Also, Obama is a war criminal who, like the current administration, served the interests of the rich and powerful - his shameful bailouts being repeated today - and an otherwise small-visioned politician whose crowning achivement was not to rock the neoliberal boat.

There's merit in that. It seems like the WHO were indeed initially too worried about stepping on China's toes (including a pathetic display where rather than even mention the name 'Taiwan' in an interview with a Taiwanese reporter, one of their senior advisors simply terminated the call - after pretending not to hear her) - a stance exacerbated by China's own cagey initial response to the outbreak, which included denying entry to WHO teams in mid-Jan.

Not that it would have mattered that much insofar as Trump repeatedly ignored the WHO even after the latter got their act together. Whatever the case, Trump's attack on the WHO has nothing to do with merit - as if anything he does is - and everything to do with looking for a scapegoat in order to better shift blame from Mr. I'm-Not-Reponsible-For-Anything-At-All.

Which is a deep fault of the culture, deeper than 'the system'. — unenlightened

Culture is an object of social reproduction and does not spring ex nihilo out of nowhere. Culture is shallow, fragile and anemic, not deep, and it is all the more visciously defended and contested because of its shallowness. The person at the top is significant, but significant as a barometer, nothing more.

To be honest I think it's deeply ingenuous to place the focus on Trump's personal failings. It's both a distraction from his politics - which in the end is all anyone should give a shit about - and more importantly, is premised upon the fantasy that if only a more 'competent, cultured and articulate' person were in office, everything would be better. It evinces a fundamental faith in the system, as though it would be working perfectly well if not only for this particular oaf that happens to be occupying the White House.

But it's precisely that faith which ought to be broken: the entire system is broken, and it's not simply because of this one man. Personalization is de-politicization and entrenches existing politics rather than arguing for a change.

Yet I think the worst is this: the disturbing classist overtones that saturate writing like that: "no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace" - i.e. Trump does not display the correct markers of class: well educated, articulate, polished, etc. Ultimately: 'Trump is not one of 'us' (who, by contrast, are articulate, witty, charming, etc)". Like, do people know what kind of privilege it takes to fit this image properly? And again - as if this were the issue. No one gave a shit when Obama blew up hospitals in the Middle-East because he was so charming.

Trump of course is a joke. But taking that joke seriously misses precisely the seriousness of the situation. Writing like that is self-affirming, feel-good cathartic fodder for middling liberals. The smell of self-satisfaction reeks off of it. It's a deeply shameful, embarrassing piece of writing that illuminates more about the writer than it does of Trump. As if anything written there is news to anyone - of course it's not. It's just libidinal, orgiastic discharge, nothing more.

Yet the point is that a great deal of those infections - and correponding deaths - were likely preventable. They need not have happened.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/14/coronavirus-cases-skyrocket-in-south-dakota/

"South Dakota’s coronavirus cases have begun to soar after its governor steadfastly refused to mandate a quarantine.

The number of confirmed cases in the state has risen from 129 to 988 since April 1 — when Gov. Kristi Noem criticized the “draconian measures” of social distancing to stop the spread of the virus in her state.

Noem had criticized the quarantine idea as “herd mentality, not leadership” during a news conference, adding, “South Dakota is not New York.”"

Yall need to bring back public hanging of public officials.

Government-loverboi NOS will be relived to hear that Trump just off-the-cuff mentioned the possibility of suspending congress. Not that Trump would do it because Mitch won't give him permission. Nonetheless, NOS will no doubt still remain a supporter for this State Leader and all-round cheerleader for big government, the Trump excreting relay machine that he is.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/banana-republic-trump-threatens-to-unilaterally-suspend-congress-20200416-p54kaq.html

This 'mention' of course coming from the piece of shit leader who left government positions vacant for months if not years and now wants to blame it on congress. Not unlike his move to blame the WHO for his own shitty job. Not that anyone should be surprised by his total avoidance of any responsibility at all. His equally piece of shit supporters will likely find excuses of too course, as they have been this whole time.

It's not the worst idea. Only it ought to be coupled with repayments from the US for the damage done for their imperial endeavours in the last 100 years too. Say, 30% of GDP to Iraq, an additional 30% to Afganistan, and maybe another 300% or so to central and south America. American interventions being more directly attributible to American agency than a non-human entity. The UK can probably join in as well for all the evil it wrought on its colonies.

