Our results are based on analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements. They are consistent with our findings about the American political media ecosystem from 2015-2018, published in Network Propaganda, in which we found that Fox News and Donald Trumpâs own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists. This dynamic appears to be even more pronounced in this election cycle, likely because Donald Trumpâs position as president and his leadership of the Republican Party allow him to operate directly through political and media elites, rather than relying on online media as he did when he sought to advance his then-still-insurgent positions in 2015 and the first half of 2016.
President Donald Trump "falsely claimed" at a Monday night campaign rally that the novel coronavirus "affects virtually nobody" younger than 18 and mainly threatens seniors and people with underlying health conditions, according to the Washington Post.
In one of the most contentious exchanges of the night, Trump lied numerous times to a woman with a preexisting condition about his record on health care and preexisting conditions.
Trump claimed he is "not going to hurt preexisting conditions" even as he is currently waging a lawsuit to repeal the Affordable Care Act without any replacement plan. The act, also known as Obamacare, banned health insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions.
Trump then lied about having a health care plan that would be better than Obamacare and also protect preexisting conditions, even though he's been promising a plan for years and has still yet to release it.
"I have it all ready, and it's a much better plan for you, and it's a much better plan," Trump said, without giving any details about what that plan is or entails.
Stephanopoulos pointed out to Trump that he has promised such a plan numerous times but has never released it.
"I interviewed you in June of last year, you said the health care plan would come in two weeks. You told Chris Wallace that this summer it'd come in three weeks," Stephanopoulos said
There is if you have some form of COPD, especially emphysema, which is ... ... Still want to tell me that there is absolutely no downside to wearing masks ?
OK. You're right...there are medical reasons for some not to wear masks. There are no absolutes (ie Everyone with COPD is better off not wearing a mask), but I'll grant you some.
I'd also suggest to you that for every person not wearing one "because of an illness", there are multiples who are wearing them because they are attempting to protect themselves from the virus and know they can remove the mask if then need to. If you have breathing issues and need to be around others....do you fear the mask or the virus?
Accepting your medical reasons as an exemption, you agree that everyone else SHOULD be wearing them?
I fear neither. It's the risk of life in the big city. Common sense tells me to stay away from things like sit down restaurants and bars for example, if I drank. No more concerts and sporting events. Is what it is. Nothing goes on forever, including me.
Like I said, while I do have breathing issues, I do wear a mask when in public. I also still use gloves with a shopping cart and have always used gloves for pumping gas ever since I first got sick with cancer.
I do agree that people should wear masks in public out of respect to others, at least until we get a widely distributed working vaccine. But and this is a big but, even with a vaccine, we still don't know who has been vaccinated or not. Many will refuse.
Now if you want to force people to wear masks, then we need a law.
In the Fox interview, Trump criticized former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who has in recent months warned the country strongly against reelecting Trump. But in the course of making that case, Trump offered an odd claim: He said Mattis had effectively stood in the way of his efforts to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
âI wouldâve rather taken him out,â Trump said. âI had him all set. Mattis didnât want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general.â
âPeople donât realize we saved millions of lives,â Trump told the crowd. The President who, in the spring, during the depths of the pandemic, told governors to scrounge up the supplies they needed on their own, claimed to have masterminded âthe largest national mobilization since World War II.â In fact, to this day, there is no effective national testing strategy, and even less of one for contact tracing. And the state, local, and public-health officials who were frantically trying to save lives had to push back against his dismissiveness, quackery, and conspiracy-mongeringâeven though, according to a Washington Post report on âRage,â a new book by Bob Woodward, Trump was quite aware of how dangerous the virus was. (âI wanted to always play it down,â he said.) He simply chose to lie to the public, further undermining trust.
In North Carolina, Trump added, âWe have achieved some of the great numbers, the case-fatality ratesâwe have the lowest of any major country in the world. People donât know that because the fake news doesnât want to write about it.â The United States does not have the lowest case-fatality rate of any major country, unless Japan and India arenât major countries. And, by another measureâdeaths per hundred thousandâthe U.S. is doing very badly, and its relative position keeps getting worse. Thatâs because many countries in Europe that were badly hit now have the virus largely under control, and we do not. Itâs true that there are scenarios in which far more Americans could have perished, for example if no distancing measures had been taken at all, or if Trump held indoor rallies at the rate he did before the pandemic. But too many did die, and too many are dying now.
There is if you have some form of COPD, especially emphysema, which is ... ... Still want to tell me that there is absolutely no downside to wearing masks ?
OK. You're right...there are medical reasons for some not to wear masks. There are no absolutes (ie Everyone with COPD is better off not wearing a mask), but I'll grant you some.
I'd also suggest to you that for every person not wearing one "because of an illness", there are multiples who are wearing them because they are attempting to protect themselves from the virus and know they can remove the mask if then need to. If you have breathing issues and need to be around others....do you fear the mask or the virus?
