And it sounds completely crazy if you accurately describe the federal government response.
I mean, at this point Trump is openly saying the US needs to reopen so he can have his beautiful rallies.
This ties to things I've read about how preppers are reacting to the situation. This is not the apocalypse they wanted because it was never about just surviving, it was about having power over other people. Ideally having the weak come to their gates to beg for food and choosing the survivors based on race idealized physical attributes.
Needing to wear a mask to the store and being limited to 3 packs of meat per visit isn't as arousing (unless that's your thing.) If a lot more people are dying it will be closer to their fantasies- they have no interest in fixing the problem for all of society, just making sure they come out on top.
To be fair, some of us were led to expect zombies.
Caring for children, cooking home cooked food, home-schooling, and just getting on and doing your fucking job as best you can are maybe not the kind of macho post-disaster activities they imagined.
I think Trump is going to do well out of this. He learned the lesson of the Bush administration well. The worse the disaster the more power everyone gives you to deal with it.
The Bush administration didn't weather the financial crisis very well.
Which is why Trump is trying to shove people back to work regardless of the deaths caused.
And just the sheer attitude about it all: I keep seeing headlines like "restaurant owners tell employees they can't wear, or get fired". (Make that grammatical.)
Foul, depraved and irredeemable, and yet liberals, progressives and the socialists who hate them can't forsake their beloved pastime of backbiting, backstabbing and backstab-legending long enough to cooperate against. My contempt is full in spectrum but monotone in pitch.
The real nazis are the backbiting liberals.
If it makes you feel better, I'm really nice nearly all the time.
And then you lull them into a false sense of security, and go in for the kill!
Don't bother. The Brazilians have eaten your lunch already.
But it was always going to be this way. There was never any other way the Trump administration would handle this. The (unfair of me) thing that made me angry was the people who spent March and April saying 'they could still pull out of this nosedive! If Trump just [did something competent], we could still save lives!'. I mean, I know they had to say it, because they themselves are sincere and competent, but this is going to be as bad as it can be until January. Getting angry is correct but won't have any effect. This was all baked in in 2016.
Far as I can see, the only way to get some use out of the completely appropriate anger is:
1. to pressure the next administration, or some persuadable local administration and
2. to explode in fury at the next Republican who says they are pro-life or anti-deficit or some stupid hypocritical shit.
3. use the energy to garner power that you can apply for your values.
To be fair, some of us were led to expect zombies.
We still don't know for sure that, six months after somebody gets infected, they don't turn into a zombie.
Which is why the CDC is recommending stakes at burials.
The state can do this because there is no structure for resistance. I really think that blaming ordinary citizens (with the exception of MAGA/militia/etc types) is wrong, because what are people supposed to do? It was obvious from the primaries that our electoral system is a., fucked, and b. manipulated by both Democrats and Republicans, and c. people don't want to go out to vote because of the pandemic, so even if voting in Biden and holding our breaths until January will help, it's going to be very difficult to do.
And what else is there? This is a large and disparate country, but the states are limited in their powers and choked in their funding, which means that, eg, a general strike in Minnesota (even if one could be organized) would be limited in how much it could achieve. Minnesota can't hire contact tracers, for instance, because there's no money and a hiring freeze. A national strike? How?
Armed resistance? By whom? In the face of the police, the army and the militias? Certain parts of the left like to posture on Twitter about how they're buying guns, but what worked in small or mountainous/wild countries in eg 1970 won't work in a large, developed country with contemporary surveillance technology.
Every state is going to open up on more or less the same timeline, hospital use is going to peak at approximately the same time across the country and millions of people are going to die. And god knows what we're facing on the other side of that. This is the only country with a large and complex government where this is going to happen.
For many years I wondered why the United States wasn't a worse and more tyrannical place, because it was obvious to me that there was no reason for the elites not to indulge in this necropolitics - there was no popular organization to serve as any kind of counterweight. I suppose there was some sort of habit of feeling that openly letting your citizens die by the millions was unacceptable, but how long could that last? And now it's done.
On another note: China makes all the antibiotics, right? If we're really determined to have some kind of confrontation with China, they'll withhold antibiotics, there will be mass shortages here and more people will die. In the past, one might have been tempted to assume that this would act as some kind of brake, but it's clear that what will happen is that rich people will get antibiotics and they'll be perfectly fine with the rest of us dying from infected paper cuts, being unable to get cancer treatments, etc.
There is no meaningful future for most of us on the other side of this.
Don't you love farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you'd want what I want-
Sorry my dear
But where are the zombies?
Quick, send in the zombies
Don't bother they're here
I have eaten
the brains
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and braaaaaaiiiinnnnnsssss
23: Now you know why I frown and why I have always frowned.
Still holding on, still employed (but for how long? will the lab reopen? who knows?) Mental health is pretty poor, tbh.
I wish I could see any actually possible way out but it feels like a perfect storm, too many factors to deal with, systems too decayed. For years I was looking around and seeing everything going wrong and wondering when disaster would sweep over us here in Minnesota and now it has.
My household is taking lots of vitamin D in case that helps. The only other tool in the toolbox is staying inside.
21.3: I remain surprised--and I say this purely descriptively--that we've seen so few attempted assassinations, regardless of persuasion of assassin/assassinatee.
