Game of the day thread, and other news

centipede - Don't get me wrong, the WHO certainly should've managed this much better and given recommendations against traveling to China much sooner, but here is the thing: their bad, conflicting reports are from January/early February, when we didn't see in the west how damaging the thing could be. I would accept if the president was being stupid just at that time (more or less like Trump, who also initially dismissed the danger). But he was TODAY again on national tv, now reproducing his guru's words that Italy/Spain have no deaths related to covid-19 and that the entire thing is a lie created just to destabilize his government, because the insane bastard is that much of a narcissistic asshole. Then he just spent a few million dollars of public money to produce a propaganda video (released yesterday on social networks) called "Brazil can't stop", urging people do ignore the "just a little cold, a little flu" and go back to work on crowded buses. Hell, he even passed an order defining churches as "essential services" that must be open, because he really wants people in crowded spaces.

So there was some confusion coming from the WHO reports, but that's certainly not the cause of confusion here. The situation is very clear: there are governors and congress/senate people working towards quarantine measures and keeping the social/health systems working, and then there's the president, his sons (who are also terrible people occupying public positions) and big supporters (mostly rich retailers) asking people to go back to the streets because "Brazil can't stop", even if, in their words, "10-15% of old people die" (this was said by one of the big retailers that support him, as if this was a normal thing).

Luckily, I just saw that today the federal justice apparently forbade the president to make any provisional measures that disrupt the quarantines ordered by governors and also forbade to consider churches as "essential services" that can't be closed. The governors and congress people also approved a law to give emergencial social assistance to the unemployed and self-employed workers that can't do their job in quarantine, so, stratogustav, it's not as extensive as what we saw in El Salvador but something is finally being done! Obviously, now the president is trying to reap the laurels and change the narrative to look like it was he who proposed that, even though he is still clearly opposed to people being in quarantine - he just doesn't mind being absurdly contradictory as long as he has the attention. It's surreal.

Interestingly, I don't even know what he thinks is presiding anymore, as most governors are ignoring him, the supreme court and justice system are repealing every stupid measure proposed by him, the vice-president is saying that his words are not the official position of the government... So, right now, his only role is to scream on tv/internet and disrupt the work done by all the other branches in the government. Sadly, two governors are his supporters and just suspended quarantine measures today on their states, right when our death rates are starting to pick up pace. One more thing about this situation: here, very few people are being tested, and the number of people dying of causes ruled as "respiratory problems" is already a much higher number than the normal, so a lot of those may be covid-19 deaths that aren't being counted. Test results are taking up to ten days to be released.

Now, changing the country a bit: I'm worried about the situation that most of you guys are living in the US, as it became the country with most cases. Please, take care! If possible, stay home and play stratogustav's game suggestions while you try to relax a bit on your quarantines.

After Super Mario 3D Land, I'm playing Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (Dreamcast). Such a great game! I always wanted to play it, now I can confirm that it is one of the best 3d action-adventure games from that era.

Yeah man, it's just comic book villainy, I've never seen anything like it. You all know how I tend to be positive about things, but it's hard to stay positive when every day there's a new insanity coming from that guy. By the way, I learned today that I'm not alone in my comparison to Nero/Caligula: it seems an article on The Economist today is calling the guy "BolsoNero". We are just lucky that other government officials that seemed to be apathetic last year are finally acting against the crazyness. EDIT: stratogustav , here is an article on The Guardian translating to english some of the crazyness the said today, like that brazilians won't catch the virus because some blokes can bathe in sewage and get nothing. I'm not kidding.

About the US, I'm really sad about all of this. I hope you guys stay safe and that the country can recover as fast as possible from this - being the major economy in the world, the US is certainly financially prepared to face the economic drawbacks, so let's just hope it can also take the best possible care of the health of whoever has the disease right now. The country certainly seems to be taking matters very seriously right now, which is good.

The idea that the virus started big in China and Iran doesn't look good for us, but now that we are getting affected they may realize we are not the ones to blame.

I've seen all the horrible things the Chinese do to animals. It is not a surprise things like this happen, and if they wanted to use that to start an international conflict, there won't be money for that.

Even high Chinese officials are blaming us:



I feel people are just mad, an they are trying to point fingers, but they have no evidence against us.

The worst is that the WHO is definitely bias in favour of China, and you can see it from afar.

The main difference between Covid-19 and the regular flu is that the death rate is a lot higher.

If in an area the flu kills 0.2%, Covid-19 kills 2% of the patients.

When we are talking about millions of people, it makes a massive difference, even if those percentages look small.

Another big difference is that we have a vaccine to prevent the regular flu, we have nothing concrete against Covid-19 other than isolation.

Billions of people already have some kind of immune defense mechanism against the regular flu, but since Covid-19 is a brand new thing, no one on Earth had anything in their immune systems to fight it. Which makes everyone vulnerable.

The extreme measurements that have been taken around the world have prevented Covid-19 to become a higher problem.

I really mean when I say those are extreme measurements.

You can ask a 100 years old man, a 75 years old man, a 50 years old man, and a 25 years old man, none of them have ever seen in their lifetime something like this, where everything is closed, when business are closed, major sports, major events, restaurants, clubs, bars, even government agencies. It hasn't been done.

This is something very unique that no one alive has seen or lived before. Even in the middle age during the black plague, Churches remained open. Churches are closed today.

However if those measurements were not taken the list of lives would have been catastrophic.

Regular flu already kills 646,000 people per year. That's 20 times more than what Covid-19 has done so far.

However if no measurements were taken, we would not see 6,460,000 people dead by Covid-19.

Instead we would see 64,600,000 people dead because the death rate would have been a lot higher because of the lack of medical resources when most people are sick at once.

We can still reach those numbers if don't continue to take these extreme measurements worldwide.

Luckily, many countries are already implementing the extreme measurements around the world, and this is keeping the numbers relatively low.

That's a good thing, and let's hope we keep it that way.

That said, for economic reasons it is basically impossible to do this properly at such major scale, and that's why the numbers keep rising.

This is the quarantine game of the day:

I feel bad for Cervantes . He had to type a several dozen paragraph long essay across several posts just to finally convince ONE FUCKING BOARD MEMBER how malignant, racist, ignorant, belligerent, and overall fucked-in-the-head that far-right pro-fascism lunatic Jair Bolsonaro is. Anyone with half a brain knows that Bolsonaro is nothing but bad news. There is absolutely no reason why ANYONE should have to take as much time as Cervantes did to explain all the things wrong with him, because it's as clear as broad-fucking-daylight for anyone with a working conscience.

It's important to remember that all but two of our regular american posters are confirmed Trump voters; outside of global democratic MeleeMonk, there's just Stratogustav, the global conservative who has gone on record as saying that he's glad Hillary Clinton didn't win the 2016 election and that he prefers Trump to Hillary Clinton, although I can't remember if he ever revealed whether or not he himself voted for trump in the last election.

This is one of the main reasons I hate this forum's user base with a red hot burning passion; 75% of it are climate change denying, far-right american Trump voters, at least one of which, scipioafricanus, has already expressed approval with Bolsonaro's decisions as President, and I'm willing to bet my entire bank account that winnersdontusedrugs @dschult and cobretti would've voted for him if they lived in Brazil. That's how these american conservatives operate; they'll support any far-right politician who's pro military and dedicated to fighting all forms of democracy, no matter how "evil" they might be.

Cervantes, I feel your pain. This is indeed a dark era for the Americas, and I have lost my faith in humanity.

No, I claimed that Balder is GLOBALLY right, which is correct.