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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29974 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Yeah I'm actually with you on this. This could be a good learning opportunity for the general public- they need to realize that the president is just one man and a human being, not some superhero working 24/7 who personally runs the entire government by himself.

That is one of the reasons I wanted Donald Trump to be president in the 2016 election. I wanted to see if the government would keep running if a person with no political experience occupied the White House.

An analogy to which I often compared it was the TV show "LOST". There is a character named Desmond who lives alone in a bunker with a computer terminal. He believes it is his job to type a specific sequence of numbers into the computer every 108 minutes or else the world will be destroyed. Quoting from the LOST wiki:

Occupants of the Swan station followed a protocol in which they typed a sequence into a computer every 108 minutes. Typing these numbers and pressing "execute" (a.k.a. pushing the button) on the keyboard discharged an electromagnetic buildup, continually averting worldwide catastrophe.

My fear about Donald Trump becoming president was that there would be some kind of highly technical task which the president was obligated to perform—analogous to typing a specific sequence of numbers into a computer terminal every 108 minutes—but which could only be figured out by somebody who had held another political office or who had graduated from Harvard Law School or Yale Law School.

When Donald Trump became president, his lack of political experience and legal knowledge did inhibit him from certain things. He signed executive orders that were dead-on-arrival because he failed to write them in a lawyerly fashion with t's crossed and i's dotted. Some of his appointments and nominations were hamstrung by procedural errors. But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST, which I consider to be a positive endorsement of the idea that random civilians with no political experience can become president.

But the world did not literally end because he typed the wrong number into a computer terminal like in LOST

As president, Trump literally fired the guy whose job that was and we did have a worldwide catastrophe.

  • -11

As someone who has gone into the weeds on this, I do not think you want to start getting into the origination of COVID, Peter Daszak and the ecohealth alliance et al. There aren't any wins for progressive politics in that direction.

I know far more than I'd like about the lab leak conspiracy nonsense. But it's also not actually relevant: whether the virus came from the market or the lab, the US position in the Chinese CDC is about the cover-up afterward.

Remember we only got the sequence used to make the vaccines because an Australian scientist, Eddie Holmes, had a personal connection with a Chinese scientist and convinced them to defy the Chinese government to release the sequence (interview with Eddie Holmes about that). Having people in the Chinese CDC is to have enough visibility in what's going on there so they won't cover things up / have those personal connections so they won't. With those connections, we wouldn't have needed that Chinese scientist being willing to light their career on fire to get that information. And would have known about the outbreak sooner.

So we had one less guy to call us racist for pointing out something odd was going on in Wuhan?

I rated this "Bad" on the volunteer page; I actually agree with your point, but zingers are not how you have productive debate. You could have raised this point less obnoxiously.

Damn, had a pretty good warning-free run, but some things are too hard to resist.

@token_progressive, apologies, I was out of line.

All good points, though it certainly seemed like Trump couldn't get his agenda done. He was good at talking politics but not really at the details of enacting policy. Of course, not wanting your President to do anything is a valid desire I think.

OTOH, though, Biden has gotten a lot of important agenda items done.

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