The rest of 21 is too rough to respond to, but it's good to see you.
Jesus, eavesdropping on Hawaii's class. They are talking about traits of an apple. The teacher is so patiently going back and forth with a student who says it tastes yellow.
21 is correct except for this :
"Every state is going to open up on more or less the same timeline"
No I think we will manage to "flatten the curve", the original goal, by having every place have a terrible outbreak on a different schedule. Most of Europe and Asia can go beyond flattening the curve to actually stamping it mostly out, but not us.
And antibiotics aren't all made in China. Also India. Generics can be made in lots of places. Even this article about the fragile supply chains also mentions Italy, Japan, etc. We also have a domestic antibiotic industry encouraged by government policy, which the manufacturers in their wisdom have located entirely in Puerto Rico.
27: What's wrong with that? Some apples taste red, some yellow.
The skin of the apple has no taste so the child is right, they all taste like the yellow part inside.
: I remain surprised--and I say this purely descriptively--that we've seen so few attempted assassinations
These days, if you are a disaffected loner, its a lot easier to do a mass shooting than to take a shot at a politician with a security detail.
I have felt too down to want to talk to anyone - it reminds me too much of better days and the only way I can get through is not to think of anything but the moment. I saw some tweet from Kotsko about how Dasein has to be oriented toward the future and with no future there's no "projects" or anything else really, and while what I know about Heidegger could go in a thimble with room to spare that really resonates with me.
Anyone who has some kind of theory about how millions of people aren't going to die of this is welcome to convince me; I would far rather be hilariously, grotesquely wrong and a laughingstock example of left pessimism.
Would you guys like the number for the zoom meeting? I could let you discuss this directly with the teacher.
Caring for children, cooking home cooked food, home-schooling, and just getting on and doing your fucking job as best you can are maybe not the kind of macho post-disaster activities they imagined.
This is so very right.
Related, Alex Jones was talking about cooking and eating his neighbors when his prepper food supply runs out (which won't be for a few years, but he's ready).
To be clear, you are offering the people on a quasi-anonymous web forum the opportunity to zoom bomb an elementary school class?
Let's just say I've got my foot on the gas, in this game of chicken. Who can say if I'll veer or not?
And of course the Minnesota budget is tanked. We could all, of course, pay some more taxes - but that will never do, even though it would probably work out to five to forty dollars more per paycheck, sliding scale, for everyone making, let's say, $40,000 a year and up - we could afford it.
I feel like for many years I was able to pretend that most people were reasonably intelligent and relatively okay, and they aren't. The greed and evil comes, fundamentally, from stupidity, bad education and reasoning errors.
The IFR estimates seem to be trending to the lower ends of original ranges as more antibody testing comes online. I think 0.7% based on NY data. 100% infection in the US is still 2+ million, but herd immunity for uncontained Ro of 3 kicks in at about 66%. Assuming a significant number people make it to a somewhat effective vaccine before infection and it's probably million dead not millions. And that will be by far the worst rate in the world so globally probably only a few million. Optimism!
34.2: The only cheerful thing I have to say is that as far as I can tell, even places that closed down well after NY haven't gotten as bad as NY. It's not taking off like crazy the way I would have expected it to. So it's going to be awful, but maybe hundreds of thousands rather than millions of awful?
Also, Frowner!
The appropriate Jones quote from that rant that needs to be shared widely with no context is, "I will eat your ass!"
40, I have nothing cheerful to say about. I would be delighted to pay so, so much more in taxes to keep my state running, but our psychopath of a governor won't consider it.
Or drench the ultrarich. The 400 people controlling a few trillion dollars or whatever.
Assuming a significant number people make it to a somewhat effective vaccine before infection and it's probably million dead not millions. And that will be by far the worst rate in the world so globally probably only a few million. Optimism!
I doubt we could have the worst rate in the world. Even the Trump administration can't make us do worse than his ideological brethren in Brazil, Russia, Indonesia etc., given our level of wealth, information freedom and competency at other levels of government. At the same time we will probably have the most reported cases by far because the other places with incompetent ruling regimes won't be detecting or reporting many cases.
Frowner, have you read Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's book, _The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins_? I think she offers insight into how people re-establish lives when all is fucked.
Utah is going to be so fucked in the fall when the second wave hits. The dominant mood is no big deal - it's only bad in New York because Chinatown and public transit. We'll have have a mild summer, then others will arrive for ski season and we'll get hammered because what we thought was "it's no big deal" will turn out to be "oh, it just hadn't arrived here yet really" and wearing masks is against our freedom even though two weeks ago everyone was saying lockdowns were bad and we should just require masks...
Does it involve alcohol and hiking?
21: "We're not gonna make it" He explained how
the end will come - You and me were never meant
to be part of the future -
All we have is now -
All we've ever had was now
46: Well, yes, that would be ideal, but unlikely absent the whole armed uprising/national strike bit. I mean, if Unfogged ran the country, even on the most generically 1960s liberal of lines, we could fix much of what ails us because it's not really that difficult. Obviously we'd then have to fight about the remaining problems, factionalize and have a coup, but we'd at least get perhaps 70% of the big problems solved first.
