[burger]

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Well put. I do hope people can take this to heart. As you say, describing the actual facts should be enough to make the point. Personally, I find myself thinking of all sorts of comments re who is doing -- or not doing -- things in response. But assigning blame is not useful in actually dealing with the situation. Assigning blame is just fine when you are deciding who to vote for, but that does not belong in any of these threads.

Assigning responsibility for government actions is critical for a few reasons: 1) there are elections coming up, and people should know what their elected officials are doing (or not) and the effects of those (in)actions; 2) (good) elected officials pay attention to public pressure, calls, letters, approval polls, etc. ; 3) being fully informed about what is going on requires knowing what governments at different levels are doing.  There is really no daylight between "knowing what your government agency x is doing" and "blaming the people in charge of agency x when they are doing the wrong thing."  4) Censorship is a terrible idea right now.  There is too much misinformation out there already.  If a national newspaper writes an article showing mistakes being made by a a government agency, it should be fair game to share it here.  And if someone sharing said article gets upset and uses some bad language, let's remember that there are literally millions of lives at stake here--that's the difference between the best and worst outcomes in the Imperial College models that everyone is talking about now.  So some inflamed feelings are going to happen, and we should accept it.

[burger]

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Well put. I do hope people can take this to heart. As you say, describing the actual facts should be enough to make the point. Personally, I find myself thinking of all sorts of comments re who is doing -- or not doing -- things in response. But assigning blame is not useful in actually dealing with the situation. Assigning blame is just fine when you are deciding who to vote for, but that does not belong in any of these threads.

Assigning responsibility for government actions is critical for a few reasons: 1) there are elections coming up, and people should know what their elected officials are doing (or not) and the effects of those (in)actions; 2) (good) elected officials pay attention to public pressure, calls, letters, approval polls, etc. ; 3) being fully informed about what is going on requires knowing what governments at different levels are doing.  There is really no daylight between "knowing what your government agency x is doing" and "blaming the people in charge of agency x when they are doing the wrong thing."  4) Censorship is a terrible idea right now.  There is too much misinformation out there already.  If a national newspaper writes an article showing mistakes being made by a a government agency, it should be fair game to share it here.  And if someone sharing said article gets upset and uses some bad language, let's remember that there are literally millions of lives at stake here--that's the difference between the best and worst outcomes in the Imperial College models that everyone is talking about now.  So some inflamed feelings are going to happen, and we should accept it.