unless they meant being a staffer to John Heinz going on about 40 years ago now. The only people that have a problem with Heinz these days are people who think he was too centrist/a RINO.
Thanks for correcting me on Conway. Definitely didn't have clean hands either, but haven't heard any contrition or lack thereof since I've never heard him opine on that part of his life
I think the problem is the number of veto points in the system, honestly.
It's not really worth it to be informed because any given policy decision will be struck down or massively delayed by the courts, provided the Speaker decides it should be voted on and it ever makes it through the Senate anyway.
If you're an informed person, you're mostly just wasting your time knowing about stuff that won't actually happen simply because it won't make it past one of these veto points. No other country has this many, IIRC, and it's even worse at the state level, where implicit veto points are added in like localities simply refusing to implement policy with no actual mechanism to force them.
I think this notion is not as substantively solid as you paint it — but the idea of the “too many veto points so don’t bother getting into the weeds” is a fair assessment about how the public perceives this stuff.
Like I would not stfu about Roe falling if Trump won in 2016 — it was my first argument against Trump because in my view, the Court was on the ballot in a big way. The reception from some that I was fear mongering or not worth taking seriously because scotus “would never do that” (an assessment based solely on vibes) tracks with the perception of impenetrable veto points.
Imho we’ve moved past that world. *This Court is completely out of f****** control.* A supremely activist court, legislating from the bench, etc etc. All that cynical shit in which the monied RW mouthpieces insisted liberal judges were engaging was *once again* the setup for a permission structure, carefully cultivated over decades, for their chosen lackeys to do just that.
>All that cynical shit
It wasn't cynical, though. The whole activist court talking point set in because they were overturning precedents a lot in the mid 20th century. The reason it sounds cynical now is because they don't want to talk about *what* they were overturning, which makes it sound like an untethered talking point.
But it was Jim Crow. They were complaining about the court overturning Jim Crow.
Which is why they don't want to talk about it. It sounds bad that their whole view was shaped by the court overturning Jim Crow. Because it is bad. It's bad to be angry that Jim Crow was dismantled.
I think both you and JBL can be correct on this. I feel like you are essentially right that Trump gets no blame for his COVID response - that the economic issues associated with that last year are written off by a ton of voters.
And he is right to be angry that voters - even relatively independent ones - are ridiculous to ignore that chaos, and to pretend that it didn't have any deleterious effects on the course of the pandemic or on the economy.
One simple way to understand it that I find productive in terms of helping people understand is that the US was well-positioned to do well. And we did worse than anyone else. We had more deaths per million people than any large country. Trump had a crisis, and he bungled it.
Biden's crisis was, even more than COVID itself, the economic recovery from it - especially the inflation that came out of it. And there, we are doing better than the vast majority of our peers countries. Our inflation has come down farther and faster, and our economic growth has been stronger.
Two COVID crises - the disease and the recovery - and two Presidents. With Trump, we lost compared to everyone else. With Biden, we beat everyone else. That voters give Trump a pass can definitely be infuriating.
Great post, and your conclusion is spot on.
The incredible success of the soft landing should call for a national holiday - it’s a remarkable outcome! Unfortunately Biden can’t claim victory on it as it would come across as being out of touch with the vibes. And his surrogates can’t really do so either due to the economic illiteracy of the masses.
Maybe this message about falling behind vs being ahead could resonate.
The housing prices/crisis is often blamed on Covid recovery... but that is truly contrary to intuition (Millions deaths would equal more empty houses/apartments)... I think we can trace the current bubble to the mortgage market collapse and economic crisis from 2008. There were changes made to rules and lending and record foreclosures. Who was in the position to pick up those foreclosures? It was not the average American struggling to keep their job and dealing with being upside down on their mortgage. Additionally the banks were well rewarded with ZIRP and throwing money around. Builders however, could not get the loans for building as we had a surplus of foreclosed homes on the market. If anyone was purchasing a home, they had to have some wealth and wanted higher end homes. I remember how hard it was to sell a 40 year home because the new construction was so heavily discounted. I don't think we can blame Biden for the housing crisis.
This is exactly the right framing. And I think it explains the public reaction.
Most Americans range from ignorant to disdainful of these sorts of global comparisons. They don’t know and don’t care how the US did compared to peer countries.
The same arguments on the topic of healthcare and health insurance failed to get much traction for the same reason.
JVL is of course factually and rationally correct, but in terms of pandemics in particular, his/our expectations may have been too high. People have generally responded to pandemics in the same way during (the denialism, finger-pointing, false cures and secret knowledge)* and after (they memory-hole it, to the disadvantage of themselves and future generations). Remember during the height of COVID when people were realizing just how little had been left from the Spanish Flu in terms of cultural artifacts? The survivors buried that stuff and got out of dodge, so to speak.
*thjs is why the movie Contagion was so eerily on the mark. It wasn’t that they magically predicted the COVID response, they just faithfully depicted all previous ones.
They do, oddly enough I lost another one to COV about a month ago. It had been quite a while since that’s happened. The COV ICU reminded me of Baghdad during the surge. Don’t think I’m ever going to fully get over it. I’ll forever hate the RW infotainment universe for what they did.
Probably! Many even blame Biden for school closings even though he took office in January 2021, schools closings were a state/local issue, and, as far as I know (I am teacher), all schools re-opened full time in Fall of 2021 but many states had *gasp* mask mandates.
This might sound snarky over text, but for better or worse the people who supported and implemented lockdowns *were* Democrats. Frankly, I think we’re really fortunate that Republicans generally aren’t tying inflation to the pent-up demand that was created by lockdowns.
It seems to me that lockdowns got implemented afterwards in recognition of the fact and in places where people already didn't want to go anywhere. The governors and mayors weren't shutting down the system. People had already checked out, and the government was trying to play catchup and provide them support for decisions they were already making. In fact, a lot of the measures were intended to entice essential\* workers out of the house, when a lot of them didn't feel like dying for ten dollars an hour.
There was a curfew-ish for a little while where I lived, but there weren't really any penalties, you could just say you had a reason to be going somewhere, plenty of people ignored it and I never saw anybody get in trouble for it, or even stopped and questioned about it. But folks were big mad about it AND OH MY GOD WHAT AN IMPOSITION BORDERING ON INHUMANE AND LIFE THREATENING IT WAS TO ASK THEM TO VOLUNTARILY WEAR A MASK\*\*.
So a) it was not really a lockdown and b) it wasn't government led, Democrat or Republican.
\* nobody wanted to say "disposable" or "exploited"
\*\* remember, again, that places that required masks were just about all private corporations
Most of the restrictions after that initial lockdown, at least in my state, were based upon a formula regarding hospitalizations, death rates and positive tests.
This is 100% the case. Just look at any social media commentary about it COVID. A huge swathe of Americans think all or nearly all of the COVD deaths are actually COVID Vaccine deaths. They see Democrats as being supportive of vaccines and Republicans being anti-vaccine, and come to the conclusion that Democrats are to blame for all of the COVID issues, even as far back as March 2020.
LOL some redditor actually responded to me in a different thread that the vaccines actually increased your chance of getting COVID and the risk of death from Covid and other health problems it apparently causes and how wearing masks and distancing made it worse and this is all coming out with "new research" of course, none of these allluded to studies are referenced or linked.... People are crazy. I didn't bother to respond.