48: I started The Mushroom At The End Of The World but IIRC the first part about all the immiserated mushroom gatherers got me so down that I couldn't read any more.
(Is there a book recs thread? The one upside to this is that I've found a ton of good but light and fairly cheerful novels, a few of which I think would be of interest to Unfoggers generally. I can read nothing serious and have now read, among other things, five Georgette Heyer novels.)
it's only bad in New York because Chinatown and public transit
Public transit definitely but why Chinatown? I read some stories that some towns in Italy's Lombardy region with a lot of Chinese immigrants actually did much better than others because they had forewarning about how bad it would get and knew what to do.
I believe that is conveying the general racist sentiment common in the general public.
Book recs is four or five posts ago -- the post about the new NK Jemisin.
Never say with one word what you can say more tentatively with 14.
Yeah. I could see that.
I've only been reading fluff, and enjoying it very much thank you. That book rec thread is all annoying hard books, so I didn't get many reds out of it.
58: I have so many light reads to recommend and will do that now! This is cheering me up a bit, although I feel the abyss of bad thoughts gaping to either side of me.
So go recommend your fluff! I like fluff!
60 was hectoring toward 58, rather than 59.
53: Utah is very, very white, and very, very racist in some parts. And many people haven't left the state in five generations (missions don't count. a mission is the way to travel around the globe and never leave Utah.) So what happened is that the Chinese virus came to New York, and all New Yorkers go through Chinatown like all the time, and that could never happen here, because of essential oils and really pale Jesus.
I am in a very foul mood today. In case it wasn't obvious.
the Chinese virus
The Chinese virus? WTF?
Did you see that NYT story, I believe, that showed the first cases in NYC came from people who'd traveled from Italy?
I really hope 62.1 is being sarcastic in a way I'm missing and not straight up Trumpist racist because I never got that from you Cala.
And on topic, I'd argue that one has to dig deeper than regional outbreaks. Utah has flattened the curve beautifully. Except in Utah County, which never really shut down, where cases are up, up, up. Fortunately it's a major population center so nothing bad will happen that can't be cured with essential oils.
I think you're reading things really poorly.
Yes, deep sarcasm, reporting community beliefs, not reporting my own.
I think part of the problem is that a lot of people, not just Republicans, are working with the wrong heuristics. Despite all the talk of flattening the curve through collective action, they haven't understood the concept and imagine subliminally that the reason new cases per day have stabilised a bit is a natural tendency for the disease to begin to coast and then lose momentum at this point (well before most of the population has had it). Social distancing for them is like hunkering down inside during a storm. The worst is over; we can start to come out. They haven't built into their mental model the causal role of the social distancing in slowing down the spreading. The car's moving downhill on a steep slope towards a cliff-edge, but it's slowing, or at least has stopped accelerating. And they're thinking: the car's slowing down; what do I need this brake on for? It's like Piagetian pre-causal thinking or something, but at a national scale.
Of course, Trump makes everything many times worse because he hardly believes in objective reality at all, much less cause and effect, but what his pathologies are doing is multiplying manifold the potential of a specific misconception to make people stick a fork in the own eye.
58, 60: there was some fluff mentioned in the Jemisin thread. "Rivers of London", "Lace"*, "The Last Astronaut", "Network Effect", "Interdependency", John Sandford's thrillers, Don Winslow's Mexico trilogy, the Slough House series, the Vimes Discworld books.
* which I only know of from the poem about Grace Darling
"Grace, the lighthouse-keeper's daughter
Rescued five from stormy water.
Girls who get a kick from Lace
Aren't the sort to envy Grace."
It's not too quick to start a pile-on, though, if you're really bored.
I'll pass. I hate the pile-ons. Comity.
34.2 Far be it from me to try to offer numbers, but some places really are hiring contact tracers and trying to take this seriously. We are. The postings are already up. I have a diagnostic test today at 3 and scheduling it was obviously part of a coordinated state effort and there were actually two people on the final scheduling call (I think the doctor I spoke to was one of them but I couldn't see her face). Someone is working hard at this.
70: I think it's even simpler than that. Most of the country hasn't had any cases, so they're seeing the economic fallout with no sign that there was any disease. Parts of the state depend a lot of tourism, and no one's coming here, so we have no disease and no economy and it's really kind of surreal to think that people are going to lose small businesses because some people 2500 miles away vacationed in Tuscany.
Part of the appeal of the thinking outlined in 70 is that it fits in with people's previous experience of diseases like SARS. Didn't that just fade away after a while, without burning through half the population? Yes, but it was relatively easy to reduce its reproduction number because it only became infectious after you showed symptoms.
76 just further to 70, not a reply to 75.
70: It isn't only a storm-passing-over analogy. I've long thought that Americans cannot conceive of a story other than 'good triumphs after much difficulty'. It is the only story they know. Recently I saw a great Twitter thread tying that back to the Hayes Code that I can't find now.
Anyway, my guess is that Americans think they just experienced the difficulty, so now the happy ending is inevitable.
Everyone knows you have to pay more for the happy ending.
So this may be my own version of sincer-a-trolling, but is the current Republican genocidal credo that different, morally, from our acceptance of car culture? Tens of thousands of preventable deaths a year because redoing infrastructure/lifestyles is inconvenient and expensive?
