Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Doctors and other hospital personnel, especially ER Docs, are working double shifts in the plague zones through days of carnage. I heard one in Miami on NPR yesterday talking about how the current surge is different from the first one. He's treating a lot of people from 25 to 45 with no underlying disease and watching them die, helpless to stop it.

As to the the ER Dr. in NY who committed suicide, she was in NY at the height of their spike. By all accounts she was bright, personable, and a fine physician. She just couldn't withstand the horror that she had to deal with daily.

Working in the middle of that is unrelenting misery. I compare it to the doctors, x-ray techs and nurses who work in oncology. They work with those patients over a period of time and get to know them, then watch as a significant percentage of them die in spite of everything they can do. There is a very high burn out rate in those jobs.

 

Yeah, here's what we need.

DELTA TWP., Mich. – Michigan police say a deputy shot and killed a man after he stabbed a 77-year-old convenience store customer who confronted him about not wearing a mask.
The 77-year-old customer was wearing a mask, Ruis was not.
Both men left the store and got into an argument in the parking lot. Ruis stabbed the other man, then fled the area,
An Eaton County deputy located Ruis' vehicle at about 7:13 a.m. in a neighborhood several miles away on Jerryson Drive in Delta Township, Oleksyk said. When the deputy made a traffic stop, Ruis got out of his vehicle and approached the deputy with a knife, Oleksyk said.
Oleksyk said the deputy retreated, ordered Ruis to drop the knife, and when he approached again she shot him.

 

No, you're missing my point. He could have a good plan - he doesn't but he could - and few would like it. He's just not trusted, for one thing, and, for two, we're in the middle of a moral inflection point where Trump is a Bad Person (and he is, understand), and that Bad Person-ness overrides everything else.

That's why so much of the public part of the Democratic Primary was about Good Person-ness. Swallwell's "Joe Biden's old as fart and it's time to embrace a younger politician" take was more salient than Kamala Harris' "Joe Biden once opposed a busing plan that actually turned out be as much of a mess as he thought it would be." But Harris' criticism was a much bigger story among the media decision-makers because crafting a perfect secular morality is A Thing now. That's why folks - mostly on the left - are getting canceled. It's a moral pruning. And part of any moral package is resisting Trump.

 

Six of the seven California counties in which the Trumpandemmic is growing most rapidly voted for Trump in 2016.

 

You keep throwing out no one would like Trump no matter what he did, but I would love to live in a world where our biggest worry is whether I simply thought Trump was a dumbass and believed Democrats could do differently. The reality is I live in a world where Trump is a gigantic cluster and I don't need to think Trump is a dumbass, he proves it every single day. The next plan Trump puts out would be his first plan.

 

I'll try to let Douthat explain it. Bold emphasis mine.

Opinion | The Religious Roots of a New Progressive Era

Second, Bottum stresses that it’s more useful to think of the post-Protestants — the “poster children,” he sometimes calls them — as an elect rather than an elite, defined more by their education and their moral sensibility than by their overt wealth or power. They are not identical to the managerial elite discerned by other theorists of late-modern class hierarchy; instead, they stand adjacent and somewhat underneath, as adjuncts, consultants, bureaucrats and activists — advisers and petitioners and critics rather than formal leaders, with more economic precarity and moral zeal than those they criticize or serve.

This point, too, is particularly useful to understanding the new power struggle within the liberal upper class. In theological terms, we’re watching the post-Protestant elect wrestle power away from the more secular elite, which long paid lip service to the creed of social justice but never really evinced true faith.

And that power, once claimed, could be used the way the old Mainline used its power: not to replace liberal political forms but to infuse them with a specific set of moral commitments and to establish the terms on which important cultural debates are held and settled. Who should have sex with whom, and under what conditions and constraints? Which religious ideas should be favored, and which dismissed with prejudice? What conceptions of the country’s past should be promoted? Which visions of the good life taught in schools? What titles or pronouns should respectable people use? Just as the old denominations once answered these questions for Americans, their post-Protestant heirs aspire to answer them today.

