The only thing these pastors who are keeping churches open is money. To ignore every health professional out there right now means they don't care about their flock at all.
Imagine people that are so deeply convinced that the media is lying to them and this is a plot to undermine his agenda. That narrative absolutely exists and there are many out there who believe it.
I don't think any churches are intentionally risking the health of their congregation.
That's pretty intentional.
I think I get what you mean, that the decision isn't being made with the intention of risking their health. But they are risking the health of their congregations, because they think they know better.
Conservatives are just as concerned as liberals about the prospect of hundreds of thousands of people dying. The only difference is they tend to have confidence that the government will be able to handle the response effort.
In my opinion we're ramping up and course correcting very well.
This has been an unmitigated disaster thus far, especially if you compare us to South Korea.
When it’s your guy who fucked up, it’s interesting how all of a sudden it’s “this could have happened to anybody!”
HEB, a Texas-based grocer, was talking to partners, running disaster scenarios, and preparing their supply chain as far back as January[0]. A private company was a month ahead of the administration despite all of the preliminary reporting and intelligence communications around the virus. There’s absolutely no excuse for the way the government bungled this.
While Trump was calling the virus a hoax, companies were already preparing for what was to come.
0: https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/heb-prepared-coronavirus-p...
I know this is bad but I don't really see the point in pretending to take them seriously - you have to be really really intentionally ignorant at this point to ignore the continuous lies and blatant criminal activity from the Republicans while still being intelligent enough to post complete sentences on hacker news.
I don't see how I could come to any other conclusion than their supporters either being intentionally very ignorant, or just very ignorant.
The majority of my news comes from NPR (IPR locally here in Iowa). The main people that comment on their Facebook page are clearly liberal and clearly also some of the biggest idiots you've ever met.
Being in a position of leadership also doesn't automatically mean you're not a moron.
What I know is that the Republican President and also the Republican Governor of Iowa are taking this very seriously.
Also I highly recommend people actually watch the press briefings because what I've found is that any time I actually listen to what Trump says, he makes a hell of a lot more sense than whatever clip the media generally chooses to play out of context.
Informative?
"There's a theory that, in April, when it gets warm, historically, that has been able to kill the virus,"
Informative?
"when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away."
I could go on. And on, and on. But I doubt it will make any difference, whatsoever.
He spent 2 months first ignoring then lying about the situation and then spent a month giving terrible advice and lying some more.
Most recently he touted unproven treatments as triumphant cures while claiming that we would be back on track by Easter. Press coverage far from taking small things out of context has in many cases had to cover a lot of ground to cover the sheer amount of stupid falling like half checked food from the presidents mouth every time he appears in public.
Fox News just fired Trish Regan for stating that Coronavirus was “another attempt by Democrats to impeach Trump.” That statement came just a few weeks after Trump himself claimed that concern around the virus was also a liberal hoax. Days after making that statement, he said that cases would drop to zero in a few days, we’re now in the hundreds of thousands. When asked why he cut the pandemic preparedness unit at his National Security Council, he claimed he had no idea that happened, despite video surfacing that shows him talking about those cuts in 2018. Doctors in NYC are days away from having to decide who lives and dies because there won’t be enough respirators for everyone, they’ve already set up refrigerated trailers to store bodies. Testing still isn’t widely available even though we were all told it would be weeks ago.
We’re now at hundreds of thousands infected, thousands dead, and no end to this in sight, given that the president has now pushed social distancing measures to the end of April.
What gives you confidence about this situation?
Re-reading your comment, I think probably the main issue I have with it probably just comes down to us thinking of different people when we see the word "conservative".
I agree that people exist who fit exactly what you described. I just think that's a much smaller slice of the population than (I assumed) you believe.
> We’re now at hundreds of thousands infected, thousands dead, and no end to this in sight
Welcome to a pandemic. Americans today aren't used to being vulnerable. If anything, it's just a reminder of how thin the facade we project on the world actually is.
No, the problem is that America has an incompetent government. China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have shown how to handle this thing with reasonable degrees of competence. We have not.
Plagues and diseases have been around since long before humans. Dealing with them is one of the functions of civilized society, and ours is failing, while other nations are doing far better jobs. But of course, Americans never want to look outside their borders at how other countries do things.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-re...
It's the usual word salad, but I think "Trump says coronavirus is a hoax" is a reasonable interpretation.
Notice how Trump's story changes rapidly. Early on, he was saying it was a liberal hoax or something. Now he's taking it seriously because he wants to look like a great leader in a time of crisis. The only thing he's consistent about is wanting to make himself look good. Luckily, for now, that's moved to actually doing the right things for the most part to deal with this (though it would have been a lot better if he hadn't screwed up so much earlier). True conservatives aren't like this: they are very principled, even if I don't agree with their principles at all. Somehow, they just haven't figured him out yet, or they're just using him for their own ends.
I'm involved in leadership for a church that closed in-person services two Sundays ago. We were probably one week later than most, but I can tell you that money did not enter the conversation at any point.
Because while I can ascribe a great deal of good-faith behavior to more normal churches, we know what kind of bad actors lurk in those palaces.
Nope. We're a small one. But just the fact that we're talking about megachurches already limits the scope of Christian churches in the US: five minute search session suggests that there are less than 2000 megachurches in the US and somewhere around 380000 churches overall.
(If I had more time I'd try to get you numbers, but any time I go down this rabbit hole it takes awhile to come out)
The other factor is that larger congregations means more opportunity for wider spread from a single infected individual, so again greater potential impact than the apparent count would imply.
It will take only one infected person in a church to spread it to a lot of people.
To me one of the scariest scene in the movie "Outbreak" was when the person sneezed in the theater.
They probably believe this is a hoax, or God will spare people who give them money, or something.
They just don’t give a €*#+%% about those on whom they prey
Kind of like any other business that provides a service that people voluntarily purchase.