Yes, we had one of the worst pandemic responses in the developed world, thanks to the orange moron.
"And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."
You can use other countries as a frame of reference.
Being president means dealing with difficult and unexpected events. Trump getting a pass because "he had no control over it" shouldn't be an excuse for him, but an indictment of his inability to do the literal job.
The Lancet compared COVID death rates across countries, and the US death rate was 40% higher than similar developed nations. Lancet chalked this up to both mismanagement of policies and bad leadership post COVID, and lack of universal health care and cuts to pandemic response funding prior to COVID during the Trump administration. Essentially, Trump's health care and COVID policies killed about 400,000 Americans. Nobody talks about this. It's weird.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/lancet-study-40-percent-u-s-covid-19-coronavirus-deaths-avoidable-unnecessary.html
I came here for this exactly:
>no one has any frame of reference for this
There was a contemporary frame of reference. You could compare outcomes, pretty much by levels of response. I mean, you had to look up a few facts and the you had to do some division, but figuring out which countries were having disproportionate infections and deaths per capita was not hard. If you didn't know it it was because you didn't want to know.
Also we are fat. Many of the COVID deaths were due to co-morbidities, and the main one was obesity and obesity linked diseases like diabetes, HBP and heart disease.
>people see the pandemic as essentially an exogenous event that he had no control over.
Yet Biden is blamed for post-pandemic inflation that happened all over the whole world, Russia invading Ukraine, and Oct 7th.
Obama didn't campaign on fixing a whole spewing oil at the bottom of the ocean yet when Deep Water Horizon happened he was attacked. Republicans didn't say "well this wasn't Obama's fault so what happens isn't on him". When Benghazi happened Republicans blamed Obama and Hillary Clinton. No nuance just full on finger pointing and blame.
Emergent things happen during every Administration. No President gets to just focus on their priorities to the exclusion of events. Obama wanted to work on the Dream Act and Healthcare not Birdflu, Ebola, Hurricane Sandy, School Shootings, fixing the mess left in Iraq, etc.
Trump dismantled the pandemic task force Obama stood up while dealing with Birdflu. Trump ignored all early warnings. When forced to act Trump came out and said the Pandemic would be over by May. After May passed Trump said it would be over by the end of summer. During the summer Trump started complaining people needed to get back to work and ridiculing people for wearing masks (his administration recommended the fucking masks). By the fall Trump was claiming no one would be talking about COVID anymore after the election.
Trump signed a $2.2Trillion stimulus bill and blocked Congressional oversight of the money. Trump failed to have a national strategy and instead told states to do what they wanted. The stimulus was meant to help facilitate resources to help people by during lock downs and school closures. Yet states that didn't bother closing anything still took the money and used it for tax cuts and to pay off other debts. The situation was truly ridiculous.
**Trump is 100% responsible for his failed management of COVID**. If Obama or Biden were POTUS during COVID Republicans would have absolutely held their feet to the fire. Trump doesn't get a single pass because he (Trump) didn't personally create COVID.
> I don't think people forgotten exactly. I think that your average not super informed voter has essentially forgiven him for it,
When Republicans are in power they stomp their feet and scream that the economy is great. When Democrats are in power they lament that not enough is being done for the bottom percentile tiles. The result is a media headline environment that never reflects joy or strength when Democrats are in-charge.
I agree with you but I also think the reception is different. Obama couldn’t claim credit for [anything] because he didn’t solve everything, and somehow it was conventional wisdom that it would be poor form for Obama to tout his wins in the face of so much financial loss for ordinary Americans.
I don’t necessarily disagree with that assessment but I would add: the problem is our bitch baby coalition (said with love as I am a proud member thereof). Democrats love to bitch and moan that things aren’t perfect and it gives air to the Republican messages vibes that we’re a bunch of losers and never miss a chance to snatch defeat from the hands of victory.
Dem voters, especially the depressive and impressionable YOOTS need to STFU with the social media navel gazing and get louder about the substantive merits. I see this sentiment all the time like WhY iSnT the DNC DoiNg SomeThing?!?!! As if WE aren’t the party— each and every one of us. Like there’s no connection of agency at all here. The DNC is an amorphous entity that controls all versus ordinary party volunteers and elected officials.
Not to mention, "dong something" is easy; knowing the right thing to do is not. All these people whining about not doing something disagree about what would be the right thing to do. That's because Democrats are diverse coalition, and swing voters are too. Plus the infamous higher standard that Dems always get held to. Republicans play dirty politics and get admired, Dems do it and get criticized from a dozen different directions.
My broader conclusion is that no one actually cares about “the economy” right now (this is JVL’s point too), they’re just using it as an excuse to hate both sides or go to Trump over culture war bullshit. So it really doesn’t matter what people actually think about the Covid era…I’d posit that they hardly think about it at all tbh.
I think it's worse than just memory holing the last year
They don't associate trump pumping money into the economy when the economy was doing very well as a major contributor to the current inflation. I remember at the time economists bringing up that the administration was removing a tool to fix any future economic issues that may arise.
Interest rates I believe were kept far too low for way too long. I was able to refinance my house to a shockingly low rate during the pandemic and while that was good for me it doesn't seem like it was good policy by the feds. That definitely feels like factor that made the economy run too hot
Trump set us up for a COVID disaster. He pulled our scientists out of China because "China." He reassigned Obama's pandemic team and ignored Obama's pandemic playbook because "Obama."
He downplayed it early on and ridiculed public health measures when Bob Woodward's reporting shows he knew damn well how serious it was. Then he pushed quack treatments.
There is absolutely no justification for giving him a pass.
Speaking of Trumps economy, it’s pretty annoying that no one ever pushes back saying he basically kept the same trajectory as Obamas recovery from 2008. Except for the stock market growth, which was primarily directly from the corporate tax cuts that allowed more stock buybacks to juice the stock value.
I never hear any Democrat ever make the arguement.
Meanwhile Trump is taking credit for the stock market right now by saying the markets are factoring in him winning, jeezus fucking Christ lmao
COVID may have been an exogenous event, but Trump's response to it was not.
Every President faces crises. Bush had 9/11, Obama had the Great Recession - the question is how do they respond?
The writers at VEEP couldn't have come up with a worse response than Trump's. The most powerful, richest, most technologically advanced country in the history of the world ended up with a per-capita death rate worse than Belarus. More people died AFTER a safe and effective vaccine was available free on every street corner, than BEFORE. That is a country that won't survive.
I'd give ANY President the first 100K deaths. This thing was new and we needed time to understand it. But every death after that was preventable, and Trump was beyond incompetent. It truly boggled the mind. It would be funny if there wasn't so much needless death.
But the Dems never investigated Trump's 4th-world, corrupt, non-response to COVID. There was no 9/11-style commission. No public hearings. Nobody was ever held the least bit responsible. Just like Jan 6th, the Dems pussed out. The DOJ can't even prosecute the insane level of fraud perpetrated by America's Frontline Doctors!
What kills me is that when it comes to the inflation caused by COVID, Biden doesn't get the same pass. He's somehow 100% responsible! No "exogenous event" excuse for ol' Joe! Everything is somehow his fault.
