Or else what?

I might start saying that the US states should all become independent, or that the US, Canada and Mexico should form a Union making them the largest trading block.

Views coloured by my political views.

We won't be in a lock down forever, but whatever. You already seem to know how the pandemic will play out, so I have nothing to add to that then.

You already seem to know how the pandemic will play out, so I have nothing to add to that then. — ssu

What in God's name are you rambling on about? I made a comment about the present being-fucked-of-Sweden with no reference to 'how the pandemic will play out' so the fact that you are incapable of keeping track of time tenses or something is your problem alone.

deadly repercussions — StreetlightX

The bodies — StreetlightX

Seriously?!?!?
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

It's weird how often people forget that the world is larger than the US, and the CDC can therefore not fabricate numbers across the globe.

Lamenting the cultural infantilization of Americans. - It appears to me we become merely annoying, but have lost the mantle of dangerousness that might have been our greatest protection. The spirit of the 2d amendment as that a citizenry could at need defend itself, the capacity alone usually sufficient, and the fact and practice when it wasn't. Now it's just deluded individuals who "need" their guns to "protect themselves and their families." So much for arms. — tim wood

We're in agreement here, in principle at least. However, I think we would also agree that violence of this kind is a last resort, and it must be first established that not only are democratic processes broken in the US (which I think we'd agree on that) but broken to a point that the effort to overwhelm those democratic processes to reestablish democracy is greater than some violent revolution.

But yes, I agree at some fundamental level, if the state derives justification by representing the general will of the people and state violence is morally speaking the people's violence in any case, then if the state no longer effectively performs that function and has lost legitimacy, re-appropriating the use of violence that was delegated to the state encounters no problem in principle. The problems are entirely practical, in that violence rarely accomplishes anything; discussion and argument have been far more powerful forces in history.

However, the reality of the situation at the moment, as you say, is infantilization and just deluded individuals, the loss of community, generally speaking, to do anything relevant at all. It makes no sense to call for armed revolution, if, for instance, general strikes have not been tried.

That is, a corruption of our national character and loss of moral compass. Trump, I think we shall find, is a no one, a nothing-at-all, the evil of him being that he occupies places where there needs to be a something/someone. And as a nothing he's undeposable. — tim wood

If you basically mean Trump is the symptom and not structurally relevant nor intelligent enough to create some sort of despotism, then we agree.

The cartoonist creator of Pogo, Al Capp, is the author of he quote, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Turns out he knew a thing or two. And the founding fathers knew we might make a mistake - it's not well understood that the electoral college was supposed to be a protection against such mistakes - and argued that the election was the curative. And now we have the 25th amendment, but without the common sense to use it. — tim wood

Here we disagree. The American founding fathers were quite self-conscious of making a system where only the wealthy could wield power; the rabble needed to be kept out. As such, Trump is entirely consistent with the system. Trump is the best proof of the advantages wealth has in the US system, and Bernie is the best proof of the disadvantages of "regular person". So, in this sense, Trump beating Bernie (because Bernie can't even get to the general, the system works so well) is demonstration of the system working exactly as intended. What the founding fathers didn't consider seriously enough is that the wealthy class, having such an electoral advantage, can systemically corrupt the whole system. In other words, the American system is simply "Aristocracy light" and the time frame from going from a "true educated and courageous elite" of the founding fathers to what we see now, is not even a good performance for an aristocratic systems.

The solution to insufficient democracy is always more democracy. Countries that have fixed feelings of disenfranchisement due to clearly unfair electoral processes, do well in maintaining a civil and coherent public discussion; countries that stagnate in this regard all up in both extreme polarization of the political discourse while simultaneously in a general political apathy of most people giving up on politics because their views aren't represented fairly.

Switzerland has, at the moment, the most fair democratic system and innovations such as "7 person presidency" so that one person cannot have too much power under any circumstances. They also have not only universal conscription but each conscript then keeping an assault riffle at home, precisely because the government really is the people and the people have no reason to fear themselves.

Trump beating Bernie (because Bernie can't even get to the general, the system works so well) is demonstration of the system working exactly as intended. What the founding fathers didn't consider seriously enough is that the wealthy class, having such an electoral advantage, can systemically corrupt the whole system. In other words, the American system is simply "Aristocracy light" — boethius

:up:

In other words, the American system is simply "Aristocracy light" and the time frame from going to a "true educated and courageous elite" of the founding fathers to what we see now, is not even a good performance for an aristocratic systems. — boethius

Yes, and this is one reason a Dem probably wouldn't have done things hugely differently in the current crisis. It would still have been a case of putting "the economy", i.e. the interests of the aristocracy, first too. And the extreme partisanship on the issue, as on just about every other issue, only obscures the problem. Aristocracy party A are not the answer to the problems caused by Aristocracy party B.

