The Walking Eagle thread

I wonder if that staff member would call the police when they are in desperate need?

you’re assuming that the story is true, and that the police actually do anything beyond shrug their shoulders or shoot your dog if they do show up

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So you are sharing tweets you don’t even believe are true.
My assumption is the staff member is an arsehole that would be straight on the phone to the police when they need them.
Not all police are bad.

it’s incontrovertibly true that whoever runs the boston police union’s twitter account was crying about this

former president of said union seems like a great guy

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didn’t remember this, or biden voting for it. his record truly is abysmal

Not off by much and accurate though are different things.

Yes there are a lot of infections here. But I also get tired of people saying that the number of infections greatly climbed at the beginning of July when that magically coincides with when we did more testing. What really happened is the number of IDENTIFIED infections greatly climbed. We didn’t get that many more infections - we just knew about the ones that existed.

COVID19 is new and nobody knew how bad it was going to be or what it could be. There were projections that were both extreme and mild - and as always the reality is somewhere in the middle. COVID19 is a respiratory disease, yet at the onset, we had people worried about sanitizing EVERYTHING… you couldn’t find hand sanitizer in stores. People went into a panic to buy hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and anti-bacterial anything (even though COVID19 is a virus and not a bacteria). Trump, Congress, Governors, Mayors all had to determine what was to be done that kept citizens as safe as possible, but our economy had to continue and it took massive hits due to quarantining.

The population of the USA was roughly 382.2M in 2019. In 2020 we’ve lost almost 200K with COVID. At the same time, we’ve lost roughly 50K to influenza. The data from the WHO and CDC in this country seems to show that COVID is most likely to be deadly when you have other risk factors. The worst of these risk factors are: hypertension, obesity, metabolic issues which are prevalent in the USA.

Sorry this went more to COVID - but it’s more an understanding of why COVID hits hard here and that there has to be a balance by government leaders to try and minimize death rate (no one really cares if people just get sick for 2 weeks) and keep the economy going.

That cannot be entirely true, given that the rate of positives was also accelerating significantly for much of that time in multiple US states. In particular it seems fairly clear that the virus was penetrating the Southeast to a much higher degree after Memorial Day than beforehand.

I agree that governments have to strike a balance, but it seems fairly clear after the Woodward revelations that Trump’s notion of what that balance should be was not remotely informed by available expertise.

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saying the ‘reality’ of a pandemic that’s killed 200k is somewhere in the middle doesn’t seem accurate to me when one ‘side’ is significantly represented by people who insisted it was a hoax or that it would cause <5k deaths

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Good post and you’re right, the numbers of testing isn’t entirely the case. Yes the disease continued to make it’s rounds through the country. You did say that the virus was penetrating areas much higher degree after memorial day - and that’s true. It’s also true that many colleges get out around that time and send their students home. College age people at the time were not considered at a high risk, and since they didn’t think they’d get sick, often kept gathering and did not tend to wear masks. In a similar fashion, young kids also didn’t wear masks much though that’s finally changed.

That said, we didn’t have much actual information on COVID in March - we were largely estimating and making educated guesses. For every “expert” that got it right, there were probably just as many “experts” that got it wrong.

My concern about did Trump have the right balance or the right information to determine the right balance is easily skewed based on whether or not you want Trump to have been right or wrong (I don’t mean you personally, I mean in general).

I was trying to say that 200K deaths to date is somewhere in the middle of the extremes that were predicted for this point in time.

And now it’s time for another fact check.
1st, I don’t recall anyone saying the death toll would be less than 5,000. If you have that, please share specific information on it.
2nd. Please don’t tell me you’re suggesting that Donald Trump called COVID a hoax? Because if you are… that didn’t happen. That’s more spin against a president that many don’t like. I’ll just post a link to sites that explain the reality of what happened.


Maybe I should stop pointing out inaccuracies of conventional wisdom.

oh, he called the pandemic a ‘hoax’ before it killed the first of 200k americans

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I have no idea why you’re still saying something about a hoax and COVID.
I also have no idea why you’re posting something about Bernie Sanders as your proof.
If you’d like to have an actual discussion, that’s fine. If you just want to spout incorrect or immaterial things, that’s your call also.

5000 deaths and ‘it’s a hoax’ reflect the range of opinion i heard on a construction site, in the US–and in an affluent part of a metro area that has actually taken it seriously. and again, it’s just not on, imo, to portray 200k deaths as a middle ground. 180k (& counting) dead is decidedly not a minor event

one of your ‘fact checks’ corrected a democratic tv ad’s framing, based on the timing of when trump called the pandemic a ‘hoax’

in responding, i provided another example of similar framing from the washington post’s ‘fact checker’

the irony of these outlets representing anything but ‘conventional wisdom’ was implicit, i guess

also i don’t know how to use this site

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So you have the following at your disposal to validate number of estimated deaths attributed to someone (I’m not even sure who) and whether or not Trump called COVID19 a hoax.

