Not sure if that’s directed at me but I’m trying to be more realism than cynic.
We’ve treated 10 million total for a disease and put 55 million out of work and rising.
My own Governor is a numbers guy and has generally been following them in regards to the disease (except nursing homes - still no plan there for the next year of outbreaks) but he joined a pact with his partisans to ask for $3T more devaluation bucks.
It would be insane of him not to, and be left out if it happens, and insane of him to do it, both.
So he chooses party over numbers with nothing better to operate from. Because there’s much bigger lasting repercussions for him personally if he’s seen as “not a team player”.
Just human nature. He’s screwed either way as are all of them.
They’re literally balancing who is allowed to eat over who gets to wait in line to get sick.
And that’s the servants.
There’s certainly more evil ones who’ll happily crash various systems to claim they need replacing. Private medical, Medicaid, the list is long and too political for here.
But “overload” of those things or mass bankruptcy benefits some of their political careers.
The unqualified small town Mayor McCheeses taking over areas they had no reason to — is only the tip of the iceberg once DC thinktanks start outlining their strategies for domination.
Can’t waste a crisis.
They NEVER do, and that looks like cynicism to anyone who doesn’t watch closely and thinks they’re all “serving” them, and realism to everybody else.
Quite a bit of it is inertia and “what they do”... if you spend a lifetime doing 90% politics, you’re utterly unqualified to lead an emergency. Most will revert to their comfort zone as soon as they have the option.
No option on initial distancing, that was math.
Now options open up, and they will always choose the best path for their tribe.
230 million “represented” by a bit over 500 has always been mathematically silly. But any chance you can get to hang a policy decision on one person with no votes and no representation — you grab that.
And then that person stays with their real tribe, their peers. Not the represented.
For better or worse, you’re under the control of your State Governor now. Not your elected representatives locally. And they’re answering to DC.
So far only one State’s highest court has struck down any new rules any have created without real representation of constituents.
This will all be still in the courts years after the thing is over with. We’ve already seen one AG tell a judge he made up law. When even the AG doesn’t want to prosecute... and the judge imposed an “iffy” rule that one person mandated via “emergency powers”... what a mess.
Retreating to the relative safety of one’s tribe, politically, over leading via best guesses at a natural phenomena the experts have no real answers for, is clearly ... predictable human behavior.
If my local Czar can stay even slightly balanced, it’s about all I can hope for.
Everybody else here knows how balanced their own captors currently are in their State.
Good luck to those who don’t have numbers based people temporarily in complete control... with no recourse that will actually matter in time, before it’s all over with.
Cynicism or realism? I don’t see any evidence these repetitive well-documented partisan behaviors actually change. It’s all too ingrained in them.
Plus, follow the money. None is living off of what they’re paid for their “service”. Both sides in the intel meetings made sure they hit the eject button for themselves personally from the stock market, long before announcing it to you.
Servants care for others over or before themselves.
Leaders take pay cuts when they’re asking others to do so.
Not going to see many of either at many political podiums.
Anyway that’s the best I can do to stay non-political about it here.
Some of these folks who did things under cover of emergency powers would have been being threatened with arrest by now, in any other time. We don’t give one person full authority for months in our system of government.
But we do now. The “emergency” loopholes are going to be highly examined over the next many years. It’ll take half a year to even get back to Representative government in some areas.
Define the “emergency”. It was stopping exponential growth. What is it now?
That’s the cynic talking right at the end...
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