 

"He could have a good plan". Five months and 130,000 dead. Tell me, Alma, who is in charge of the federal response to Covid-19? When Katrina hit, everyone looked to Michael Brown, because he headed up FEMA.

Who runs the Covid response, and what is the nationwide policy and plan? I guess you could say Pence, because Trump "put him in charge", but that's nonsense, he has done nothing but stand and nod as Trump said stupid and false things. There is no federal plan, no nationwide guidance, no policies, other than whatever nonsense that Trump spouts about injecting bleach or taking a drug that has been proven to be ineffective.

As to "he is not trusted", if someone lies to you daily for years about matters of state, matters of consequence, about trivial matters, and lies when the truth would do, any sensible person no longer trusts him. That's not a political attack, it's basic human relations.

He does not just "not have a good plan", he has offered no plan at all other than "Wait, and it will disappear", and he has disputed, derided, hindered and fired the people who know what should be done if they don't suck up and parrot his bullshit.

As to Biden, it wasn't about "good person-ness". It was about "Who do we think has the best chance to win in the general against Trump?", straight up. Biden does seem to be a nice guy, but he could be abrasive and combative if he could beat Trump at that game. Instead, Biden is plain vanilla, so all the names and labels that Trump attempts to hang on him fail to stick except with his 30%.

 

Remember when he was all for gun control for a week after Parkland? I remember a lot more than "few" liking that plan.

Amazing considering your narrative everyone hates him and everything he does...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/us/politics/trump-gun-control.html

 

Shame on you. You sound driven to want things to go badly.

 

When Trump won in '16, I figured, OK, this isn't rocket science. You have the world's best experts to advise you in whatever subject you need to know about. You talk to these people, ask questions, toss out options and just make the most reasonable decision you can.
About 10 minutes into his presidency, I realized none of that was going to happen. Listening to his inauguration speech, I said the same thing over and over again: Oh my God, what have we done?

 

Hospital closest to me just put a refrigerated truck outside to handle the overflow of bodies.

Let me know when you have the positive spin for that.

 

EDIT: I should say I'm responding to Alma's post-protestant post. I got verbose and too many people posted in the meantime.

I'm going to comeback to that post in a little bit because my ability to process it is slow right now. I'm having a hard time understanding the point, but I think that's on me right now and not so much the post (I think).

But I will make my point in this way. Trump had an ability here that he squandered by doing what he always does: Ask how it is going to help him to act, who else can he blame and how can he get out of making a tough decision that might make him unpopular among his base. Trump could have gotten out in front of this thing and pounded his chest about how fantastic he was doing and how we are winning. He did the same damn thing with the rejection of NAFTA, which had much of the reaction that you are claiming is here: Democrats and the media think he is stupid for doing this and how dare he. Difference is, he actually got something done with NAFTA and some people on both sides of the aisle actually saw the need to do what Trump was doing even if he did it with the grace of a bull in a china shop. Here, he's basically pretending there's no problem.

I'll go back to when I was 17/18 years old when Bush II was elected. For reasons that I'm sure I could have explained when I was 17/18 years old, I thought Bush was full of shit and our country made a bad decision. Polls following his inauguration had Bush slightly more than a 50 percent approval rating. Not great, not terrible. Then after 9/11, his approval rating shot up to 90 percent. It's because he emerged as a leader following a national crisis. His impromptu comments at Ground Zero inspired confidence. I looked at my dad around this time and said Bush was getting re-elected. Bush hadn't changed and I didn't vote for him in 2004, but he was a leader in that moment. Trump is not a leader in this moment. He had a chance but he refused. Again, I would love to say we're arguing over semantics with Trump, but in reality we're screaming for a coherent plan.

I'm now going to re-read that post, Alma and try to get my head around it.