Post by Nadica (She/Her) on Jun 29, 2024 22:20:40 GMT
Vaxxing And Relaxing To Fascism - Published June 28, 2024
The Democrats have really messed up by vaxxing and relaxing Joe Biden.
I didn’t watch the presidential debate. I’m not a masochist.
But catching up today, it’s obvious that it went badly for Joe Biden. Very badly. Worst-case-scenario bad. Panic in the streets bad (well panic in the blue corners of the Beltway at least).
First off he had a ‘cold’ we’re told. He was coughing a couple of minutes in. Could very well have been covid. Probably was.
If it was, this would add to his at least two previous confirmed infections.
From the opening salvos, he was badly off. His voice weak and cracked. During Trump’s answers he was standing slack jawed, staring down, his whole appearance like death-warmed-up. Too many of his answers were meandering, failing to land on a meaningful point or conclusion.
Trump by contrast, while full of malignant narcissism and lies, was full of free wheeling and largely lucid malignant narcissism and lies.
The contrast was stark.
Which brings us to covid. And its impact on the brain.
It doesn’t hit everyone equally. We know Biden has had it at least twice. And we know that covid, even mild covid, is bad for brains, whether you are vaccinated or not.
A neuroscientist who spends her career looking through a microscope at the things viruses do to brains says she’s studied HIV, influenza, Zika and has “never seen the type of damage SarsCov2 leaves behind (in the brain) after infection with other viruses."
Yes, Biden is old. But his cognitive decline in the last few years has been marked. This was him in December 2019, just before the arrival of covid. Lucid, sharp and without that haunted-behind-the-eyes look.
Trump of course has had confirmed covid once and likely a few times by now. But the reality is his cognitive decline is not on the same scale as Biden’s. He is mainly still the nasty buffoon he ever was.
The truth is nothing about health outcomes is fair, whether that’s covid or any other illness. The healthiest people get cancer and die. 30-a-day smokers don’t. Some vaccinated people get long covid. Some unvaccinated people don’t. Trends don’t always extrapolate down to the level of the individual.
Luck, genetics, environment all play a role.
Sometimes shit just happens.
And it looks like it has happened to Biden.
The tragedy of course is that if covid has played a part in his obvious cognitive collapse, it will be by his, and his party’s, own hand.
The man who declared the pandemic over in the year with the biggest death toll. The man and his party who encouraged a premature return to normal. Who declared the only public health intervention we needed was the vaccine. The party whose pandemic talking points rapidly overlapped with the anti-vaxxers and anti-public-health figures on the right they had mocked mere months earlier. The party whose governors, from New York to Los Angeles, are now trying to ban face masks.
The Democrats vaxxed and relaxed their man into accelerated cognitive decline and in doing so might have paved the way for the return of Trump and the inevitable horrors a second term would bring.
Incredibly, in an early Trump salvo, he slammed Biden for presiding over more covid deaths than he did. Trump may have spouted a lot of lies in the debate, but this wasn’t one of them.
How is the leader of the anti-vaccine, anti-public-health party able to land such a solid blow against the ‘pro-science’ party who in no small part were elected because of Trump’s covid failures?
It’s incredible.
Incredible failure.
And Biden didn’t bite back on covid, didn’t point to the public health disaster that a second Trump term would bring. Because he couldn’t. Because the Democrats haven’t stood up for public health. On the contrary, they abandoned it for capitalist convenience. And now, by trying to ban masks, they are going to war with it. The words necessary to defend public health have, in less than four years, fallen out of their vocabulary. The spirit to defend it also abandoned, they allowed Trump to land the most meaningful covid line of the debate.
This should not have been possible.
Where does the US go from here?
If it was a functioning democracy, and the Democratic party was a functioning party within that democracy, they’d be ditching Biden asap. They’d find a way, regardless of convention. But knowing the Democrats, knowing their reverence for convention above effective politics, they won’t.
