Has Trump put the lives of innocent American hostages at risk for his political gain?
Note that I’m not saying that he wouldn’t, just that he hasn’t yet to my knowledge.
I would say that Reagan’s treasonous acts were in fact even worse than Trump’s, considering that Trump’s impeachment treason was to put a foreign country at risk.
Note that that isn’t to say that Ukrainian lives matter less than American hostages or that what Trump did wasn’t bad, just that putting Americans at risk is “worse” on a scale of treasonous actions.
Another way that things are in fact getting better is that unlike Reagan, Trump actually got impeached (even if the conviction failed at the end).
Do you remember how Trump chose not to address COVID for political gains when it looked like it was hitting primarily democratic cities? I’ve seen some calculations that half a million more Americans died from COVID because of his reaction to it. That’s treason on a level nobody has reached
Yes, I do remember the Trump White House making the decision to keep COVID guidance classified for what appeared to be political gains. I remember my boss at the time arguing against that decision and receiving retaliation, leading us to pivot our business strategy near the equinox.
(I was told that) the last Trump administration’s hires were so inept that they didn’t change the passcode to dial in to the situation room as I listened in to this meeting, live. I hope that Tulsi (or whoever the new DNI ends up being) will be smart enough to change the passcodes on day 1. It’s a matter of national security. My revealing this is intended to serve as a reminder to do better this time. Maybe it’s moot because I doubt that the situation room is still running Adobe Connect (I hope), and maybe the new system was designed help facilitate better opsec (I hope). I broke my brain a bit by forcing firefox to run Flash in March 2020, two months after its supposed EOL in January 2020, just to listen to that shitshow. Completely shattered what was left of my faith in our federal government’s ability to do anything.
I don’t remember any evidence that Trump himself was involved in that decision-making, but 1) that doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved in the decision-making outside of where I had limited visibility and 2) that doesn’t mean he isn’t responsible for the actions and decisions of those he nepotistically hired.
I’ll note that my perception of all this was filtered through a really weird job I ended up at under questionable circumstances and it’s hard for me to put much certainty behind any claims without external, corroborating, contextual evidence.
Thank you for the reminder… it’s been a crazy ride and that was a completely different life for me that’s genuinely hard for me to think about or remember much of until someone says something that brings back rushes of memories and leaves me shaking and a bit disoriented and I end up sleeping a lot to recover.
Please gimme a source on those calculations you’re talking about.
After thinking about these a bit more, especially The Lancet article, I have a hypothesis.
For wealthy neoliberal elites, COVID was babby’s first trauma, so they overestimate how badly it impacted the average worker. It was so much worse than anything that had happened in their privileged lives up to that point that by comparison it was a world-altering traumatic event that changed everything.
Working people are used to surviving hardships (especially medical hardships) while those in power ignore them. COVID and the Trump administration’s lack of response was just business as usual. Compared to other widespread diseases that get routinely ignored and for which poor people routinely get denied care, COVID was minor (albeit more infectious) and easily forgettable.
That’s my best guess for why the libshits can’t grok why the little people reacted with such indifference while they lost their fucking minds.
That is part of it, but there is also a long-running thread of medical denialism in society. People want to believe their home remedies, homeopathic cures, chiropractic adjustments, or bleach enemas can cure things just as well or better than certified doctors can. To be fair to them, it has only been about 130 years since doctors learned they should wash their hands before surgery. The average person isn’t educated enough to understand how safe, effective, and trustworthy vaccines are.
The other part of it is explained by the lottery. Millions and millions of people play the lottery regularly even though the odds of them winning are about the same as getting struck by lightning while getting bitten by a shark. The average person is shit at understanding odds. They think that they will be lucky enough to beat the odds.
That applies for avoiding Covid. They don’t understand that being harmed by the vaccine is far fat less likely than being harmed by the disease. They think they can beat the odds by not getting the disease and still avoid Covid. Some won, but most lost.
Yeah. Medical and science denialism is a big problem. It gets fed when medicine and science are presented as absolutes with no room for debate or discussion, just blind fealty to experts. As a trained scientist who has worked professionally as a scientist for 12 years, I don’t trust several disciplines because they project this attitude. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical of those who ask for blind trust in authority.
I’m a former scientist in the environmental field and we deal with similar denialism for similar reasons. As science and technology get more complex, the average person simply doesn’t have the background to understand the problem, let alone possible solutions. A certain amount of trust in authority is necessary unfortunately.
If you tell people to trust authorities about climate change instead of fostering critical thought and understanding, who is to say that their authorities will align with yours?
