DocWatts

Does spreading misinformation that may directly lead to deaths count as Free Speech? If tons of people are misinformed about basic safety procedures during a pandemic due to the toxic disinformation from some of the people Joe gives a platform to on his podcast, and you end up catching Covid from one of them, does another person's 'freedom' to spread toxic misinformation end up impinging on your rights? 'Free Speech' isn't always a black and white issue, it has to be weighed against other social goods such as Public Safety.

The US is ______________. I'd argue dysfunctional (or developmentally imbalanced) would be a better word to put in there than Center-Left or Center-Right, since where a place is along the Left/Right spectrum is always going to be perspectival to some degree. The issue is that the US is a large and diverse country with regions that are both very Progressive and others that are still quite Conservative. Our Federal Government is dysfunctional in the way that it fails to proportionally represent this diverse range of interests, due to the continued existence of antiquated Institutions such as the Electoral College and the make up of the Senate, both of which give an outsized voice to rural (ie Conservative) regions within the US.

We can thank the ingenuity of scientists for managing to come up with a vaccine within a year, rather than anything Trump did. Trump and the Republican should not be credited when they are diametrically opposed to investments in Public Health and Scientific Research; the Covid vaccine exists in spite of Trump's administration, not because of it. The fact that he didn't have a game plan for what to do once vaccines became available is just one more point which goes to show how negligent his administration was during a National Emergency.

Trump's entire modus oprandi was to defund and dismantle the state, including Public Health and Safety measures. Him not having a plan in place to distribute vaccines is consistent with withdrawing from the WHO, underfunding and dismantling public health measures, and attempting to shift blame onto the governors rather than taking an active leadership role during a national emergency.

The claim that scientists told people not to wear masks is something that circulated in the Conspiracy Theory community as a Bad Faith effort to discredit epidemiologists such as Dr. Fauci and to absolve Trump's culpability for his failure to adopt measures to address the pandemic. These are literally the same tactics that Bad Faith actors use to discredit climate change; they cherry pick any minor qualified reservation they can find and conflate that to try and discredit the entire scientific establishment. Democratic states tend to be much more urbanized and thus have higher population densities than the largely rural Republican states, which is why they were hit harder in the initial stages of the pandemic. States that adopted mask mandates and stay at home orders were more successful in containing the spread of new cases. This is the same kind of idiocy as when you hear Right Wingers say that systemic racism doesn't exist because of 'black on black crime'; it's a Bad Faith oversimplification that intentionally disregards the underlying context surrounding the issue. Trump not having a plan to distribute vaccines was from Biden's transition team, who were left holding the flaming garbage bag that Trump left them. His 'plan' was to leave the States to figure it out, without any coordinated help or action from the Federal Government. https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN29T0FY

Both the US and the UK were lead by right wing Populists with similar ideologies who ignored the advice of scientists and downplayed the pandemic, so no surprise both countries had similar outcomes as a result of thier negligent leadership. Perhaps someone more familiar with Spain and Italy could chime in, but I do know that both countries have a higher proportion than the US does of an aging populations that's at unique risk for Covid. Belgium has a much more urbanized population than the US (Belgium is the 7th most urbanized country in the world, right behind Qatar and Hong Kong; the US is 36th, right ahead of Canada). That said, I'll grant that the US isn't the only country that shit the bed when the pandemic hit, but that doesn't absolve Trump for things he easily could have done to prevent over a hundred thousand preventable deaths (just listen to the damn scientists, tell his legions of Cult like followers to wear a mask, stop pushing austerity measures to dismantle Health and Public Safety Services while in the middle of a pandemic, etc). Add to that Trump had literally no plan whatsoever to distribute vaccines to people, as Biden's transition team was shocked to find out.

Yeah and they managed it far better than the US, which had more Covid deaths than any other country; more than China and India each of which have more than a billion people. Had the Trump administration done at least a somewhat competent job of handing Covid, rather than downplaying and denying the pandemic for political reasons, hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been prevented. In our legal system we have a concept called criminal negligence, and if it doesn't apply to this case it doesn't apply anywhere.