And Europe has the same situation?

https://brazilian.report/coronavirus-brazil-live-blog/

European governments vary widely in structure and implementation. So, it depends somewhat on what country you're in, but, in general, we're better at keeping money out of politics and giving the electorate more meaningful choices. For example, in Ireland, the two traditionally largest parties got a combined less-than 50% of the vote in the last election for our equivalent of your House. Our Senate has very little power and our President is just a figurehead, so that vote really matters. (And moneyed interests don't get to buy politicians. Anyone who can afford to buy a few posters and print a few leaflets has a chance of being elected.)

Yes, the US system is clearly for sale. The early bungling of the US in regard to COVID-19, especially the testing problem, is still under investigation, but it has the appearance of a simple mistake.

The failure of NYC to contain the virus is a little better understood now. NY just didn't know what they were dealing with. Interestingly, for the most part, NY's exposure came from Europe, not China. So Europe's failure to contain became America's failure.

To what extent did monied interest delay the US response compared to Europe's reaponse? Honestly, it's not obvious that there was a big difference in the responses except the US got a head's up and so haven't had deaths related to an overwhelmed hospital system the way Italy did.

I await the Frontline documentary to fill in details that we dont see on the surface. I'd be glad to blame 1%'s for thousands of deaths, I'm just not seeing it.

Yes, and this is one reason a Dem probably wouldn't have done things hugely differently in the current crisis. It would still have been a case of putting "the economy", i.e. the interests of the aristocracy, first too. — Baden

In broad outlines, yes.

But I disagree strongly in this particular situation.

The Democratic aristocracy are competent custodians of Empire; stabilizing the Empire is what Obama achieved. Hillary would have done mostly the same, just being slightly more aggressive with respect to Russia (and unknown vengeance factor against Republicans for humiliating her with the blow job).

In the case of the pandemic, the Democrats (and even Republicans before Trump) understood that a true pandemic like we're seeing is an incredible threat to both US imperial security and the aristocracy. There's simply no way to competently respond in a for-profit system nor social safety net to deal with the economic disruption.

This is why the US had the pandemic response team and the CDC would lead pandemic response anywhere in the world. I believe there's an answer Obama gave about "why are we spending money to stop Ebola in West Africa" which was basically "hey! this is in our interests too! Idiots!".

The great irony in the modern US political epoch is that it's Democrats trying to diligently preserve the empire that the Republican base loves so much. Clinton consolidated American soft power dominance post Soviet Union. Bush put the empire into free fall, Obama saved it. Trump has done severe damage to the Empire already before the crisis: purging the entire "soft power" diplomatic corp, making a mockery of the office of the president, embracing dictators, disregarding treaties, creating a trillion dollar deficit, having no coherent Imperial foreign policy, appointing corrupt sycophants to run everything (or then not appointing anyone at all!).

And Trump's biggest mistake in managing the crisis was firing the pandemic team. Yes, China covered it up, but, knowing they might do this, the US previously had people on the ground to not rely on China's honesty (and it seems US intelligence agencies were on top of this issue to fill the civilian side anyways; just now must embarrassingly admit to intelligence capacity rather than rely on either the correct functioning or then the plausible deniability provided by a civilian team with boots on the ground, given the scale of the F-up, US intelligence agencies can't contain these infos even if they wanted to). So, the whole "blame China" thing is basically akin to leaving a kleptomaniac alone in your house and then working oneself into a righteous fury when things are stolen.

The mitigating affect of public health care and a social safety net is also why the EU simply delegated pandemic policing to the US. It's their Empire, it's them without public health system, it's them with most to lose, let them police pandemics; not as a conscious policy, just that risk analysis puts pandemic much lower down for Europe, and then the US has a big investment already, so the result is such a policy effect; hence, pandemic preparedness is just a bureaucratic health system issue rather than a potential existential European issue.

Of course, if you don't want US empire, then Trump and the absurd levels of corruption and propaganda of the Republicans is a good thing, in a sense; not good in itself, but the lesser of two evils (better to have a bumbling crime boss who makes a mess of things, than some genius Machiavellian psychopath).