Your assertion is a recipe for pushing people to believe misinformation because they feel that they can trust their pastor or their employer or the guy on the news more than some nerd.
For me, Trump’s handling of COVID specifically and the COVID pandemic more generally were such a minor blip in the timeline of horrors and chaos that I witnessed and partook in and only barely escaped from between 2018-2022 that it’s hard to register the pandemic as a significant event in that timeline.
I work with elderly people mostly so the absolute terror was probably magnified for me. Regardless of their politics, they knew they were the most vulnerable and it scared the shit out of them.
I was unfortunately very separated from society from 2018-2023, so I’m reliant on written records and memes to understand how others responded to it. As someone who missed it, I really get the impression that it was mostly the wealthy who freaked out, either from trying to process that our society’s medical infrastructure is shit, or from being sociopaths who were selfishly upset that their workers wanted time off.
One of the groups that doesn’t get talked about often in regards to COVID is the reaction of the gay community, especially the older ones who lived through the worst days of the AIDS epidemic. They took it VERY seriously.
how do you feel about the whole iranian general missile thing. that felt like it could have gone very, very wrong. Keep in mind to that he was largely still using the established beuracracy when he came in and this go round he has a lot more intended people and many military people said they had to keep him in check.
My understanding is that Soleimani was responsible for the deployment of a type of anti-vehicle mine in Iraq that killed hundreds to perhaps in the low thousands of US soldiers. A lot of the military brass wanted him dead for personal reasons and Trump was too weak to resist their urging he be taken out. Trump may have avoided immediate consequences because Soleimani was more useful as a martyr to the Iranian leadership at this point. In the long run it fueled another generation’s anti-US animus.
If you’re talking about Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani, then I have to admit that I’m less familiar with thr details there since it happened while I was out of commission.
From the wiki article, it looks like the root problem was Trump being an idiot and loose cannon by reneging the Iran nuclear deal, leading to a crisis in the Gulf, which he then tried to solve by killing that guy.
yeah it was a moment when it was like. did he just start ww3. I mean I think everyone was bowled over at how small the response was from iran. it was just a dangerous as fuck thing to do.
Has Trump put the lives of innocent American hostages at risk for his political gain?
Note that I’m not saying that he wouldn’t, just that he hasn’t yet to my knowledge.
I would say that Reagan’s treasonous acts were in fact even worse than Trump’s, considering that Trump’s impeachment treason was to put a foreign country at risk.
Note that that isn’t to say that Ukrainian lives matter less than American hostages or that what Trump did wasn’t bad, just that putting Americans at risk is “worse” on a scale of treasonous actions.
Another way that things are in fact getting better is that unlike Reagan, Trump actually got impeached (even if the conviction failed at the end).
Do you remember how Trump chose not to address COVID for political gains when it looked like it was hitting primarily democratic cities? I’ve seen some calculations that half a million more Americans died from COVID because of his reaction to it. That’s treason on a level nobody has reached
Yes, I do remember the Trump White House making the decision to keep COVID guidance classified for what appeared to be political gains. I remember my boss at the time arguing against that decision and receiving retaliation, leading us to pivot our business strategy near the equinox.
(I was told that) the last Trump administration’s hires were so inept that they didn’t change the passcode to dial in to the situation room as I listened in to this meeting, live. I hope that Tulsi (or whoever the new DNI ends up being) will be smart enough to change the passcodes on day 1. It’s a matter of national security. My revealing this is intended to serve as a reminder to do better this time. Maybe it’s moot because I doubt that the situation room is still running Adobe Connect (I hope), and maybe the new system was designed help facilitate better opsec (I hope). I broke my brain a bit by forcing firefox to run Flash in March 2020, two months after its supposed EOL in January 2020, just to listen to that shitshow. Completely shattered what was left of my faith in our federal government’s ability to do anything.
I don’t remember any evidence that Trump himself was involved in that decision-making, but 1) that doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved in the decision-making outside of where I had limited visibility and 2) that doesn’t mean he isn’t responsible for the actions and decisions of those he nepotistically hired.
I’ll note that my perception of all this was filtered through a really weird job I ended up at under questionable circumstances and it’s hard for me to put much certainty behind any claims without external, corroborating, contextual evidence.
Thank you for the reminder… it’s been a crazy ride and that was a completely different life for me that’s genuinely hard for me to think about or remember much of until someone says something that brings back rushes of memories and leaves me shaking and a bit disoriented and I end up sleeping a lot to recover.
Please gimme a source on those calculations you’re talking about.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/01/03/trump-to-be-sentenced-jan-10-as-judge-upholds-hush-money-conviction/?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00804-3/fulltext
I read another recently but can’t find it. Any search with the words Trump and COVID is a tricky proposition.