Accepting your medical reasons as an exemption, you agree that everyone else SHOULD be wearing them?
It would not seem possible that Donald Trump could sell himself as the hero of the coronavirus crisis, but, as he demonstrated on Tuesday evening, at the Winston-Salem airport, in North Carolina, he is not one to let either shame or the truth get in the way of a boast. The tally of Americans who have died of COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University, is now more than a hundred and ninety thousandâa figure that is almost certainly too low, given testing shortagesâbut the number that Trump was interested in was the crowd size. âI was told fifteen thousand people!â he said. An airport official told the Winston-Salem Journal that he guessed there were seven to nine thousand people there. Some of the people in the stand behind the President were wearing masks, printed with âMAGAâ or âTRUMP,â but, judging from videos of the milling crowd and from press reports, few other attendees were. The President certainly was not. He told the crowd that he normally held rallies in indoor venues, âBut because of, uh, China, the arenas arenât working out too well, right? You canât really do that anymore for a while.â
When Trump said âChina,â he wasnât just using a shorthand version of âChina virus,â his xenophobic label for SARS-CoV-2. He was referring to what might be called the Trump 2020 coronavirus story line, which is as epic as it is fictitious. The synopsis, a version of which he offered at the rally in North Carolina, goes like this:
Act I: Paradise Betrayed
âWe built the greatest economy in the history of the world, we were forced to close it because of the China plague that came in,â Trump said. Leave it to Trump to dream up a myth of lost greatness about not only America but also about his Presidency. His plan seems to be to use his great failing as an all-purpose excuseâthe coronavirus did it, not me. A Trump drama, though, demands more than an unthinking virusâit requires a villain. And so, later in the speech, returning to the subject of China, he said, âWe just have the plague. Weâve had other plagues sent by them. I wonder if they did it on purpose. What do you think, huh?â The crowd cheered its affirmation. Perhaps it makes sense to Trumpâs supporters that the Chinese government would unleash a pandemic on its own population in a bank-shot attempt to bring him down. It does not, however, make any logical sense. (...)
I said wearing masks is not a problem for most people. I do not think most people have diabetes, suffer from a lung disease, or wear glasses.
Even without a law mandating the wearing of masks, I do not see refusing to wear a mask as being about individual freedom for the reasons I previously stated.
Otherwise, satisfied.
Okie dokie.
But wrong on glasses. It is safe to say that at the very least, half of all (western world inhabitants) over the age of 50 wear glasses. And nearly all over should.
Unless you lived in Cambodia. Those who wore glasses were the first killed by Pol Pot. Glasses were an indicator of intelligence there as only educated people needed glasses in order to read. So was his thinking. Very soon, no one was wearing glasses anymore. Whether they needed them or not.
Just a little historical factoid I wrote about in a paper once.
Location: Perched on the precipice of the cauldron of truth
Posted:
Sep 12, 2020 - 9:39pm
kurtster wrote:
Only a few people have diabetes ? Only a few wear glasses ? Lung disease is a minor problem ?
Refusing to wear a mask when the imposition is done without a law in place is an expression of individual freedom, faulty as it may be.
Refusing to wear a mask as an expression of patriotism is not a proper demonstration of patriotism and is in fact an improper demonstration of patriotism, imo.
I would say the contrary. Wearing a mask is more patriotic than not wearing a mask. Assuming patriotism is defined as standing up for what is good for the whole of the nation. IMHO, attaching the concept of patriotism to wearing a mask is an improper association with the notion of patriotism in the first place.
Satisfied ?
I said wearing masks is not a problem for most people. I do not think most people have diabetes, suffer from a lung disease, or wear glasses.
Even without a law mandating the wearing of masks, I do not see refusing to wear a mask as being about individual freedom for the reasons I previously stated.
Only a few people have diabetes ? Only a few wear glasses ? Lung disease is a minor problem ?
Refusing to wear a mask when the imposition is done without a law in place is an expression of individual freedom, faulty as it may be.
Refusing to wear a mask as an expression of patriotism is not a proper demonstration of patriotism and is in fact an improper demonstration of patriotism, imo.
I would say the contrary. Wearing a mask is more patriotic than not wearing a mask. Assuming patriotism is defined as standing up for what is good for the whole of the nation. IMHO, attaching the concept of patriotism to wearing a mask is an improper association with the notion of patriotism in the first place.
Satisfied ?
Head over to the COVID-19 forum before R_P adds a cartoon or news headline to it and you'll see some research regarding your contention about hypercapnia.
(Spoiler alert: too much CO2 isn't a problem)
Regarding patriotism - I agree that we need to think of Americans, and not Red/Blue humans fighting like sheep/cattle for grazing rights.