The reason why the Democratic elites are legitimately "closer to the facts" and constantly virtue signal this belief, is because facts are genuinely needed to competently run an empire, whether for corrupt purposes or some laudable transcendent goal. Why the neo-cons were called "the crazies" by their more liberal, but equally devoted to Imperial maintenance, counter-parts. However, like all aristocratic systems, this goal of facts and competency, and being "long term greedy", is simply not maintainable; corruption and fantasy narratives always become endemic in any aristocratic system (Troy, Egypt, Athens, Sparta, Rome, Carthage, First Temple, Second Temple, Rajah's, China dynasties, the Khans, British Empire, French Empire, the Confederacy, Bismark, Ottoman's, the Tsarists, the Japanese, Nazis, the Soviets); the pattern is always the same, just more or less quick depending on various cultural and stabilizing external threat factors (threats large enough to force meritocratic processes within the elite and society at large, but not so big threats as to just show up and win).

I'd be glad to blame 1%'s for thousands of deaths, I'm just not seeing it. — frank

I can help you out there ol'buddy.

Governments have whole great big departments devoted to something called 'security'. They spend a lot of time and money looking at all the possible disasters and difficulties that might come along and how they can be managed and minimised. It's what governments are for, organising our mutual security. And those departments have been predicting a covid pandemic specifically, and an infectious respiratory virus in general. Of course the fine details of the computer models do not match the actual events, but everything in general about this was predicted and all the possible responses pre-evaluated.

But it turns out that the 1% are extremely sanguine about the death of mainly old and infirm people as a social cost-saving measure. So the preparations were not made and the planned responses were not implemented.

Of course the fine details of the computer models do not match the actual events, but everything in general about this was predicted and all the possible responses pre-evaluated. — unenlightened

Source?

Don't bother. I've told Frank this previously and he spewed some irrelvent babble in response.

No disrespect intended, man, but I really never try to engage you in any kind of serious discussion. Insult me for saying that... fine, it's just true.

There's a whole crowd on here whose comments I rarely bother to read. You're one of the them.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fema-report-warned-of-pandemic-vulnerability-months-before-covid-19/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/exercise-cygnus-uncovered-pandemic-warnings-buried-government/

for examples.


Just to compete with the other analysts and predictors, here's my op from a whole 4 months ago.

The end of work has been predicted before, and it hasn't happened yet. But what might be starting to happen is the devaluation of work, which means the devaluation of the human being.

The value of a human being is the product of his labour; such has been the orthodoxy of economics, and it follows that an increase of productivity results in an increase in the value of labour, but the production singularity, whereby not only automation is automated but progress itself is mechanised, mean that already, manufacturing is taking second place to services. Unskilled labour is already valueless; the human body costs more in resources than it can produce.

Economic logic therefore dictates the scrapping of this uneconomic unit. Your country no longer needs you. Fuck off and die. To object is to make an extinction rebellion. — unenlightened

No worries, I regularly do the same :)

Of course the fine details of the computer models do not match the actual events, but everything in general about this was predicted and all the possible responses pre-evaluated. — unenlightened

Though this is true, the media (due to corrupt incompetence when it comes to science literacy to protect corporate interests) insists on presenting computer modelling as predictive and simplifying assumptions and error bars as some sort of problem where we need to wait and see (we see this in the global warming debate).

People making these models are not even attempting to predict actual events, they are trying to evaluate risk and cost bounds of different scenarios and identify the actions that have the highest cost-reward (for both informational and containment/mitigation purposes).

One of the previous health experts that's been on the TV a bunch (I'll try to track him down) was continuously making this point: the price is high in any scenario, but investing upfront can radically reduce costs on the back-end. All epidemic models easily show why this health expert is correct. As even in diseases that end up being not so bad (like swine flu), the local costs invested in containment as best as possible are anyways insignificant compared to the global costs if you underestimate the threat.

Ironically, the media was correct that swine flu was a big issue, but because risk analysis is taboo on mainstream television (otherwise you end up teaching people global warming is an irrational risk to take, giving the benefit of the doubt to chemicals is stupid, tolerating systemic fragility with just-in-time supply chains is moronic, outsourcing critical production is self-defeating, etc.), created a sort of "boy who cried wolf" effect and people were desensitized to this pandemic. Had they had scientifically literate people allowed to speak, then the risk framework (and what numbers ultimately drive the consequences and response level) would have been easy to point to: "see, swine flu ended up having these numbers, why it didn't shut down the global economy, but we now have 95% confidence level Coronavirus has these way high numbers that will shut down the global economy if containment isn't serious and disruptive to a lot of flyers, and yes Boeing stock too, which is a big kick while their down from the Max fiasco, but it's not society's job to run cover of a systemic risk to make mental life comfortable for a few Boeing executives ... a few weeks anyways".