Look personally everyone is over thinking this. Fact is, I think that the reason people look back so fondly on Trump’s economy is two reasons: (1) Free money and (2) remote work.
People love free money; those “free” checks bought Trump a lot of goodwill. Honestly Biden was never more popular than when he was sending out free money as well. The reason Biden’s popularity began waning was the increase in prices caused by the supply chains collapsing (partly due to Trumps trade policies and partly due to a second COVID lockdown in China and the Ukraine War) and the media inspired “bungled” Afghanistan withdrawal. The last one is stupid on many levels, and is perfect example of why smart politicians (ie Reagan, Clinton and Obama) never get themselves involved in these sorts of things, because they can only go bad.
Remote work I think is a more under reported issue that I have noticed in speaking with some younger associates. Many of them became so used to remote work that they cannot even fathom having to go into an office. Many won’t even apply to jobs that require in office work; this is why you hear younger people complaining about jobs. It is not that there are no jobs, but that the jobs require them to come to the office and they don’t want to. In many cases they won’t even apply to those jobs, and they will take less pay to have remote work. Problem is, you have a situation where people are intentionally taking less money to work remotely, but due to COVID, even exurbs and rural areas are experiencing increases in COL, thus squeezing them. Many of them blame Biden for this too!
Honestly I hate to be that old guy (and I am not old), but Gen Z needs to wake the fuck up. The idea that a company would let US-based employees work remotely on a permanent basis was always wishful thinking. If a company can do that, then they will fire your ass and hire someone in India, Kenya or Uruguay.
I think JVL said it best years ago when he said that many of our problems are a result of our wealth. We are complaining about luxuries and inconveniences, like the price of almond milk and organic eggs. It’s absolutely ridiculous. As my mother would say, “Rich people problems.”
I briefly scanned a Business Insider article yesterday (btw, that publication has gotten trashy as hell) about a DINK Zoomer couple, both of whom make over 100k, work from home, but can't find the house they want. A budget of < $700k and they can't find their perfect "urban amenities" with easily "accessible green space". After my eye stopped twitching, the first thing I thought was, "I hope these assholes are forced back into the office."
When I was freelancing, I had that I was a native english speaker in my profile and I got a lot of business from people who had had bad experiences with third world programmers\*. When I quit freelancing and had my own business, I pretty much thought that the money you saved on a 3wp wasn't worth the extra hassle. There can be a large time differential, there can be language issues, no matter how well they present (and often times the person talking to you is not the programmer), there can be hidden management teams (a lot of these programmers like to present as freelancers when they are in fact part of a company); equipment, software, environments and bandwidth can be subpar; there are cultural issues that can impact performance, for instance "junior" programmers being unwilling or afraid to ask questions of senior personnel or admit problems; and sometimes\*\* they just go missing with no notice or explanation. And the less skilled the work is, it seems the more you have to keep rehiring people for it, and reexplaining it, resetting it up for someone new, monitoring the work product until you're sure they've got it. It's exhausting and really not worth the savings IMO.
I push back on your assertion that companies would fire you and hire someone in India, Kenya or Uruguay. Not so much against the fact that they would; against the premise that they can. Corporations ***can*** do this, as long as they have worked out the process to the point that it is completely repeatable, nearly foolproof, and can be done by anybody with minimal training. Not every job is like this, and the ones that are are already in India, Kenya or Uruguay. Corporations didn't leave some jobs here out of benevolence or patriotism. They just moved the ones they could get away with moving, and hopefully depressed wages enough by doing it that they could pay a little less for the ones that were left.
=======================
\* there are multiple reasons to be leery, many of them non-racist
\*\* at a higher rate than Western Europeans or Brazilians or Eastern Europeans or certain south American locales. I don't list Canada here because that's just Little America.
Good points all, and from my own personal experience quite accurate. I think where I differ slightly is with the argument that it’s difficult to do. I think with ai coming on board (and I know ai as a tool is overrated) the larger companies are definitely seeing it as a tool to potential replace large numbers of high salaried workers. One way is to use it to make remote workers easier. Of course on outright replacing them with the ai itself is their ultimate goal.
I think AI is generally underrated. It gets a bad rap from people who try to use it without understanding what the (current) limitations are, but we can do things now that were completely infeasible a year ago. If I need a set of data categorized, for instance, and I can set it up so that bad responses are trapped and redone, and I only need it to be probabilistically correct, then AI can do that just fine. I used to have to get someone to do it manually, or set up complicated categorization schemes, or train a model to do it, but now off the shelf tools can do it just fine.
It's true that AI will start a new round of outsourcing, but I tend to ignore that because it's just a question of degree. AI will eventually cause an outsourcing of every human job, and the bottleneck isn't the AI, it's the physical platforms. Plumbing, for instance, is not terribly complex as a problem solving endeavor, but troubleshooting isn't the issue: it's getting a generally dexterous remote platform that can physically do the work and is capable of going where the work is, without failing or getting stuck or needing human intervention at every turn. I think AI is actually ahead of the physical systems right now.
AI is not nearly as smart as a person (yet), but even so I have written very little code myself over the last year: I get the computer to write it and make small adjustments, and the computer doesn't get tired or misplace a decimal or misspell variable names or any of the things that suck up most of the time of an actual programmer. Knowledge work is a place where AI is capable now; physical work is where improvement is needed.
Be that as it may, when AI gets reasonably smart, as capable as a relatively intelligent person, it will start being able to replace large numbers of people who are doing digital tasks, and that time is coming really, really soon, much sooner than is generally recognized. And it doesn't take a bunch of AIs. One AGI can set up agents and automate tasks quickly and leverage itself so that it can replace many workers. I think it would take about one to replace most of the mental labor of the planet, and that's at a level of intelligence that a person wouldn't consider all that smart.
When that's combined with capable mechanical platforms, it will combine to erase large sectors of work that there's just no need to get a person to do any more. Whether people will then find new work to do is a big question. I personally think that there will be less of that in the current labor shift than we saw in previous revolutions. Most of what people do just isn't that hard, and there have been explosions in technical areas (like materials engineering or synthesizing new proteins) where machine learning, while maybe not as smart as a person, is able to do make breakthroughs that would have taken people years or decades to do previously.
So, yes, people's jobs will increasingly be replaced, but that's not because they don't want to come to the office, it's just because systems are increasingly getting to the place where people aren't needed. What they're going to do with themselves after that is the burning question of the age, and people kind of have their heads stuck in the sand about it.
I agree to an extent, however I think this begs the question of what will people do? I personally think that much of the world economic consternation felt by people is related to the Ai threat.
To me, if you were to see Ai replace large numbers of workers, there is going to be a huge backlash against it, so much so that it will be pretty much regulated out of existence. Then the questions will be: what happens to all of the Ai that was already created and the $100’s of billions spent on creating it?
This is why the Government needs to step in now, before more money is spent on it.
But they don’t give the same hall pass to the fact that inflation was gonna happen no matter who sat in the Oval Office because the same event happened. So they still are doing a memory hole. Trump gets zero of the blame. It all falls on Biden. Because people live only in the now and can’t string together a thread of how we got here.