And in doing so, they may just have vaxxed and relaxed the country back into the arms of Donald Trump.
The Democrats have really messed up by vaxxing and relaxing Joe Biden.
I didn’t watch the presidential debate. I’m not a masochist.
But catching up today, it’s obvious that it went badly for Joe Biden. Very badly. Worst-case-scenario bad. Panic in the streets bad (well panic in the blue corners of the Beltway at least).
First off he had a ‘cold’ we’re told. He was coughing a couple of minutes in. Could very well have been covid. Probably was.
If it was, this would add to his at least two previous confirmed infections.
From the opening salvos, he was badly off. His voice weak and cracked. During Trump’s answers he was standing slack jawed, staring down, his whole appearance like death-warmed-up. Too many of his answers were meandering, failing to land on a meaningful point or conclusion.
Trump by contrast, while full of malignant narcissism and lies, was full of free wheeling and largely lucid malignant narcissism and lies.
The contrast was stark.
Which brings us to covid. And its impact on the brain.
It doesn’t hit everyone equally. We know Biden has had it at least twice. And we know that covid, even mild covid, is bad for brains, whether you are vaccinated or not.
A neuroscientist who spends her career looking through a microscope at the things viruses do to brains says she’s studied HIV, influenza, Zika and has “never seen the type of damage SarsCov2 leaves behind (in the brain) after infection with other viruses."
Yes, Biden is old. But his cognitive decline in the last few years has been marked. This was him in December 2019, just before the arrival of covid. Lucid, sharp and without that haunted-behind-the-eyes look.
Trump of course has had confirmed covid once and likely a few times by now. But the reality is his cognitive decline is not on the same scale as Biden’s. He is mainly still the nasty buffoon he ever was.
The truth is nothing about health outcomes is fair, whether that’s covid or any other illness. The healthiest people get cancer and die. 30-a-day smokers don’t. Some vaccinated people get long covid. Some unvaccinated people don’t. Trends don’t always extrapolate down to the level of the individual.
Luck, genetics, environment all play a role.
Sometimes shit just happens.
And it looks like it has happened to Biden.
The tragedy of course is that if covid has played a part in his obvious cognitive collapse, it will be by his, and his party’s, own hand.
The man who declared the pandemic over in the year with the biggest death toll. The man and his party who encouraged a premature return to normal. Who declared the only public health intervention we needed was the vaccine. The party whose pandemic talking points rapidly overlapped with the anti-vaxxers and anti-public-health figures on the right they had mocked mere months earlier. The party whose governors, from New York to Los Angeles, are now trying to ban face masks.
The Democrats vaxxed and relaxed their man into accelerated cognitive decline and in doing so might have paved the way for the return of Trump and the inevitable horrors a second term would bring.
Incredibly, in an early Trump salvo, he slammed Biden for presiding over more covid deaths than he did. Trump may have spouted a lot of lies in the debate, but this wasn’t one of them.
How is the leader of the anti-vaccine, anti-public-health party able to land such a solid blow against the ‘pro-science’ party who in no small part were elected because of Trump’s covid failures?
It’s incredible.
Incredible failure.
And Biden didn’t bite back on covid, didn’t point to the public health disaster that a second Trump term would bring. Because he couldn’t. Because the Democrats haven’t stood up for public health. On the contrary, they abandoned it for capitalist convenience. And now, by trying to ban masks, they are going to war with it. The words necessary to defend public health have, in less than four years, fallen out of their vocabulary. The spirit to defend it also abandoned, they allowed Trump to land the most meaningful covid line of the debate.
This should not have been possible.
Where does the US go from here?
If it was a functioning democracy, and the Democratic party was a functioning party within that democracy, they’d be ditching Biden asap. They’d find a way, regardless of convention. But knowing the Democrats, knowing their reverence for convention above effective politics, they won’t.
And in doing so, they may just have vaxxed and relaxed the country back into the arms of Donald Trump.