The models end up having pretty good predictive accuracy anyways in this case because the phenomena of epidemics is really well understood and repetitive both throughout human history and other species. But this isn't really relevant for the purposes of decision making, it just makes decision making even easier if the goal is containment/mitigation (which it wasn't; stock market was the goal but epidemiologists didn't have a model to explain how the pandemic might interact with the stock market to Western leadership).

Thanks. So there's foreknowledge of the threat of pandemic.

What we're saying is that 1%ers knew this, knew that COVID-19 was this very organism, and suppressed it in order to keep the economy running.

So what happened? How did NYC end up locking down and weathering the crisis fairly well in the face of no cure and no vaccine?

Why didn't businesses stay open and let the hospital overflow as happened in Italy?

And was the Italian disaster a result if 1%ers?

No worries, I regularly do the same :) — StreetlightX

Cool.

We're accusing them if putting money ahead if lives. So why did they allow the economy to shut down? — frank

You need to look at the timing, because all you have to do to turn a crisis into a disaster is delay a little. It turns out that you cannot quite get away with saying you want a lot of old and frail people to die because it's good for the economy, so you have to act. But you delay acting enough to maximise the deaths, but not so much that even frank will realise you are deliberately letting people die.

I was asking why the 1%ers failed to keep the economy up and running.

We're accusing them of putting money ahead of lives. So why did they allow the economy to shut down?

For you Americans own sake! Stop spouting, start suggesting. To get some sort of effective response to Covid-19 you need mass concern of Republican and Democrat middle ground to pressure your bloody congress representatives to start working together and run your governance.Tell them to work with the separate states who are doing something if you have to. Tell them to tell Trump what's going to happen if that's what it takes. You're all Americans,start acting like it. If you're a Democrat talk with your ex class mates who are now Republican,if Republican converse with your Democrat neigh-bours. Together flood all your local representatives with e-mails, twitter, instagram, etc, etc. Talk with your neighbourhood to form a local consensus and then challenge your local republican and democrat representatives to be seen to be working together too forward your views. You got plenty of work to do, anything but what is the general state of play at the moment has got to beat your current efforts.

Remember the Arab spring, it didn't last but it sure took off in a hurry. You all deserve to be heard, but too many of you can't even listen and connect to each other. There's more than a little noodle in among all these posts and I'm certain that at least a few of you carry some local clout and have some worthwhile community connections. There's a meaningful challenge or two in all this crisis if some of us choose to take it up. Also as "I like Sushi" has noted, there are some positive things already being done, mainly on individual private bases, I'd encourage shouting about them. cheers, good luck, you need it, all of you.

As for NY, its largely been screwed by its leaders and continues to be screwed even as they put up a concerned, heartfelt face to the very public it fucks over:

"Even as patients died in the hallways of hospitals and their bodies piled up in the makeshift morgues outside, the governor and legislature enacted billions in cuts to health care. They cut $300 million from hospitals, hundreds of millions more from long-term care programs and community health centers that keep seniors and the disabled out of hospitals, and shifted hundreds of millions in costs onto localities that will have no choice but to raise the sales tax (in other words, the price of groceries) or cut social services to bear them.

The governor did delay the implementation dates of some cuts in order to accept upwards of $6 billion in emergency federal Medicaid funds which he’d been threatening to reject (and would have made New York unable to accept the federal funds), a concession that multiple legislators cited as informing their votes for the budget. That accepting billions in free health care aid was a “concession” gives some indication of the perversity of the governor’s priorities.

...The single time a reporter at a coronavirus press conference asked him recently if he would consider increasing taxes on the wealthy, Cuomo answered: “I don’t know how you raise taxes on people who are out of work and their business is closed because government needs more funding.” But the only one raising taxes on hard-hit New Yorkers is Cuomo, whose budget’s Medicaid cost-shifting will force counties to raise sales taxes. ... Cuomo is lying when he tells families he can’t “protect them from the reality” of cuts. He could, were he willing to ever so slightly expose his Wall Street campaign donors to that same reality."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/andrew-cuomo-new-york-budget-austerity-cuts-coronavirus
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/andrew-cuomo-medicaid-coronavirus

So what happened? How did NYC end up locking down and weathering the crisis fairly well in the face of no cure and no vaccine? — frank

You do realize we can read your previous comments?

The position you started at was:

Many elderly or terminally ill people won't go to the hospital at all. Hospice comes to them at home. Medicaid pays again.

