We have people get tremendous anxiety and depression and you have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies. You have death probably, definitely would be in far greater numbers than the numbers we’re talking about with regard to the virus. — Trump

If you do a quick google check, a figure of 10k comes up for deaths linked to the great recession suicides. That doesn't begin to compare with the estimates for ignoring the virus. But of course, facts don't matter.

Philosophy forum appropriate:

So suspend rent and provide income relief. Hell, establish a UBI ASAP. Better yet, communalize the means of production everywhere, put businesses into the hands of workers, and nationalize every single company that asks for and gets a bailout. Abolish the private health system by yesterday, and ensure that everyone can afford to be treated. Suspend all medical debt. Hell, abolish all medical debt. Time for a debt jubilee. Worried about the economy being passed on to children? Abolish all student debt too. Appropriate the wealth of anyone worth more than a billion dollars; name a dog park after them so that they feel better. So many things that can be done. But you'd much prefer to murder half a million+ of your population.

Why not just eliminate money altogether and toss everyone in the Gulag who disagrees? No. We’ve seen the lengths despots have gone to realize their technocratic schemes. They always end up using human beings as the brick and mortar.

Says someone who is happy to let half a million people perish. Those lengths are real and being contemplated by those in power, with whom you sympathyze, always - so much for your fake railing against the state. No need for your imagined fantasies of gulag boogeymen. Death will be handed down by the boots you lick.

Although abolishing money is not a particularly bad idea.

Those sorts of appeals to emotions only work on your fellow travellers. I can see the difference between who say they care for others vs. those who actually do. With a simple twist of the tongue you can say you’re saving lives without having to rise from your lazy-boy.

Not me whose fantasizing instead of taking into account what those in power are actually contemplating. The only appeal to emotion is yours, government lover. No coincidence that your 'fellow travellers' are the elites and the powerful.

Everyone call your grandparents and tell them they have to die so that people can go get their mudslides at Applebee's again.

Yep, that's what it amounts to! That's why I so hate consequentialist ethics.

That was actually funny.

Jodi Dean on the temporal aspects of the latest crisis of capitalism brought about by CV:

"We already know that the time of capital, of the self-valorization of value, is futural, anticipatory, always oriented to not now but later. This is what drives intensifications of production -- the speed up and automation, the push to get more out of workers to generate the more of whatever might lead to more profit in the future. The same with investment: forecasting what will happen is what generates bets now; they are always bets on a future.

Capitalist time is out of joint with the time of the virus. How? Tests for the virus look backward: did infection happen? What was the cause of the sickness one presents? It's why in the US in particular we are playing catch up. Capitalists didn't see profit in anticipating the epidemic -- "too many" ventilators and empty beds are but heaps of dead capital. We can only know where the virus was, make guesses about how it traveled.

The time of life with Covid 19 is asynchronous, fragmented, dissonant. The rhythms of our lives have been disrupted -- school, train, work, drinks, home or whatever familiar combinations gave our life its specific punctuation. Private time appears in its excesses: too much or too little, utterly alone or overbearingly together. At the same time, too much time becomes absorbed in screens. Every meeting, every communication -- work, entertainment, connection, boredom -- has the same interface whether we want it or not. Like the PBS show for tweens said in the seventies "c'mon and zoom-zoom-zooma-zoom."

Working from home makes work endless, a new elongation of the workday enabled not just by the technology but by the elimination of specific sites for work. It's not a snow day and the demands just keep coming.

Capitalist time is impatient. No rest (and they never learn this means no recovery). No time to live, or to try to save lives. No time to wait out the epidemic, protect the frontline medical workers, develop a vaccine and save some lives. For us there's no time to waste. For capitalists it's wasted time.

And with the tantrums and temper of a child incapable of waiting of accepting the imperative of constraint now for the sake of a future good, the president and his class -- he's not alone in this; Lloyd Blankfein has weighed in behalf of the banks --are saying "Time's up.""

Is it just me or has someone been "sleeping by the switch"
as they say concerning the virus? I mean, what the hell ! ?Has there been no one watching out for this s*#t? With the billions that is spent on defense this is what we get? But , I'm just a common man, what do I know?

Is it just me or has someone been "sleeping by the switch" — Teller

No one is sleeping by the switch. The switch has been deliberately ignored in the name of profit. You're a common man, which probably means it's OK if you - or at least your parents and grandparents - die.

Real Trump = indistinguishable from Saturday Night Live Trump.