After thinking about these a bit more, especially The Lancet article, I have a hypothesis.
For wealthy neoliberal elites, COVID was babby’s first trauma, so they overestimate how badly it impacted the average worker. It was so much worse than anything that had happened in their privileged lives up to that point that by comparison it was a world-altering traumatic event that changed everything.
Working people are used to surviving hardships (especially medical hardships) while those in power ignore them. COVID and the Trump administration’s lack of response was just business as usual. Compared to other widespread diseases that get routinely ignored and for which poor people routinely get denied care, COVID was minor (albeit more infectious) and easily forgettable.
That’s my best guess for why the libshits can’t grok why the little people reacted with such indifference while they lost their fucking minds.
That is part of it, but there is also a long-running thread of medical denialism in society. People want to believe their home remedies, homeopathic cures, chiropractic adjustments, or bleach enemas can cure things just as well or better than certified doctors can. To be fair to them, it has only been about 130 years since doctors learned they should wash their hands before surgery. The average person isn’t educated enough to understand how safe, effective, and trustworthy vaccines are.
The other part of it is explained by the lottery. Millions and millions of people play the lottery regularly even though the odds of them winning are about the same as getting struck by lightning while getting bitten by a shark. The average person is shit at understanding odds. They think that they will be lucky enough to beat the odds.
That applies for avoiding Covid. They don’t understand that being harmed by the vaccine is far fat less likely than being harmed by the disease. They think they can beat the odds by not getting the disease and still avoid Covid. Some won, but most lost.
Yeah. Medical and science denialism is a big problem. It gets fed when medicine and science are presented as absolutes with no room for debate or discussion, just blind fealty to experts. As a trained scientist who has worked professionally as a scientist for 12 years, I don’t trust several disciplines because they project this attitude. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical of those who ask for blind trust in authority.
I’m a former scientist in the environmental field and we deal with similar denialism for similar reasons. As science and technology get more complex, the average person simply doesn’t have the background to understand the problem, let alone possible solutions. A certain amount of trust in authority is necessary unfortunately.
I have to disagree.
If you tell people to trust authorities about climate change instead of fostering critical thought and understanding, who is to say that their authorities will align with yours?
Your assertion is a recipe for pushing people to believe misinformation because they feel that they can trust their pastor or their employer or the guy on the news more than some nerd.
For me, Trump’s handling of COVID specifically and the COVID pandemic more generally were such a minor blip in the timeline of horrors and chaos that I witnessed and partook in and only barely escaped from between 2018-2022 that it’s hard to register the pandemic as a significant event in that timeline.
I work with elderly people mostly so the absolute terror was probably magnified for me. Regardless of their politics, they knew they were the most vulnerable and it scared the shit out of them.
I was unfortunately very separated from society from 2018-2023, so I’m reliant on written records and memes to understand how others responded to it. As someone who missed it, I really get the impression that it was mostly the wealthy who freaked out, either from trying to process that our society’s medical infrastructure is shit, or from being sociopaths who were selfishly upset that their workers wanted time off.
One of the groups that doesn’t get talked about often in regards to COVID is the reaction of the gay community, especially the older ones who lived through the worst days of the AIDS epidemic. They took it VERY seriously.
The only time I’ve ever been to a gay bar was the one at the Pentagon in Feb 2020. Surreal experience. Didn’t stop the karaoke, though.
how do you feel about the whole iranian general missile thing. that felt like it could have gone very, very wrong. Keep in mind to that he was largely still using the established beuracracy when he came in and this go round he has a lot more intended people and many military people said they had to keep him in check.
My understanding is that Soleimani was responsible for the deployment of a type of anti-vehicle mine in Iraq that killed hundreds to perhaps in the low thousands of US soldiers. A lot of the military brass wanted him dead for personal reasons and Trump was too weak to resist their urging he be taken out. Trump may have avoided immediate consequences because Soleimani was more useful as a martyr to the Iranian leadership at this point. In the long run it fueled another generation’s anti-US animus.
If you’re talking about Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani, then I have to admit that I’m less familiar with thr details there since it happened while I was out of commission.
From the wiki article, it looks like the root problem was Trump being an idiot and loose cannon by reneging the Iran nuclear deal, leading to a crisis in the Gulf, which he then tried to solve by killing that guy.
Can you expand on the question?
yeah it was a moment when it was like. did he just start ww3. I mean I think everyone was bowled over at how small the response was from iran. it was just a dangerous as fuck thing to do.