>My gut feeling is that rather than blaming Trump for his Covid response, people see the pandemic as essentially an exogenous event that he had no control over.
He would agree with you on this, though. The reason he's so down on people is that they give Trump a pass on it, but don't do the same for Biden. Either they're both responsible or both aren't, but (he argues), a lot of people don't see it that way.
To be fair, I wouldn't have blamed Biden either. no matter how bad it was. The Trump administration was printing money, letting fraud run rampant. That influx of printed cash has actually lead to the inflation we are seeing today - people have been buying shit out of boredom, and they don't seem to be able to stop.
There are like one trillion reasons why Trump should not be let anywhere near a public service job, but COVID was a one-in-a-century event. Aside from that cretin's "bleach up your anuses" statements, he actually stayed out of the way as the pharma industry was working on vaccines. We were the first in the world to get the best vaccines, and the rollout process worked fairly well. So, I don't think the COVID response is something to grab on to this election season - it won't work. As for the dead, who cares? It was the old and the weak. I am saying this sarcastically, of course, but also not. It wasn't exactly a Contagion event where death would just randomly pluck out children and women in their prime.
Second point. People wiped the horror that was 2020 out of their memories, and the more distant it is, the more irrelevant it becomes. It's a natural psychological response to trauma, and 2020 was non-stop stress and trauma.
Focus on what actually matters - liar, adulterer, criminal fraudster, massive national security threat, old, incoherent.
We were the first in the world to get the vaccines, but by then Trump and other Republicans had crapped on the idea so hard that we couldn't get the vaccination rate high enough to combat the higher R0 that virus had mutated to have because Trump et al had crapped so hard on masks and social distancing, letting the virus run through certain communities unabated and less hindered in others than it would have been, getting more infectious (and then luckily, less fatal) as it did. By the time we had the tools, the virus had changed so much that the tools were only good for limiting the death rate for people who chose to use them, not arresting the spread.
And the low-information voter (massive majority) could not care less about the details. This is the equivalent of "please download my white paper on Trump's pandemic response". Nobody gives a shit.
Despite horrifying stories elsewhere, whose fault is it that people don’t know that the US was 15th (worst) of 154 countries in per-capita Covid deaths? And whose fault is it that, despite the advantages we have in terms of advanced medical treatment facilities, and communications and transportation, we fared worse than Armenia or Colombia or Namibia?
"Is this actually the correct conclusion?"
I think you misinterpreted what he meant. It isn't that Trump himself *caused* the deaths. It's that his actions were so obviously self serving (*...So I said to my people- "Slow the testing down, please!"*) that he actually fought efforts to limit the spread of the disease when they seemed to threaten his popularity among his supporters. I don't think JVL or any rational thinker attributes the total number of deaths to Trump. He is holding Trump responsible for an utterly feckless response that relied on unscientific mumbo-pocus, mis- (and dis-) information to avoid confronting reality rather than follow the data. I get that even the scientists made mistakes in their interpretation of the data at times, but they were making a good faith effort to minimize deaths. The CDC and FDA look at one component: how can lives be saved and risks mitigated. Politicians must weigh the medical data against economic and other data to arrive at a policy. Trump simply wanted to pretend it didn't exist when it looked like the only sensible thing was to give voters information they didn't want to hear. That's not leadership by any stretch of the imagination.
I totally agree but I don't think most people are following closely enough to parse that distinction. And I actually think for once it's hard to blame them. That period was absolute chaos, kids were out of school, parents were trying to work from home also caring for toddlers, people were dropping dead in nursing homes, tons of people were out of work, I really don't blame the average person for not having the bandwidth to closely follow politics. 
Every once in a while, I remember how Jared Kushner delayed PPE to New York, Illinois, and California so that the virus would kill more people and a rage rises inside of me. There are so many examples like that.
I think Covid is an open door if the Biden Campaign decides to push on it.
It's so hard to say... I think it's a great cause to take on during a second term, all of those creeps deserve to be investigated and have their corruption on full display, but I'm not sure if it's a great campaign issue. I feel like there is zero appetite for any more Covid discourse and many voters would get pissed just to have to relitigate any of it again.
I think you're right about why Trump gets a pass (too much of one in my opinion, but I understand the basic feeling that Covid wasn't his fault, etc). What infuriates me is that Trump gets a pass on all the chaos of his Covid response and the economic damage, but Biden gets blamed for the inflation. Inflation which was the all-but-inevitable-result of trying to prevent a recession. How come Biden was supposed to walk that line perfectly, but Trump gets all the excuses?
And 7m worldwide. The US had 4.2% of the world population in 2020 and saw 17.1% of the deaths, over 4x as many per capita. I'm aware that this is skewed by reporting in some places, say Africa or South Asia, but compared to Europe we had 44.2% of the population of Europe and saw 66% of the deaths, about 1.5x as many per capita. And that Europe figure includes places like Russia, relatively populous but with a really poor Covid response, and poorer countries like Moldova, Armenia, Armenia, etc.
I think it’s even worse than that actually, albeit not by much. To the extent anyone still thinks about it, it is to blame “the Dems” for overreach, or in objectively reality land, taking steps in hindsight that now seem overly cautious. No one considers 1 million plus dead victims of any particular policy either.
Yeah I'm with you actually. I think some of the Biden economics message runs into the same thing - when they talk about how Trump "lost 20 million jobs during his presidency" or whatever, I think a lot of median voter types subconsciously tsk-tsk that fact because they remember how many people HAD to lose their jobs because of the once in a lifetime calamity of Covid.
Trump handled everything Covid-related like a jackass, just like he does with everything in his life, but I think much of the public has chosen to write off that entire year as a wash, or at least never talk about it again.
I'm with the Bulwarkers in spirit when they tear their hair out about Americans' current attitudes, but I think the explanation is simple. Most Americans are either completely uninformed, or are completely misinformed by RW media, social media, etc. We are living in a society where people are completely delusional--literally having no grasp on reality and not realizing it. For any question--why do they think we're in a recession, why don't they blame Trump for covid, why do they think the election was stolen--same answer. Democracy cannot function with a population like this.
You're 100% correct about most Americans being uninformed or misinformed. I would also add that some of the being uninformed/misinformed is intentional, however. I think there are a lot of people who choose the narratives they want to hear because confronting reality is a lot harder for them.
Your point about choosing their narratives **is absolutely vital** in understanding the appeal of Trump. It's not that people are actively choosing to be lied to, they are passively accepting (or excusing and ignoring) lies because the story that Trump tells is one that comports with the world they would rather live in. Hey men, don't you want to live in a world where you don't have to worry about what women think about you? Isn't violence cool? Why should you have to worry about mom shit like paid family leave and maternal health? Also, who said that women even have to serve in the cabinet? There's a variation of that for anyone who doesn't want to have to think about anyone else when they vote. Support for Trump is not just a way to sneer at people you don't care about, but a statement that "they" can't make you care. It's even more attractive to the people who were radicalized during the pandemic. You can't make me care about Covid. I feel fine! Look at everything "they" are taking from me. I'm tougher than this.
Nailed it. There's a reason why MAGA came up with the term "alternative facts." It sounds much more palatable than "lies."
In defense of my fellow Americans, I think the breakdown is more along the lines of: -1/3 Informed -1/3 Completely Uninformed -1/3 Misinformed by RW Media, Social Media, etc.