Obviously a little different in that it's something we've gotten used over time rather than being bloodthirstily and gratuitously called for by people who know better, but in outcome...
78: A happy ending is inevitable once you accept the beauty in the heat death of the universe.
79: But don't bother, with how things are you wouldn't want one.
But about 75, I think that's in there too. If your state has almost no cases you might not want to lock down till there are more. But I don't think it accounts for why people would want to open up, say, Georgia.
80: Well, there's going to be a lot more COVID deaths - probably enough to cover car deaths for forty or fifty years, so there's that.
But my feeling is that it's worse for us as a society when there's something that is very obvious and visible which we let happen than when it's something bad but invisible or misunderstood. It's worse to be a society where we openly say, "well, we're just going to have to [let the police shoot people/operate torture prisons/let Puerto Rico basically collapse/let millions of people die of coronavirus] because we lack the political will to do anything different" than it is to be a society where most people don't understand what's going on. It's worse for the people who do accept the situation, because it makes them harder and crueler and willing to perpetrate even greater barbarity, and it's worse for the people who know but can do nothing because it gives them despair and a sense of helplessness. It also removes the weapon of public opinion, because less and less is shocking.
Really, there's a trajectory from the crooked election in 2001 through Katrina and Abu Ghraib to the present where we as a society have been more and more desensitized to corruption and unjust death. It's not purely "people find out about it and don't care"; it's that people find out about it, care tremendously and find that due to corruption at the top and a lack of mass movements/unions/ways of mobilization, there is absolutely no way it can be changed or stopped.
Increasingly visible nepotism, too - electing George W Bush was bad in itself because it's part of the increasing sense that politics is a closed world. The apotheosis of this being the Trump administration.
But the whole thing is just everyone eating the seed corn for thirty years and being surprised when the famine comes.
What I'm saying is that public understanding of traffic deaths and how to change them is weak because in any given community there are few and most people don't really have any in-depth understanding of how infrastructure is developed. Whereas "we're operating a torture prison, we could close it and probably should, why not just give people a trial" is pretty simple and you don't need a lot of background knowledge to feel that way.
Also, I think we underestimate how little most people in this country understand of the world and how it comes to be. Even relatively educated people don't know that much about traffic issues, never mind any less-educated person who isn't an activist on the topic.
78, 83: Maybe, but I've also heard messaging from the pro-open things up right that is grim and fatalistic. "Old people die, what do you expect?" "Sure, people will die, but we all die anyway."
80: I don't really have a philosophical defense of this--and I'm pretty much in agreement with you, things need to change, I want everybody to live in super-dense domed pedestrianized cities, only interacting with nature by the occasional visits to wilderness dachas provided by a lottery run by our all-seeing, all-knowing AI ruler--but a few salient, not well argued, points:
1. The benefits of car culture, to the extent that it can be seen to have benefits, are more evenly distributed than the benefits of the economy.
2. Awful things are additive. Every society has made some lifestyle choices that lead to unnecessary kilodeaths. Maybe a society can handle--in terms of resources, emotions, societal collapse etc.--N of them but it isn't able to handle N+1. Maybe we can trade off--keep pandemic deaths, get rid of highway deaths and deaths by automobile-caused environmental injustice?
3. Since the badness of car deaths is baked into our rhetorical environment, leaning too hard on it strengthens the death cult. If X is like Y, we've always had Y, and Y couldn't possibly be bad, X must not be bad, either. And we collectively become more desensitized to the kilodeaths.
(on refresh) 84: You still think 2 million COVID deaths is in play? Agreement on the desensitization, though.
Increasingly visible nepotism, too - electing George W Bush was bad in itself because it's part of the increasing sense that politics is a closed world. The apotheosis of this being the Trump administration.
I get what you're saying, but Trump supporters were reacting against the nepotistic, closed system. Trump came from outside politics, didn't talk like a politician, and promised to "drain the swamp".
80: Car crashes kill fewer people than you might think. It's around 36K/year. And not all of those are avoidable by redesigning society, the Netherlands still has a quarter of those deaths, and I'd guess that's an unreasonable best-case scenario. By excess mortality, COVID killed 37K people by mid-April. We're likely to have at least 10 years worth of traffic fatalities dying of COVID in a single calendar year, and maybe 30-40 years worth. So I do think it's a bit different.
Really, there's a trajectory from the crooked election in 2001 through Katrina and Abu Ghraib to the present where we as a society have been more and more desensitized to corruption and unjust death. It's not purely "people find out about it and don't care"; it's that people find out about it, care tremendously and find that due to corruption at the top and a lack of mass movements/unions/ways of mobilization, there is absolutely no way it can be changed or stopped.
This has been the lived experience of my entire adult life. It's toxic, inducing bitterness and helplessness, made even worse by the subset of the population who cheers it on because owning the libs and oppressing the despised minorities is more satisfying than solving problems.
Mostly I'm able to function by harnessing my white-hot core of incandescent rage into earnest cheerfulness, pace Camus, but this pandemic keeps throwing me for a loop. No one will ever get me to believe in the essential goodness of the citizenry of the United States again, but I had thought that self-interest had a fighting chance against the epistemic closure of the right-wing. Ha.
