[Genuine Realist]

The original post at least mentions COVID-19, and insurance coverage is germane.  However, I'm sympathetic to Lex; the post had more to do with ACA and the decision to challenge its constitutionality in the Supreme Court than it is about COVID-19, and the ACA is one of the most frought political issues of the last decade.  And I also agree with him that the post was heavy on editorialization.

However this post started, it has turned into an argument of whether the original post violated Terry's rule or not, which itself seems unrelated to COVID-19.

If you want to focus on whether declaring the ACA unconstitutional will have an impact on COVID-19 (note, the case wouldn't be heard until the fall, and wouldn't be decided until 2021), have at it, but please keep the focus on the relationship to COVID-19.

BC

This is just too much fun!  The challenge now is obviously to see whether it's possible to get a thread shut down under the Terry Rule by excessive discussion of... the Terry Rule!  

Hard to imagine a better way to spend a toasty Friday afternoon in late June... :-)

For what it is worth, I haven't locked any threads, and I don't plan to.  Since I participate in the discussions, and I occasionally inadvertently get carried away and have posted a few questionable posts, I sort of feel like it would be a conflict of interest if I were also arbiter of what is and is  not acceptable.  I do post my opinion of when I think things are starting to head in that direction, but you don't have to be a mod to do so.

BC

The major reason I insist on keeping the record straight on Trump is that the all-things-lead-to-Trump approach leads to massive oversimplification.

Trump's behavior since the point in time that the medical community reached a consensus that C-!9 was no ordinary seasonal flu )approximately March 1st)  has been beyond despicable. The opposition criticized him for unresponsiveness, to some extent unfairly, but unfair criticism is the heat that comes in the Presidential kitchen. Rather than shake it off and get on with the business of addressing the most serious national crisis since World War II (no exaggeration), he goes - as always - eyeball to eyeball with them, belittling them AND the C-19 crisis, thereby endangering both lives and the economy. The result is a completely disastrous Administration that will be mercifully gone in November. Then maybe we can begin to pick up the shattered remnants of the political dialog. If the New York Times went bankrupt on the same day, it would be proof of the existence of God. But that's too much to hope for.

BUT . . . to assume that the reaction against masks and social distancing is strictly a Trump thing is to indulge in a massive oversimplification. The sweeping SIP orders that were promulgated around March 10th were a massive rupture of the social fabric. They were of sweeping scope, unlimited duration, and extended somewhat arbitrarily. Health officials were completely tone deaf to the hardship this imposed on many service workers. (Witness the myopia of some of the posters on this Board.) Whatever you may think of the validity of the riot/protests, the spectacle of elected officials disregarding completely the rubrics they'd insisted upon only a short time before (I'm thinking particularly of Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan) did not sit well.

Pushback to this in a nation famously not composed of docile sheep was inevitable. Declaring cultural war on the resisters, which is what is happening, is just not going to work. You have to make the case. Abbot in Texas closing down bars and limiting (but not prohibiting altogether) large gatherings seems to me the way to go. We have to reassure the people whose lives where damaged by measures that may have been harsher than they should have been, that we can get this done, while returning to something like normalcy.

[Genuine Realist]

The original post at least mentions COVID-19, and insurance coverage is germane.  However, I'm sympathetic to Lex; the post had more to do with ACA and the decision to challenge its constitutionality in the Supreme Court than it is about COVID-19, and the ACA is one of the most frought political issues of the last decade.  And I also agree with him that the post was heavy on editorialization.

However this post started, it has turned into an argument of whether the original post violated Terry's rule or not, which itself seems unrelated to COVID-19.

If you want to focus on whether declaring the ACA unconstitutional will have an impact on COVID-19 (note, the case wouldn't be heard until the fall, and wouldn't be decided until 2021), have at it, but please keep the focus on the relationship to COVID-19.

BC

This is just too much fun!  The challenge now is obviously to see whether it's possible to get a thread shut down under the Terry Rule by excessive discussion of... the Terry Rule!  

Hard to imagine a better way to spend a toasty Friday afternoon in late June... :-)

For what it is worth, I haven't locked any threads, and I don't plan to.  Since I participate in the discussions, and I occasionally inadvertently get carried away and have posted a few questionable posts, I sort of feel like it would be a conflict of interest if I were also arbiter of what is and is  not acceptable.  I do post my opinion of when I think things are starting to head in that direction, but you don't have to be a mod to do so.

BC

The major reason I insist on keeping the record straight on Trump is that the all-things-lead-to-Trump approach leads to massive oversimplification.

Trump's behavior since the point in time that the medical community reached a consensus that C-!9 was no ordinary seasonal flu )approximately March 1st)  has been beyond despicable. The opposition criticized him for unresponsiveness, to some extent unfairly, but unfair criticism is the heat that comes in the Presidential kitchen. Rather than shake it off and get on with the business of addressing the most serious national crisis since World War II (no exaggeration), he goes - as always - eyeball to eyeball with them, belittling them AND the C-19 crisis, thereby endangering both lives and the economy. The result is a completely disastrous Administration that will be mercifully gone in November. Then maybe we can begin to pick up the shattered remnants of the political dialog. If the New York Times went bankrupt on the same day, it would be proof of the existence of God. But that's too much to hope for.

BUT . . . to assume that the reaction against masks and social distancing is strictly a Trump thing is to indulge in a massive oversimplification. The sweeping SIP orders that were promulgated around March 10th were a massive rupture of the social fabric. They were of sweeping scope, unlimited duration, and extended somewhat arbitrarily. Health officials were completely tone deaf to the hardship this imposed on many service workers. (Witness the myopia of some of the posters on this Board.) Whatever you may think of the validity of the riot/protests, the spectacle of elected officials disregarding completely the rubrics they'd insisted upon only a short time before (I'm thinking particularly of Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan) did not sit well.

Pushback to this in a nation famously not composed of docile sheep was inevitable. Declaring cultural war on the resisters, which is what is happening, is just not going to work. You have to make the case. Abbot in Texas closing down bars and limiting (but not prohibiting altogether) large gatherings seems to me the way to go. We have to reassure the people whose lives where damaged by measures that may have been harsher than they should have been, that we can get this done, while returning to something like normalcy.