The virus however, is mindless.

Which means Trump, who is failing miserably in his response...

Merging happens weirdly here. It says merged, but all it does it create a link in the merged thread into the mergee thread without copying over content. It's a forum software thing and there's not a great deal that can be done.

“The US response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014, told a Georgetown university panel recently. “What’s happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions.”

Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”

In Konyndyk’s analysis, the White House had all the information it needed by the end of January to act decisively. Instead, Trump repeatedly played down the severity of the threat, blaming China for what he called the “Chinese virus” and insisting falsely that his partial travel bans on China and Europe were all it would take to contain the crisis."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-politics-us-health-disaster

Frikkin banana republic.

It's bailing out the stupid, corrupt, and greedy rich. That's not capitalism. — fishfry

Ah but comrade Fishfry, it is capitalism, always has been, always will be. Same thing happened in 2008. Same thing will happen after the next, inevitable financial crisis. This isn't socialism for the rich. This is just how things have always worked in the normal run of capitalism from time dot.

This discussion was merged into Coronavirus

This discussion was merged into Coronavirus

This discussion was merged into Coronavirus

This discussion was merged into Coronavirus

This discussion was merged into Front line clinicians fear for themselves and their families.

This discussion was merged into Front line clinicians fear for themselves and their families.

This discussion was merged into Front line clinicians fear for themselves and their families.

The second has already started. The first - you're probably exactly right, but it was also be incoherently coupled with the notion that the State is being AuThORoTaRiAn. Both as having absolute power and having been totally powerless.

It will be interesting though, because 'the State' in question belongs to Trump, whose balls these same people enjoy sucking on. Normally the response would be then to blame local government, except it's clear that local governments have done far more than the incompetence of the federal government. Not that they've ever let facts get in the way of a good narrative. It will be incoherence all over.

From a comrade:

"What really bugs me is this new version of coronabro who thinks we are all being hoodwinked by science and the powerful. To what, keep us in our homes not working? What even is this conspiracy?"

You can only laugh - if it wasn't so utterly stupid: a conspiracy made by stupid people for other stupid people.

Ah we got a wild one. Slurp slurp.

I just don’t want important decisions to be made on information that is off by orders of magnitude and based on unreliable data and assumptions. But I suppose that is the sort of thing you’re used to given your fake, bad faith interpretation of my argument. You wanted authoritarianism and you got it. Enjoy. — NOS4A2

Agreed. All the more reason why the fact that nearly everyone was caught with our pants down on this needed more and more stringent measures to be taken faster than we could have predicted. So far, the only people to have been exposed as utterly unreliable and totally useless are those who have continually downplayed the effects of the virus. Put them all in a bin, including yourself.

I will most certainly enjoy the fact that we aren't having 600+ deaths a day as Italy has been having all week. 'Authoritarianism' is a fantasy boogyman here dangled by idiots like you for other idiots to suck on, so the old, sick and poor can get fucked harder than they already are.

If you're waiting for perfect information you'll always be late — Benkei

That's the point: the 'demand' for perfect information is nothing but an excuse to inaction, a setting of an impossible bar in order to better mystify and distract. It's also a terrifying demand by the very standard of those who might call for it - 'perfect information' is the kind of thing best gleaned by - yep - more institutional intrusion into everyday life. No surprise given that NOS is a state bootlicker and lover of all things government.

Sorry to hear about Brazil's situation. Whoever stabbed Bolsonaro in the stomach way back when should have used a bigger, more serrated knife.

And if Biden's elected, will he rise to the occasion, or do you expect him to drop a turd while standing naked at the podium while asking where his pants went? — Hanover

I'm pretty sure he's MIA right now precisely because of the latter.

Hillary might have tried to pay CV off and appoint it to a board somewhere.

I'm not content to smolder in the face of capitalism. how do we use this fuck you energy in a way that isnt a forum fuck you? I mean this. People are really coming together now. How to use it? — csalisbury

You're always asking for personal solutions to transpersonal problems. I don't have any answers for you. I don't have any answers for any particular people, and I am in no position to offer them. Here I just normalize a certain discourse, make it stock standard and create an atmosphere - make the obvious unobvious and the unobvious obvious. You do whatever you want or can.

I hope BoJo recovers, but I also hope he suffers to the utmost before he does. May prompt him to take it seriously.

Stop right there.