Why the rhetorical questions Vega? Blaming the WHO is meant to deflect attention to the total failure of Trump's leadership and give fodder to his servile peons - like NOS - to spew out instead.

Yes, I care about getting things right :)

But do go on about how much the state sucks while you fellate the head of state...

You mispelt entertained, bootlicker.

^ Anti government nutjob licks balls of head of government.

The response is basically: there is no better world than the one we currently inhabit, and any effort to make it better will end in disaster. This, even as disaster is all around. Instead, what is happening right now - the death of the poor and the black and the old - is the best possible outcome. The most just deserts have been meted out by the best possible world, which just happens to be this one. It's perverse in a way that words don't quite do justice to.

I disregard your concerns because they're agenda based, and it's an agenda I don't agree with, which is that the impoverished you identify are not benefited better under the current system more than they would be in whatever alternative you're envisioning. — Hanover

What could this possibly mean as a response to the fact that the poor and the non-white are being infected and killed off at higher rates? Does reality have an agenda? Is reality an agenda for you? If you disregard reality, then so much the worse for you, not reality.

I dunno, the death of the poor and the marginal doesn't seem like a sidetrack. It makes me wonder how it could seem that way to anyone. Actually scratch that. They've always been ignored - dismissed, 'disregarded', in your words, as a sidetrack - precisely by people like you.

Anyone who wants to keep responses to this 'apolitical' is doing nothing but endorsing the hyper-politicised situation that exists on the ground at it stands. It's as stupid as those liberal fucks who say "I don't see color" while vast racial injustice bleeds out of every corner of the world. It's not by avoiding politics that one sees reality for what it is; it's by avoiding the reality of politics that one avoids reality entirely. It's wilful, harmful ignorance.

Of course, that's not to say that ideological responses ought to be discounted. They should be put front and centre too. Like the fact that the bailout tax benfits will overhwelmingly be geared towards helping millionaires - i.e. "80 percent of the benefits of a tax change tucked into the coronavirus relief package Congress passed last month will go to those who earn more than $1 million annually,"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/coronavirus-law-congress-tax-change/

The reasons people resisted quarantine measures were purely ideological, it isn't just the discourse, it's, unsuprisingly, policy being politically/ideologically motivated rather than just looking to the epidemiologists and scientists for cues on how best to manage the pandemic — fdrake

It goes beyond this even - a pandemic like this is immediately political not only because of politically and ideologically motivated responses - responses ought to be politically and ideologically motivated - but because the virus's effects are immediately deferentially socially distributed along class and even racial lines. Aside from the fact that - in the US at least - CV has killed disproportionately more black people than others (because less likely to have access to good healthcare, because more likely to work in so-called 'essential jobs', because less able to have the privilege of self-isolating) the virus kills the poorest of the population at incredibly high rates:

"The coronavirus has taken a particularly vicious toll on paraprofessionals, who represent just 19% of the workforce but more than 44% of deaths. The statistics mirror a stark reality across the city: that the virus has fallen disproportionately hard on low-income communities of color... Paraprofessionals, who often work intimately alongside students with disabilities, earn salaries starting around $26,000."

Anyone who says that this virus 'hasn't exposed the cracks in American society' is either not looking, or a deliberate hack. As Jodi Dean says aporpos 'opening up' again:

The various discussions of return and re-opening are misleading. They proceed as if the primary differences that matter are in terms of region, geographical location. But this prevents us from seeing the class character of re-opening: who is returning to what and under what conditions?

If we think about the 50 deaths in the NYC public school system, does return mean increasing the exposure of teachers' aides, teachers, cafeteria workers, janitors? Does it mean increasing the risks to children who will then take the virus back to their families living in close quarters? Are the decision-makers thinking about the over-crowded and under-served public schools?

I expect that the goal is letting the top 10 percent live good lives while continuing to sacrifice the warehouse workers, delivery personnel, grocers, food processing workers, farm workers, etc. Already the food supply is taking hits as large scale food processing plants are closing down (rather than take appropriate precautions to make the factories safe, provide the workers adequate space and PPE, and pay them overtime and health benefits). Already agricultural workers are being infected, transmitting the virus to each other, and then ultimately being left to die. Return to normal is the name for legitimating this condition.

