Don’t forget that hospitals in desperate need of PPE had shipments hijacked and stolen by the feds, given to corrupts pop-up resellers run by cronies and auctioned off back to the hospitals that originally bought them.
Having a memory and attention span longer than 2 weeks is fucking exhuasting
I, like Pepperidge Farm, also remember. That was such a massive shit show, I have no idea how the Administration Responsible for PPE Hijacking managed to get a second installment of the show going. That really should have been the end of them all.
Thats because the people who voted for him the second time either don’t know, or don’t care.
Man, I’m seeing smug videos online about everyone “finally admitting we were right all along.”
They’re just running around pretending that there was no real danger and no real deaths. It’s a death cult.
People treat 6 years ago like 20, eh?
The New England Patriots used their private plane to smuggle PPE into the country because the regime was stealing shipments off the runway.
IT happened in Maryland too. The took it right off the Tarmac.
I swear I read that some hospitals had to have it shipped to odd places or roundabout fashions just so they’d have a chance to actually get it delivered.
Yeah, supposedly that’s how we worked around it.
I worked in a rural hospital in a blue state throughout the entire pandemic and do not remember this. Can someone add sources bc I’m not seeing much when I Google it. The hospital I worked for had serious problems with misappropriation of funds from government funding but we did have PPE.
More:
Wow! Thank you so much!
I mean I guess you’re welcome lol… I hate that I remember like every single fucking thing this shitheel has done. It can eat away at you, watching nothing happen to these evil ghouls.
Only tangentially related, but… I decided at the start of 2025 to hit the little star to save a post on Lemmy every time I see something awful and illegal being done by Trump administration. Get a little running list going, maybe I could even use it to convince my parents to stop being fascists (nope).
Or I dunno if I thought maybe I’d come back years later and revisit, or compile into a goddamn coffee table book or something (“Remember this shit? One Harrowing Article a Day for a Year”? I dunno).
Turns out there were just way too many.
It’s unwieldy, and the Lemmy “saved article” page, bless its heart, was not built for parsing or navigating in any real way. Now I’ve got thousands (tens of thousands?) of saved articles and I wish I had enough programming knowhow to scrape them from my account into a CSV and categorize them or something…
Anyway, I don’t know why I’m even saying all of this other than to say that I remembered these ones without having to look at my saved articles.
Trump also routed very expensive reusable COVID testing machines to his boss, Putin, to make sure he stayed in good health at the cost of American lives.
Trump and all republicans are anti-American scum who need to go away from this planet.
I oddly only remember Blue Flame medical
The hilarious thing is that half the ‘masks cause brain damage’ crew is now masked up as ICE agents so no one can see their crimes against humanity.
To be fair, ICE agents do demonstrate a correlation between masks and brain damage. (The causality just happens to go the other way.)
“Mr. Fauci, how dare you tell people not to inject bleach and snort Ivermectin?!”
Then they say my body, my choice no doubt.
It’s only a thing if it benefits them
It sucks that this is political here. Like, what the fuck? How much paint thinner are these people
inhaling… Chugging!?I think it was disinfectant that was recommended for chugging. That and putting lights inside my lungs.
I hope to never be a hero, this country treats its heroes so poorly.
An example I learned of recently is Smedley Butler. Super decorated military careerist, but once he got out, he wrote War is a Racket and called out the corporate profiteers directly. The man basically singlehandedly foiled an attempt to coup the US government and prevented fascism from corporations like JP Morgan, City National Bank (Citibank), General Motors, Goodyear, Standard Oil, and more. Congress investigated and confirmed there was a coup planned and they would have acted. And since these companies don’t exist anymore, we can see that they were prosecuted and held accountable.
Oh wait, that’s right, they slandered Butler, called the whole thing a hoax and paid off the papers and members of congress to run the stories so that no one faced accountability.
