> It's the fault of the American people for voting these morons into office.
Eh, not so much. Americans are forced to express their complex ideas and preferences through a system that consists of a handful of essentially binary choices. And most voters probably don't even strongly approve of any of the choices they're given.
Speaking as an American, I'm aware. But the morons wrt this particular crisis...are universally from one of those two choices. You can certainly find fault with the other choice, but they don't nearly have the "ignore facts, ignore what anyone other than I tell you, ignore even the evidence of your own eyes" message.
I totally hear you, but elections aren't just about selecting leaders with competence and honesty. They're also about expressing preferences on moral issues, too. A lot of voters are willing to set aside the former and vote on the latter, because in their minds, they aren't given the choice to do both. I also think that lack of choice has a really corrosive effect on voters who find themselves in that situation.
And us? What is this lesson teaching us that we didn't already know?
Yes, we have to deal with the consequences of their idiocy. I fail to see how our agency, given we aren't voting for these clowns, is contributing to the problem.
Bluntly, your "us or them", your (or at least your candidate's) "they're a basket of deplorables"... yeah, you're contributing to the problem.
What this should be teaching you is to not write off people that you don't agree with. They're still human beings. They're still Americans. You think they're wrong, and that's fine, but regarding them with contempt does not make it easier to persuade them to agree with you.
You may say that the contempt originated with them. You may be right. But be better than them, not just like them.
You don't have to strongly approve of a candidate to vote for them to be president. And if you don't, then you can't be too surprised with the racist, bigoted, incompetent holder of the office.
We can demurr about the complexities of the Republican primaries in 2016 but the depressing take here is simply that people preferred racist and bigoted over competent.
If it's the fault of anyone, it's the fault of decades of clever sociopaths realizing that humans will swallow simple lies more easily than complex truths, and exploiting the trait to gain power.
That's a complex truth, and I don't like it either.
> Trump lost the popular vote, but got over 80 more electoral college votes.
Yes, and I'm as vehemently anti-Trump as they come, especially lately, but let's be real - that's the system by which the people vote these morons into office, and always has been. The popular vote has never mattered, except rhetorically.
Is this going to be the season when Americans actually care enough to change it? Probably not.
Every week I am surprised at seeing the support Trump STILL has. FFS, his approval rating is going up! Who in their right mind still approves of this moron and his handling of this crisis. Oh yeah, the old boomers STILL running around in MAGA hats. Some American people obviously voted for these morons in office and I still can't believe it. Lying , cheating, scamming, and quid pro quo wasn't enough to impeach a sitting president, and shows there is no justice left for the rich and powerful.
Don't you know? The coronavirus is a "hoax." It's perpetrated by the libs. /s
Of course the people who would believe something like that would still vote for this moron. They are not exactly intellectually gifted themselves. Nor do they have values or principles to speak of, choosing to elect someone who is likely a serial rapist, among other crimes, as president.
This, so much. The root of all of these issues is a drastic overestimation of the average persons cognitive ability. To use IQ as a proxy, the mean (100) is shockingly incompetent and to paraphrase a famous comedian, half of us are below that average.
There was a time when merit tended to bubble up into positions of authority but that has been increasingly untrue for decades, for a host of reasons that all point to a rotting western culture.
> There was a time when merit tended to bubble up into positions of authority but that has been increasingly untrue for decades, for a host of reasons that all point to a rotting western culture.
Before diversity and inclusion drives skewed hiring toward genitals and skin color as opposed to merit.
Before we started throwing billions of dollars at our worst performers, and lowering standards across all school districts, in a failed attempt to bring our lowest up, at the measurable cost of bringing our top performers down.
What proportion of the population do you think actually contributes to the progression of society? Scientists, engineers, competent politicians, doctors, policymakers...maybe the top 10% are capable of being and carrying out the orders of visionaries? In the West we've gradually reallocated our resources towards the needy, and now we reap the reward of decades of neglect for our top performers as we graduate 18 year old "adults" who are barely equipped to even live alone. Not to mention how pitifully we are outcompeted on the world stage - have you been to a college career fair lately? It says something about our society that the majority of students, at top tier schools, are foreigners.
This is what happens when "nationalism" and "individualism" are turned into dirty words by decades of propaganda. Either this war on corona turns things around and brings us out desperately needed Pattons and Churchills, or this truly is the beginning of the end of the American Empire.
I'm sorry but the people who most complain about diversity and inclusion being the downfall of our civilization have not exactly been shown to be the brightest minds in this whole thing.
I don't see top performers being actually concerned by this at all. On the contrary, top performers seem to be fairly concerned about how traditionally exclusionary measures have impeded a lot of talent from being developed.