86: Oh, sure. That's what the death-cult types are saying. And that fits in with Frowner's 84. But what are the non-shitheads telling themselves? That's what I thought Megan's comment and my 70 were about.
89: Did I not say tens of thousands? And Vision Zero isn't impossible; it just takes more change than Europe has managed yet either.
Anyway, good thoughts in 84~89. I certainly wouldn't want to equate or compare not personally being a full-throated anti-car activist with being a GOP death-culter.
"Sure, people will die, but we all die anyway."
Someone's got to make a red cap with "Trump 2020: Valar morghulis"
A big part of me, for climate change and maybe also for car deaths, has been thinking, well, the feedback loop is just too long. Humans cannot process anything that isn't visible and they can't tie effect back to a cause that was a long time ago. Now, with COVID 19, the feedback loop is potentially two weeks, and that seems like it is too long too. Also, people are innumerate. Tens of thousands falls into the same bucket (bigger than a hundred) as millions and billions. Once you have LOTS OF deaths, doesn't really matter which one it is, until it hits your own family.
Fair warning: clicking on 95 leads to instantaneous and VERY LOUD noise.
Rosen is the indispensable media critic. And he understands Trump's lack of agency in all of this:
I do not want to be too conspiratorial about this. To wing it without a plan is merely the best this government can do, given who heads the table. The manufacture of confusion is just the ruins of Trump's personality meeting the powers of the presidency.
until it hits your own family.
Sigh, this. The modern American conservative can only conceptualize harm to the extent that it happens to their own family. Which is why issues that are approximately uniformly distributed across families, like some aspects of queer rights, will eventually get fixed (possibly on an embarrassingly long time scale), while ones that only affect poor people or people in certain ethnic groups will last indefinitely.
80: I don't think you're trolling, but I think we've done a lot with respect to car safety. Cars are designed better to protect occupants. Drunk driving laws in some places are so strict that one drink will put someone over the limit. It's not where I'd like it as a cyclist, but we basically try to mitigate the harmful effects of cars. If we were treating cars like COVID we'd act like having brakes was an infringement on our liberties.
There were many, many people who objected to seat belt laws as an infringement.
And most drunk people remain opposed to drunk driving laws unless they get an exemption for themselves because they can handle it.
26 Lot of people need shooting in the face.
Drunk walking is great. The time passes so much faster than sober walking.
The United States does not act as if the number of car deaths is acceptable. On the law enforcement side, we accept that legally mandated seat belts and airbags are worth adding a few billion dollars to the costs of cars every year. We also accept speed limits that get us everywhere a little bit slower than would be the case if they did not exist.
Manufacturers find it profitable to charge extra for "driver assist" kinds of safety measures.
The number of automobile-related deaths topped out in 1972 at 54,000, or 26 per 100,000 people, a year when lots of cars without seat belts were still on the road (they were required to be installed since 1968, but not legally to be worn until the 1980's). Nationwide speed limits were lowered drastically the next year. New laws and technology have been phasing in ever since, and the number has kept dropping ever since, with occasional blips. The low on the Wikipedia page was 2014 with 32,000 or 10 per 100,000.* It's went up a bit in 2015 and 2016, I assume because of smart phones, but seems to be gradually decreasing again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
*Fun exercise in American history: What are the causes of the various blips in annual deaths?
1973-75: Speed limits reduced
1976-78: Speed limits start going back up
1980's: Mandatory seat belt laws
1996 forward: airbags widely introduced, then become mandatory
2015-16: cell phones and texting increase carnage
2017: j"smart technology" in more cars.
Also, major death rate drops in 1974, 1982, 1992, and 2008-09 connected to recessions. 2020 also.
Social distancing for them is like hunkering down inside during a storm. The worst is over; we can start to come out. They haven't built into their mental model the causal role of the social distancing in slowing down the spreading.
I think this is completely right on a subconscious level.
And I think that this:
Most of the country hasn't had any cases, so they're seeing the economic fallout with no sign that there was any disease.
and this:
I've long thought that Americans cannot conceive of a story other than 'good triumphs after much difficulty'.
are the concrete words that people's minds string together when driven by the unconscious impulse of "now we come out of the cave and see the shining sun".
This thread got me wondering what my favorite teacher from high school was thinking these days. I hid him on Facebook in 2016 because he was the Trump-est person in my feed. Anyway, it's all Covid-19 denial on his Facebook now, so back to hidden.
The modern American conservative can only conceptualize harm to the extent that it happens to their own family.
This is exactly right. They fundamentally do not believe than anyone is having a negative experience that they themselves have not had.
I have a half-baked theory that it comes from authoritarian childhoods and being told over and over again that you're not sad over the thing you think you're sad over. That leads to two things:
1. Most things are not legitimate to feel sad about.
2. When ther people express sadness, it makes you super angry. Who are they to feel sad about some illegitimate thing and have other people take them seriously?!
Obviously this is not universal. Plenty of people here had authoritarian childhoods and managed not to become raging assholes. But I think this is a common pattern, at least.
I've long thought that Americans cannot conceive of a story other than 'good triumphs after much difficulty'. It is the only story they know.