It’s not even a new thing. Here is what happened to the Captain of the USS Indianapolis after successfully delivering, in secret, the bombs that were used to end WW2. On the way home they were attacked by a Japanese sub and the ship sank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Indianapolis_(CA-35)
Captain Charles B. McVay III, who had commanded Indianapolis since November 1944 through several battles, survived the sinking, though he was one of the last to abandon ship, and was among those rescued days later. In November 1945, he was court-martialed on two charges: failing to order his men to abandon ship and hazarding the ship. Cleared of the charge of failing to order abandon ship, McVay was convicted of “hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag”. Several aspects of the court-martial were controversial. There was evidence that the Navy itself had placed the ship in harm’s way. McVay’s orders were to “zigzag at his discretion, weather permitting”; however, McVay was not informed that a Japanese submarine was operating in the vicinity of his route from Guam to Leyte. Further, Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, commanding officer of I-58, wrote in his testimony to Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that zigzagging would have made no difference.[38] Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz remitted McVay’s sentence and restored him to active duty. McVay retired in 1949 as a rear admiral.[39]
While many of Indianapolis’s survivors said McVay was not to blame for the sinking, the families of some of the men who died thought otherwise: “Merry Christmas! Our family’s holiday would be a lot merrier if you hadn’t killed my son”, read one piece of mail.[40] The guilt that was placed on his shoulders mounted until he killed himself in 1968, aged 70.[41]
Working in a retirement home. Covid arrived and within a few weeks, a third of the elderly died. The doctor that said it was just the flu didn’t dare come near the place after the first few deceased. And still so many people didn’t wanted to take it seriously.
Thank you for being there with our elders during such a horrifying time. If not for brave people like you they would have been alone.
I was delivering packages on Sundays during Covid, and retirement homes were always the scariest to deliver to because I was very conscientious of the fact I could be infected and I did not want to pass it through those doors. Fortunately most places had notes to drop packages at the front doors, but each of those deliveries was another chance to worry for the elderly inside. Thanks for working through that time, but also I’m sorry you did.
nursing homes, retirement community, centers are rife with abuse/neglect already.
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
It’s worse actually, he took PPE from states he didn’t like and sent it to Russia. There’s a phone call proving it. Literally giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
And ventilators, testing kits and actually useful medications (not bleach or horse dewormer)
I guess she won’t read this but she is a real life hero.
Id love to send her some love and thanks — but that probably requires me joining a corrupt and toxic social network I’m purposely trying to avoid.
If you search the handle that’s in the screenshot, you can very quickly find what looks to be a legit email address for her.
Fauci is a hero.
Republicans— every single one of them— are fucking morons and pedo protectors.
c/ootl - got the context for this? Who’s criticizing him and why?
Dr. Fauci got called to a Senate committee that Rand Paul put together to question him on COVID-19 after publishing his personal diary. The Republicans tried to do anything to make Dr. Fauci look bad and publicly insulted him over and over to his face. It was all an attempt to get him to say something they could construe as perjury. So, because he’s not some idiot, he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights over and over. Now, the Republicans want to hold him in contempt for…using his constitutionally protected rights. The same constitution, by the way, they swear to support and defend.
Rand Paul yelling “Who the fuck do you think you are?!!” In a congressional hearing should embarrass all Americans, but we’re well past that point, I guess.
I’ve been embarrassed since he turned our politics into reality tv.
Republicans are dogpiling him right now because after appearing before congress like 20 times already to talk about covid, during the latest appearance he stopped giving AF and exercised his right to remain silent while basically calling Rand Paul an asshole lol.
So in typical conservative fashion, despite hundreds of hours of context leading up to this moment, all the headlines are like “SEE HE MUST BE A LIAR OTHERWISE HE WOULD TESTIFY”
They basically blame him directly for covid. And by covid they mean the social and economic harm of masking and social distancing, because the actual virus itself obviously isn’t real. And if it is real it was made in a lab. But despite being made in a lab it does absolutely nothing to you, total nothing virus, basically just a bad cold. Actually it’s the vaccines that caused all the deaths. The same vaccines that are Joe Biden’s fault despite them literally being produced and released under the direction of Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed”, all during his first term as president. Which isn’t true Trump would never do that. And if he did it’s because Fauci lied to him
Make it make sense
It doesn’t, that’s the problem. A problem a lot of us Americans are dealing with - when you can’t make any sense of what or why these politicians and their supporters have these ideas and do the things … It’s very hard to not be worried. Like I have anxiety bad enough it’s a disorder but I feel like every thinking man woman and child in the USA right now is walking around just holding onto that low-key anxious energy because nothing makes any sense.
