Is Kamala Harris a communist?

[Geronimo]

Is Donald Trump a fascist?

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/27/nx-s1-5091154/trump-arlington-cemetery

tackily attempting to flout law, decorum, local authority and decency to score cheap imagery for political points is diagnostic of fascist for you? Maybe the toadies shoving people is diagnostic of fascist?

[EPW]

Good summary, yes and yes.

[Lorizael]

Whoever wins, we lose. Like Aliens Vs. Predator but without cool fight scenes.

As long as Trump is running for president (which he will do until he dies), I just don't care about policy at the Federal level. When one candidate is so manifestly unfit for office, the details of this or that tax plan just don't matter. I sometimes vote for Republican candidates in state and local elections, but I won't at the Federal level. Until the RNC completely divorces itself from Trump, they can't be trusted near power.

[Elok]

Well, policy at the federal level cares about you--or me, at least. I finally had a real career with job skills. We were saving up to buy a house. So of course the real estate market overheated dramatically such that my new income meant nothing. And then post-covid inflation sent the cost of everything through the roof, thanks in part to the two idiots dumping free money on the country. So I got a really nice raise at work, which looked like I might be coming ahead ... and now HEY LET'S HAVE PRICE CONTROLS vs. MOAR TARIFFS and why must the Executive Branch actively try to make my life suck? I will be working till I"m seventy-five and die in a house I still don't own. So what if Trump's a stupid *******? He's too cowardly, shortsighted, and distractible to ever be an effective dictator. All I care about is which one sucks less, and unfortunately it's pretty much neck and neck.

[Lorizael]

So what if Trump's a stupid *******? He's too cowardly, shortsighted, and distractible to ever be an effective dictator.

Well, just off the top of my head, he put kids in cages and facilitated the stripping away of women's bodily autonomy and ****ed up the pandemic response so much that a million Americans died, so I'm really not all that concerned about how ineffective he is compared to elite level dictators like Hitler or Pol Pot. The material conditions of my life improved dramatically over the first ~3/4 of Trump's presidency (not because of anything he did...), but that's not what I was thinking about when I mailed in my ballot, because there were many millions of Americans (not to mention people around the world) whose lives were significantly worse almost directly because of him.

[DinoDoc]

My point was that "convicted felon" brings up a mental image of ... at a bare minimum somebody who defrauds innocent people of large chunks of money..

Trump has been found in court to have done this as well

[Elok]

Convict him of that and I will drop all verbal/written objection to the "convicted felon" title, though I can't promise not to roll my eyes or make a jerking-off motion behind the confidentiality of my keyboard.

[Elok]

The kids in cages I will absolutely grant you, though it appears from cursory googling that the cages in question were actually constructed, and used to hold detainees including minors, by the Obama administration. Trump's innovation was chiefly in deliberately separating them from parents, which is admittedly quite the dick move. Possibly there are still more layers but Trump is bad enough without being held to a separate moral standard from more gracious and telegenic presidents.

We're obviously not going to agree on Dobbs and the bungling of the response to COVID was a lot of people's fault. Trump initially pushed vaccines enthusiastically and got one himself, so he doesn't come off looking particularly bad in my book--this is the one example where his followers actually refused to obey him, en masse. At any rate, I do not believe President Hillary Clinton, or anyone else, would have meaningfully mitigated the death toll. We were always going to lose a lot of people. I should know, I saw 'em come in, old, fat, and unvaccinated, and go out in a box a week or two later. Admittedly that was only starting in late '21, firmly within the Biden administration, when people were continuing to die in droves. CDC says about 350K died in 2020.

[Lorizael]

Trump initially pushed vaccines enthusiastically and got one himself, so he doesn't come off looking particularly bad in my book--this is the one example where his followers actually refused to obey him, en masse.

Yes, the vaccine push was the one commendable thing about his covid response. But his downplaying of the severity of the initial epidemic, his muddying the waters about effective treatments (bleach, horse dewormer, etc.), his pulling back about vaccines when he realized it didn't play well with his base, and his dismissal and dismantling of the groups responsible for pandemic response beforehand were all very bad and led to a lot more people dying, and are absolutely not what virtually any other president, Republican or Democrat, would have done.

[Elok]

Had to google the last thing; it looks like some people left abruptly under murky circumstances and were not replaced until the actual emergence of COVID? He also tried to cut zoonotic disease funding, it says, but Congress thwarted him. In any case, unless the people who left would have been less idiotic than the CDC et al, all that is largely irrelevant; the death was pretty well baked into the cake by halfway through Trump's administration, by a climate of seething distrust and paranoia (which, to be fair, he cultivated, albeit in a general way). That paranoia was then exacerbated by a series of unforced errors, starting right out of the gate with claims about masks which the CDC themselves believed to be untrue; they were in fact true, anything short of an N-95 is silly health kabuki, but they believed otherwise and that did a great deal to poison the water. Then you had "church is unacceptable, but we will okay protests ten or twenty times as large for fear of being called racists,"* and vaccine mandates/cards (hello, right wing fever dreams!), and ... crikey, I can't remember it all, but there was just a lot of overbearing paternalism and double standards, and I don't see how Trump was responsible for any of that. He screwed up, many ways, but he was not the worst of the screwups, and nothing short of a virtuoso performance would have restored enough public trust to ensure near-universal vaccine compliance. Without that, yeah, bring out your dead.