Fair enough; my point was that the Scandinavian Social Democracies are further than anyone else towards the kind of social progress and socio-economic stability to make the first baby steps towards Yellow value memes even feasible. That said, even the Scandinavian Social democracies aren't immune from the problems that democracies in the world are facing. If anything I could see this getting worse with the instability that Climate Change will bring with it over the upcoming century.

In a more sane world Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema would have a home in the Republican Party, and would be broadly representative of what a functional Republican Party might look like; conservative, yes, but not only in it to loot the country by dismantling the State. Way things are, what we really have is one relatively functional political party, and one party whose entire reason for existence is to enrich themselves by dismantling the state and undermining electoral democracy. Not a fan of Joe Manchin, but let's not draw false equivalencies between him and crypto-fascist Republicans.

Also agreed. Seems like it's easy to fall into the trap of demonizing Western Medicine (and taking all of its advancements completely for granted), when finding ways to Integrate Western Medicine and Holistic Practices seems like the obvious path forward.

Bringing up the deadly consequences of Trump's terrible domestic policy when someone tries to claim that Trump somehow holds a moral high ground for not killing a bunch of people is completely relevant. Whataboutism would be if I brought up Trump in response to a critique of Biden or Obama for instance. Let's not abuse the term here If someone tried to argue that Hitler was great for Germany because of the economic benefits of the autobahn without addressing World War II or the Holocaust, you'd be completely right for calling them out for neglecting some obvious things, eh?

Maybe a better way of saying it is that western medicine is in the relative dark ages when future people look back on this era in a century. Compared to the medicine from the actual Dark Ages we're living in a relative Utopia, as attested by the fact that when you have surgery five burly men don't have to hold you down because anesthetics weren't a thing yet. Dark Ages and Utopias are a matter of perspective.

A recent study found that around %40 of Covid deaths in the US could have been prevented if Trump had an even reasonably competent response to the pandemic. Even were the claim that Trump didn't start any new wars actually true, he still somehow managed to kill more Americans with his domestic policies than America has lost in any of its wars, with the only exceptions being WWII and The Civil War. Quite an accomplishment really, as it takes an aggressive level of incompetence and negligence to rack up hundreds of thousands of deaths through means other than a war.

Yellow seems like the next step for the Scandinavian Social Democracies, rather than a country like the US that's still arguing whether or not Health Care should be a Right. Yellow should try checking back in another 50 or 80 years when the US has gotten its shit together, and some of the limitations of Green Social Democracy start to become apparent.

It's my understanding that in there may be a small reduction in the number of low wage jobs, but this is more than offset by increased wages for people making less than the median wage (ie almost half of the country, the median wage here being only about $16/hour), and also by the number of people lifted out of poverty by an increase to the minimum wage.

Here's a Vox article outlining what's likely the final version of the Covid relief Bill: https://www.vox.com/2021/3/5/22315614/covid-19-stimulus-bill-economic-relief-coronavirus-pandemic Tldr; $1,400 stimulus checks $300-a-week boost to unemployment insurance A boost to the child tax credit $170 billion towards helping schools re-open $350 billion to State Governments Tax Subsidies for Individuals purchasing Health Care through the Affordable Care Act Tens of billions for Public Health directly related to Covid 19 Not Included: $15 federal minimum wage ____________________________________

Kind of comes with the territory when you've elected yourself President for Life. Is that a good tradeoff in exchange for no accountability or oversight, and treating the State as your own personal bank account? Politicians with a backbone can exist within a democratic framework, look to Bernie or AOC for people willing to speak in straightforward way with Conviction about a range of issues.

@Danioover9000 There are indeed multiple types of Biases; diving in to all of them would be difficult to do with any brevity. Confirmation Bias is part of a broader set of Psychological Biases which influence our thoughts and beliefs. This Infographic on this site does a decent job at outlining fifty of the more common Cognitive Biases that are out there (though of course some of these are more common than others, and of course they differ in how benign or malignant they are in practice). https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-cognitive-biases-in-the-modern-world/

Problem is that people over here do question media, but do it on the most surface level and unhealthy way imaginable; they'll be almost completely uncritical of Information Sources that reinforce thier existing Biases, while picking apart Information Sources that don't conform to thier Worldview in a very un-nuanced way. And obviously Americans don't have a monopoly on this sort of thing, as its an expected part of human psychology, but the problem tends to be worse here because almost nothing has been done to educate people on Media Literacy in landscape where sensationalist Media is so pervasive in people's day to day lives. Quite the contrary in fact, since it leaves room for Bad Actors to come in and manipulate this state of affairs to thier advantage (Fox News, Trump, Conspiracy Peddlers, take your pick).

