+1. Too much cult-like following, nothing to do with politics.
I don’t know. I don’t think business owners in big cities are boarding up their businesses because they’re afraid of Trump supporters.
But i do ask that if Trump somehow pulls this out—can one of you Biden supporters loot a TV for me? You know…in protest.
I think that you need to be specific: make, model, size, and so on.
To help them out, of course.
It’s worth noting that Biden has the support of not just liberals, but moderate Republicans as well. People, who, you know, actually care about the country and the economy, which is going downhill thanks to the incompetence of the Trump administration in handling the pandemic. It takes a special kind of incompetence to lose 235+ thousand lives due to a virus in less than a year. USA is doing worse than 3rd world countries, and that’s pathetic.
When looking at the death rate per capita, the US is doing better than countries like Belgium, Spain and the UK, with much less damage to the domestic economy (aka. less restrictions). I’m not saying the US did a good job handling the crisis but it for sure isn’t as bad as you’d make it out to be by reading the news.
It’s funny how some people seem never to learn. Diabolizing people who don’t agree with you is what got the US into the situation it finds itself in today. Maybe it’s time to stop disparaging them and maybe for once try to understand the reasons why almost 50% of voters support a person like DJT.
Thanks for the chart. According to your chart and looking at death per million column, USA is doing worse than third world countries such as Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, all of them poor 3rd world countries.
I didn’t know about the situation in Belgium. For whatever reason, they quickly relaxed the rules and opened schools. Given the high population density (383 /km^2 compared to USA’s 36/km^2) and the high rate of contagion, it’s little wonder that this resulted in a strong spike in covid cases. This should serve as a warning to not open schools prematurely, and certainly not all at once.
It seems to me that population density is a significant risk factor - the virus is more likely to spread in densely populated areas. This was certainly the case for Belgium. For comparison’s sake, Spain has a population density of 93.67 / km^2, while UK is 275/km^2. Bolivia has a very low population density of 11/km^2, while Ecuador has a population density of 70/km^2
It’s all over but the shouting, but I suppose there will be a lot of shouting.
I’m pleased that Biden will win (unless the US turns into a post-Soviet bloc dictatorship in the next few days), but it’s quite stupefying to me that nearly 70 million people looked at Trump and thought, yeah, I want four more years of this. They didn’t vote for Trump because of policy. There’s a deep and ingrained cultural reason for it, and frankly at this moment thinking about that just exhausts me.
Understanding mental illness is difficult.
Yes: I’m joking.
Don’t send letters.
going back to the data provided, USA is doing worse than it seem to suggest, for a few reasons:
- USA is one of the richest countries in the world, if not the richest
- USA has a relatively low population density. 36 persons/km^2 compared to other countries with 300+ persons/km^2
- USA had more than enough time to prepare for covid. USA could look to Italy as to what can go wrong with policy. Harvard Business Review released this article, way back in March, when covid was still containable. Lessons from Italy
of course, having a president actively downplay the virus and make false or misleading statements didn’t help matters.
Yes, they did. They voted for Trump because of Biden’s policy. They don’t like it and they don’t want it.
so many sour boyz, beta
Disagree.
70 million people didn’t vote for Trump because they wanted to avoid paying more taxes on their income over $400k. I’m sure more Trump voters could recite the finer points of Q conspiracy theories than Biden’s tax policy. It’s cultural and there are a lot of factors to it, not least right-wing media, FB, and the rise of disinformation and propaganda.
I’d add the contempt the liberal, well educated part of the population seem to have for them with their “fly over states” etc. These are people whose future looks bleak and for years their calls for help have been completely ignored by the media and the people on the coasts. It’s no wonder a guy like Trump, who speaks their language with short, simple sentences and promises a return to the days when you could make a good living in a coal mine, gets their vote. It’s easy and tempting to chalk off these people as uneducated right wing nutjobs but as long as you keep doing that, we will continue to see Trump-like politicians win elections.
You also didn’t know about Spain and the UK. That’s why instead of parroting what the headlines are telling you, it’s sometimes very useful to look at the data.
And just to clear any confusion you might have, I am not saying the US did a good job handling the crisis. I’m just saying that it’s not as bad as people think it is because people just look at the absolute numbers and not the per capita data. And it’s easy to criticize an administration like Trump’s.
Wrong. I heard about Spain and UK. Maybe you should stop with your habit of putting words into people’s mouth. Also, as I have said before, per capita death doesn’t tell the whole story. You also have to take into account population density. Yes, Belgium has more per capita death, but they have over 10 times more people living in there than the US. You have to look at the data with a critical eye and see what may be influencing the data.
By the way, I originally said that USA is doing worse than 3rd world countries, which is true and confirmed by your own data.
Well, is such contempt mutual and self-generating? To some extent, yes, and it’s interesting to consider how a phrase such as “own the libs” has become so prevalent, and for many Trump voters, owning the libs in some fashion would be a primary reason for their votes. I suppose “deplorables” could be a term directed the other way, though I’d also suggest that the right-wing media machine is very effective at setting up windmills to tilt at, such as antifa, Soros, etc.
Of course, it’s hilarious that millions of people wanting to own the coastal elite voted for a man who lived in an ornately decorated apartment in a Manhattan skyscraper bearing his name.
What terrifies me is that there will be a much smarter, more effective demagogue who will follow the Trump playbook. Keep an eye on Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley, in particular, though it will be hard for anyone to replicate Trump’s act because well, he had a few decades of exposure - and a TV show - before he got into politics.
A large portion of the cultural resentment is racial. No way around it. Trump coddled white supremacists throughout his administration and people picked up the signals loud and clear. To me, that should have been a deal breaker for millions of Americans. It’s just not the way forward for us as a nation and for our leadership in the world.
Anyway, I’ve got a million thoughts these days and I don’t have the mental acuity or energy to write them. Nor the time. I’m pleased that Biden won but I’m very concerned about the future of our country and the world. Love to all.
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So we get to go from someone with a bad temper and short attention span to someone who can’t remember the name of the current president (a common question when checking an individual’s lucidity) and who frequently subjects females to unwanted hair sniffs on national television.
Lovely.
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If you’re going down that road, you’ll also have to factor in the fact that the US social safety net is almost non-existent when compared to other industrialized nations. Having limited social safety net to fall back on hard times forces you to keep going to work even if you’re risking your health. A minimum wage worker in Europe can stay home and feed his family, in the US he cannot.
What’s also intriguing is that the US approach was pretty akin to Sweden’s way of handling the virus. (minus Trump’s idiotic commentary and the ad hoc nature of handling the crisis). Sweden didn’t shut down the economy and they said from the get-go that the cure can’t be worse than the disease. You have to weigh the effects of shutting down the economy on the population’s health as much as you must consider the death toll caused by the virus.
I wish we had someone like Andrew Yang as president. Too bad this will never happen.