[ExI] > Taiwan is standing strong

[John Clark]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 12:52 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> John, I propose a day of open season on political discussion.  Today.*
>
> * Anyone here object?*
>
> * If not, John do explain please why Julian Assange killed people.*
>

OK you asked for it. Nobody knows how many Americans Julian Assange will
end up killing, it will almost certainly be in the thousands I just hope
it's not in the millions. Julian Assange Is a useful idiot, a tool of
former KGB agent Vladimir Putin that helped him dictate who would become
the next President of the USA. I didn't know it at the time but it turns
out Assange was't Putin's only tool, he had a army of internet trolls that
had done their homework and knew what buttons to push for the specific
audience (guns race religion abortion whatever) they were dealing with, and
so we got such absurdities as pizzagate. Now the reason is clear but in
2016 I couldn't understand where the intense hatred the name Hillary
Clinton engendered in so many people came from. I thought she was a pretty
vanilla politician and, although not my favorite flavor, vanilla is a lot
more appetizing than shit.

Most Americans were too smart to fall for Putin's propaganda but due to a
blunder in the Constitution the American people don't get to choose their
Commander In Chief, only the Electoral College can do that and they decided
to put a turd in the White House who had no concern for the welfare of
American people whatsoever.

Because of Assange and other Putin stooges (such as members of the
Libertarian Party and the Green Party) we got the most anti free market
anti-libertarian president in American History, but even more important we
also got the laziest, most ignorant, and dumbest president in American
History. We might still have been OK if he had surrounded himself with
smart people who had the courage to say "you're wrong", but he insisted on
only having yes-men around him who tell him what he wants to hear not what
he needs to know, and chose people to run multi billion dollar agencies who
knew nothing about them. We even get people as stupid as Wilbur Ross who
predicted that COVID-19 would mean more jobs for the USA. Genius or talent
or even baseline competence is not highly valued in this administration,
despite the flag kissing patriotism isn't valued either, only loyalty to
the president is.

Trump cut the budjet for CDC and dismantled the very team was was set up to
rapidly respond to pandemics like this. Why? Because Obama started it and
he thought anything Obama did was by definition bad. The Chinese gave the
rest of the world a 45 day warning of what was going to happen and most
countries made good use of that time, but due to jaw dropping incompetence
on the part of Donald Trump the USA squandered that super valuable time.
Every expert on epidemiology says testing is vital if you want to get ahead
of a epidemic and earlier you test the better the chance of stopping it or
at least slowing down the virus is, and as of March 2 the USA had tested
one person per million of its population. Elsewhere on March 2 South Korea
had tested 2,138, even third world countries did better than the USA, much
better, Vietnam had tested 18 and Turkey tested 11. The USA tested 1, one
in a million.

If there is anything good to come out of this horrible virus it's that
Trump will now likely lose the November election. But whether that election
loss translates into a new president in 2021 is an entirely different
question. I just can't see him being a good loser in 2020 when he was a
sore winner in 2016, I think somebody will have to literally drag him out
of the Oval Office by force.

 John K Clark
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