Man blames media for news

queue cue

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I’m not familiar with both, but I’m guessing only one throws poop. That one.

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Zero-sum is the only math they know. It’s practically the defining characteristic of conservatives.

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Cue the queue of staggering corpses, then.

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yOTwrAP

Actually, I’m not. But the family tree does have a sturdy British branch. We sometimes call it the special branch.

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Same where I live. At the grocery store I normally use, the canned soup aisle contained exactly two cans of cream of mushroom. Also completely gone was the old student standby cup o’ ramen noodles. Even Dinty Moore canned beef stew and Spam were completely gone. Now THAT’S evidence of panic buying to the max.

I can’t help but think how are they going to restock if the workers at the places where they make and package and ship things are all out sick?

Still, I do find one silver lining in this cloud: at least I don’t live in a place where people eat creamed eels.

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You’re correct as far as it goes. But the real reason they are not hyping the “virus hysteria” (and are bending over backwards to ignore/minimize/demonize virus awareness/preparedness) is the fact that Their Orange Friend is POTUS right now. Can you imagine the screaming headlines that would be dominating Fox if Hillary were in office? There would be 9 different Congressional investigations into the “scandal” and they’d be doing everything they could to terrify Foxtogenarians to (just short of) death to rally the base. “Virus hysteria” would force “caravan hysteria”, “muslim/terrorist hysteria”, and “violent crime hysteria” to take a back seat.

EDIT: So the crisis has now gotten too large to ignore and they’ve realized its not going blow over any time soon. And it’s fascinating the tack they’re apparently taking. It’s not partisan. It’s much more dangerous: “Be Terrified” plus “We’re All In It Together” plus Patriotism. Dangerous, because once we’re out of this crisis (or it’s nearing November 3rd), the spin will be "Trump Saved Us! Thank God and Thank Trump! 4 More Years!"

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Right. If you could scrape together an extra $3 or so every month, you could buy an extra pound of dried beans for your stockpile and always have a supply. Always good advice.
Note: this is assuming you have a place to store your stockpile, and I realize not everyone has that luxury.

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While food insecurity is a real problem in this country, you do know that most people are not food insecure? And it’s kind of ok to tell them to stock up?

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Can’t say or do anything that might call attention to how badly he’s cocked up the response to the pandemic. Yeah if Hillary was president they’d be screaming their lungs out about how terrible it is.

I’m optimistic though because a big chunk of Trump supporters are in the high risk category, and if they decide to keep going out, ignore the warnings, etc. …

I fear it’ll be more like Iran (you know, with the recent digging of mass graves). Italy has better health infrastructure than the US, more hospital beds per capita, better social safety net (that helps keep people home), has taken more radical steps to curb transmission than the US, etc. We’ll be lucky if it’s like Italy here.

And his justification there - I’m only panicking because other people are panicking!

I keep running into the “it’s no worse than the flu” idiots online. What’s weird is that they admit that it’s worse than the flu, even in downplaying it. (E.g. admit that the death rate is many times more than the unvaccinated rate for the flu, even if they low-ball the coronavirus death rate.) I’m not sure if the problem is innumeracy or not thinking it through. I mean, the actual death rate for the flu is half of the unvaccinated rate, and this virus is expected to infect two to three times more people than even pandemic flus have. So even if we accept the numbers provided by the “it’s no worse than the flu” bros, it’s still 12-36 times worse than the flu. And that leaves aside the whole issue that the death rate for this virus will be entirely dependent on how slammed the hospitals are…

They’re obviously not thinking about it - at all - they’re just mindlessly accepting right-wing talking points.

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https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2019-01-11/stretched-thin-majority-of-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck

I just encountered somebody today that told me the same thing - “not even worse than the flu”

I showed him my handy explainer

See this - started on March 10th when there were 761 “confirmed” cases. Experience in rest of world says virus spreads at 1.15 to 1.25 per day. We’ll use 1.25. By March 16th chart shows we should be at 2900 cases. Where are we? 3800 cases. No Immunity. No Vacine. Its not like the flu.

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Oh no - they’d be all mashed together into one giant poo-ball of terror.
“Immigrant violent viruses are stealing our white wimmin for their Mooslim caravan of terror!”

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In a similar vein there are practically no cases being reported in Africa. I trust that WHO is reporting the best information they have accurately. Simultaneously - and not at all contradictorially - I do not trust the accuracy of some of the information they are receiving #cough#USA#cough#

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I know which i prefer.

Hint: it’s not the angry egg wearing a badly fitting toupee.

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I’m not understanding how that article makes the argument for true food insecurity. They state that many people overextend their credit lines for luxury goods they can’t afford, but couldn’t they be using or have used that credit line to buy nonperishable foods they can’t afford?
To be clear, I’m not arguing that there are truly food-insecure people, or advocating using an effing credit card to buy groceries. But just posting that link in response to @snigs comment doesn’t seem salient to the point being debated.

my previous comment was that many people can’t afford to stockpile food for emergencies. it was snigs who brought up food insecurity, something that i was not debating in the first place.

Maybe “wrong” does mean something different here, because I don’t see the need to deal with topics in absolutes.