That is Trump and the people that want to lick his ass. That isn't the elite. — ssu

What is wrong with you? He's the president of the United States. "Isn't the elite"? Jesus fuck on a stick. Did your brains fall out as soon as you started typing the word 'Trump'? Why does his name turn everyone into an irrepressible moron?

Comrade NYT, surprisingly, has a nice article on how capitalist profit imperatives enabled the world's richest country to lack .75c masks when anyone with the relevant knowledge - including the government - could see the need for it long ago:

"Few in the protective equipment industry are surprised by the shortages, because they’ve been predicted for years. In 2005, the George W. Bush administration called for the coordination of domestic production and stockpiling of protective gear in preparation for pandemic influenza. In 2006, Congress approved funds to add protective gear to a national strategic stockpile — among other things, the stockpile collected 52 million surgical face masks and 104 million N95 respirator masks.

But about 100 million masks in the stockpile were deployed in 2009 in the fight against the H1N1 flu pandemic, and the government never bothered to replace them. This month, Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, testified that there are only about 40 million masks in the stockpile — around 1 percent of the projected national need."

https://nyti.ms/2QKKZn0

Two points to make re: the economy vs. health 'debate'.

First, there isn't a debate. 'Opening for business' before the spread is contained will kill the economy. Anyone who thinks otherwise has no idea how an economy works, and is arguing, more so than those who would see this virus contained, that the economy ought to be shuttered even more than it currently is. You're a fucking idiot by even your own standard.

Second, a declaration by elites that the economy is in fact open in the midst of rising numbers of infection and death will be met by strikes so crippling that again, the precious economy will be murdered anyway. The strikes happening in Italy are but a premonition of what will pass. Nobody not in an armchair is willing to die for the rich - die for the Dow, as they say - and workers will walk off the job long before they begin to serve burritos at your local tex-mex.

Corollary: in light of the above, those who think there really is a debate are, regardless of intention, effectively arguing both that the economy ought to be crippled to the largest possible extent, and that more people ought to die than necessary. The worst possible outcome.

Beyond that - abolish all debt:

"if the U.S. government can finance $4.5 trillion in quantitative easing, it can absorb the cost of forgoing student and other debt. And for private lenders, only bad loans need be wiped out. Much of what would be written off are accruals, late charges and penalties on loans gone bad. It actually subsidizes bad lending to leave them in place. In the past, the politically powerful financial sector has blocked a write-down. Until now, the basic ethic of most of us has been that debts must be repaid. But it is time to recognize that most debts now cannot be paid — through no real fault of the debtors in the face of today’s economic disaster."

@Maw, @unenlightened: it turns out I was wrong. Even now people - barely people - can play the personal responsibility card with a straight face:

place a higher burden on the old to protect themselves — Hanover

I'll let this abyss of moral excreta speak for itself.

And no Hano, it's not 'back to' class warfare. It's never been anything but class warfare.

The "neoliberal" philosophy would say that profits, even for the very wealthy raises all boats (if we are assuming non-corrupt actors) — schopenhauer1

The whole point is that CV brings into sharp relief for anyone with a pulse how utterly vacuous this is. Profits won't help us here. Profits were the first thing to go, recognized by everyone to be the most useless, superfluous foam atop the real wave that is society. Everyone who spouted the propaganda that value is generated from the top (therefore we can't tax them!), saw the aristocrats in their naked parasitism as soon as the bottom fell away. In fact it's worse than this - it was the profit drive that enabled this catastrophe to be as catastrophic as it has been, insofar as it has utterly diminished the capacities of societies to respond in ways that did not multiply its effects and impact the poor, old, and sick the hardest. There's no need to play devil's advocate. One just has to have a set of lungs and a pair of eyes.

Edit: actually, it gets even worse than this. Even if, against all credulity, profit could be said to be beneficial, the question that ought to be ringing in everyone's ears is: where the fuck is it? Boeing made billions in profits in the years leading up to this (last year excepted, thanks to their disastrous 737 MAX debacles, itself a result of capitalism working as expected), yet barely a few weeks in they're getting bailed out by public funds to the tune of even more billions. Maybe Boeing should just get another fucking job, as everyone tells the poor. But of course the profits are in the hands of shareholders, who, having stashed them in the Caymans, couldn't give less fucks if they tried. Nationalize Boeing, now.

