As Samantha Bee points out in this excellent segment, it is the consequence of systemic racism that results in every disaster hurting those sectors more.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
As Samantha Bee points out in this excellent segment, it is the consequence of systemic racism that results in every disaster hurting those sectors more.
I wrote earlier that one reason for the toilet paper shortage is that there are different manufacturers and different supply chains for suppliers for commercial and residential use that have different specifications. The supply side for each sector is carefully balanced to meet the demand side of that sector and under normal circumstances, the system works very smoothly. But when people started staying home in large numbers, the demand side shifted from commercial to residential, and that upset the balance.
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I came across this interesting debate between two professors of philosophy Gregg Caruso and Daniel Dennett on the endlessly fascinating and controversial question of whether we have free will or not. The topic is fascinating because what exactly we mean by the term ‘free will’ is difficult to pin down and controversial because many people find it hard to give up the idea that they have free will and respond very strongly against arguments that deny it exists. (For those who want to go into it in some detail, back in 2010 I wrote a multipart series of blog posts on this very topic. It is better to read them in sequence but do not follow the links at the top of each post to ‘previous posts’ because that link takes you to when the posts were published on a site before I moved to FtB and that site no longer exists.)
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This meme that I received captures our dangerous idiot president perfectly. (The person who sent it to me did not tell me where he got it from. I wish I knew so that I could credit its creator.)
At the best of times Donald Trump does not present a picture of coherence and maturity. But lately he seems to have plumbed even greater depths of irrationality and I think that it is because his dysfunctional White House and his utter lack of a measured response to the Covid-19 crisis is being recognized and he is being called out on it. So far he has been able to overcome the dysfunctional nature of his administration by sheer bombast and demagoguery but in this virus he has met something that does not care about him in the least, affects everyone, and cannot be ignored or belittled, and he does not know how to respond.
Trump is a narcissist and is utterly incapable of taking responsibility for anything bad that happens but in this crisis, his patented efforts to lash out at critics and blame others are looking increasingly desperate. He is clearly looking like a cornered wild animal and losing it, though he never had much of it to lose. So we see him lashing out at one target after another. His favorite targets are of course the media, the Democratic party, and the ‘deep state’, all of whom he thinks are trying to discredit him.
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Conspiracy theories seem to be endemic, at least in the US. There seems to be a sizeable size of the US population willing to believe in all manner of theories about any major event that have little or no factual basis and this period of the coronavirus pandemic is no exception.
The last thing America needed on top of a president still in denial over the state current pandemic is the rest of the population believing conspiracies about it, but here we are.
While scientists agree that the virus emerged from nature, the uncertainty over how people were first infected by Covid-19 has left space for misinformation to grow. In Britain, that has meant the propagation of a random conspiracy theory about a link between coronavirus and 5G wireless technology – which almost a third of people say they can’t rule out.
In the US, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center, about a third of Americans surveyed believe that Covid-19 was created by humans in a laboratory.
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At the eight-minute mark in this segment from Seth Meyers, we find Trump saying antibiotics used to be able to combat all kinds of diseases but that Covid-19 is such a “brilliant enemy” that is so “very smart and invisible” that antibiotics do not work against it.
Yes folks, the person who has described himself as a “very stable genius” does not know that antibiotics only work against bacteria and that the coronavirus is, you know, a virus.
Trump is a textbook case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Last week Wisconsin held elections despite efforts by the state’s Democratic governor Tony Evers to postpone the event like other states have done due to fears of people congregating in voting places during this pandemic. But the state’s Republican controlled legislature over-ruled him and it was backed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court that has a 5-2 Republican majority. Like many states in the US, the positions on the Supreme Court are elected and people run of partisan platforms. When the governor tried to at least extend the deadline for absentee voting, the legislature again blocked him and took the case to the US Supreme Court that upheld their claim. So the election went ahead with long lines of people who sometimes had to wait for hours to vote. This was especially true in the urban areas where minority and poorer voters are where, as usual, polling stations were much fewer than in more affluent suburban areas.
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The verdict is in and the conclusion is that the Trump administration utterly botched its response to the Covid-19 epidemic. Andy Kroll catalogs the many missteps and that the dysfunction extends to the coronavirus task force created by Trump, compounded by the fact that Trump seems to have enormous faith in his son-in-law Jared Kushner to deal with complex matters even though there is no evidence that he is at all competent. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth just like Trump and they both seem to think that this denotes ability.
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In the latest episode, he focuses on the people who are most affected by the pandemic, those who have lost their jobs and those who are deemed to be essential workers, and why their current plight is a strong argument for permanently providing the kinds of protections that the government is now trying to temporarily meet, such as universal free health care, paid sick leave, better unemployment benefits. In fact, conservatives, and businesses like Amazon, are worried that the demand for such things will be too strong to resist.