How's everyone doing?

From someone from a Country with a multi-party system (Germany) I can wholeheartedly say:

“Centrist Parties” are nearly as bad as the extremes ;-/

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The centre isn’t a fixed spot, either. If you have some faction that is quite far to the right, the political centre can end up being moved over to the right.

We’ve currently got about 500k people vaccinated. I really hope the half-hearted rollout isn’t going to end up with us having a vaccine-resistant strain.

“Both parties keep coming up with increasingly fringe candidates”

Yeah, no. The Left in the US is coming up with progressive candidates that equate to mainstream Leftist candidates in Europe. The Right in the US = QAnon, MAGA, and the KKK.

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It does rather look that way.

Yeah, that’s way more accurate than what I said–the US “left” isn’t very far left at all, while the far right is absolutely awful.

I characterized both sides as coming up with fringe candidates because I know a number of people who abhor the far right and were happy to vote for Biden in the general election but think Bernie Sanders is “too far left.” I also know Sanders supporters who at least considered voting Trump as a middle finger to the Democratic establishment who they believe screwed over their guy and cost him the nomination. But “fringe” was an overstatement.

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Hm- as an immigrant from a de facto 1-party country, where the ruling party has an overwhelming majority on 45% of the vote and the opposition is currently supine on everything that matters, not so fast. As far as I can tell, centrist German politicians are models of reason and logic and cooperation compared to their British counterparts - yes, yes, this is a low bar.

Listening to the radio news discussing seriously how a CDU-Green coalition could work sounds near miraculous to my British ears. Yes, Die Linke and the AfD are there, but at least they’re in the open and have to answer for their policies rather than infecting the central parties /cough/ yes I mean Britain again.

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That is my main point of contention. With a handful of parties trying to get the majority is often a dance on a pin’s head imho. Since the constant need to compromise with the more “sane” left and right parties dillutes the planned message (also it is a nice way of backstabbing them non-centrist parties with robbing them of their more sane plans and reforms (and therefore voters)).
Specifically the constant vying for favor with the people who aren’t morally bancrupt enough to vote for the far right or are not not braindead enough to vote for the far left’s anarchy brings a constant wishy washy proposed politics portfolio to the table which confuses everyone, centrics and non-centrics alike.
I don’t think the 2 party system in the USA is perfect (in fact it is quite horrible) but I don’t think the splintering of political spectrums over here is the be-all-and-end-all means to anything either…

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Speaking as a Brit, one of the things I like about watching German politics is how the extremists have got their votes, but it usually avails them absolutely nothing. They have to compromise in order to get anything done, and often end up an irrelevance, because they’re massively outnumbered.


I think the UK is officially the worst in the world at this point, in terms of per capita deaths?

It’s getting close. UK is sitting at #5 on cumulative deaths/capita for countries with populations >1M. US is at #10. UK is #1 on the new deaths/captia 1 week rolling average, so the trajectory is not good.

This is according to the JHU data retrieved by 91-divoc.com.

One item I’ve been tracking for perspective is the US is close to having more deaths from COVID-19 than WWII.

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We’re over 100k deaths, so we’re definitely in the running for #1.

Almost one in every 660 people in the UK have died from Covid or Covid-related causes so far during the pandemic or about one-in-six of all deaths . The UK has one of the worst coronavirus mortality rates in the world, at 151 per 100,000 people.

UK gov only counts you as a covid death if it’s within 28 days of a positive test. If you die on day 29 in ICU = not covid.

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I’ve been watching this too, as a means of comparison. To put @Apex 's point in context, US covid deaths have now well exceeded the number of US WW2 combat deaths, US Civil War combat deaths, total US casualties from WW1 (including wounded), and combined total US casualties for Korea and Vietnam.

And the vast majority of those deaths were military personnel. Covid is primarily killing civilians. And it is in no way done. So please, let’s keep the masks and distancing and hand-washing regimen going, whatever country we’re in. Another 4 or 5 months, and we should be on the other side of this thing.

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So has the GOP. Tomorrow morning, the Republican Party is going to realize that 4000 Americans have died from COVID-19, that unemployment is high, small businesses are suffering and that the deficit has become the biggest ever…and the O’Biden/Harris administration has done nothing to fix this!

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Got my second vaccination yesterday. Thankful for the vaccine, but man do I feel like run over shit today. Fever, chills, aches, the whole nine. Hopefully it’s only 24h like they say.

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That’s awesome! But I do hope that stuff goes away soon.

My wife got her first shot on Tuesday. I’m very happy for her

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I forgot to ask you. How’s your family doing?

Ok, thanks for asking. My mom seems to have gotten the worst of it; she’s feeling better but fatigues easily.

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My wife got it, and had a similar reaction, and it was just a day.

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This was inevitable.

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Man, I remember when Gwyneth Paltrow was a decent actress, not a crazy grifter.

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She’s awful. Happy to forget about her acting career, nothing which she did was great.

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