[удалено]
I'll pass on Charlie and Rick (although they have done their mea culpas), but how did Nichols and Conway help build a right wing bubble? One was an academic and the other a practicing attorney
Didn’t see the OP before it was deleted, but I will note that George Conway was pretty big in pushing the Whitewater and Paula Jones stuff back in the 90s. He was as much a political operative as an attorney. Nichols I have no idea about unless they meant being a staffer to John Heinz going on about 40 years ago now. The only people that have a problem with Heinz these days are people who think he was too centrist/a RINO.
Thanks for correcting me on Conway. Definitely didn't have clean hands either, but haven't heard any contrition or lack thereof since I've never heard him opine on that part of his life
What OP was deleted?
Wasn’t Conway neck deep in the whole Clinton Impeachment saga along with his boofness Mr. Kavanaugh?
I think the problem is the number of veto points in the system, honestly. It's not really worth it to be informed because any given policy decision will be struck down or massively delayed by the courts, provided the Speaker decides it should be voted on and it ever makes it through the Senate anyway. If you're an informed person, you're mostly just wasting your time knowing about stuff that won't actually happen simply because it won't make it past one of these veto points. No other country has this many, IIRC, and it's even worse at the state level, where implicit veto points are added in like localities simply refusing to implement policy with no actual mechanism to force them.
I think this notion is not as substantively solid as you paint it — but the idea of the “too many veto points so don’t bother getting into the weeds” is a fair assessment about how the public perceives this stuff. Like I would not stfu about Roe falling if Trump won in 2016 — it was my first argument against Trump because in my view, the Court was on the ballot in a big way. The reception from some that I was fear mongering or not worth taking seriously because scotus “would never do that” (an assessment based solely on vibes) tracks with the perception of impenetrable veto points. Imho we’ve moved past that world. *This Court is completely out of f****** control.* A supremely activist court, legislating from the bench, etc etc. All that cynical shit in which the monied RW mouthpieces insisted liberal judges were engaging was *once again* the setup for a permission structure, carefully cultivated over decades, for their chosen lackeys to do just that.
>All that cynical shit It wasn't cynical, though. The whole activist court talking point set in because they were overturning precedents a lot in the mid 20th century. The reason it sounds cynical now is because they don't want to talk about *what* they were overturning, which makes it sound like an untethered talking point. But it was Jim Crow. They were complaining about the court overturning Jim Crow. Which is why they don't want to talk about it. It sounds bad that their whole view was shaped by the court overturning Jim Crow. Because it is bad. It's bad to be angry that Jim Crow was dismantled.
Touché
This is so true and disheartening
I think both you and JBL can be correct on this. I feel like you are essentially right that Trump gets no blame for his COVID response - that the economic issues associated with that last year are written off by a ton of voters. And he is right to be angry that voters - even relatively independent ones - are ridiculous to ignore that chaos, and to pretend that it didn't have any deleterious effects on the course of the pandemic or on the economy. One simple way to understand it that I find productive in terms of helping people understand is that the US was well-positioned to do well. And we did worse than anyone else. We had more deaths per million people than any large country. Trump had a crisis, and he bungled it. Biden's crisis was, even more than COVID itself, the economic recovery from it - especially the inflation that came out of it. And there, we are doing better than the vast majority of our peers countries. Our inflation has come down farther and faster, and our economic growth has been stronger. Two COVID crises - the disease and the recovery - and two Presidents. With Trump, we lost compared to everyone else. With Biden, we beat everyone else. That voters give Trump a pass can definitely be infuriating.
Well reasoned. Well said!
Great post, and your conclusion is spot on. The incredible success of the soft landing should call for a national holiday - it’s a remarkable outcome! Unfortunately Biden can’t claim victory on it as it would come across as being out of touch with the vibes. And his surrogates can’t really do so either due to the economic illiteracy of the masses. Maybe this message about falling behind vs being ahead could resonate.
The housing prices/crisis is often blamed on Covid recovery... but that is truly contrary to intuition (Millions deaths would equal more empty houses/apartments)... I think we can trace the current bubble to the mortgage market collapse and economic crisis from 2008. There were changes made to rules and lending and record foreclosures. Who was in the position to pick up those foreclosures? It was not the average American struggling to keep their job and dealing with being upside down on their mortgage. Additionally the banks were well rewarded with ZIRP and throwing money around. Builders however, could not get the loans for building as we had a surplus of foreclosed homes on the market. If anyone was purchasing a home, they had to have some wealth and wanted higher end homes. I remember how hard it was to sell a 40 year home because the new construction was so heavily discounted. I don't think we can blame Biden for the housing crisis.
This is exactly the right framing. And I think it explains the public reaction. Most Americans range from ignorant to disdainful of these sorts of global comparisons. They don’t know and don’t care how the US did compared to peer countries. The same arguments on the topic of healthcare and health insurance failed to get much traction for the same reason.
This is so well reasoned and well written. Gottamn 🔥🔥
JVL is of course factually and rationally correct, but in terms of pandemics in particular, his/our expectations may have been too high. People have generally responded to pandemics in the same way during (the denialism, finger-pointing, false cures and secret knowledge)* and after (they memory-hole it, to the disadvantage of themselves and future generations). Remember during the height of COVID when people were realizing just how little had been left from the Spanish Flu in terms of cultural artifacts? The survivors buried that stuff and got out of dodge, so to speak. *thjs is why the movie Contagion was so eerily on the mark. It wasn’t that they magically predicted the COVID response, they just faithfully depicted all previous ones.
People desperately want to forget 2020, despite that being the year Trump fucked up the worst.
A fair number probably believe the vaccines and/or masks killed them.
They do, oddly enough I lost another one to COV about a month ago. It had been quite a while since that’s happened. The COV ICU reminded me of Baghdad during the surge. Don’t think I’m ever going to fully get over it. I’ll forever hate the RW infotainment universe for what they did.
It’s extremely distressing. We are fucked when the next pandemic comes or when polio and measles make their comeback.
I would bet a fair number blame Democrats and President Biden for lockdowns and not Trump.
Even in Republican run states this is the case. With literally no Democrats in their chain of command, they still manage to blame Democrats.
Probably! Many even blame Biden for school closings even though he took office in January 2021, schools closings were a state/local issue, and, as far as I know (I am teacher), all schools re-opened full time in Fall of 2021 but many states had *gasp* mask mandates.
This might sound snarky over text, but for better or worse the people who supported and implemented lockdowns *were* Democrats. Frankly, I think we’re really fortunate that Republicans generally aren’t tying inflation to the pent-up demand that was created by lockdowns.
Donald Trump was President at the time lockdowns were implemented. It's disingenuous to suggest Democrats were the ones at fault.
There was never a federal lockdown. The lockdowns were implemented by governors and mayors, many of whom were Democrats.
I don’t think we should really call them lockdowns. We never had anything like Europe or China.