Like even if you try to find a reason there isn’t one and if there is a reason it’s nonsensical, probably racist, and one hundred percent not grounded in our shared reality.
But it does make sense (just not good). You and I might not agree with the motives, but they do exist. There are entities both external and internal to the US that want to tear society down. Causing disfunction, fomenting hate, allowing infrastructure to decay, creating chaos, sowing discord and more are all a part of that effort. There might be differing reasons these entities have, but it boils down to greed and authoritarian control. It is happening elsewhere, as well. We see right-wing ideology/politics springing up in Latin America, Europe and Asia.
The Foundation of Geopolitics is one of the texts that lined out the (Russian) path for the future and how to disrupt the West that was aligned against them and it appears to be working. The other large influencer is Israel. I am certain the Mossad is out there thwarting the democratic process to help shape their goals. The billionaire club are the other parties that are helping to bring all this together. I thought I read somewhere that they are pressing the gas-pedal for human extinction b/c they believe they are better and above that. Therefore they will survive and will start the new (improved) human cycle or something after we are removed. Again, their reasons might vary, but the results are the same. Shackles for you and me and the world is theirs to conquer. So far.
I am sure I have a less than perfect perspective and two paragraphes doesn’t cover much here really, but this is roughly how I see current affairs from my limited proto-human lense.
I hear ya. I just mean looking at it from a purely selfish and utilitarian lens there really is no actual reason for a lot of the bad shit happening. Like it’s not helping anyone, it’s actively harming people and a lot of the people getting harmed voted for it.
I guess maybe because it makes people money in terms of the military industrial complex and prison complex (slavery) so that could be part of it. I’m tired of it all though - this timeline is so stupid.
I think you might like this video
Benn calls it “leveragism” but basically it’s about control. Rather than making more money, it’s more valuable to devalue/strip the power of communities to fight against you so that you can more easily institute your policies. When you think of it like that, stuff that just seems wildly cruel starts to make sense.
But really, Benn is just analyzing material conditions and coming to a logical conclusion. I don’t think he’s read Marx, but it’s basically Marx lol.
I mean … it is wildly cruel it doesn’t just seem that way. I suppose yeah if you view it through some sociopathic cretin billionaires perspective it makes “sense” but it’s still super fucked.
Honestly anyone that is cool with that shit needs a swift visit to the guillotine.
I thought I read somewhere that they are pressing the gas-pedal for human extinction b/c they believe they are better and above that.
Dark MAGA - Here’s a video too. Curtis Yarvin is loved by Peter Thiel. JD Vance is Thiel’s protege. Thiel is the one that wanted to make a corporate government nation state out of Greenland, entirely deregulated. They call it “Praxis.” Trump also started talking about “freedom cities” which is the same concept. Literally making their own nation states to live in while the poors are left out to die or whatever in the coming climate apocalpyse.
Shit is fucked up yo.
Conservatives have been wrong about everything for a few centuries now. Covid was one of those most clear and unambiguous examples of their world view and ideology being wrong. It broke them, because there was no longer a single grain of doubt to hide behind, as millions died around them. So now they just manufacture a separate reality whole cloth, because it’s easier than trying to spin objective reality in their favor.
Iirc the House is subpoenaing him again to try and blame him for all their failings
As above. This was a global crisis. The issues were not caused by the Republican party, nor by the Democrats, nor by anyone even in America! I know… Imagine a thing happening that isn’t directly to do with America!
