.... if the Covid-19 takes off, 6 dead in Washington State right now, then I predict that they will shut down, in November, polling booths in jurisdictions that may be at risk of voting blue. Public safety don't you know. Sigh.

Renoir 1939 commenting on the The Rules of the Game – a film about a society riddled with lies and death - France just before the German invasion. It resonated with me. The film was a huge flop cause it was so close to the truth as people stared down the barrel of nazi bollocks.

These Trumpists are dancing on the edge of the volcanic indeed, and shit is about to erupt.

"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security ...To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted. Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) ... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. " German professor after World War II describing the rise of Nazism to a journalist

I see history happening... Bit like putting a frog in cold water and heating it up. By the time it realises it is cooking it is too late to escape. November could not have bigger ramifications. If people are not noticing with sufficiency just how wrong the administration is, how off it is, how unbalanced he is I don't think it an exaggeration to say American democracy is at risk. We can only learn from history if we allow ourselves to, and those authoritarian christian nationalists that have staged such an outrageous coup at the very top of the three branches are certain in their strategies of reselling a narrative to a gaslit nation to boil that fucking frog...

[link:https://www.indy100.com/article/greta-thunberg-cartoon-rape-x-site-canada-oil-energy-company-9369046|]

What grown arsed man would think that this was OK? And not just the wanker that produced this, but anyone who put it on their hardhat etc...

[link:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-drops-out.html|]

The field needs to narrow but this sucks. We are going to end up with old male and stale....

One of the many yuge flaws in right-wing thinking is that they believe they can control and manipulate countries and peoples through markets and profit-making enterprise, all the while ignoring the need for investments in basic societal infrastructures for the health and safety of their peoples. And then something like Covid-19 comes along and the smoke and mirrors at the heart of their philosophy is shown up for how shoddy and fragile it is. A bunch of market and political leaders losing their minds because their carefully constructed commerce at the heart of everything world is fundamentally threatened, because the markets know that the people who rule us are not capable of managing this outbreak in a way that is not going to lead to a pandemic.

Is it any surprise Trump is denial about all of this? He literally does not have a clue what to do. His entire spoilt, bratty, white male privileged life has been about bullying and threatening and whining until he gets his own way and, now, he is encountering an enemy that cannot be corrupted or compromised, it cannot be smeared or sued or cowed and as someone commented on another thread yesterday, you cannot gaslight a pandemic, the pandemic does not care – and it is very worrying that Trump is trying to do this very thing… Media making shit up to make him look bad - Democrats colluding with the rest of the world in a planned hoax… If he cannot get serious about this then he needs to step aside and put some actual bloody experts in charge, because the catastrophe is not that he will fail, it is that his failure in this is life threatening, and he will potentially take so many down with him.

Just as you think it can't get anymore awful - they surprise you yet again...

How very Trumpian... put a fucking idiot in charge.
Announcement of a prayer circle in 3...2...1...

This will be his entire strategy


After all anything else would be federal intervention on a persons own health choices, were suggesting self isolation and popping to the doctors is not financially viable for the vast majority of those most at risk...

…a President's main concern with a pandemic that has the capacity to literally kill many people, particularly those from our most vulnerable communities, being principally about the performance of the stock market would be considered more than a tad objectionable…

Just yet another example of how he has tainted the dialogue to such an extent that this is pretty much now considered situation normal.

...speaking for myself I get somewhat obsessed with the ridiculous wankers that rule us and with the idiots that cannot see through them, that it is easy to forget when the chips are down, most people are good people... not the Nazis, obvs