I think about this a lot. It's exactly how we teach history to kids: that once a wrong is fixed, it's fixed forever; there's only ever progress. We buy into the notion that the moral arc of the universe just naturally bends itself toward justice, even if slowly, so it comes as a surprise to learn that it's actually (to mix metaphors) a fucking coronavirus seesaw.
Better than seeing a coronavirus fucksaw.
It's been days before but needs repeating. Replace the blade with a dildo. Do not just cover the blade with a dildo.
|| I just got a promo from our newly renamed minor league baseball team, the Paddleheads. How about that Alternate Jersey?? https://groupmatics.events/event/PaddleHeadsJerseys |>
They're not saying it, but obviously everything become collectible when major league baseball cancels the Pioneer League. Next year, right?
112: unless you're a fucksaw-curious Trump voter
It's still really striking to me how much people's experiences and reactions vary based on their specific locations. It really is a series of separate regional outbreaks with totally different dynamics rather than a single nationwide epidemic.
87: I am, temporarily, and much to my shame on a Team car culture right now. I took an empt bus on Friday March 14 and haven't since, I was going out some before the stay at home advisory.
I gave blood today bur waited until they had a drive at corporate headquarters, because I can drive there easily and there is free parking.
This was my first time giving blood. I tried to do everything right, but Ali felt so lightheaded a few hours later. I took a nap and then. Slept through the alarm for my Teams webinar.
I wrote a thing a couple of years ago from which I learned that motor traffic kills more people in Mexico than drug trafficking does.
My plan is to become team car culture, actually - a friend is selling the car that I have borrowed for errands and doctor visits and I don't want to be dependent on public transit right now so I'm just going to buy it. I bike and walk, but I can't bike to, eg, a doctor in a suburb, and others in my household need to be driven. It's just a really old Toyota, so I'm not going to be driving it over the mountains or anything, but I'd rather have it than not.
As to household finances - well, we'll either be bankrupt or dead in a couple of years unless things break absolutely perfectly, but I'm still angling for bankrupt but alive.
105: This is true, but the variance is higher. More weird shit happens, like staring at the sunset and crying, or trying to prove to myself that I can sprint the next quarter mile, or I end up sleeping in a bush that probably isn't even median level of comfort for a bush.
107: Americans are well known for their love of Plato.
116: Ayup. Hell, even comparing my western PA friends (Allegheny Co: ~100 cases/million) to my eastern PA family (Lehigh Co: 850 cases/million) is quite different.
motor traffic kills more people in Mexico than drug trafficking does.
You can't imagine what being an internal combustion engine mule does to your body.
Utah is very, very white, and very, very racist in some parts.
Salt Lake isn't as bad as where you are. Your town is basically known for two things. The college, and having a lot of white trash. Oh, and the birthplace of John Moses Browning.
I am another one of those that covid has caused to join team car culture. I stopped riding the bus around the middle of March, and not planning to start riding again anytime soon.
We're also totally infested with gangs. I *love* the reputation. It keeps Kaysville off my mountain.
Hey Cala, Gwift, LizSpigot: What kind of businesses were these, do you guys know?
Nearly half of the employees of a Utah County business tested positive for COVID-19 after the business instructed employees to not follow quarantine guidelines and required staff who had tested positive to report to work, according to a written statement from county executives.
I don't know! Authorities aren't giving out any information (probably wise given busybodies) but man I want to know.
Even since Brigham Young, people go to Utah for a happy ending.
Where I am in oneida county, ny, the last step function hit to the number of cases was a greenhouse that hired a lot of immigrant/seasonal workers.
I don't understand what is going on. If states cannot get some money from the federal government the depression deepens. Is McConnell try to get Republicans to lose? I understand the ignorant moralism that says high-spending states must be punished for their laxity. But, one would hope only a few Republicans in the house are not consciously posturing, and less in the Senate. It doesn't seem to be a matter of a bargaining position.
High spending and high taxing -- states typically have to balance budgets -- isn't laxity. It's civilization.
Are these yahoos the enemies of civilization? They sure act like it.
teo is right that like all politics, all coronavirus is local. It becomes a question of who "we" are. Generally, in Montana, we're only 2 or 3 degrees of separation, at most, from nearly anyone. We don't generally have large exploitive employers of immigrants, like those meat packing plants in Colorado and Nebraska, so it's a bit harder to hide from the knowledge that the people who are dying are "us." I have no problem at all imagining that among a whole lot of white people in the South,* people of color are not us, but them. So when "they" die it might inconvenience us, but it's like the locusts in Sudan or the genocide in the rain forest. Happening to someone else. Early on, the husband of the first person to die in Indiana had said he wasn't worried about covid, because it was just something happening on TV.
* South of Nunavat.
(AIHSEB, the notion that government is just something that happens on TV is (a) the cause of so much suffering; (b) why we have this guy; and (c) a decent definition of the Trump Doctrine. To be fair, cos-playing socialist revolutionaries are prone to the same kind of delusion. Turns out it's slow boring of hard boards all the way down.)
52.3: frowner! been thinking about you and v happy to see you around these parts. altho can't say i have anything particularly convincing on the cheering you up front re: reality, i highly recommend checking out the backlisted podcast episode on venetia, it is a real treat, and then follow up with the episode they did on jilly cooper. both stellar.
Frowner!
