MeanwhileOnGrad
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
What is a Tankie?
Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.
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Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
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Infinitely worse. It’s hard to calculate, but there were countries where they literally had single digit covid numbers during the pre vaccine days, just because they gave the situation the gravity and strictness it deserved
I have a family member who’s in the hospital right now, in a part of the country where practically no one including the hospital staff is wearing a mask. It’s hard to even find them in the hospital to put one on. There are rooms clearly marked with mask and droplet precautions on the outside of the door, and the staff will take a mask from a box next to the door, go inside to deal with that person, and then when they’re done they take their mask back off and go back to walking around treating patients with no mask. What do the people in those rooms have? I don’t know but I can confidently say the hospital is fucking up in a fashion that is actively killing some number of patients and that politics are involved in that.
I am constantly worrying whether Trump’s bullshit will wind up adding my family member, individually and personally, to that 1.5 million surplus deaths
Tell all that to my family member. Once he’s out of the hospital and not in danger of the exact procedures Trump pushed hard for giving him some kind of currently-life-threatening infection, we can rap about jurisdiction and industrial numbers.
Sure, it’s hard to be precise about the outcomes what some theoretical more competent administration might have done differently. But yes, Trump’s measures killed some number of people, and gave some number more disability that lasts to the present day. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Like I say, once my family isn’t actively directly being endangered by the lasting after effects of his malicious policies, we can have a calm debate about it.
It is not an emotional argument to point out that the MAGA bullshit of people wearing masks or getting vaccines making them the enemy is purely a Trump-world invention, with aftereffects continuing to and beyond the present day. Same goes for that stuff being of a totally different and explicitly malicious kind than the simple errors that some government body might commit that was trying to address the crisis, instead of using it simply as another way to pursue its overt policy of going to war with all sensible people everywhere, in any way they could find.
And it happens that I have an example directly and personally relevant to me, but there are plenty of families all across the country who have the same. Quite a lot of them have lost family members. I know some of those families with dead members. It's not just an anecdote.
I think I've spent as long as I need to on this. If you want to say that Trump didn't kill a fuck of a lot of people, as a direct result of prioritizing his culture-war bullshit over literally saving lives (or that that killing of people more or less on purpose is not a problem), I don't know what to say to you.
No, he caused it. He may not have directly created the virus, but he is personally responsible for the disaster that tore apart the US.
He explicitly disbanded the organization directly responsible for warning about and planning for possible pandemics.
He dismissed the danger and refused to do anything at all until the pandemic was in full swing.
He politicized standard and critical pandemic procedure, crippling any effort to manage the spread and deathtoll.
He caused havoc in ppe distribution as feds competed with states and hospitals to fill a "stockpile" that strangely never seemed to distribute said stockpile.
He actively spread misinformation on treatment and preventative care, downplaying necessary medical treatment and promoting crackpot "cures".
Even at it's height in 2020, he was attempting to sweep it away out of sight instead of doing what needed to be done: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing-slow-down-response/index.html
Suffice to say, he did plenty to make the pandemic what it is. Honestly, the only thing I can give him any credit for is focusing on fast tracking the vaccine. But considering his part in fostering the pandemic we are still dealing with, he isn't absolved of much, imo.