A nasty virus spread throughout the world. Governments and scientists didn’t know what to do. They rushed to make policies to deal with it, within the crappy, corrupt political systems that all countries have. Most came up with a mostly crappy response, mostly dictated by corporate lobbies and electioneering, like every other policy they’ve ever come up with. Lots of people died. Lots more than would have if everything had been done perfectly, but we don’t live in such a world and we would no more have if the Democrats were in charge.
Nobody is angry at the republicans for causing the pandemic.
Democrats are angry that republicans (specifically under Trump) fucked up the pandemic response and at least indirectly- but also frequently directly- hundreds of thousands of the millions of dead Americans.
Imagine not being angry at that.
As above. This was a global crisis. The issues were not caused by the Republican party, nor by the Democrats, nor by anyone even in America! I know… Imagine a thing happening that isn’t directly to do with America!
Welll there were some people trying to prevent lockdowns from being enacted, some people suggesting Ivermectin and bleach as cures or prevention for COVID, etc…
Different countries had very different outcomes and while the US wasn’t the worst, it could’ve been a lot better if a certain party hadn’t hampered any effort at improving the situation.
Sure. But there are also some scientists who think the lockdown didn’t work, or only work really fast and hard. Or only work in dense populations but are useless in sparse ones. The Democrats don’t have a monopoly on truth, they’re not omniscient. They just had a different idea of how they wanted to respond based (like every other politician) on what they thought would sell well to their electorate.
Who knows what they word have actually done in power. I hate to break it to you, but politicians lie - it’s kind of their job.
A bit unfortunate you’re getting down voted for a more nuanced take. The jury is still out on large scale lockdowns. China managed to control the spread by aggressive contact tracing and testing, resorting to lockdowns as last resort. And it worked fairly well for some time.
The downvotes are par for the course, if I was interested in a popularity contest I wouldn’t have commented on a thread about Fauci!
You’re right on lockdowns. The jury is out, but most seem to think them a mistake, or mistakenly applied.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0261759
According to our estimates, the policy intervention saved 866,350–1,711,150 lives (4,886,214–9,650,886 quality-adjusted life-years), while mortality attributable to the economic downturn was 57,922–245,055 lives (2,093,811–8,858,444 life-years). We conclude that the number of lives saved by the spring-summer lockdowns and other COVID-19-mitigation was greater than the number of lives potentially lost due to the economic downturn. However, the net impact on quality-adjusted life expectancy is ambiguous
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/15/9295
The comparative analysis of different countries showed that the assumption of lockdowns’ effectiveness cannot be supported by evidence—neither regarding the present COVID-19 pandemic, nor regarding the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu and other less-severe pandemics in the past. The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save. It is suggested therefore that a thorough cost-benefit analysis should be performed before imposing any lockdown for either COVID-19 or any future pandemic.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.625778/full
a cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 finds that lockdowns are far more harmful to public health (at least 5–10 times so in terms of wellbeing years) than COVID-19 can be.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3782395
Biomedical evidence from the early months of the pandemic suggests that lockdowns were associated with a reduced viral reproductive rate, but that less restrictive measures also had a similar effect. Lockdowns are associated with reduced mortality in epidemiological modelling studies but not in studies based on empirical data from the Covid-19 pandemic. Psychological research supports the proposition that lengthy lockdowns may exacerbate stressors such as social isolation and unemployment that have been shown to be strong predictors of falling ill if exposed to a respiratory virus. Studies at the economic level of analysis points to the possibility that deaths associated with economic harms or underfunding of other health issues may outweigh the deaths that lockdowns save, and that the extremely high financial cost of lockdowns may have negative implications for overall population health in terms of diminished resources for treating other conditions.
deleted by creator
the gop house is again using the distraction of targeting fauci again, try to get him to say covid was a hoax.
A century ago, Fauci would have been lauded as a hero.
He is in my book.
Even just a decade ago.
Dubya’s supporters would have hated him
Stupidity has always been a defining characteristic of the 'Murican people
Another fucked up part of this is how much this brain dead conservative American anti science rhetoric spread across the rest of the world.
