“Teach the Controversy” Tactic Applied to Trump and COVID19
It has long been a successful tactic on the lunatic American political right to sideline serious debate by insisting that their deranged opinions are equally valid to a well reasoned and moderate view based on science. Unfortunately respectable American media has bought this nonsense and let themselves be dragged into fringe territory, afraid to not seem balanced enough.
A good example of this is the tactics used by creationists. They have long learned that pushing their utterly non-scientific views into the biology class is non-starter, and so they invented “Intelligent Design” as pseudo-scientific theory. Now I am being overly generous. Then they attacked schools for “Not teaching controversy,” the idea being that you should hear “both sides” of the story, as if Intelligent Design warranted any serious consideration by science at all.
Next will be Flat Earthers insisting that their non-scientific nonsense should be taken serious. I am sure the anti-vaxxers also think they deserve equal consideration to real science.
Now what is next on the increasingly Fascist American right is an attempt to normalize Donald Trump. To suggest that he is somehow like any other political leader which should be valued in objective terms. In this alternative reality pointing out the obvious problems with Donald Trump’s presidency in fomenting various crisis is now suddenly deemed political
This is an anti-Trump article. It fails to address the probability that Covid-19 was bioengineered. This is and opinion held by many. HIV was bioengineered at UC Davis under contract with the U.S. Army Biological Warfare people. I have seen the evidence.
Scientists have been rather tired of explaining why the Corona virus is unlikely to have been bioengineered. When the vast majority of scientists have reached the conclusion that the virus is naturally and there are people who still insist it is must have been engineered in China, then we are not talking about science any more but conspiracy theories.
I just wanted to make that clear; …that it was political. Not scientific. That is not “bizarre”, and it was not a “complaint”.
Yes it was a complaint. You are a Trumpist ideologue who is not accepting that Trump is an utterly incompetent leader who totally screwed up the COVID-19 handling in the US. You are here attempting the old “teach the controversy” tactic. You pretend that whether Trump does a good or bad job is purely a value judgement, when in reality Donald Trump is objectively speaking a horrible leader measured by almost any metric.
It is kind of like complaining that an article isn’t scientific and is anti-Hitler because it blames Hitler for WWII. It is a logical fallacy to assume there is equally good and bad parts with all leaders. There are few if any good parts to Trump. He is mostly a very bad leader.
And the article did in fact not spend much ink on talking about Trump. But you cannot write a serious article about the failure of America’s COVID-19 response without mentioning Donald Trump. Failing to do so would be utterly unscientific and unreasonable.
The intent to smear Trump is transparent here. He has many faults (fewer than Biden)
You cannot smear a guy who is objectively a horrible person. If they primarily wanted to smear him, they didn’t do a very good job. There are so many things wrong with Trump they did not mention. While I am no fan of Joe Biden, suggesting Trump has fewer faults than Biden just displays your ideological blindness.
but he was the first to call for blocking ingress of people from China at the beginning when WHO was telling us there was nothing about which we should be concerned
No, they never said that. That is a flat out lie. And plenty of countries closed borders to China much earlier than Trump. Trump’s border closing wasn’t even a proper closing. Numerous Chinese got trough after the closing. And he failed to close the border to Europe when the case load was much higher in Europe. You could always count of a white supremacist like Donald Trump to be quick about closing borders to “lesser people.”
The problem was that Donald Trump put no plan in motion for testing and tracking. He flat out lied about what Americans could expect. A few cases he said which will soon turn to zero, despite nothing being done domestically other than closing some of the borders.
I can contrast with my own Norwegian government which handled this whole thing a lot better. They where clear from the start that it would get into the country despite border closing and that we would have to operate with dynamic borders, ceiling off people and areas inside the country as the virus spread. That is how you fight a virus. You cannot use country borders, as your only means of fighting it.
China has totally open borders to China, yet their spread was significantly less than in the US, so obviously there are other things besides border closing that matters.
Dr. Fauci was telling us we did not need masks.
Which was long the recommendation due to the difficulty of using masks correctly and the desperate need for masks for health care workers. We still don’t use masks in Norway. We got through this whole thing much better than the US despite never using masks.
Why? Because it isn’t primarily about masks or border closing but about testing, contact tracing and shutting down early when you need it. None of which the US did. Shutdown came very late.
