OT: good retrospective article......

[johnson86-1]

The worst thing that happened to us in the US was for the response to break out on political lines. That all but insured a debacle.

I'm not sure it's accurate to say the response broke out on political lines. There is no non-partisan institution to facilitate public policy discussions in the US.

So policy decisions are made, and they are immediately described and reacted to in partisan terms by pretty much every entertainment or media organization in the US that has any popular following.

 

[Bill Shankly]

I'm not sure it's accurate to say the response broke out on political lines. There is no non-partisan institution to facilitate public policy discussions in the US.

So policy decisions are made, and they are immediately described and reacted to in partisan terms by pretty much every entertainment or media organization in the US that has any popular following.

It most definitely was very much political. That isn't even in question. Both side played politics with it, and I lost what little respect I had left for all of them.

 

[Bill Shankly]

Really got me with this one:
[FONT=&quot]In the U.S., the story of the pandemic year has been dominated by the character of the president who presided over it so ineptly, often with such indifference it seemed he was rooting for the disease.

[/FONT]Funny, since Biden is still using Fauci and the team Trump put together. We did something never accomplished before with the vaccine. All that swept under a rug to bash a republican.

Well, I DID label it a retrospective article. That is by definition armchair quarterbacking.

 

[SheltonChoked]

It depends on how well the vaccines work (and they seem to work very well) and perhaps even more importantly, how many actually take them.

I think it will be more the latter then the former.

 

[SheltonChoked]

This tells me that I was still getting sick beforehand,.... I was contracting it from other people. .

Welcome to what the rest of the world knew by 1870.
Did you think sickness just appeared from the either? from bad smells?

And you know that other people spread sickness to you, but you DGAF about spreading it to others?

 

[johnson86-1]

It most definitely was very much political. That isn't even in question. Both side played politics with it, and I lost what little respect I had left for all of them.

You are (not surprisingly) missing the point. First, yes, it was political. Policy is by its nature political. That's more or less the point of politics, is to have a reasonably ordered way to set policy. What is should not be is partisan for the sake of being partisan. But that is what we have for every issue that receives any attention, but it's not because it "breaks out" that way. It is made that way by the press first, but also by pretty much anybody with any reach, by viewing everything through a party perspective rather than judging things on their own merits. It's why, for example, kids in cages went from not being an issue, to being an issue, to not being an issue based on the letter behind the presidents name. It's all good and well to say that shouldn't be a partisan issue, but the people/institutions with the ability to discuss the issue on the merits rather than through a partisan lens and actually reach any significant number of people don't want to. Or maybe that's backwards and it's that there is no significant number of people that want to discuss things outside of a partisan lens so any institution that tries is essentially self-selecting itself into relative obscurity.

 

[SheltonChoked]

That's just wishful thinking. Sure, in some idealized world, we could shut it down for 3 weeks and stop the spread. It's not possible in the world we live in. If it were, we should still do it now to shut down a lot of viruses that don't have ready non-human reservoirs. In reality, what would happen is we'd impose a ton of harm on people in exchange for a temporary dip.

Signed,
The Idealized world
China, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan