This guy is seriously suggesting that we simply infect everyone with the coronavirus right now and get it over with, because drawing it all out is hurting his pwecious stock market.
This is absolutely horrifying.
Rick Santelli on @CNBC says we should consider giving coronavirus to everybody to just get it over with.
That way it won’t wreak so much havoc on the economy.
This is your brain on capitalism.pic.twitter.com/Uv5UYyKtxy
— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) March 5, 2020
Even if you play it with the sound off, he looks deranged. How dare we hurt his money?
I have a few objections to his plan. One is that part of the problem with a pandemic is that it overwhelms the capacity of clinics and hospitals to properly treat patients. His solution maximizes chaos and thereby maximizes the amount of death and suffering. These viruses mutate every year, like the flu, so slamming the population now doesn’t mean we won’t get a repeat next year. And finally, and least, if he thinks the stock market is hurting now, imagine what it would look like in a month in which 10 million Americans died and far more are flattened with illness and grief.
That bozo is Rick Santelli, a business editor for CNBC. He’s not a doctor. He is evidence that a business degree tends to inflate the ego but not the knowledge of its recipients.
Also, every week that goes by when I don’t have the virus yet is a week when doctors can get closer to finding a vaccine or better treatments.
Obviously.
He is though, a cosmically stupid sociopath.
There is so much wrong with this idea.
.1. Evidence is that skilled intensive care makes a huge difference in the death rate from Covid-19.
.2. The goal of the various social measure of control such as quarantine, contact tracing, lockdown etc.. is to slow the virus down as much as possible.
If a huge number of patients hit the hospitals all at once, the hospitals can’t give them all state of the art, labor intensive, machine intensive care.
In Wuhan, at some points, they just told people to go home because there was no room.
Some of those people died shortly after that while infecting their families.
.3. The Chinese have shown that the virus can be contained and beaten back.
They are close to 100,000 cases with 3,000 dead and new cases have dropped sharply.
Under Rick Santelli’s plan, they would have 1.4 billion cases and 28 million dead.
Which would do the most damage to the stock markets and economy?
I can’t follow his logic, and I can’t hear what he’s saying at the end of the clip?
I would fire that guy immediately.
Not because he is a sociopath with no connection to any other human beings.
But because he is very, very dumb.
I wouldn’t take his advice about anything or let him any where near even a house plant.
No, no. I completely agree with him!
And to prove the courage of his convictions, he should be the very first in the land to be infected – on a cruise ship with no medical professionals, just him alone.
Especially, given his desire to collapse everything into pure chaos, his money would be long gone in the smoking ruin that would be the stock market and bond community, when nobody is able to trade due to being ill.
Or even better, send the moron milk dispenser upon his stupid flakes breakfast eater Twain’s “Idiot of the 33rd degree” letter.
With emphasis on “…but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other…”.
When is the snatch snatcher going to hire him for the white house staff ?
What an utterly foolish and despicable person.
And let’s not forget that the more people the virus cycles through, the greater the chances of a mutation that could make it even worse (or, of course, of any mutation, but we only really care about the ones that will make it worse for us.) Infecting the entire US population (or, if I’m hearing this moron correctly, the entire world population) is just asking for this thing to produce an even more virulent or deadly strain than the current ones. It’s not just sociopathic, it’s astoundingly stupid. But what else can you expect from someone who’s stupid enough to think that actual free markets exist.
Clinics and hospitals would be overrun with coronavirus cases, so anyone with other medical needs would suffer. For that matter, consider having CoViD-19 on top of something like kidney disease or diabetes.
I suspect there’s an unspoken assumption here, which is that the economy doesn’t care if 10% of the population dies. It’s hard to say how true that is, but assuming it is, it surely means that anyone willing to align their own interests to those of the ‘Economy’ is making a monstrous choice.
Speaking purely from the perspective of the markets (which…fuck), I wonder, just wonder, if maybe a better solution would be for the leader of the largest economy on the planet demonstrated that there was a response plan in place, experts were in charge, and that any necessary expenditures would be made.
Or, he could refuse to test anyone to make it appear like it’s not that big of a deal, fooling no one with money on the line. He could blatantly lie about it over and over and demonstrate a tragi-comedic level of understand of every single element of this situation (from the nature of the virus, whether it’s the same as the flu, how clinical trials work, what a vaccine is….).
But the easier fix is definitely to start the culling.
Just to add some context, Rick Santelli is the bright intellectual light who dubbed and helped instigate the very important and not all fucking stupid Tea Party Movement:
Dumb, dumb home owners did this to us. Not the people who leveraged those unethically obtained mortgages at a $50-$1 level.
It’s a modest proposal.
This comment should be enough to disqualify him from ever commenting on television again.