Reference #1. A range of opinion you heard on a construction site in the USA?
Reference #2: Two organizations whose job it is to do fact checks and provide clearer answers as to what actually happened or not.

When these do not agree, you are telling me that you believe Reference #1?
And to support your faith in Reference 1 (the range of opinions at a construction site) you use a different story about a fact checker that was from another source on a completely unrelated topic who may or may not have checked that unrelated story properly?

This is truly fascinating. Thank you for stating your beliefs and basis for them so clearly. It truly helps me understand your postings.

You’re still not understanding what I wrote about middle ground, but I no longer think that is something we need to debate.

No it is not at all. You claim not to be a Trump apologist yet have bent over backwards over a series of posts to do exactly that. Trump got repeated briefings about the seriousness of this issue throughout the months prior to this taking told in this county. Yet he never publicly took it seriously. Not in terms of his words or in his actions. There are certain responses that the various agencies CAN do to an emergency like this that can only be initiated by him. He did not pull those levers. But not only did he do nothing, he actively engaged in a rabid disinformation campaign that actively made things way worse.

There has long been a debate over why he was ignoring his experts, but based on his attitude to testing of himself and those around him we have long had evidence that his private understanding of the seriousness of this belied what we saw him do and say. We now know, unequivocally,that this discrepancy existed from the start. This was not a case of getting several months into it, realizing it was worse than he thought it would be and just not being able to publicly back down. No, he knew from the start.

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that’s a remarkably toxic way to agree to disagree, congrats

I’ll give you that,i worded it wrong,but anyway when i said rate i mean’t overall numbers and he’s still to blame for the lack of urgency towards the spreading of the virus,which mean’t 1,000’s more died from it than needed to,plus add in the fact he asked people to Liberate in States.which made people gather on mass and protest,when social distancing should have been the number 1 priority.

Mate i’m from the UK,if it’s not a pistol or rifle it’s a machine gun,semi or automatic same thing to me,you’re splitting hairs,i’m not talking about what he’s achieved or trying to in regards to gun laws,i’m talking about letting people walk around with them in Militia’s.I’ve explained what i said now about him advocating and inciting people walking around with machine guns,i can’t be any clearer in what i mean’t there.The Liberate tweets weren’t just about Covid lockdown though,it was also sent to Virginia for people to stand up for the 2nd amendment as it’s under siege,you’re telling me thats not incitement?? Like i said he may not have said “everyone grab a machine gun and walk the streets” in those exact words but are you seriously telling me you believe that the people haven’t taken that tweet as a green light to carry machine guns,and by calling them good people,thats not advocating it?? c’mon now,i may not be fully clued up on American politics but i’m not that clueless,if i am then why am i seeing groups of 100’s of Black and White Militia’s bearing arms like it’s the normal thing to do,if Trump doesn’t advocate it,then why isn’t he stopping it??

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This is incredibly tortured defense of the idea that he has not incited violence. This was an armed stand off between LEOs and private citizens. The use of weapons in the way that group wielded them is not protected in the second amendment. Trump’s response was to ratchet up the tension celebrate the armed protesters. This is but one of an uncountable number of cases in which politically motivated armed confrontations and conflicts has been held up as a desirable state him.

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I am not apologizing for Trump at all or at least wasn’t intending to.
On most of the posts I’ve simply tried to separate fact from fiction which is in no means being an apologist.

Yes he has misled the public on many things related to COVID. More accurately he downplayed it.

But he has done so (my opinion) to balance shutting everything down and keeping the economy moving. All I was stating is that I didn’t know if what he did made things worse or not in the grand scheme for the country moving forward. From a COVID point of view, he probably did. From a financial point of view, maybe not.

What I’m trying to figure out is why there is so much on the USA and Trump are highlighted so much. The UK right now has more cases per population than the USA and appears to be on an upswing. The USA is on a decline according to the data. I’m not trying to pick on the UK but it happens to be one of the countries I check more often than not. India has way more new cases these days, and the number from the USA is comparable to Brazil, France, and Spain.

Did what Trump said and put into motion mean there were more cases in the USA? Probably. But what percentage of that I don’t know. Did Brazil, France, Spain go into lockdown way too late or do nothing? What about the UK? Spain and France are seeing massive second spikes unfortunately. What happened in these countries? This is not me trying to blame other countries or to say they are worse or better, I’m seriously just curious.