Speaking of the Trolley Problem - one of the ghastly things that happened in Italy was doctors and medical staff having to allocate respirators on the basis of likelihood of recovery. In other words, as there were not enough resources to go around, then they had to be prioritised for those with the greater likelihood of recovery. It must be hugely agonising for the frontline people in the trenches, so I don’t want to pontificate about it, but it’s worth reflecting on, as it’s likely to happen in a lot of places over the next 8-10 weeks.

over the next 8-10 weeks — Wayfarer

Where's that figure from?

Just going off the trends which seem to be indicating that the pandemic is going to hit a peak in April and May. I don’t know if it will peak and then start to abate, but I think the expectation is that the next 8-10 weeks are going to be pretty dreadful in Europe and America, particularly.

Yeah, a few places picked up on linking the trolley problem to the decisions having to be made by doctors in Italy. It got me thinking - and made explict an intuition I had - that the trolly problem, far from being a general model of ethics, is precisely a paradigm of ethics adopted in liminal situations, states of emergency and exception in which normal society has ceased to function. It's somewhat of a intellectual and philosophical travesty that it is taken for a litmus test of ethics in general.

agree - I rarely participate in discussions of the trolley problem, for that very reason. But now, actual people are really having to grapple with similar matters of life and death - which must be a truly awful situation to be in.

:up:

To be fair, for that remark you’re gonna have to let nobrainnolife rant about TDS for around the 40th time.

nobeernolife + TDS = 38 results

Talk about a one-trick pony.

I noticed. :eyes:

So, the US today* had almost twice as many new Covid cases as anywhere else in the world. Sounds like a good time to stop social distancing and open everything up. :vomit:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

*After the daily update, today is now yesterday. Click on the tab.

TDS Syndrome? - TDSS.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/comrade-britney-viral-britney-spears-calls-for-redistribution-of-wealth-amid-virus-quarantine

Comrade Britney. Actually re-listened to some greatest hits earlier today on the back of this. So good.

No, just a lack of imagination.

Yet many here dismissed my post on this matter and hypotheticals as ‘pointless’. The very same people are now ‘washing their hands of responsibility’ in more inventive ways no doubt.

Hypothetical scenarios - when taken seriously - prepare people for unforeseen scenarios they would previously have deemed highly improbable to impossible.

Sorry, I forgot the US was the all that mattered. That just reinforces my point that not enough people are thinking of this in terms of the global economy and how this will impact on the poorest long term.

I'm not sure how your response relates to anything I've said. I'm not taking a position on whether some countries are or aren't over reacting. I'm just watching how this thing unfolds. I do however think that the virus will cause more havoc than many are considering. We haven't thus far observed a society where it has become endemic yet, that might not be a very nice place to hang out. And places where it does become endemic will have to be isolated from the rest of the global community. Unless an effective vaccine is produced.

I think the figure of 600,000 is an underestimate, because we don't yet know what the mortality rate would be were the virus to become concentrated in communities and the social effects that would have.

There have been reports that healthy doctors in China and Italy have died due to receiving a high dose on infection. Presumably the virus incubates more quickly in this case overwhelming the immune system before it has a chance to develop anti bodies. Where the virus becomes concentrated in a community there will be more cases of high dose infection, higher mortality and the resultant panic, in which people overwhelmed with fear will flee leaving the whoever is left to die. This social reaction has already happened in Spain in a number of care homes. Where dead people (presumably not dead when they left) were found abandoned by their care workers.

Based on the numbers, the UK is about one week behind Germany and France. They seem to be taking the same measures those countries took a week ago.

Yes, although it is not enforced and a bit vague. I am pointing to London as a hotspot, it is still spreading freely, on the Underground, in shops, petrol stations etc.

Yeah, yeah. I am sure whoever you're working for already has a whole narrative lined up for you to peddle.

It got me thinking - and made explict an intuition I had - that the trolly problem, far from being a general model of ethics, is precisely a paradigm of ethics adopted in liminal situations, states of emergency and exception in which normal society has ceased to function. It's somewhat of a intellectual and philosophical travesty that it is taken for a litmus test of ethics in general. — StreetlightX

I am of the opinion that the "trolley problem" is entirely based on an unjustified distinction between action and inaction.

But in the case of doctors deciding who gets access to medical equipment, a "trolley problem" only comes up when the same equipment could either treat one very sick person or several slightly less sick persons.

In other cases, it's an issue of conflict of duties. I think most moral philosophies agree that in case of conflict between equal duties, a personal decision is permitted. As far as moral questions go, the "general economic consequences" Vs "individual lifes" conflict is a lot more interesting, I think.