You seem to be concerned with all the young healthy people. Most of them will either have no symptoms, mild symptoms, or they'll feel like shit for a couple of weeks. They won't burden the system too much more than all the other viruses are already doing.

I'd be happy to join you in talking about triaging hundreds of people in one day, rounding them up in convention centers, etc. That's almost a philosophical issue (not quite.) There just isn't any reason at all to think that we'll need to do that. None. — frank

For instance, your idea now that things are "progressing nicely" and you're the calm and steady hand among us doomsayers I already addressed a month ago (how I already explained it before even that):

It's going to be just like Mad Max. I'm telling you. Total disaster.
— frank

I've already explained it cannot get to a madmax outcome since 85-90% of cases recover easily. So letting it just go out of control and killing whomever it can as quickly as possible, wouldn't collapse society. The 90 - 95% (as not all people become cases) of people that survive can easily just carry on.

So, even if society chose to maximize deaths by doing absolutely nothing to slow infection, it's still not a mad max scenario.

Stop wagging your finger at that straw man.

However, just straight up letting 5% of people die without any attempt to help them is obviously not politically feasible.

Even 5000 isn't politically desirable as ssu notes. — boethius

You're just going in delusional circles now; you're just imagining you've been right all this time by adopting our previous positions and thinking we were predicting some even more extreme apocalypse.

When I was arguing for competent containment it was to avoid this as a worst case scenario of shutting down the major economies all at once (which means stressing the worlds resources to deal with pandemic all at once, and the obvious economic depression level implications). Now that we're here, yes, things can get even worse which merits discussion; martial law, out-of-control inflation, geopolitical dislocations. But considering your haughty dismissal of the risk of getting to this point, and the obvious advantages that would have been reaped if the US administration wasn't in denial about getting to this point, maybe it's time to review your analytical capabilities before jumping in again with your Apocalypse straw-manning and trying to portray the US response as competent with as little research as you did a month ago.

It's not just bad faith, but ridiculously and transparently so (since we can read your previous comments! just like we can watch Trump claiming the problem will magically go away and that he doesn't feel responsible anyway) to pretend the current situation was your "a ok, everything on track scenario". It's bizarre fantasy.

It's not exactly Mad Max, but we are getting more young ones than I expected.

The bad ones go into a condition called DIC. I dont remember what that stands for, but it's a systemic inflammatory response indicating an overwhelming infection. It gets bloody. Is there CV in that blood? If course!

So here I am covered in plastic, thank God I remembered my anti-fogger spray, turn the vent off, pull the ETT, cover head in plastic, prepare for the long journey of cleaning this vent up for the next person.

What's so weird is that when I usually withdraw support, the whole family is in the room. It's only with homeless people that the RN and I do this alone. But now everybody dies alone. I haven't gotten to know any of these people.

If I seem dispassionate, maybe it's because this is what I do for a living.

Did I just pull the healthcare worker card on ya? Damn right!

A second wave might hit in the fall and basically the corona-virus might stay with us just like the common flu. — ssu

Why would it wait until the fall? The second wave would come right away.

Talk with your neighbourhood to form a local consensus and then challenge your local republican and democrat representatives to be seen to be working together too forward your views. — rob staszewski

We're practising distancing, congregating with the neighbours would be counterproductive.

It's not exactly Mad Max, but we are getting more young ones than I expected. — frank

You do realize we already had this conversation, that I already explained over a month ago:

Yes, I do care about the old and would rather anyone, old or young, get the care appropriate to the disease.

The disease affects young people less, yes, but many still need critical care and some still die, all at once it is not logistically possible to provide that care. — boethius

There was zero reason to be surprised about "we are getting more young ones than I expected". The information was available to expect exactly what we are seeing, and the sooner actions are taken the less doubling times happen: and every doubling time you let happen due to inaction doubles the problem!

You were happily drinking the Republican cool-aid a month ago, smugly comfortable that whatever consequences for believing such propaganda are safely in the future, certainly secretly assuming things "won't be so bad" and you'll be able to pop out with this sentiment with the entire right-wing echo chamber roaring to the rescue.

That's not the timeline we're in though. Pretending this is more-or-less what you expected all along, with a few little details missed, is just pathetic trolling at this point. But, I am not calling you a troll like the beer guy; I think you're a genuine believer in this propaganda; even as it falls off the rails and plunges into the abyss, you're a happy passenger. Indeed, sailing has gotten noticeably smoother with a total lack of contact with the ground.