As an American I can confirm that our dysfunctional education system over here does not teach media literacy, and as a Culture it's something that the majority of the populace is deeply ignorant about. No one teaches you any of this unless you go out of your way to seek it out. So I'm not sure that it's fair to shift the burden of responsibility here on to ordinary people, when society hasn't given them the tools to discern truth from falsehood, how to tell if an information source is biased, etc. A lot of, well let's call them Epistemologically Challenged and Media Illiterate people over here. That being the case, it makes more sense to me to hold people with millions of followers who spread disinformation accountable rather than victim blaming epistemologically and media illiterate people.

Also the fact that it costs money to be able to work is something that's overlooked by people who've never had any experience with Poverty; just try applying to a job without being able to provide a Home Address or a Phone Number, and see how far that gets you. That's of course leaving aside Costs like Transportation and Child Care. Saying that someone is too poor to be able to work sounds like hyperbole or a joke, but sadly it's absolutely true in countries lacking basic support structures for people (such as the United States). UBI would go a long way towards addressing this, and far from deincentivizing work, it would give many people the financial resources to actually be able to begin participating in the Labor Market.

I've read other studies about UBI trial runs (such as the one they did in Ontario), which concluded that it had very little effect on people's willingness to work. If I remember offhand, the only groups where it had a notable impact were for full time students, and for mothers with young children (where arguably its completely understandable why both would prefer to work less hours if given the choice). Most UBI proposals I've seen have incomes of anywhere from $500 to $1200 a month, which is a significant boost for people already working a normal job, yet not nearly enough to live comfortably off from on its own. If anything, I see UBI incentivizing more people to work because of the improvements it brings to the Labor Market, in that it gives workers more leverage to negotiate from (ie not having to accept the first crappy job offer available due to financial desperation).

The guy wasn't running as a peace Candidate, so I'm not sure why anyone is surprised that Biden's continuing down the same tired path of military interventionism as literally all of his predecessors for decades. The last President who made a serious effort to break from the National Security State was probably Jimmy Carter back in the seventies, and even he wasn't entirely successful. Sadly I don't see this problem being addressed in a substantive way until we have a much more Democratic form of government, and Nationalist political platforms don't appeal to enough people to win national elections. No way this is getting solved when the Military Industrial Complex is a defacto jobs program for much of the country.

Makes sense. And just because nuclear may not be the lynchpin of an energy policy for combating climate change doesn't mean it can't still be incredibly useful in other areas. The nuclear reactor aboard the Voyager 2 space probe has been providing power to that device for something like five decades now, which should go without saying is an incredible feat of engineering.

A typical nuclear power plant takes something like 15 - 20 years to become profitable, and considering that these facilities cost billions of dollars to construct it's obviously a huge risk. From what I understand the reason that various places are turning away from nuclear has less to do with safety concerns, and more to do with the volatile economics behind nuclear energy. While nuclear power can be made safe, modernizing older facilities is prohibitively expensive, and several operational nuclear plants have chosen to shut down rather than eat the cost of updating thier facilities to meet more stringent safety standards. Considering all that, it'$ not hard to see why nuclear is at a disadvantage compared to other carbon neutral energy sources. While in theory nuclear energy has distinct advantages over both fossil fuels and renewables, that doesn't amount to much if economic realities put it at a severe disadvantage compared to renewables. In addition to economic concerns, the fact that uranium and thorium are nonrenewable (with estimations of available supplies lasting another one to two centuries) means that the best nuclear can hope for is to be a stopgap until the world transitions to renewables. All of which is to say that Nuclear energy something that sounds great in Theory (cheap and reliable carbon neutral energy!), but in practice Nuclear faces obstacles that make it less advantageous compared to other forms of energy production.