Wouldn’t all the deaths caused by the health care system being completely overwhelmed also play havoc with the economy in the short and long term.
I’m a pacifist, I struggle with it though. Some days are easier than others. Someone with coronavirus needs to sneeze in this shitheads fa… Okay I’m in control again. Quarantine, containment is the priority not this jerk.
@3 lumipuna
To oversimplify, following Deleuze and Guattari, “Accelerate the process”. You can find it listed under headings such as “This fucknut is a genocidal maniac”.
He did come back and say, repeatedly and at some length, that that was an utterly boneheaded, insensitive, and all around horrifying thing to have said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8H_Sh7XG4I
this is the same kind of idiot who at the height of the cold war would have advised that we use a first strike and destroy the Soviet union before they destroy us.
he is another one of those investment advisors and talking heads who exist only to parrot the current trends and have very little understanding of how things actually work. They are the ones who pile on the causes when they emerge and initialize the panics when they occur.
They like our current leader live in a comic book world .
uncle frogy
Voidhawk has it right:
There are 7 billion people out there. Nearly everyone who isn’t me is going to say something stupid at least once in their lives. A significant number of people are going to say things that are truly, completely, thoroughly horrible.
Okay, so someone on TV went there and said something truly, completely, thoroughly horrible. The indictment isn’t that one person out of the thousands of talking heads said something terrible. The real indictment is that the network didn’t immediately cut to commercial and then announce on air the moment they came back that Santelli would never again be welcome on their network.
I’m sick of the bullshit excuse that just because a network broadcast someone’s opinion doesn’t mean the network as a whole agrees with that opinion. Sure, maybe that’s true. But the network still obviously considers, “let’s kill tens of millions of people to protect my money” a reasonable position that reasonable people should discuss.
The idea that this is not outside the bounds of reasonable opinion or debate is far more harmful than the fact that one idiot said it somewhere once.
Next he’ll be proposing that we eat babies.
@gijoel
If anyone in the last 20 years has honestly described Santelli as “modest” I’ll eat a meat dinner.
Order these suggestions in whichever way seems right to you.
* You first, asshat.
* If a disease leads to legs rotting off and it affects the stock market, everyone would naturally also chop off their legs to stabilize it, by you way of “thinking”.
* Fuck off, die, today.
18) @wcaryk:
And in his “apology” he talks about “measles parties” as if that were a sane response before vaccines. Oi. I guess people did that, but no one in my community did it (that I ever heard about). They just sent the sick kids like me home until they were over it (if they got over it).
So he compounds his idiocy with apparently being an antivaxxer. Why is a Tea Party moron on MSNBC in the first place? I know, I know, they’re not really the radical left network Twittler and Fox would have you believe, but c’mon.
Sure, why not. If we could do it, it would only mean what, a couple-hundred million dead? From the virus itself, that is- I suspect the death toll from the total collapse of global civilization (people do get so bent out of shape when their governments deliberately and openly inflict plagues upon them) would have a rather higher body count.
But hey, no one would have to worry about the markets anymore.
From the asshole who invented Teabaggers comes advice worthy of Randall Flagg
Quite apart from the numerous humanitarian, public health, and economic reasons this would be a terrible idea, how would that even work? I mean, how could you even infect everyone at the same time.
Or we can let the stock market die since like currency it enables people who value things more than people. If the externalities harm people uninvested in it that’s a pretty shitty tool unless you care more about things than people.
I’m not saying it’s simple or that there aren’t people literally dependant on these things but this shit looks pathological to me.
I’m mildly curious as to why he isn’t worried about the effects of this virus that has so many people worried about it… Does he think he’s immune, or does his “infect everyone” bit not really mean “everyone” and exclude him or people like him?
I’m not personally concerned with it right now, as I feel it’s more media hype than an actual threat, and I don’t think I fall within the demographics that tend to be most seriously affected by this, and I don’t think I’m likely to catch it, or suffer too bad from it if I do catch it… But I’m not going to willingly volunteer to get infected with it…
Nixw
I have a few objections to his plan. One is that part of the problem with a pandemic is that it overwhelms the capacity of clinics and hospitals to properly treat patients. His solution maximizes chaos and thereby maximizes the amount of death and suffering……………www.Fox120.com
“How dare we hurt his money?” Hey! Money is people too, my friends.
Is Santelli invested in sanitoriums?
News.com.au is not the best source, but in a recent item they say Chinese doctors claim COVID-19 is like SARS and AIDS combined because of what it does to the lungs. If true Santelli is worse than ignorant.
For a minute there I assumed he was one of those prepper billionaires who could jump on their private planes and debunk to their boltholes here in New Zealand. It seem he isn’t. We are quite happy to breathe covid-19 over anyone who tries it, assuming they don’t bring it with them. :)