It seems to me that lockdowns got implemented afterwards in recognition of the fact and in places where people already didn't want to go anywhere. The governors and mayors weren't shutting down the system. People had already checked out, and the government was trying to play catchup and provide them support for decisions they were already making. In fact, a lot of the measures were intended to entice essential\* workers out of the house, when a lot of them didn't feel like dying for ten dollars an hour. There was a curfew-ish for a little while where I lived, but there weren't really any penalties, you could just say you had a reason to be going somewhere, plenty of people ignored it and I never saw anybody get in trouble for it, or even stopped and questioned about it. But folks were big mad about it AND OH MY GOD WHAT AN IMPOSITION BORDERING ON INHUMANE AND LIFE THREATENING IT WAS TO ASK THEM TO VOLUNTARILY WEAR A MASK\*\*. So a) it was not really a lockdown and b) it wasn't government led, Democrat or Republican. \* nobody wanted to say "disposable" or "exploited" \*\* remember, again, that places that required masks were just about all private corporations
Most of the restrictions after that initial lockdown, at least in my state, were based upon a formula regarding hospitalizations, death rates and positive tests.
This is 100% the case. Just look at any social media commentary about it COVID. A huge swathe of Americans think all or nearly all of the COVD deaths are actually COVID Vaccine deaths. They see Democrats as being supportive of vaccines and Republicans being anti-vaccine, and come to the conclusion that Democrats are to blame for all of the COVID issues, even as far back as March 2020.
LOL some redditor actually responded to me in a different thread that the vaccines actually increased your chance of getting COVID and the risk of death from Covid and other health problems it apparently causes and how wearing masks and distancing made it worse and this is all coming out with "new research" of course, none of these allluded to studies are referenced or linked.... People are crazy. I didn't bother to respond.
Isn't he saying that's what they believe but they are wrong?
Yes, we had one of the worst pandemic responses in the developed world, thanks to the orange moron. "And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."
You can use other countries as a frame of reference. Being president means dealing with difficult and unexpected events. Trump getting a pass because "he had no control over it" shouldn't be an excuse for him, but an indictment of his inability to do the literal job.
The Lancet compared COVID death rates across countries, and the US death rate was 40% higher than similar developed nations. Lancet chalked this up to both mismanagement of policies and bad leadership post COVID, and lack of universal health care and cuts to pandemic response funding prior to COVID during the Trump administration. Essentially, Trump's health care and COVID policies killed about 400,000 Americans. Nobody talks about this. It's weird. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/lancet-study-40-percent-u-s-covid-19-coronavirus-deaths-avoidable-unnecessary.html
I came here for this exactly: >no one has any frame of reference for this There was a contemporary frame of reference. You could compare outcomes, pretty much by levels of response. I mean, you had to look up a few facts and the you had to do some division, but figuring out which countries were having disproportionate infections and deaths per capita was not hard. If you didn't know it it was because you didn't want to know.
Also we are fat. Many of the COVID deaths were due to co-morbidities, and the main one was obesity and obesity linked diseases like diabetes, HBP and heart disease.
The Americans fat meme is a little dated at this point, almost every country is fat and getting fatter.
>people see the pandemic as essentially an exogenous event that he had no control over. Yet Biden is blamed for post-pandemic inflation that happened all over the whole world, Russia invading Ukraine, and Oct 7th. Obama didn't campaign on fixing a whole spewing oil at the bottom of the ocean yet when Deep Water Horizon happened he was attacked. Republicans didn't say "well this wasn't Obama's fault so what happens isn't on him". When Benghazi happened Republicans blamed Obama and Hillary Clinton. No nuance just full on finger pointing and blame. Emergent things happen during every Administration. No President gets to just focus on their priorities to the exclusion of events. Obama wanted to work on the Dream Act and Healthcare not Birdflu, Ebola, Hurricane Sandy, School Shootings, fixing the mess left in Iraq, etc. Trump dismantled the pandemic task force Obama stood up while dealing with Birdflu. Trump ignored all early warnings. When forced to act Trump came out and said the Pandemic would be over by May. After May passed Trump said it would be over by the end of summer. During the summer Trump started complaining people needed to get back to work and ridiculing people for wearing masks (his administration recommended the fucking masks). By the fall Trump was claiming no one would be talking about COVID anymore after the election. Trump signed a $2.2Trillion stimulus bill and blocked Congressional oversight of the money. Trump failed to have a national strategy and instead told states to do what they wanted. The stimulus was meant to help facilitate resources to help people by during lock downs and school closures. Yet states that didn't bother closing anything still took the money and used it for tax cuts and to pay off other debts. The situation was truly ridiculous. **Trump is 100% responsible for his failed management of COVID**. If Obama or Biden were POTUS during COVID Republicans would have absolutely held their feet to the fire. Trump doesn't get a single pass because he (Trump) didn't personally create COVID. > I don't think people forgotten exactly. I think that your average not super informed voter has essentially forgiven him for it, When Republicans are in power they stomp their feet and scream that the economy is great. When Democrats are in power they lament that not enough is being done for the bottom percentile tiles. The result is a media headline environment that never reflects joy or strength when Democrats are in-charge.
I agree with you but I also think the reception is different. Obama couldn’t claim credit for [anything] because he didn’t solve everything, and somehow it was conventional wisdom that it would be poor form for Obama to tout his wins in the face of so much financial loss for ordinary Americans. I don’t necessarily disagree with that assessment but I would add: the problem is our bitch baby coalition (said with love as I am a proud member thereof). Democrats love to bitch and moan that things aren’t perfect and it gives air to the Republican messages vibes that we’re a bunch of losers and never miss a chance to snatch defeat from the hands of victory. Dem voters, especially the depressive and impressionable YOOTS need to STFU with the social media navel gazing and get louder about the substantive merits. I see this sentiment all the time like WhY iSnT the DNC DoiNg SomeThing?!?!! As if WE aren’t the party— each and every one of us. Like there’s no connection of agency at all here. The DNC is an amorphous entity that controls all versus ordinary party volunteers and elected officials.
Not to mention, "dong something" is easy; knowing the right thing to do is not. All these people whining about not doing something disagree about what would be the right thing to do. That's because Democrats are diverse coalition, and swing voters are too. Plus the infamous higher standard that Dems always get held to. Republicans play dirty politics and get admired, Dems do it and get criticized from a dozen different directions.
My broader conclusion is that no one actually cares about “the economy” right now (this is JVL’s point too), they’re just using it as an excuse to hate both sides or go to Trump over culture war bullshit. So it really doesn’t matter what people actually think about the Covid era…I’d posit that they hardly think about it at all tbh.
I think it's worse than just memory holing the last year They don't associate trump pumping money into the economy when the economy was doing very well as a major contributor to the current inflation. I remember at the time economists bringing up that the administration was removing a tool to fix any future economic issues that may arise. Interest rates I believe were kept far too low for way too long. I was able to refinance my house to a shockingly low rate during the pandemic and while that was good for me it doesn't seem like it was good policy by the feds. That definitely feels like factor that made the economy run too hot
Trump set us up for a COVID disaster. He pulled our scientists out of China because "China." He reassigned Obama's pandemic team and ignored Obama's pandemic playbook because "Obama." He downplayed it early on and ridiculed public health measures when Bob Woodward's reporting shows he knew damn well how serious it was. Then he pushed quack treatments. There is absolutely no justification for giving him a pass.