2nd 97.
his ideological brethren in Brazil, Russia, Indonesia
AFAIK Jokowi is ideologically nothing like the rest of that group. He's just (hahahah) a virus denialist.
The Russians are apparently back to throwing dissenters out of windows.
The thread has wandered from the OP, but I've been watching our local numbers vs state numbers plus some regions of general interest. It's hard to see the per capita increases when you have massive cities driving state numbers. Someone at the other place linked a piece from Brookings Institute (sorry for the ugly link)
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/04/22/as-covid-19-spreads-newly-affected-areas-look-much-different-than-previous-ones/
which was sort of useful. I think folks in this little town think we're winning, because Detroit is doing better (or New York).
MI seems pretty well-organized at this point, with hospitals set up for transfers to minimize local burden, but there are a lot of rural areas with extremely limited healthcare capacity. Like, a hospital with two ICU beds and the nearest city a six hour drive. IL cases are spreading from Cook County (Chicago) to outlying counties. There has been very little in the news about capacity in non-Detroit areas.
That's an interesting article.
I've been watching the Maryland numbers by county and ZIP code. The case numbers track where people are, and where population density is, with a couple exceptions. Many states have a lot of prisons in the middle of nowhere, but the only place in Maryland like that is Cumberland, which has a few more cases than it should. I don't see explanations for a bunch of the other higher-than-expected ZIP codes except "they did a lot of tests because they were afraid it was spreading". The big exception, off the charts, is Salisbury (Wicomico County), the one place left with a big meatpacking plant that didn't move to Delaware or Virginia. Likewise Sussex County, Delaware has the most cases in the state, while being by far the most sparsely populated with no cities over 10,000 people. The ZIP code of Georgetown, Delaware has over 300 cases and no other ZIP code has more than 200. I don't see any particular effect from where I know Amazon distribution centers are, or any other big facilities. No correlation with chicken farms themselves. Just the meatpacking plants. You can see the meatpacking in the stats because Wicomico is the only county with A) any chicken farming B) any net international immigration.
Meatpacking plants just seem to be perfect places for transmission. They are crowded because they are refrigerated and they don't want to refrigerate a huge area. They are big facilities because of economies of scale. They are full of air currents intended to keep microbes from landing on the meat, not to keep microbes out of people's faces. They recruit poorly paid immigrants who tend to live near each other, socialize with each other and carpool with each other. Huge waste occurs if they ever slow down the lines, not just because of efficiency, but because in today's specialized industry the birds will get too big for the line if you wait (huge culls are now happening anyway).
I shouldn't say "I've been tracking them". The state has been tracking them. I looked at them and compared them to census information.
Also Delaware has only 3 counties. I don't know if that makes the statistics in Sussex County more or less alarming.
Bereft of boisterous benches BJ blusters barrenly.
The Anchorage Daily News has been maintaining a nice graphic of cases in Alaska, updated daily. It's basically the same information as the state's dashboard, but with nicer graphic design.
130 and 131 seem entirely right to me. And the spread of 131 in England(as opposed to Sweden) has been very great in the last decades, maybe since even 1970 and local government reforms. The centralisation of power to London, so that local votes matter less and less, along with the fptp electoral system which means most people have no meangful vote even for national governments, have been deeply corrosive developments.
138: Oy. So, that sounds like meat packing needs to be restructured in the long term, and that probably means that meat prices have to go up some. Any places that aren't artisinal, organic producers who do it better? Alberta had a big outbreak at a meatpacking plant. The company also owned the plant with the outbreak in South Dakota, so it doesn't seem like Canada knows what it's doing. (I also worry about the camps where the Oil Sands workers live, but I can't imagine that the Oil Sands are profitable right now.)
Indeed, the oil sands can no longer be profitable. If they were all the people in Alberta would surely not have vanished overnight the way they did two weeks ago.
I am angry for non-apocalypse-related reasons. I plan to go home and eat a large melon.
Is this also a thing across the pond? We have a friend who lives in a tiny flat with his father and brother, such that social distancing is impossible, because poor. The brother leaves the house every day and just wanders around, because possibly mentally ill, but who knows. I am worried sick about these people (the father is 80+), but they must be typical of a huge demographic.
148.1: Yeah, that's how it works here too.
The secretary of agriculture is now blaming the packing plant workers for spreading Covid to each other in their housing outside the plant. Because they sound all be living in separate mansions instead of the kinds of crowding you can pay for with a packing plant wage.
148: my health system has 2 major teaching hospitals. The one 8 work for serves a community with a lot of Latinx immigrants. Maybe 10% of our patients normally but 40% of our inpatients with COVID. The other hospital is closer to the predominantly black neighborhoods of Boston and that is who they are seeing. Our suburban community hospital had an early and sharp rise in cases following the Biogen exposure but it went down pretty quickly, not so much a flattening of a symmetric curve as a quick drop a couple of weeks before our real surge. Presumably all of those people were able to stay home.
148/149: So is the racial gap in outcomes for Covid on par with the racial gap for health outcomes in general? Or is it worse for unknown reasons?
I had it wrong. It was the HHS secretary. My apologies to the other shithead in the cabinet.
I don't have a link because I'm on my phone.
