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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

by 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.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people “The next minute” is off by something more than 6 orders of magnitude. You kind of skipped over ~4.2 million minutes he spent as Lieutenant Governor between those jobs.
        jeffdavis 7y ago
        Wow. Time flies when I'm paying attention to other stuff ;-)
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. California schools pretty much immediately set up daily meal pickup when they closed (often, for anyone under 18 at any school site.) And this was already happening when they said that.
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?

by crusso 7y ago

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.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Look at someone like Newsom. One minute he's the mayor of SF, the next he's the governor of 40M people “The next minute” is off by something more than 6 orders of magnitude. You kind of skipped over ~4.2 million minutes he spent as Lieutenant Governor between those jobs.
      - jeffdavis 7y ago
        Wow. Time flies when I'm paying attention to other stuff ;-)
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > This was specifically because many of those students would go hungry since they rely on food programs at school. California schools pretty much immediately set up daily meal pickup when they closed (often, for anyone under 18 at any school site.) And this was already happening when they said that.

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?