Doug's Darkworld

My chosen post title. As in we live in interesting times. Sigh. A distant relative just died of Covid-19. Starting to hit close to home. I never even met him, but was saddened beyond words. Every time someone dies humanity’s light shines a little less, and senseless deaths even more so. And mark my words, Covid-19 deaths are senseless, if we were an intelligent species outbreaks like this would be both rare and quickly shut down. Instead the planet is run by competing armed gangs more concerned with turf control and protecting the assets of the rich and powerful than the welfare of humans. Granted some are much better than others.

So much is happening so fast that these posts often are outdated before I publish, but I will soldier on. Always interesting and informatives links to share, though those can get outdated quickly too. More Americans have now died of Covid-19 than died in the Korean War. And we’ll pass the Vietnam War easily this week. Various points, after which I will review Monday’s White House briefing.

No, deaths are not being inflated by leftist health care workers. Shades of nonexistent voter fraud. Fox News and the White House are promoting this nonsense. I’d say it’s silly, but alas the right has spent decades priming people to believe “libtards” are nefarious creatures bent on destroying America, so it’s easy to come up with crap like this, and lots of people will believe. Also this is another horrible insult to the health care workers, but that’s the White House for you, insults substituting for rational leadership. If anything, the death toll is undercounted.

The big news today is people demonstrating to reopen various state economies. So I’ll just cover that. I guess encouraged by Trump, a bunch of Red States are gonna relax their quarantines. See above image. Yes, fringe groups are claiming that Covid-19 quarantines are infringing on our  freedom, curtailing our rights, and basically (yes, the claim has been made) are Nazi power grabs. Trump is encouraging them, he very much wants to get the economy going again. His re-election kinda depends on it.

I did try to watch Trump today, but after ten minutes of lies and bragging, I couldn’t take it anymore. He does have good writers, they carefully frame the “facts” in such a way to sound good. So Trump can sound off about how great everything is, and the press and the Dems are just lying about everything to make him look bad. If everything was great, no problem. I don’t think everything is great …

So only a few points. People claiming their rights are being curtailed by quarantine orders are, well, how to put it, full of shit? There’s no such thing as an unfettered right, all rights are things you are free to do if they don’t harm other citizens. Or more on point, the Supreme Court, you know, the actual fucking arbriter of rights in our constitutional republic, has repeatedly ruled that things like quarantine orders are constitutional. It’s not even debatable. Ordering people to stay home to prevent spreading a deadly disease is what governments are for, for God’s.

Well, we’ll see. Trump pretending Covid-19 was no big deal made the USA the world’s number one epicenter of Covid-19, and abandoning social distancing prematurely will likely have similar results. The only way to open up safely is to have massive programs in place to test people, and trace their contacts if they are infected. And the USA is nowhere near that, despite Trump’s cherry picked claims to the contrary.

So yeah, the shit show that is Trump’s America under Covid-19 is about to get worse. I’m seeing extreme stuff coming from all quarters. “They want to abandon social distancing, let em. Darwin will rule.” I’d be happy for a miracle now, but in real life that ain’t gonna happen. If there’s a God, it’s pretty clear it gave us the brains and resources to make Earth into a paradise. And if we chose not to, it’s our problem. “You break it, you bought it” is God’s number one rule.

Disjointed post. Things are changing at a speed unprecedented in my lifetime. Trying to make sense of it all. Current thinking: “Reality trumps ideology.” We’ll see whose ideology makes the grade. I don’t think any of them will. Things are not ever going back to normal, because normal was an exploitive crapfest. That the world economy collapsed because of an utterly predictable and preventable event shows it was a horribly flawed economy.

Wow, we may be witnessing a whole new era in human history. The next few months are going to be interesting. See post title. Freaking A. Stay safe, stay healthy. Shares and comments appreciated. #StaytheFuckHome.

Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.

(Image: A tweet. Credit: Public Domain.)