1. Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”

  2. Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that.

He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.

  1. Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that.

A fundraising banner from The Guardian, an indepedent British newspaper. The centerpiece is a serif block "For f****s sake", with the letters after the f sprayed over with "act '"

    • steel_nomad@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      All those down votes are what you get for trying to bring any logic and thought to the discourse. And we thought Lemmy would be better than Reddit, eh?

      • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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        1 hour ago

        It was to be expected. Downvotes simply mean people don’t like what I’m saying - not that it’s wrong. I say what I believe to be true even when I know it’s unpopular. I just can’t help but to call people out when they make generalized absolute statements like that. I don’t even like Trump but I also seem to be missing the gene or whatever that makes so many absolute lose their minds over him to the point they can’t even think straight anymore.

      • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world
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        2 hours ago

        The topic has been debated to death. There’s no logic, nor original thought here. Just more obstinate baiting for BS roundabout arguments that keep going in circles, and never engaged in good faith.

        I wish you people would grow TF up, but we all know you never will.

    • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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      11 hours ago

      The United States was actually well set-up to defend against pandemics. After the ebola scare, the Obama administration created a task force to effectively respond to future infectious diseases, and a plan was written up to guide the U.S. through a potential pandemic crisis situation.

      Purely out of pride, Trump disbanded the task force and scrapped all of the planning that was done during the Obama era, and then 2 years later was hit by the exact kind of situation the U.S. had planned for.

      I can’t guarantee that the U.S. would have avoided lockdowns, and the exact number of Americans killed by Trump’s decision will always be nebulous, but it’s very clear that his decisions before and during the COVID pandemic were harmful.

    • GeorgimusPrime@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      He deliberately downplayed the infectiousness of the virus very early stages, and then spread anti-vaccine misinformation afterwards. As the US is a major air transport hub for, this also led to casualties in countries where it would have been a non-event. Early restrictions and screening on flights from China, then subsequent following of Fauci’s recommendations would have made a huge difference.

    • nomous@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      He didn’t do shit except tell people not to wear a mask and to shine a light up their asses.

      Do you actually not remember 2020?

      • Glytch@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Don’t forget, he also told people to inject bleach and take dangerous doses of horse dewormer.

        • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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          54 minutes ago

          Except that he did not tell people to inject bleach. That’s misinformation.

          Also, calling ivermectin a “horse dewormer” is disingenuous and saying he has made claims about dosages is a lie. Yes, it was originally intented for veterinary use but it was approved for human use too in 1987. People used to buy the paste meant for animals to treat a skin condition because at the time that was the only way to get ivermectin without a perscription which doctors would refuse to write them. That’s where the horse dewormer narrative originates from. However, it’s a legitimate drug (though ineffective against COVID) and to claim otherwise is just partisan thinking not based in reality.

    • MonkRome@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      We had the most severe rate of COVID deaths in the world outside of Eastern Europe. That shouldn’t happen in the most powerful country in the world. We failed to do the things we needed to early on and created a culture of misinformation because our president decided to play politics in a crisis.

      Had we reacted as well as New Zealand, largely considered to have one of the better responses, we theoretically could have had 280k deaths instead of 1.2 million. (If we matched their death rate) Obviously population density and our countries complex system account for some of the difference in death rate, but it doesn’t account for the enormous gulf between us and other wealthy countries. We are the only wealthy country in the world that had a death rate as high as ours. He bungled the response and likely got an extra half a million people killed. It’s amazing that this fact alone didn’t end his political career, but Americans suck at interpreting data.

      • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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        15 hours ago

        Sure, but the person I was replying to claimed that “Trump’s incompetence caused a million people to die,” and I was questioning whether all of that can really be blamed on him. Because I don’t think so. He was pro-vaccine from the beginning, and there were plenty of Democrat politicians saying they wouldn’t take “the Trump vaccine.”

        And no, I don’t think the situation was handled optimally in the U.S. - but that was the case almost everywhere. Obviously, Trump isn’t without fault here, but placing all the blame on him feels disingenuous

        • MonkRome@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          Sorry you’re getting down votes. I think you’re giving your honest perspective and that doesn’t deserve the dismissiveness. I do think you undersell how much Trump specifically had to do with misinformation though. I do really believe the culture around Trump really follows his lead, so when he was selling misinformation, you saw his followers parroting his misinformation which I do think was likely responsible for a lot of death.

        • Zink@programming.dev
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          10 hours ago

          What strange land do you live in? In my corner of the US, being both anti-mask and anti-vaccine is very solidly a trumper thing. That’s regardless of the confusion very early in the pandemic or what one politician on a given side might have said once.

          • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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            3 hours ago

            Oh it’s definitely a right-wing thing but I wouldn’t exactly blame Trump for all of it. He even got booed at his own rally for telling people to get vaccinated.

        • Aatube@kbin.melroy.orgOP
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          15 hours ago

          Democrat politicians saying they wouldn’t take “the Trump vaccine.”

          That sounds wild. Could you provide an example?

          • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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            15 hours ago

            Well apparently they didn’t exactly say they’d refuse to take it but voiced their scepticism about it nevertheless.

            In September, Harris, then the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate, hesitated when asked if she would take a vaccine that was approved before the election.

            “I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump,” Harris said, “and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take his word for it.”

            Cuomo went further, suggesting he mistrusted not just President Donald Trump, but also the Food and Drug Administration under Trump. Asked about his confidence in the FDA, Cuomo indicated he didn’t have much.

            “I’m not that confident,” Cuomo said, adding: “You’re going to say to the American people now, ‘Here’s a vaccine, it was new, it was done quickly, but trust this federal administration and their health administration that it’s safe? And we’re not 100 percent sure of the consequences.’ I think it’s going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be.”

            Source

            • Aatube@kbin.melroy.orgOP
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              14 hours ago

              Hmm. I will say I think the skepticism of the vaccine that came out too quick was bipartisan, though, if not more among Republicans.

              • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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                14 hours ago

                I don’t think there’s inherently anything wrong about scepticism towards new things like that. It’s when the disnformation and conspiracies comes in that it turns kinda sinister.

                Probably true that it’s more common on the right - in the U.S. atleast.