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Observation selection bias is an easy one the GOP likes to take advantage of. Eg: not testing for covid to show covid went down.
Also: drone strike civilian casualties.
- Not testing for covid to show it went down is the current strategy of the Biden admin
  
  Lol. Look at this galaxy brain equivicating there start of a pandemic with an endemic with vaccine.
  I mean, obviously the covid hospital occupancy rates would be identical if the actual case rate was the same.
  Oh wait...
  https://ourworldindata.org/covid-hospitalizations
  What's that? Less then 10k vs over 140k? Definitely the exact same situation! /s
  Don't trip over yourself making excuses now
  
  Hospital rates are down because we killed a lot of people and the rest aren't being recorded as covid.
  I know people who very recently have caught and have had their bodies permanently damaged by this disease within the last few months, one of them being a family member who did everything right, so the whole "lol no big deal it's endemic now" shit is really fucking depressing, ngl. It kind of handwaves away a very real pain people are going through.
  
  Yeah because it's too late now. Covid has become just another disease spreading around now. If people actually wore masks and got vaccinated we could have eradicated it but now it's like the flu where it changes to quickly to manage.
  Which was the whole point of the quarantine and masks and social distancing but god forbid Sarah doesn't hang with her besties and John doesn't get to party on the weekends
  
  If people actually wore masks and got vaccinated we could have eradicated
  Not really, there was no chance of us eradicating covid. Covid spreads well even among the masked and the vaccinated. We could only slow it down.
  but now it's like the flu where it changes to quickly to manage
  It was like that from the start, there were multiple competing strains of covid right from when it was first discovered since it had already been spreading for at least 2 months at that point and was all over the world.
  Covid was always going to become endemic.
  
  Yeah, eradication was never a goal. It was always about slowing the spread so hospitals would hopefully not get overwhelmed.
- Also: drone strike civilian casualties.
  When did they change how they count civilian casualties? I heard it was under Obama's administration, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
  
  There is quite the back and forth between Democrats pushing for accountability and the GOP pushing against.
  From Wikipedia, which has all the references one might need:
  "On July 1, 2016, President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring annual accounting of civilian and enemy casualties in U.S. drone strikes outside war zones ("Areas Outside of Active Hostilities"), and setting a deadline of May 1 each year for the release of such report. However, soon after taking office, President Donald Trump designated large areas in Yemen and Somalia to be "areas of active hostilities," thus exempting them from disclosure. The Trump administration also ignored the 2017 and 2018 deadlines for an annual accounting, and on March 6, 2019, Trump issued an order revoking the requirement. "
  The executive order:
  https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2017-title3-vol1/pdf/CFR-2017-title3-vol1-eo13732.pdf
  Trump recinding the order:
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/politics/trump-civilian-casualties-rule-revoked.html
  Plus some other dumb shit by Trump:
  "During the Obama administration, proposed U.S. drone strikes in locations outside active war zones (i.e., in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia) required high-level approval. The Obama administration process for approving drone strikes in such locations featured centralized, high-level oversight, based on intelligence about individuals suspected of terrorism activity. Obama's approval was required for every strike in Yemen and Somalia, as well as "the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan" (about one-third of the total as of 2012), and insisted on deciding whether to approve a strike unless the CIA had a "near certainty" that no civilian deaths would result.
  ...
  October 2017, Trump abolished the Obama-era approval system in favor of a looser, decentralized approach, which gave the military and CIA officials the discretion to decide to launch drone strikes against targets without White House approval. "
  All sorts of references corroborating those summary:
  https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/obama-drones-trump-killings-count/
  The short version is: Obama demanded accountability and his approval. Which did not exist before and was revoked after. Hence, the different counts of casualties is not representative of an actually difference. Only representative of the GOP being shit.

334 comments