8 ms·

It did come from all political quarters, however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer. Notice how many of the clips from your video are from Janua

It did come from all political quarters, however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer. Notice how many of the clips from your video are from January or early February. The POTUS was still publicly pushing the coronavirus = flu comparison in early March even after we saw what happened in Iran and Italy. Remember, he said on February 28 that being worried about the coronavirus was “their new hoax” from the media and his political opponents, so he himself recognized his political opponents were pointing out the severity by late February. Edit: i don’t want to get too deep in the politics with this, I do agree with your ultimate point that most won’t learn from this and will simply return to their team’s side regardless of who got this one more right.

crusso 7y ago
however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer Now you're splitting hairs. You know who the first politician in the USA who was banging the drums in alarm about Wuhan and the coronavirus? Tom Cotton. Republican Senator. Do you support him now? Does his early conviction of the severity of this event put you behind him and everyone who echoed his concerns? Are you likewise now opposed to the people who were ridiculing him as a conspiracy theorist and fear-monger?
- javagram 7y ago
  Tom Cotton was one of the people who were on this and warning of it early. So was Steve Bannon. There are others. Just because someone has an R by their name doesn’t mean they’re a homogeneous blob. I think that’s great, I don’t agree with all their politics but they didn’t let themselves be blinded by optimism and looked at what was actually going on here. And the theory that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab where they were studying bat coronaviruses always seemed credible to me (Reminder, the 1977 flu likely escaped from a Russian or Chinese lab but this was never admitted either). The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought (Hannity, etc.) Edit: again, he was calling it “their new hoax” so you really can’t deny that he was behind on this one :-)
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    "The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought" How did you come to that conclusion? What about the Democrats in New York, which is the epicenter of the virus outbreak right now (certainly the US and probably the world)? I remember hearing someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close.
    - alpha_squared 7y ago
      > ...someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close. This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. Without those programs, many students have little to eat at home. It's a little disingenuous to represent it in another light. If anything, it highlights yet another weakness in our society.
      - JPKab 7y ago
        The weakness is that those kids are still being raised by losers who can't bother to feed their offspring. Food is dirt cheap. Grew up in poor schools with mostly free lunch recipients. Parents were mostly shit bags who spent money on typical crap you'd expect. The idea that it's anything more structural than culturally dysfunctional idiots not investing time in cooking for their kids because it's less work to let the school do it is wishful thinking.
      - jeffdavis 7y ago
        Yes, of course they had reasons. It's not obvious what to do in a disaster. But did people die because of that decision? Probably. Maybe a lot. Tough calls. It comes down to who made those tough calls earlier. And that's not a partisan thing, or a smart/dumb thing. Plenty of bad decisions to go around, but we probably shouldn't lay the blame to thick anywhere. Because it's chaos and people are adapting and changing in real time. Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people and he has to shut down the state to slow down the virus. I guarantee he's going to be a different person in 12 months.
- jsnk 7y ago
  I'm glad you brought Tom Cotton up here. He was one of the few individuals who was able to ask the right questions at the right time. And yet, when he did that, all kinds of mainstream media including WaPo came out saying he was repeating a "coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked". https://archive.vn/TG8zN#selection-999.29-999.84 https://archive.vn/TG8zN#selection-999.29-999.84 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronavirus-tom-cotton-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru... https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/ https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/ https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/483354-sen-cotton-repeats-coronavirus-origins-conspiracy-theory https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/483354-sen-cotton-repeat... https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/republican-senator-tom-cotton-regurgitating-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/republican-senat... https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/tom-cotton-coronavirus/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/tom-cotton-coronavir... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-cotton-coronavirus-china_n_5e34a3b7c5b6f26233294378 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-cotton-coronavirus-china_... https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theories-claim-new-coronavirus-was-bioengineered/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theori... Now WaPo seems to be admitting that we should at least consider the possibility that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://archive.vn/UP6dx#selection-1801.148-1801.176 https://archive.vn/UP6dx#selection-1801.148-1801.176
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    Your last link seems broken, but here's another: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-did-covid-19-begin-its-initial-origin-story-is-shaky/2020/04/02/1475d488-7521-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-...
  - nl 7y ago
    The theories which are explored in the Washington Post article (around the idea that someone Wuhan Institute of Virology might have been accidentally infected with the virus while studying bats) are completely different to the claim the it's an engineered bio-weapon that came from those labs. (To be clear, Tom Cotton himself says the bio-weapon thing was just a hypothesis[1].) [1] https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126 https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126
- anoraca 7y ago
  His "banging of the drums" was literally spreading conspiracy theories. I think that it is fair to criticize him for unscientific fear mongering. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronavirus-tom-cotton-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
- neycoda 7y ago
  Is this about whether Republican s or Democrats are better, or about how our politicians dropped the ball and the top one stayed in denial the longest?
InfiniteBeing 7y ago
Democrats were upset about Trump's travel restrictions. The epicenter in the United States in in New York. This is what was happening in NY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uNKatrJgw&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uNKatrJgw&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyNXZ8v8sY&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyNXZ8v8sY&feature=emb_logo
nswest23 7y ago
I watched that video and no one on the left was making a joke of the coronavirus. They were all stating that the flu is more dangerous which while being clearly a miscalculation, not the same as calling it a left wing hoax so save your moral equivalence for another day.

