So in summary, the mayor opportunistically ordered the Trump-contracted rinks closed despite broad support, residents gathered at one of the rinks as an act of protest of the closures (or a swan song), a Trump supporter unwittingly tries to protest at a protest (or wake), the other skaters are hostile and miss the irony, security tells him to lose the flag or have it removed by force, …
No, no, no; you don’t understand! The Dems are radical leftists! Antifa! 
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Polling right now indicates it’s going to be the latter. The majority of republicans still support Il Douche and believe he won the election.
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There need to be just enough Republicans to form a third party, or become “moderate” Democrats, for the GOP to be rendered weak on a national scale. If that happens it will be like the dam bursting, and more people will leave the party.
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The numbers don’t support that. The people who might have done that are leaving the party.
However, I expect that they are contracting enough that only trumpy candidates can win primaries, but they won’t do well except in the reddest parts of the country.
2022 is going to be interesting.
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Hard disagree here. The responses that have been most effective internationally are following the science.
Closing down outdoor ice rinks is not following the science. It’s of a piece with the beach-shaming antipattern we’ve seen in US & European media. Zeynep Tufecki has good threads on all of this; reading her has been invaluable through the whole crisis.
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The Nazis* haven’t tried to overthrow the US government lately?
*(If the “Nazis” aren’t from Germany, they’re just sparkling American fascism.)
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The problem isn’t going to the beach, it’s going to the beach and gathering in large clusters without social distancing.
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This whole montage is one of my favorite Rick and Morty bits.
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Meh. Who cares. Pandering to them and worrying about their feelings is what got us Trump in the first place.
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Exactly. They already have a persecution complex. Why play into it?
Because they have that complex whether punched or unpunched. But when punched they seem to back off their bad behavior for a moment. It also encourages marginalized people to know they aren’t alone.
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Why let their persecution complex allow them to get away with promoting toxic and dangerous political ideas that are literally aimed at ending democracy in America? That’s their end goal, make no mistake. They showed us that on the 6th. We let them get away with this authoritarian actions at our peril.
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Nah. I’m good with it.
I’m not advocating letting them get away with their crimes. But a man waving a flag in public is not committing a crime, he’s expressing an opinion, and there were ways of responding to that which did not involve violence.
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It seems like the tackling happened across the rink from the camera, after some ongoing interactions with other skaters, so he very much could have been making violent threats against other skaters, though. And, as someone upthread mentioned, he’s also skating around with something that could cause serious injury to other skaters. That rink is crowded, there are lots of people there, and it was clear the guy is working to antagonize others.
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At the risk of derailing – and I do understand that reasonable people will have respectful disagreements about this sort of thing, and will leave the subthread after this message – let’s engage with the cited article here a little better.
“You’d think from the moral outrage about these beach photos that fun, in itself, transmits the virus,” the Harvard epidemiologist Julia Marcus told me. “But when people find lower-risk ways to enjoy their lives, that’s actually a public-health win.”
The beach shaming is especially terrible because, so many months in, we now know that the virus spreads most readily indoors, especially in unventilated, crowded spaces, and even more so in such spaces where people are talking or singing without masks. Outdoor transmission isn’t impossible, of course, but being outdoors is protective for scientifically well-understood reasons: Open air dilutes the concentration of virus in the air one breathes, sunlight can help kill viruses, and people have more room to stay apart in the great outdoors than within walled spaces.
…
But what about the indoor restaurants, packed shops, and house parties at vacation hot spots by those beaches? These activities represent a real risk, and especially given what scientists have found elsewhere, it’s crucial to emphasize that the crowded indoors appears to be conducive to transmitting this virus efficiently. A pandemic is a communications emergency, as the saying goes, and the only effective way to communicate risk effectively is to tell people the truth in plain language, and to give them evidence-based advice on reducing risk. Furious scolding about the least risky part of a potentially risky chain of activities is certain to backfire. When we scold, people stop listening, especially when they figure out that the scolding isn’t evidence-based—and they eventually will. When authorities close parks and beaches without strong scientific evidence, socializing may well move out of sight to more dangerous settings indoors.
My 2c is that scolding along the lines of “why is this rink open at all??!?” is making the communications emergency worse, not better.
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These are reasonable questions, and as you’ve noted the science states that outdoor activities in of itself can be less risky as long as reasonable precautions are taken.
You specifically brought up “beach shaming” – while ignoring that at least in America during much of last year beaches – especially in places like Florida – were packed with people with little/no social distancing. In fact the governor explicitly discouraged this practice. No doubt this led to super spreader events (but we’ll never know since Florida has been infamously cooking the books when it comes to their COVID-19 numbers).
I don’t think anybody here is fun-shaming people. Goodness knows we need all the fun we can get. What people are by and large shaming is the ongoing outbreak of irresponsible and dangerous science denial.
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Pretty sure getting stuff actually legit accidentally stuck there disbars you from the competition.
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None of us could have predicted where we’d be now politically back in 2015.
Yes, I recognize that the numbers don’t support it, but right now is not three years from now.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s still a possibility, and an enjoyable one to think about.
Indeed.
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