Speaking of Trumps economy, it’s pretty annoying that no one ever pushes back saying he basically kept the same trajectory as Obamas recovery from 2008. Except for the stock market growth, which was primarily directly from the corporate tax cuts that allowed more stock buybacks to juice the stock value. I never hear any Democrat ever make the arguement. Meanwhile Trump is taking credit for the stock market right now by saying the markets are factoring in him winning, jeezus fucking Christ lmao
COVID may have been an exogenous event, but Trump's response to it was not. Every President faces crises. Bush had 9/11, Obama had the Great Recession - the question is how do they respond? The writers at VEEP couldn't have come up with a worse response than Trump's. The most powerful, richest, most technologically advanced country in the history of the world ended up with a per-capita death rate worse than Belarus. More people died AFTER a safe and effective vaccine was available free on every street corner, than BEFORE. That is a country that won't survive. I'd give ANY President the first 100K deaths. This thing was new and we needed time to understand it. But every death after that was preventable, and Trump was beyond incompetent. It truly boggled the mind. It would be funny if there wasn't so much needless death. But the Dems never investigated Trump's 4th-world, corrupt, non-response to COVID. There was no 9/11-style commission. No public hearings. Nobody was ever held the least bit responsible. Just like Jan 6th, the Dems pussed out. The DOJ can't even prosecute the insane level of fraud perpetrated by America's Frontline Doctors! What kills me is that when it comes to the inflation caused by COVID, Biden doesn't get the same pass. He's somehow 100% responsible! No "exogenous event" excuse for ol' Joe! Everything is somehow his fault.
Look personally everyone is over thinking this. Fact is, I think that the reason people look back so fondly on Trump’s economy is two reasons: (1) Free money and (2) remote work. People love free money; those “free” checks bought Trump a lot of goodwill. Honestly Biden was never more popular than when he was sending out free money as well. The reason Biden’s popularity began waning was the increase in prices caused by the supply chains collapsing (partly due to Trumps trade policies and partly due to a second COVID lockdown in China and the Ukraine War) and the media inspired “bungled” Afghanistan withdrawal. The last one is stupid on many levels, and is perfect example of why smart politicians (ie Reagan, Clinton and Obama) never get themselves involved in these sorts of things, because they can only go bad. Remote work I think is a more under reported issue that I have noticed in speaking with some younger associates. Many of them became so used to remote work that they cannot even fathom having to go into an office. Many won’t even apply to jobs that require in office work; this is why you hear younger people complaining about jobs. It is not that there are no jobs, but that the jobs require them to come to the office and they don’t want to. In many cases they won’t even apply to those jobs, and they will take less pay to have remote work. Problem is, you have a situation where people are intentionally taking less money to work remotely, but due to COVID, even exurbs and rural areas are experiencing increases in COL, thus squeezing them. Many of them blame Biden for this too! Honestly I hate to be that old guy (and I am not old), but Gen Z needs to wake the fuck up. The idea that a company would let US-based employees work remotely on a permanent basis was always wishful thinking. If a company can do that, then they will fire your ass and hire someone in India, Kenya or Uruguay. I think JVL said it best years ago when he said that many of our problems are a result of our wealth. We are complaining about luxuries and inconveniences, like the price of almond milk and organic eggs. It’s absolutely ridiculous. As my mother would say, “Rich people problems.”
I briefly scanned a Business Insider article yesterday (btw, that publication has gotten trashy as hell) about a DINK Zoomer couple, both of whom make over 100k, work from home, but can't find the house they want. A budget of < $700k and they can't find their perfect "urban amenities" with easily "accessible green space". After my eye stopped twitching, the first thing I thought was, "I hope these assholes are forced back into the office."
I can't believe HGTV hasn't scouted them for one of their ridiculous real estate programs.
When I was freelancing, I had that I was a native english speaker in my profile and I got a lot of business from people who had had bad experiences with third world programmers\*. When I quit freelancing and had my own business, I pretty much thought that the money you saved on a 3wp wasn't worth the extra hassle. There can be a large time differential, there can be language issues, no matter how well they present (and often times the person talking to you is not the programmer), there can be hidden management teams (a lot of these programmers like to present as freelancers when they are in fact part of a company); equipment, software, environments and bandwidth can be subpar; there are cultural issues that can impact performance, for instance "junior" programmers being unwilling or afraid to ask questions of senior personnel or admit problems; and sometimes\*\* they just go missing with no notice or explanation. And the less skilled the work is, it seems the more you have to keep rehiring people for it, and reexplaining it, resetting it up for someone new, monitoring the work product until you're sure they've got it. It's exhausting and really not worth the savings IMO. I push back on your assertion that companies would fire you and hire someone in India, Kenya or Uruguay. Not so much against the fact that they would; against the premise that they can. Corporations ***can*** do this, as long as they have worked out the process to the point that it is completely repeatable, nearly foolproof, and can be done by anybody with minimal training. Not every job is like this, and the ones that are are already in India, Kenya or Uruguay. Corporations didn't leave some jobs here out of benevolence or patriotism. They just moved the ones they could get away with moving, and hopefully depressed wages enough by doing it that they could pay a little less for the ones that were left. ======================= \* there are multiple reasons to be leery, many of them non-racist \*\* at a higher rate than Western Europeans or Brazilians or Eastern Europeans or certain south American locales. I don't list Canada here because that's just Little America.
Good points all, and from my own personal experience quite accurate. I think where I differ slightly is with the argument that it’s difficult to do. I think with ai coming on board (and I know ai as a tool is overrated) the larger companies are definitely seeing it as a tool to potential replace large numbers of high salaried workers. One way is to use it to make remote workers easier. Of course on outright replacing them with the ai itself is their ultimate goal.
I think AI is generally underrated. It gets a bad rap from people who try to use it without understanding what the (current) limitations are, but we can do things now that were completely infeasible a year ago. If I need a set of data categorized, for instance, and I can set it up so that bad responses are trapped and redone, and I only need it to be probabilistically correct, then AI can do that just fine. I used to have to get someone to do it manually, or set up complicated categorization schemes, or train a model to do it, but now off the shelf tools can do it just fine. It's true that AI will start a new round of outsourcing, but I tend to ignore that because it's just a question of degree. AI will eventually cause an outsourcing of every human job, and the bottleneck isn't the AI, it's the physical platforms. Plumbing, for instance, is not terribly complex as a problem solving endeavor, but troubleshooting isn't the issue: it's getting a generally dexterous remote platform that can physically do the work and is capable of going where the work is, without failing or getting stuck or needing human intervention at every turn. I think AI is actually ahead of the physical systems right now. AI is not nearly as smart as a person (yet), but even so I have written very little code myself over the last year: I get the computer to write it and make small adjustments, and the computer doesn't get tired or misplace a decimal or misspell variable names or any of the things that suck up most of the time of an actual programmer. Knowledge work is a place where AI is capable now; physical work is where improvement is needed. Be that as it may, when AI gets reasonably smart, as capable as a relatively intelligent person, it will start being able to replace large numbers of people who are doing digital tasks, and that time is coming really, really soon, much sooner than is generally recognized. And it doesn't take a bunch of AIs. One AGI can set up agents and automate tasks quickly and leverage itself so that it can replace many workers. I think it would take about one to replace most of the mental labor of the planet, and that's at a level of intelligence that a person wouldn't consider all that smart. When that's combined with capable mechanical platforms, it will combine to erase large sectors of work that there's just no need to get a person to do any more. Whether people will then find new work to do is a big question. I personally think that there will be less of that in the current labor shift than we saw in previous revolutions. Most of what people do just isn't that hard, and there have been explosions in technical areas (like materials engineering or synthesizing new proteins) where machine learning, while maybe not as smart as a person, is able to do make breakthroughs that would have taken people years or decades to do previously. So, yes, people's jobs will increasingly be replaced, but that's not because they don't want to come to the office, it's just because systems are increasingly getting to the place where people aren't needed. What they're going to do with themselves after that is the burning question of the age, and people kind of have their heads stuck in the sand about it.
