• panopticon [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Your whataboutism can’t deflect the fact that the US policy on COVID put the prerogatives of capital ahead of public health, doing the most half-assed lockdown procedures without contact tracing, pretty much guaranteeing that this apex predator would continue to stalk the streets and mutate indefinitely, enabling mass social murder on a historical scale, pushing the most precarious workers back into contact with the public to get sick over and over, pushing kids back to school without vaccinations under the pretext that they were low risk (false), allowing infections to rebound through the population endlessly through the vectors of families, workplaces, and schools.

      We’re now at the point where the most at-risk, especially the immune compromised, continue to die quietly in the background while the country’s leadership declares the state of emergency to be over. Officially over a million dead here and it’s sure to be a mass underestimation because states are no longer reporting, and regardless it’s a major risk factor of other diseases, especially cardial, one of which claimed one of my closest family members after they caught COVID multiple times before being vaccinated despite performing all these supposed protocols to the extreme (doesn’t matter how much you isolate if the workers delivering your groceries bring the virus with them).

      Oh yeah and, the pandemic never went away, “endemic” is a weasel word that really means “the weak shall suffer what they must,” hardly a word about long COVID in the media any more even though we don’t yet understand its full extent. US COVID policy amounts to enabling a mass death and disability event. Guess our burgers and haircuts are more important than the lives of the elderly and immune compromised. America’s COVID policy is neglect and eugenics with more steps. As for North Korea, who’s deranged enough to give a fuck about their supposed lack of protocols (also false) when the real disaster is still unfolding all around us?

      • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        You say that like it’s whataboutism to mention a country had it worse when the original commenter meant to make it sound like there was a singular country with the issue. I never said America’s response was great, but I responded asking if they were talking about North Korea because they had it worse, even going so far at one point to say covid didn’t exist in a practical sense. They ignored the virus and it almost decimated them because North Korea has such bad health. They fit the commenter’s allusion to a country that handled it badly better than America even if America handled it badly too.

    • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      America had a larger infection rate and mortality rate than North Korea.

      I know what you’re gonna say “oh they lied about their numbers”. Why would I trust the US to be honest about theirs? Why would I trust the US media in their claims about North Korea lying about its numbers?
      The US had several whistleblowers like Rebekah Jones getting arrested/abused/harrased for their reporting on the state of the US obfuscating data.
      The american media has been shown to lie time and again, especially when it comes to foreign matters - Most famously about Iraq. What reason do I have to trust it?
      The United States has the largest prisoner population in the world and has a history of persecuting minorites and political dissidents like leaders of black lives matter. These dissidents are dissapeared at secret police blacksites where they are tortured. This prisoner population is used as slave labour, which is still legal.
      Why would I trust the lies peddled by this authoritarian regime about a country whose population they relentlessly bombed until they’d murdered 20% of it.

      • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Even if giving your sources the benefit of the doubt, you say that as if the US is the only place that talks about things going on in North Korea.

        • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Ah neat you failed to engage with the central argument, instead moving the goalposts to now being another weirdly general discussion.
          You were referring to American media and American claims, so this is the framework. Instead of either accepting your sources are flawed, that you have a bias, that they have a bias, that you might not be entirely correct, you choose to shift the discussion to one where you yet again take another incredibly broad position that is so vague it is nigh impossible to disorove. I don’t think you do this on purpose, I think it is reflexive, but I encourage you to interrogate your actions upon encountering data that conflicts with your worldview.

          • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I’m not moving any goalposts, I’m simply stating the observation that there are other nationalities who not only might serve as a spark or derivative for whatever the American media says but also that info is shared enough that it can amount to a confirmation. Some other countries and their media, such as the BBC and Russia Today, report on both America and North Korea as much as America does. Never did I imply I was only talking about things because America was the one doing the narrating though.

            • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              m simply stating the observation that there are other nationalities who not only might serve as a spark or derivative for whatever the American media

              What does this have to do with a discussion about North Korea as presented by American media? You are not engaging with the argument or the points, you are not even relating it to your own, you are instead reframing the discussion to be about something else - You are moving the goalposts.

              Never did I imply I was only talking about things because America was the one doing the narrating though.
              dawg your alleged sources were all American media.

              Oh hey you managed to find one whole article! Good on you! Is that article the sources you mentioned? I just wanna be sure that I’m not missing out.

                • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  You initiated this with the framework of American media. Now that that media has been critiqued, you are trying to reframe the discussion to one that is being more general, rather than actually engage with the argument put forth or acknowledge in any way what I have been saying. You are not engaging with my argument, you are trying to avoid it by making the discussion be about something else.