Seriously, I'd be interested in it when you get to a computer. Or if you remember google terms and the name of a newspaper you read it in, that would be enough.
I thought the governor of Iowa or South Dakota or Nebraska was also claiming the workers more likely spread it at home, not at the plant, because of their strange, non-American, vaguely disgusting living conditions. Exactly the same as people in New York 100 years ago blaming people for living in tenements. Which, it is true that the outbreak gets worse when you employ people who have no choice but to live in large cramped households, but that is at least partially your fault.
We also had the Republican Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice do this:
The county, home to the JBS Packerland meatpacking plant, had its coronavirus cases surge more than tenfold, from about 60 cases to almost 800, in just two weeks, the lawyer said.
That's when Roggensack interjected.
"These were due to the meatpacking, though," she said. "That's where Brown County got the flare. It wasn't just the regular folks in Brown County."
Brown County, Wisconsin. Home of Green Bay. Home of the Green Bay Packers. Which have been called the Green Bay Packers for 100 years, because of the local meatpacking industry. But meatpacking is not what the regular folks in Brown County do. The regular folks, like lawyers and judges, would not be caught dead as a so-called "packer".
158: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/07/azar-coronavirus-meatpacking-workers-241915
Thanks. I was just getting ready to walk to my other computer.
159 is just amazing
Painting these assholes as out of touch elites should be a layup but you know how it is
Kevin Drum is unusually dark this morning.
163: "They paved Uighurstan and put up a parking lot..."
I was going to guess that Lambeau himself was the son of Canadian immigrant meatpackers, but his dad was a bricklayer, and his family is from Belgium.
167: Moby! Sorry for not making my return a pun.
165: Der Angriff Steiners wird alles gut machen.
165: It really captures something precisely right about this situation, though.
Anyway, the Trump plan is very clearly going to be "open things up and blame liberal/foreigners/poor." I'm allowing myself some optimism that the blame-shift will fail, but there's no way I can see for anybody to stop the opening up or do it in a way that protects the vulnerable. Trump, the Senate, and a bunch of governors can do that and nothing can stop them.
The thing about 171 isn't that it's true (it is) but that essentially this has been his only plan the whole time: claim credit when anything good happens, blame when anything bad happens, grift away in the background. This guy is incapable of trying a new trick even when faced with a curve ball the scale of covid-19. Which I suppose isn't surprising, but how many double underlines can you draw under "WTF" when talking about the state American politics has worked itself into.
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Soup, thanks again for the computer advice the other day. Very helpful.
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(er, that it was helpful, I mean)
129: 171, but also they're gambling that roger was right in 7. It's possible but not certain. This crisis is very different from most recent ones.
So, no new cases again today, on 465 tests. We haven't had more than 4 new cases, I don't think, on any day since April 18 -- and seven of those days, including these last 4, at 0. We had a total of 453 positives -- all but 23 are recovered (or, in the case of 16 people, dead). Of those 23 active cases, 6 are hospitalized. It's easy to think that we're winning, and that maybe going out for a beer and a burger -- served by masked staff -- isn't going to be a huge risk.
The trick is how our economy survives without tourists, statewide, and without home games, locally.
Have you tried mining copper some more?
Not your typical UMC+BScEng.
The UN Development Programme found that most of its respondents who voluntarily joined Boko Haram or al-Shabaab had little or no secular education. The study also found that 57 percent of the respondents admitted to not being able to read or understand the Qur'an, the key religious text exploited by Boko Haram and other self-proclaimed jihadi groups. In Chad, only 50 of the 2,200 former Boko Haram fighters have been to primary school -- and not all of them can read and write according to the Centre for Development Studies and the Prevention of Extremism.
169.2 is not as funny as one could wish; just true.
And meanwhile there's been another toxic gas leak in India, but nobody else has noticed.
Indian casualties have to hit at least five figures to be newsworthy.
I can do small scale things locally, but we are going to run out of money and can't easily raise taxes and have to balance our budgets. We are contracting out a lot of our contact tracing to the Partners in Health non profit. Mainly, that's because they pitched the idea to Baker, and they have experience doing it. I kind of wonder whether that's not also a way of letting rich people subsidize it. People are fundraising for testing, and maybe there will be fundraising for contact tracing too.
What I want to know is what can I do politically to try to get Biden elected and flip the Senate? Also stop judges.
Our schools are funded by local property taxes. Regressive, but at least the education budgets won't be universally slashed.
Wu declared his innocence during his first interrogation. After being tortured, he confessed on his second interrogation. During his seventh and final interrogation, he renounced his previous confession and reasserted his innocence. (He maintained his innocence during his entire incarceration, even rejecting a deal where his sentence would be shortened in return for acknowledging guilt.)
"I did 16 years. My youth is gone. The first half of my life was spent in vain." "Whoever wronged me must apologize."
A totally random man in Henan.
I'm just trying to figure out what I can do to prevent economic collapse locally. Part of that is changing Congress and the President. My Congressional Reps are fine. In fact, I'm annoyed that Joe Kennedy is trying to primary Markey, because he's less liberal. My state will vote for Biden, so how do I channel my anger to effect change?
The Senate is probably the most important thing this year. If you want to focus on a specific race to donate/volunteer, Maine is close to you and is definitely going to be one of the key races.