crusso 7y ago

however one political quarter stayed in denial much longer Now you're splitting hairs. You know who the first politician in the USA who was banging the drums in alarm about Wuhan and the coronavirus? Tom Cotton. Republican Senator. Do you support him now? Does his early conviction of the severity of this event put you behind him and everyone who echoed his concerns? Are you likewise now opposed to the people who were ridiculing him as a conspiracy theorist and fear-monger?

javagram 7y ago
Tom Cotton was one of the people who were on this and warning of it early. So was Steve Bannon. There are others. Just because someone has an R by their name doesn’t mean they’re a homogeneous blob. I think that’s great, I don’t agree with all their politics but they didn’t let themselves be blinded by optimism and looked at what was actually going on here. And the theory that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab where they were studying bat coronaviruses always seemed credible to me (Reminder, the 1977 flu likely escaped from a Russian or Chinese lab but this was never admitted either). The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought (Hannity, etc.) Edit: again, he was calling it “their new hoax” so you really can’t deny that he was behind on this one :-)
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  "The political quarter that was in denial was mainly the POTUS and those who simply follow whatever the POTUS is doing without independent thought" How did you come to that conclusion? What about the Democrats in New York, which is the epicenter of the virus outbreak right now (certainly the US and probably the world)? I remember hearing someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close.
  - alpha_squared 7y ago
    > ...someone on TV (probably DeBlasio or Cuomo) saying that public schools were not going to close. This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. Without those programs, many students have little to eat at home. It's a little disingenuous to represent it in another light. If anything, it highlights yet another weakness in our society.
    - JPKab 7y ago
      The weakness is that those kids are still being raised by losers who can't bother to feed their offspring. Food is dirt cheap. Grew up in poor schools with mostly free lunch recipients. Parents were mostly shit bags who spent money on typical crap you'd expect. The idea that it's anything more structural than culturally dysfunctional idiots not investing time in cooking for their kids because it's less work to let the school do it is wishful thinking.
    - jeffdavis 7y ago
      Yes, of course they had reasons. It's not obvious what to do in a disaster. But did people die because of that decision? Probably. Maybe a lot. Tough calls. It comes down to who made those tough calls earlier. And that's not a partisan thing, or a smart/dumb thing. Plenty of bad decisions to go around, but we probably shouldn't lay the blame to thick anywhere. Because it's chaos and people are adapting and changing in real time. Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people and he has to shut down the state to slow down the virus. I guarantee he's going to be a different person in 12 months.
jsnk 7y ago
I'm glad you brought Tom Cotton up here. He was one of the few individuals who was able to ask the right questions at the right time. And yet, when he did that, all kinds of mainstream media including WaPo came out saying he was repeating a "coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked". https://archive.vn/TG8zN#selection-999.29-999.84 https://archive.vn/TG8zN#selection-999.29-999.84 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronavirus-tom-cotton-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru... https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/ https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/ https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/483354-sen-cotton-repeats-coronavirus-origins-conspiracy-theory https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/483354-sen-cotton-repeat... https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/republican-senator-tom-cotton-regurgitating-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/republican-senat... https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/tom-cotton-coronavirus/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/tom-cotton-coronavir... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-cotton-coronavirus-china_n_5e34a3b7c5b6f26233294378 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-cotton-coronavirus-china_... https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theories-claim-new-coronavirus-was-bioengineered/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theori... Now WaPo seems to be admitting that we should at least consider the possibility that the virus may have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://archive.vn/UP6dx#selection-1801.148-1801.176 https://archive.vn/UP6dx#selection-1801.148-1801.176
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  Your last link seems broken, but here's another: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-did-covid-19-begin-its-initial-origin-story-is-shaky/2020/04/02/1475d488-7521-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-...
- nl 7y ago
  The theories which are explored in the Washington Post article (around the idea that someone Wuhan Institute of Virology might have been accidentally infected with the virus while studying bats) are completely different to the claim the it's an engineered bio-weapon that came from those labs. (To be clear, Tom Cotton himself says the bio-weapon thing was just a hypothesis[1].) [1] https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126 https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126
anoraca 7y ago
His "banging of the drums" was literally spreading conspiracy theories. I think that it is fair to criticize him for unscientific fear mongering. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronavirus-tom-cotton-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
neycoda 7y ago
Is this about whether Republican s or Democrats are better, or about how our politicians dropped the ball and the top one stayed in denial the longest?

InfiniteBeing 7y ago

Democrats were upset about Trump's travel restrictions. The epicenter in the United States in in New York. This is what was happening in NY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uNKatrJgw&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_uNKatrJgw&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyNXZ8v8sY&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emyNXZ8v8sY&feature=emb_logo

nswest23 7y ago

I watched that video and no one on the left was making a joke of the coronavirus. They were all stating that the flu is more dangerous which while being clearly a miscalculation, not the same as calling it a left wing hoax so save your moral equivalence for another day.