The brain dead right wingers are poisoning the world with their special flavour of idiocy.
Yep. It hit Japan hard too, anti mask anti vax fuckwits multiplied, oh and vaccines cause autism too didn’t ya know
Carl Sagan demon haunted world
Should be required reading for every human adult
To be clear, propaganda paid for by billionaires and spread by Americans who can’t identify truth from lies if it comes from their favorite TV channel/social media profile. The rest of the world is just overwhelmed by convincing brainwashed idiots.
Fauci was trying his best to navigate a shitty situation and you had fuckers like Krystal and Sagaar on Breaking Points spewing hatred at him. All of them are fucking assholes. Fauci isn’t a fucking politician or pundit or anything … he’s trying to save lives by making choices and decisions where people were ready to sacrifice him regardless for political reasons. But Breaking Points are oh so happy to shit on him and the comment section is full of antivax and covid deniers.
I have never heard of Krystal Ball until recently, and she’s making the rounds for an interview with Adam Smith, and seems to be portrayed as some leftist pundit. And now seeing this comment, it feels like life has been and will be ok not hearing from her ever again.
I generally like Krystal’s other views and she’s married to Kyle Kuklinski (whom I like) and they have shows together and she has good takes going up against Bill Maher. I started to watch her like a year or two ago. It was just when Fauci was getting an award around his retirement or whenever and I just saw an episode of Breaking Points just attacking him. They were like, he’s just a liar and he doesn’t deserve any awards for his career and it completely put me off for a while. I did restart listening to her myself … but I’m more “critical” or aware around her. Destiny popped into my feed recently and I really like him and then people say he’s pro-Israel … so I’m going to just pay more attention around those areas.
That being said I turned off Breaking Points the show itself entirely. The covid denial comments were overwhelming during the Fauci episodes and then Saagar (or however you spell it) was a Trump supporter to a degree for a while. He did a mea culpa from the “manosphere” stuff eventually though.
We stopped teaching science decades ago…
No Child stripped all the critical thinking out and made it all short term rote memorization.
You don’t learn science by memorizing things, you learn science by learning to think analytically
We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through (higher education). If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people. That’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.
– Roger Adolf Freeman, economics professor at Stanford, advisor to President Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon
Once again, it leads back to Reagan. Not that he’s a root cause, but he enacted the legislation that did the bidding of capitalists to fuck us all.
Years ago, someone sent posted a listing of 200 reasons why Reagan sucked. All seemed accurate. As you say, he wasn’t necessarily the root, but man did he help facilitate the future we got shoved down our throats.
Reagan was elected twice. The root of the problem is the American voter. Still is.
Good point. Give me an example of critical thinking then.
Let’s use the exact topic as a springboard seeing as we’re on it.
Proposition A: A nurse complains about how horrible her experience of Covid was because of all the death and suffering… Conclusion B: So no-one should criticise Dr Fauci.
Talk me through the critical thinking that makes proposition A lead to conclusion B.
Or, with Covid itself…
Proposition: A government spokesman says I ought do X to prevent a virus from spreading. Conclusion: therefore I ought to do X
Talk me through the application of ‘critical thinking skills’ in that analysis.
I suspect we might be talking at cross purposes, as you may be using the new meaning of ‘critical thinking’, which is roughly ‘beleive everything The Atlantic tells me’.
I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to say…
But you definitely don’t understand what critical thinking means, or what anyone else means when they use that phrase.
But it’s pretty clear if I attempted to explain it, you’d just keep trying to start a slapfight
Edit:
Yeah…
All I saw in your one week post history is a bunch of comments claiming COVID wasn’t a big deal
It’s not complicated.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/critical-thinking
noun
the process of thinking carefully about a subject or idea, without allowing feelings or opinions to affect you
We can just work with the standard definition.
Start with the process. What rational process gets you from ‘awful things happened during Covid’ to ‘The health minister at the time cannot be criticised’?
