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Are you trying to start fights today?  Bringing up a thread that's more than 6 weeks old?

Biden has more empathy than former ever could.  If you supported former or never called him out for his lack of empathy, you certainly don't get to criticize a decent, caring person.  Remember in the beginning of Covid when former was asked what he would say to people who were scared?  He just insulted the reporter.  Except for the Republicans, most reasonable people would agree Biden has a great deal of empathy and Trump is incapable of showing empathy.

And its not just Americans.   Around the world, most people agree former lacked empathy, especially during the covid crisis

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/05/will-americans-forgive-trump

One of the first things Biden did in office was to hold a national memorial service to recognize the more than 400,000 people who had died of covid.

Even former's campaign manager thought he lost the election in part because of his lack of empathy.

www.newsweek.com/ex-trump-campaign-manager-brad-parscale-says-lack-empathy-during-pandemic-cost-him-election-1551640

This was written a year ago, before the election.  We know which side Americans chose.

www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/30/trump-empathy-virtue-signaling/

Trump is running against empathy
To the GOP, caring about anyone except yourself makes you a sucker.

And that carelessness is no accident. It’s the theme of his campaign, his government and his party. Trump is the purest embodiment of an insidious rot in the Republican Party — a belief in the primacy of individual interests even at the expense of the common good. Trump is the human apotheosis of a guiding principle that says every policy decision is a zero-sum transaction where any benefit to someone who is not you is an automatic loss for you. Trump’s presidency boils down to the notion that caring about others or helping others with no expectation of material personal gain is a weakness.

In the presidential campaign that will end in a few days, Joe Biden is an avatar of everything Trump is not in terms of his orientation toward others. His public experience of grief — having lost his first wife and daughter in a car accident, and later his son Beau — have made him particularly sensitive to how Americans are dealing with loss in the middle of a pandemic that has killed at least 228,000 people here. He does not withhold affection, or awkwardly pantomime it as Trump does.

For this, Trump’s followers have heaped disdain on Biden, most notably for having the temerity to care about his surviving son, Hunter, in public. The New York Post published texts apparently sent between the Bidens while Hunter was in rehab, one of which read: “Good morning my beautiful son. I miss you and love you. Dad.” Around the same time, a photo surfaced where the men are embracing each other and Biden is kissing his son on the cheek, prompting the right-wing commentator John Cardillo to ask, “Does this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you?” Biden’s warmth and emotional generosity, even toward his own children, is viewed as weakness. Trump adviser Mercedes Schlapp complained during a televised Biden town hall event that she felt like she was watching an episode of “Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood,” and she meant it as an insult. Being a good neighbor is antithetical to everything Republicans stand for these days.
Trump built a career on magic words. The spell broke at the debate.

This is true in the smallest ways and the largest alike. Being a good neighbor implies a responsibility to others and a duty to look out for them. It implies that it’s immoral to consciously enable harm to the most vulnerable and to perpetuate injustices upon people who are disenfranchised. These values should be nonpartisan; they’re theoretically built into the social contract. But they do not translate into policy or rhetoric on the right. Look at the utter disdain the right has for small gestures of open solidarity. Conservatives today are enraged by things like people who work in entertainment while simultaneously expressing political opinions (exceptions made for Ted Nugent, James Woods, Scott Baio and, well, the former reality TV star in the Oval Office) or expressing support for Black Lives Matter, which they dismiss as “virtue signaling” because they cannot fathom public solidarity as anything but performative unless it expresses support for people who are exactly like them. (Saying that “blue lives matter,” on the other hand, doesn’t count as virtue signaling because it echoes a White conservative view toward law enforcement that denies the existence of systemic racism, which implies they might have some moral obligations to Black people.) Even simple expressions of politeness, like asking someone their preferred pronouns — which takes as much effort as holding a door open for somebody walking behind you — are met with incredulous insistence that no one could possibly be doing it out of basic respect for another person.
And that carelessness is no accident. It’s the theme of his campaign, his government and his party. Trump is the purest embodiment of an insidious rot in the Republican Party — a belief in the primacy of individual interests even at the expense of the common good. Trump is the human apotheosis of a guiding principle that says every policy decision is a zero-sum transaction where any benefit to someone who is not you is an automatic loss for you. Trump’s presidency boils down to the notion that caring about others or helping others with no expectation of material personal gain is a weakness.