Honestly don't think we've seen such a deference to capital ever in the modern age? — Maw

It's always been there, but this event exposes how shallow that deference is: the language of 'personal responsibility', which is the go-to strategy when allowing the poor to suffer and die despite structural inequality, is inadequate here. The new, developing language is instead that of 'necessary sacrifice', which is nowhere near as empowering and makes obvious just how much the rich and their unthinking shills are all too happy to trade people for money and its promise.

I'd tone it down a notch with the argument everything is happening because the evils of the neoliberal capitalist death cult. I would say that the dire situation in Italy has more to due with the fact that it was among the first places hit after China. — ssu

Yes and this would be an inadequate analysis, simplistic to the point of redundancy. If you're not talking healthcare and it's deliberate sabotage by the EU - in service, by the way, of tranferring public wealth into the hands of overseas private lenders with no democratic accountability - then you ought to simply stop talking altogether. Worth also mentioning that millions of Italian factory workers are still going to work, having been deemed 'essential services' despite being entirely unnecessary, hence the call going on over there, for a general strike:

https://www.leftvoice.org/italy-calls-general-strike-our-lives-are-worth-more-than-your-profits

I will never tone this shit down just so you can feel comfortable. I hope you squim.

Not sure why this seems to be so hard for Seagull.

Ah. The bliss of looking at everything from a distinct political view. :snicker: — ssu

The bliss of knowing the basics about the state of the Italian economy? And your alternative is... ignorance?

Worth noting that the failure of the Italian state has largely owed itself to the EU bureaucracy, which, thanks to a decade of imposed neoliberal austerity programs, have gutted the Italian public sector, leaving it one of the most fragile economies on the continent. Once again, capitalism fucks everything.

Ah, then it's a PLBKAC problem. No surprise.

CV has been ... convenient for a number of state powers. Malaysia, which has deployed the military to the streets, had CV hit just after what was effectively a coup in government which was widely unpopular with the public. Malaysia, which has a rich tradition of protest, has more or less deserted streets right now. Timing couldn't have been better.

Lose your index finger or something? You have two you know.

So you think that in no circumstance when deciding policy, human live can be measured against other values? — ChatteringMonkey

I'm gonna say this one more time then never again because you're wasting my time: I don't care for your hypotheticals.

No actually the modelling is pretty clear. In fact you don't even need modeling, just follow the trend lines with your index finger.

Love all these 'its so uncertain' responses. No it's not. Objectively wrong.

There are no hands being delt here, only political decisions to be made over actively preventing entirely preventable deaths or actively encouraging entirely preventable deaths. You stand for the latter, like the corporations and heads of state you barrack for.

Yeah sure OK lets spend half a paragraph talking about cars "not faffing around the point". Trains next? Legos?

Via Jodi Dean, whose running commentary on CV is one of the few things worth paying attention to among the media scrum:

"The sheer magnitude of the population difference between China and Spain should preclude the possibility of there being more coronavirus deaths in Spain than there are in China. But it's not. China's material, institutional, cultural, and political infrastructure give it a capacity to respond that is far more effective than what we see in Spain and Italy -- and the United States.

I'm not worried about increasing authoritarianism in the US. That concern is animated by an underlying anti-communism that either mistakenly thinks that public interest is simply self-interest generalized or that takes "give me freedom or give me death" as the final word on liberty (and of course the subtext here is give My liberty is more valuable than YOUR death).

The danger is not authoritarianism -- it's capitalism, both in the way that bailouts prioritize corporations over people (Boeing? really?) and in the concomitant focus on economic recovery even as the epidemic is still in its early phase. So the subtext here is profits are not just more important than death. Profits are death, a truth of capitalism and imperialism that the pandemic displays in all its horror."

I've barely mentioned Trump at all so I don't know why you think that qualification matters in the slightest. I agree that the American response has been largely in keeping with the European one - the point is that this is what some would like to alter, and have been actively encouraging. And not to beat around the bush with that - because people seem unwilling, unable or too embarrassed to spell it out - I mean actively encourage the death of the poor, sick, and old.

You can make up whatever fantasy thought experiments you like. I'm talking about what's happening now, and what will actually happen. The virus is controllable, as Wuhan proves, along with other countries which have kept infection rates low, and deaths lower. This in contrast the the exponentially rising numbers of the US, Australia, Spain, and others. You can faff around the point all you like with made up, unrelated daydreams - I'm not going to replace talk of real lives with your armchair imaginaries.