*you could argue that the mass protests were in fact entirely different because they were outdoors, but the rationale given was that "racial justice is a kind of health," or something equally absurd.

[Lorizael]

I'm with you on the misguided paternalism of our various health institutions, but I disagree that just because multiple entities are to blame, we can't fairly place a lot of the blame on one particular blameworthy entity. And consider: much has been written about the failures of the American medical system during the pandemic. Whose appointees and civil servants are more likely to be aware of and receptive to those lessons--the ones who think the fake bioengineered China/Fauci virus was a scam that didn't actually kill anyone and was just an insidious plot to infect America with communism, or... the other ones?

[Elok]

AFAIC the single, large point of failure here was the undermining of public trust that made effective mass vaccination impractical. That failure was entirely bipartisan; it was a failure on the part of Red America for being paranoid, resentful asses, and a failure on the part of Blue America for doing essentially nothing to encourage their trust and a great deal to undermine it. The lesson to be learned has little to do with Covid itself and much more to do with the utter necessity of establishing and maintaining credibility; I have no idea who, if anyone, has learned it. The lab leak hypothesis now seems to be false, but it was never as incredible or fanciful as it was made out to be in the press, an American laboratory cooperating on gain-of-function research with a poorly-run Chinese operation was in fact deeply unwise even if this particular case was not their fault, and the rush to discredit it "because racism" was yet another unforced error.

[Lorizael]

Lab leak was probably a reasonable hypothesis for awhile, but I didn't pull the wild conspiracy version of it out of my ass for rhetorical points; there really are people in Trump's orbit (not just his followers, but the people buttering him up for positions in his administration) who believe or at least tacitly encourage the notion of a "plandemic." I really think more of the blame for the loss in trust in our institutions should go to the people who told us we shouldn't trust our institutions (possibly because of blood-drinking pedophile demons).

[Elok]

As opposed to the people in the administration who said, "no, that's not true, we're not lying to you," then applied immense pressure to social media companies to censor people who disagreed with them? The nutjobs probably would've gotten fewer listeners if the Biden administration hadn't chosen to act in the maximally suspicious way. Plenty of blame to go around. As to who's "more to blame," that probably depends on whether these people actually believe the things they type, or their reasons for believing if so, etc., and it just isn't a very interesting question for me. "But they're more at fault than we are, right?" is not actionable intelligence. It does not move us closer to solving the problem. It only justifies inaction by shifting the burden of effort onto the guiltier party. Not that I'm expecting you, Lorizael, to personally make a significant difference here, but it seems everybody's talking this way. If Covid has shown us that a breakdown in trust can be deadly--and it has--then the answer is to try to build trust, and there is no way to force people to trust you, or to change the way they think in general. Your own behavior is the only thing you have power over.

[Lorizael]

The nutjobs probably would've gotten fewer listeners if the Biden administration hadn't chosen to act in the maximally suspicious way.

It was early in the pandemic, in 2020, while Trump was in power, that the CDC and others lied to and/or misled us about masks and flattening the curve and what we can really expect from a vaccine. You might say the blame for that should go to career civil servants rather than Trump political appointees, but it certainly shouldn't go to the Biden administration.

Plenty of blame to go around. As to who's "more to blame," that probably depends on whether these people actually believe the things they type, or their reasons for believing if so, etc., and it just isn't a very interesting question for me. "But they're more at fault than we are, right?" is not actionable intelligence. It does not move us closer to solving the problem. It only justifies inaction by shifting the burden of effort onto the guiltier party. Not that I'm expecting you, Lorizael, to personally make a significant difference here, but it seems everybody's talking this way. If Covid has shown us that a breakdown in trust can be deadly--and it has--then the answer is to try to build trust, and there is no way to force people to trust you, or to change the way they think in general. Your own behavior is the only thing you have power over.

My point is that even setting aside all of Trump's odiousness and general unsuitably for office, Harris is still the better bet because of the kinds of people she's likely to appoint--people who genuinely care about the mission of whatever agency/department/etc. they're at, as opposed to people who are vocal about wanting to destroy the agency/department/etc. to rid it of communist tranny groomers.

[BeBMan]

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/27/nx-s1-5091154/trump-arlington-cemetery

The Army sez

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/aug/29/trump-kamala-harris-interview-poll-election-latest-updates?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-66d091f58f08f4abbe22c0b2#block-66d091f58f08f4abbe22c0b2