This is projection, and it’s particularly disingenuous when it comes from people who often wrap their contempt for people who aren’t White, straight, natural-born citizens in a public Christianity, posting Bible verses to Twitter and implying that a virtuous America is one that is willing to separate immigrant children from their parents, strip women of their own bodily autonomy, punish gay people for being gay and only able to help the poor if they pass some litmus test that shows them to be deserving. This is a perversion of virtue, but it’s a perfect manifestation of a society where any notion of common good and shared responsibility has been eroded by an emphasis on individualism that utterly denies the role that luck plays in anyone’s ability to thrive and succeed and blames people who suffer from systemic injustices for the harms done to them.

It also leads to Marie Antoinette levels of tone-deafness by elites who cannot relate to, and secretly despise, the plight of working people in America. “Find something new,” warbled senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump, who got her jobs in business and government from her father, as millions of Americans lost their own as the pandemic decimated the economy. Research shows that money tends to erode empathy interpersonally, which partially explains but does not mitigate the behavior of the Trump family — and also explains the priorities of the Republican Party, which has gone to great lengths to protect the interests of the 1 percent, giving them generous tax cuts and backstopping the covid-19 losses of large companies while refusing to bail out their actual working-class constituents. And what’s the excuse for such stinginess? Too much federal unemployment aid might lead people to stay home instead of going back to work. If you needed any more evidence that the GOP has no empathy for working people, see their apparent assumption that the working class is inherently lazy and will not be productive citizens unless starvation is the alternative. It’s okay if some of you die, as long as not a single one of you gets something you might not deserve.
This Republican notion of deservingness itself is a failure of empathy. It demands that the poor work 10 times harder than, say, Jared Kushner, to achieve a baseline quality of life, imposing work requirements for benefits on people who want to work and can’t. It says that children can be used to punish their parents, whether it’s denying them services because of unpaid school lunch debt or taking them away from their parents to discourage immigration. It says that money is the best indicator of success, hard work and character, despite the fact that according to a 2017 study, 60 percent of private wealth in this country is inherited (as it was by the Trumps and Kushner), and some portion of the rest is generated through lucrative financialization schemes that add no meaningful value to society but often harm large swaths of the population, as in the 2008 credit crisis. It convinces people on the receiving end of luck — whether it’s the circumstances they were born into, the people they knew, random timing, the color of their skin or their gender, or even the intelligence they have innately — that they deserve these benefits of all of these things, and that conversely, the people with different outcomes deserve what they get instead.
I worked for Jared Kushner. Of course he says his covid-19 failure is a success.
And elites in this regime have no reservations about saying openly that as long as they’re taken care of, their constituents don’t matter. CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked Trump spokesman Hogan Gidley this week whether he was concerned about Vice President Pence’s upcoming rally in Wisconsin, which could prove to be a superspreader event. “Hospitals in Wisconsin are near capacity. Does that give you any pause, or the vice president any pause, about going there and holding a big rally?” she said.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Gidley, apparently thinking of whether Pence might be contagious — since several of his aides recently tested positive for the coronavirus — but not worrying about any rally attendees who could easily infect each other. “The vice president has the best doctors in the world around him, they’ve obviously contact-traced and have come to the conclusion that it’s fine for him to be out on the campaign trail."



Gift Article

Are you trying to start fights today?  Bringing up a thread that's more than 6 weeks old?

I’m not watching your video or any videos you post.  We’ve been down this road before and you are easily duped by doctored videos.

As to “I don’t have to be part of the decision making process to know” scenario it only shows your ignorance.  I’m not just picking on you.  It’s all “backseat drivers” who think they know or know better or think they can do it better. All backseat drivers are making assumptions without knowing the facts and they often end up looking foolish once the facts are brought to light.

So the question is why were there still Americans left in Afghanistan by the end of August, they were given ample notice the US was pulling out.  So why did they wait until the last possible minute?  You are the one with all the answers, care to enlighten us?

Could it possibly be because no one anticipated how fast the Afghan government and military would collapsed?  And how much did the agreement dumpster don made with the Taliban, while cutting out the Afghan government , contribute to the chaos?

As to “turning the page”, last I heard the Biden Administration is in talks with the Taliban to get the last of the folks that want out, out.  

