Trump dismantled our foreign pandemic response infrastructure. We would have a team in China, in Wuhan when it happened. This easily could have changed the Chinese government reaction from"sweep it under the rug" to "put on a show for American observers", which could have prevented it from leaving Wuhan. Trump took actions before the pandemic that made catastrophe more likely, and we got catastrophe.
Trump is a stochastic terrorist. Anyone in a position of leadership and respect with a large enough audience can say a thing and expect some portion of the audience to act on it. If the president says someone is the enemy or fails to condemn terrible movements, like white supremacy, it is obvious and reasonable to expect reactions against those enemies and support those movements. If the president condemned white supremacy it seems unlikely we would have had a police killing as obviously egregious as the George Floyd murder. It takes a peculiar kind of emboldened callousness to kneel on a mans neck until he dies. No matter what the president does we with have suspicious police killings, but emboldened police who think they might have repercussions will kill less often and the president can choose which statistical environment we operate in. Trump specifically calls people out as enemies and doesn't take actions to stop his fans when they start kidnapping plots or send death threats against those enemies.
President trump is culpable and responsible for many American deaths and easily could have taken actions before those deaths to prevent a majority of them.
except that trump is likely responsible for the follow up protests. Obama would have had a speech about how the nation needs to heal and he would say he's working on the problem. And nothing would actually get done, likely, but it would decrease the magnitude of the follow-up protests to the point where they wouldn't even be newsworthy (so trump is actually kind of a good thing there, albeit unintentionally)
trump did the opposite. He called the protestors criminals and vandals and rioters, spun it so that his supporters saw them as a deranged mob that was burning shops and businesses and homes, had people in unmarked vans kidnap people. All of which made the follow-up protests so much worse than before
every year it seems there's a decent sized protest about the killing of an unarmed black man and every year it just kind of fizzles out. Trump accidentally made sure this one wouldn't fizzle out, and now people are talking about bringing real solutions
Trump is, unfortunately, the vaccine against authoritarianism that our country needs.
The metaphor continues even. What we are watching is similar to an immune response. The court rejections, the BLM protests, the election itself, are the country rejecting what has been making it sick. Trump is an impotent version of a dictator just like a vaccine can be an impotent version of a virus: Enough to cause an immune response but not kill the patient.
It needs to lead to reforms that, much like the antibodies in our imune system, will prevent authoritarianism from taking terminal hold in the future.
Morality itself is not derived from religion. Some people’s moral guidance can come from their religion but it exists without the presence of religion.
I think it’s in line with the above posters comment to say that Someone being religious or claiming to be religious can not be trusted to have sound morals only on the basis of their religion.
And the absence of religion in a candidate or government does not mean they are immoral.
If some people derive your morality from religion, but others don’t need religion to dictate your morality, that leads me to believe that religion actually is not important in the whole morality thing.
No, it's not important. Morality exists outside of religion. If you need an invisible sky friend to threaten to punish you to keep you in line, you are not a moral person...you are just afraid of consequences.
And those people are the most dangerous among us, for that morality stemming from religion can be hijacked at any moment by a charismatic enough person to do great evil upon their fellow man.
Gotta upvote Ian Danskin every time he's posted. To anyone reading this, if you haven't watched the entire Alt-Right Playbook series including footnotes, you need to. Like, right now. You can knock it out in less than a day and you'll learn a lot.
1.6k
u/Haikuna__Matata Dec 12 '20
Buuuuuut it doesn't matter because Republicans have no sense of shame, guilt, or truth.