It is, as always, important to point out that according to this the president made response decisions based on his belief a disaster myth — that the public panics in times of disaster — which disaster scholars have studied for over 50 years.
Whether it’s officials delaying calls for wildfire evacuations or not being truthful w/the public about the scope & severity of an emerging pandemic lives are put at risk — and lost — when public officials make decisions based on a false belief about human behaviors in disasters.
It is horrifying and, frankly, lazy.
We know how to respond to these events. We have a century of damn research on this. We have practitioners with decades of experience. Yet, none of that matters when the person in charge won’t listen.
Here's a tweet from March 3rd where I defined what the word 'panic' actually means.
Here's a whole podcast episode talking about the disaster myths.
Here's an article I wrote about it during Florence
blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/t…
Read Rebecca Solnit's book. Look Quarantelli up on google scholar. This information is accessible.
To be clear -- I do not at all think that is why the President delayed sharing information with the public or failed to take decisive action but...
Okay also just seeing that the timeline is mad at Bob Woodward for not sharing these interviews earlier and like... okay, sure but also this surely is not revelatory or going to change anyone's mind?
I guess I'm just not sure how many more examples you need that the president has lied about something before you understand that he is a habitual liar.
He lies about disasters, among other things, constantly. Like... truly... constantly.
Like... I've written entire articles about it. 🤷♀️
Idk man, I just don't know where we go from literally changing a hurricane map with a sharpie...
This is all to say that if I were the president of a country staring down a pandemic I would simply not make response decisions based on The Disaster Myths.
Whatever. I've been tweeting about this for four years so I'm pretty done with it.
When in doubt, double down on the disaster myths!
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