>I'm sorry but the people who most complain about diversity and inclusion being the downfall of our civilization have not exactly been shown to be the brightest minds in this whole thing.
That's because one side is taboo and culturally suppressed. This thread may get me banned from HN, for example.
But by definition the push for diversity, which started in academia, bled into government, and has most recently been taking over the corporate world, selects for characteristics (race and gender) which are not correlated with merit.
Ignoring the fact that the entire idea rests on an unsupportable basis (a conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of representation/outcome), it's a theoretical mechanism by which we can explain the decline of performance across every corporate, political, and academic sector. We spend more per capital on school children than any other country in the world, by the way, so it isn't a question of funding. And the issues seem to exist in all states, regardless of government party, so it isn't likely a strictly political issue.
Clearly there is some deep cultural problem at hand and the people making policy have been leaning left for years in all sectors. Including media outside of Fox news. It fits.
No, it's because you're creating conspirative BS that is so far out of reality it's not even worth considering.
In 15 years of being in the workforce I have never seen any diversity initiative having so much as a modest effect on people taking classes or employment.
You are probably going to get banned because this a racist tirade from an ignoranimus who clearly has no real life experience in neither academia nor industry. It's stupid, delirious, and forgettable.
>In 15 years of being in the workforce I have never seen any diversity initiative having so much as a modest effect on people taking classes or employment
Well, start here [1].
>this a racist tirade from an ignoranimus who clearly has no real life experience in neither academia nor industry. It's stupid, delirious, and forgettable.
You are throwing a lot of vitriol my way but not discussing any of my points. Though it should not be relevant, I am not white. And I am the son of immigrants. There is no need to make this personal.
The entire position between diversity and inclusion is inconsistent. The claim is that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams - this implies that diverse people's perform differently. If they perform differently, why should we expect them to be equally represented in merit based roles?
That's not my point at all. And it is a myopic conclusion to draw from my comments. Unfortunately in our society we have been conditioned to expect a singular outcome from any such discussion and immediately avoid it on grounds of offensiveness.
The point is that here you literally have a mechanism which is explicitly prioritizing traits which have nothing to do with merit. Regardless of whether our other metrics are appropriate, it is by definition clear that with this system you will inevitably dilute competence -
Incidentally this is a source of political bias in academia; you get your way if you can convince a generation or two that that having people with different skin colors working together is somehow going to improve the quality of science that you practice.
No, it is absolutely the point, unless you believe that the skill for CEOs was fairly distributed in its proportion of old, white men, or if you feel that whites and Asians objectively make for better engineers, or if you think that blacks make for better jazz musicians.
Drop this ridiculous rationalization of racism and sexism.
>or if you think that blacks make for better jazz musicians.
But it isn't racist to suggest that they may be better sports players, right?
Look, none of what I'm saying justifies discrimination against individuals, because we are still dealing with probabilistic distributions. What it does suggest is that inequality of outcome can be explained without resorting to racism and sexism. Further it suggests that our goals of gender and racial parity in industry cannot occur without some penalty to merit, which may be worse for society.
> Further it suggests that our goals of gender and racial parity in industry cannot occur without some penalty to merit, which may be worse for society.
Sure, now go out and prove that that's actually what happened and that the penalty is worse than the benefit of elevating of people who used to have no status to even play the game.
There's some blame to go around, but I put most of it on the CCP. Their early coverup and subsequent actions have contributed the most to making this situation as bad as it is. They arrested doctors[0] and continue to lie about their case totals[1].
This is a dangerous attitude. Yes, leaders should be held accountable, and also people need to take responsibility for themselves and their communities by working together and rejecting poor leaders.
Placing all of the blame on others is how you end up with poor leaders in the first place as you follow people who share that same trait.
South Korea and the US had the first reported case of corona on the same day. Both countries took polar opposite approaches. What’s most optimistic timeline for US to get handle on the covid to lift shelter in place rules? At least two months?
Without a nationwide plan, we won't be able to control the virus. Localized responses is good at controlling hot spots. We need to put out all hot spots at once which requires a federal plan and more testing to control the virus.
I don't think that is entirely fair. They are operating on what they know at the time, maybe underestimating themselves. Situation is constantly evolving.
Then they speak with that level of confidence. "This is what we believe, but it's not confirmed", "There's a high level of variability and unknowns here".
Instead Trump and cohorts are speaking in horribly over-optimistic platitudes that are based on his _hopes_, not his knowledge - and he doesn't have the oratory nuance to make one sound different to the other.
We're constantly lied to. It's not the fault of the people in America. It's the fault of those in charge.