If you have solid verifiable proof this is not the case and he has “turned the page” please share it with us.

Let's start with the fact that the borders are not actually open.

Too bad you have no boundaries!

It must really eat at the Republicans that after four years of total devastating incompetence by a Republican President the Democrats managed to elect a decent man doing a really decent job cleaning up the mess left by their guy.  That he is showing compassion and empathy in the process that the other guy could never do.

And thank you for sharing your petty little remark with us.  It’s a perfect example of the bitterness Republicans must feel about now.

That he is showing compassion and empathy in the process that the other guy could never do.

Many private businesses are mandating vaccines for their employees, not just government agencies. 

From Facebook to Goldman Sachs to Microsoft to Salesforce to Tyson Foods to Disney to Walmart to Morgan Stanley to Google to to Anthem to . . . 

But that is not what I asked. Should a private business be able to tell employees that they must get vaccinated or be fired? A private business can kick out people for not wearing shoes or a shirt if a sign is posted. Some restaurants have a dress code. My school system had certain clothing requirements(no open-toed shoes, for example) and we were not allowed to display any political buttons, signs or the like.
This question pertains to the rights of private businesses to have requirements for its employees. According to an AMA survey, 96% of doctors have been vaccinated. I did see a notation that *some* people who have certain allergies should discuss getting the vaccine with their doctor, but as far as I can find, it is recommended by the CDC, John’s Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic that the vaccine is safe for the vast majority of folks. Maybe I missed something? It’s certainly possible.


ETA: I also feel the need to add a note about the article by AIER that you linked in response to Lucy G. There have been some allegations about just how free-thinking that think tank really is.

bylinetimes.com/2020/10/09/climate-science-denial-network-behind-great-barrington-declaration/

But that is not what I asked. Should a private business be able to tell employees that they must get vaccinated or be fired?

Show me one study other than the one from Israel.  The faults in that study have already been pointed out.  There are studies like the CDC one from Arkansas or Kentucky that show acquired immunity does not offer the same protection.

No, the vaccine does not prevent it, but you are less likely to spread it.  The vaccine slows the transmission of covid.

Just showing you that you did say it’s possible the vaccine is not safe.  You can argue semantics all you want, but it’s not any different than saying the vaccine is unsafe.

If pixiechick answered my question, I can’t find it. Do private businesses have the right to mandate vaccines for their employees as a condition of employment? I believe that they do.

Please do link your multiple legitimate studies that have not been debunked and that show a prior case of COVID confers the equivalent immunity that full vaccination does.

Please link your multiple legitimate infectious disease specialists who don’t feel that everyone who CAN be vaccinated, SHOULD be vaccinated, including those who have already had the disease. 

(not chiropractors who are hawking ivermectin or whatever)

And for updated U.S. vaccination numbers and goals, here is the Mayo Clinic for you, updated as of Sunday. www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-tracker

Oh lucyg, don’t you know? It’s not for her to do that! You should do that yourself…for some apparent reason that I can’t recall right now 😉

Another reason to consider getting a vaccine is that even though you've had covid, you have no idea how many antibodies your body has produced. You could have zilch or it could be plentiful. You don't know unless you're tested. 

It has been stated over and over again (with links to legitimate sources) that antibodies from having the illness itself are in no way as equally protective or as long-lasting as the vaccine series is at preventing reinfection.

And we are not at 75% fully vaccinated. Current number is 57% of all Americans.

The vaccine is safe.  There are no doubts or questions that it might not be safe.  Millions of Americans and millions of people around the world have taken them.  Those claiming that we don’t know the effects 10 years from now don’t understand how vaccines work.  

In the US, we tried carrots and incentives to get people to take the vaccine.  We tried answering questions from trusted sources.  Those tactics didn’t work, white conservative evangelical male Republicans still refused the vaccine.  Perhaps if Republican politicians  had done more to advocate for the vaccine, we wouldn’t be in this situation.  It’s a public health crisis and now we’re looking at mandates.

As we’ve already stated, you are protected from the vaccine.  You are protected from hospitalization, severe illness and death.  And vaccines slow the transmission.

Vaccines are safe and effective.  Anyone that suggests otherwise is spreading misinformation.

We have given thoughtful, rational answers but you continue to ignore them.  And move the goal posts.

you moved the goal posts.  Now the vaccine is not safe or effective?