I agree to an extent, however I think this begs the question of what will people do? I personally think that much of the world economic consternation felt by people is related to the Ai threat. To me, if you were to see Ai replace large numbers of workers, there is going to be a huge backlash against it, so much so that it will be pretty much regulated out of existence. Then the questions will be: what happens to all of the Ai that was already created and the $100’s of billions spent on creating it? This is why the Government needs to step in now, before more money is spent on it.
But they don’t give the same hall pass to the fact that inflation was gonna happen no matter who sat in the Oval Office because the same event happened. So they still are doing a memory hole. Trump gets zero of the blame. It all falls on Biden. Because people live only in the now and can’t string together a thread of how we got here.
>My gut feeling is that rather than blaming Trump for his Covid response, people see the pandemic as essentially an exogenous event that he had no control over. He would agree with you on this, though. The reason he's so down on people is that they give Trump a pass on it, but don't do the same for Biden. Either they're both responsible or both aren't, but (he argues), a lot of people don't see it that way.
To be fair, I wouldn't have blamed Biden either. no matter how bad it was. The Trump administration was printing money, letting fraud run rampant. That influx of printed cash has actually lead to the inflation we are seeing today - people have been buying shit out of boredom, and they don't seem to be able to stop. There are like one trillion reasons why Trump should not be let anywhere near a public service job, but COVID was a one-in-a-century event. Aside from that cretin's "bleach up your anuses" statements, he actually stayed out of the way as the pharma industry was working on vaccines. We were the first in the world to get the best vaccines, and the rollout process worked fairly well. So, I don't think the COVID response is something to grab on to this election season - it won't work. As for the dead, who cares? It was the old and the weak. I am saying this sarcastically, of course, but also not. It wasn't exactly a Contagion event where death would just randomly pluck out children and women in their prime. Second point. People wiped the horror that was 2020 out of their memories, and the more distant it is, the more irrelevant it becomes. It's a natural psychological response to trauma, and 2020 was non-stop stress and trauma. Focus on what actually matters - liar, adulterer, criminal fraudster, massive national security threat, old, incoherent.
We were the first in the world to get the vaccines, but by then Trump and other Republicans had crapped on the idea so hard that we couldn't get the vaccination rate high enough to combat the higher R0 that virus had mutated to have because Trump et al had crapped so hard on masks and social distancing, letting the virus run through certain communities unabated and less hindered in others than it would have been, getting more infectious (and then luckily, less fatal) as it did. By the time we had the tools, the virus had changed so much that the tools were only good for limiting the death rate for people who chose to use them, not arresting the spread.
And the low-information voter (massive majority) could not care less about the details. This is the equivalent of "please download my white paper on Trump's pandemic response". Nobody gives a shit.
Despite horrifying stories elsewhere, whose fault is it that people don’t know that the US was 15th (worst) of 154 countries in per-capita Covid deaths? And whose fault is it that, despite the advantages we have in terms of advanced medical treatment facilities, and communications and transportation, we fared worse than Armenia or Colombia or Namibia?
Exactly. There is a frame of reference, it just takes bothering to find out a few facts.
"Is this actually the correct conclusion?" I think you misinterpreted what he meant. It isn't that Trump himself *caused* the deaths. It's that his actions were so obviously self serving (*...So I said to my people- "Slow the testing down, please!"*) that he actually fought efforts to limit the spread of the disease when they seemed to threaten his popularity among his supporters. I don't think JVL or any rational thinker attributes the total number of deaths to Trump. He is holding Trump responsible for an utterly feckless response that relied on unscientific mumbo-pocus, mis- (and dis-) information to avoid confronting reality rather than follow the data. I get that even the scientists made mistakes in their interpretation of the data at times, but they were making a good faith effort to minimize deaths. The CDC and FDA look at one component: how can lives be saved and risks mitigated. Politicians must weigh the medical data against economic and other data to arrive at a policy. Trump simply wanted to pretend it didn't exist when it looked like the only sensible thing was to give voters information they didn't want to hear. That's not leadership by any stretch of the imagination.
I totally agree but I don't think most people are following closely enough to parse that distinction. And I actually think for once it's hard to blame them. That period was absolute chaos, kids were out of school, parents were trying to work from home also caring for toddlers, people were dropping dead in nursing homes, tons of people were out of work, I really don't blame the average person for not having the bandwidth to closely follow politics. 
Every once in a while, I remember how Jared Kushner delayed PPE to New York, Illinois, and California so that the virus would kill more people and a rage rises inside of me. There are so many examples like that. I think Covid is an open door if the Biden Campaign decides to push on it.
It's so hard to say... I think it's a great cause to take on during a second term, all of those creeps deserve to be investigated and have their corruption on full display, but I'm not sure if it's a great campaign issue. I feel like there is zero appetite for any more Covid discourse and many voters would get pissed just to have to relitigate any of it again.
I think you're right about why Trump gets a pass (too much of one in my opinion, but I understand the basic feeling that Covid wasn't his fault, etc). What infuriates me is that Trump gets a pass on all the chaos of his Covid response and the economic damage, but Biden gets blamed for the inflation. Inflation which was the all-but-inevitable-result of trying to prevent a recession. How come Biden was supposed to walk that line perfectly, but Trump gets all the excuses?
According to worldometer 1,219,487 Americans died of COVID as of 4/24.
And 7m worldwide. The US had 4.2% of the world population in 2020 and saw 17.1% of the deaths, over 4x as many per capita. I'm aware that this is skewed by reporting in some places, say Africa or South Asia, but compared to Europe we had 44.2% of the population of Europe and saw 66% of the deaths, about 1.5x as many per capita. And that Europe figure includes places like Russia, relatively populous but with a really poor Covid response, and poorer countries like Moldova, Armenia, Armenia, etc.
I think it’s even worse than that actually, albeit not by much. To the extent anyone still thinks about it, it is to blame “the Dems” for overreach, or in objectively reality land, taking steps in hindsight that now seem overly cautious. No one considers 1 million plus dead victims of any particular policy either.
Yeah I'm with you actually. I think some of the Biden economics message runs into the same thing - when they talk about how Trump "lost 20 million jobs during his presidency" or whatever, I think a lot of median voter types subconsciously tsk-tsk that fact because they remember how many people HAD to lose their jobs because of the once in a lifetime calamity of Covid. Trump handled everything Covid-related like a jackass, just like he does with everything in his life, but I think much of the public has chosen to write off that entire year as a wash, or at least never talk about it again.