Re-opening the economy appears to be focused on the privileged. If the economy is opening the workers continue to die, while high income people can go on like before. The media and the politicians will move on, talk about the stock market, and let a death rate of 500 or so per day in New York state be the new normal. The more the focus is on re-opening, the less visible will be the necessity of a rent, mortgage, and debt jubilee, the violence and cruelty of employer based health insurance.

Normal = class war.

This event is political all the way down. It is not the crust on some perfectly apolitical cake. Anyone who doesn't see it, or denies it, is complicit with the way in which the politics of this is current, actually, playing out.

Anyone who doesn't see these issues as immediately political is a dupe, and all the more a victim and willing participant of shitty politics for it.

Reality doesn't give shit what you accept.

The same maybe true of the brain — TheMadFool

It isn't. That's the point.

The two of you are saying that there are analog processes involved in thinking. However, these analog processes are irrelevant because what counts here are thoughts and thoughts are discrete combinations of on/off neurons. — TheMadFool

These two sentences literally contradict each other. Read: sentence two is wrong.

Quoting from Anthony WIlden's System and Structure:

"[Von Neumann] points out that what he calls the prima facie digital behavior of the neuron is a simplification. It is true that neurons either fire or do not fire, but this firing may be modified by the recovery time of the neuron. Similarly, a neuron may represent a simple, two-valued logical network: its firing after a combined and/or synchronized stimulation by two connecting synapses represents 'and', and its firing after stimulation from one or the other of two synapses represents 'or'. But most neurons embody synaptic connections with many other neurons. In some cases, several connecting axons or branches (ending in synapses) from one neuron form synapses on the body of another. Moreover, the axons themselves may stimulate or be stimulated by their neighborhood, the 'impulse' then travelling in both directions, towards the neuron and towards the synapse. Thus, quite apart from the estimated 10^12 synaptic connections in the network, and without considering the dendrites or the phenomenon of direct axonal stimulation, the possible patterns of stimulation do not involve only the so-called 'impulse'.

These patterns probably also include the frequency of the series of impulses in a single axon, the synchronization of impulses from different axons, the number of impulses, and the spatial arrangement of the synapses to which the impulses arrive, as well as the so-called summation time. (This, again, is quite apart from the interrelated physical, mechanical, chemical, and electrical processes in the axon which propagate the message). Some of these aspects, such as frequency, spatial arrangement, and the chemical processes, are analogs.

Von Neumann also points to the constant switching between the analog and the digital in the behavior of the message systems of the body at another level: a digital command releases a chemical compound which performs some analog function or other, this release or its result is in turn detected by an internal receptor neuron which sends a digital signal to command the process to stop or sets off some other process, and so on... It has been suggested that we think of these processes not in terms of 'impulses', which imply a basically energetic model of what is obviously an information system (which 'triggers' energy in order for 'work' to be done), but rather in terms of logical types and classes. The neuron could be said to fire or not to fire if and only if the requisite analog and digital logical arrangements have been completed".

That's how.

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

No worries, I regularly do the same :)

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

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:

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.

That time is now, and it's being told in all its deadly repercussions. The bodies will not wait for you to spin your tidy little yarn.

What this reply has to do with your initial post is beyond me. Probably because it is entirely irrelevant.

And as has been said a lot of times, you have to look how they perform when the other Nordic countries have to loosen their lock downs. If there comes that second wave. — ssu

What? The whole point is to note the difference in outcomes that follow from differences in approach. This is as stupid as staying that you can't compare Stalins gulags with countries without gulags because you have to wait until Stain no longer has gulags. A stupid point to make.

lmao

Guess the conspiracy nuts are out now.

As for Sweden, it is predictably getting utterly fucked: "Sweden has not only the highest rate of fatalities per capita, but also the total death toll is higher than that of all the other Nordic countries put together" as anyone with a pulse will have foreseen.

https://see.news/sweden-reports-worst-death-count-among-nordic-countries/

Also the EU breaking up, or at least being totally, utterly restructured, might be quite a good thing. It's an anti-democratic enforcer of neoliberal debt politics that serves creditors over people and is the cause of massive misery all over the European continent.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csz781

^ Listen for a good explainer on what's happening with EU finances and CV atm.

Americans deserve better than America:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-new-coronavirus-threat-to-the-world-is-the-usa,13788

"The reality is that America’s response to the pandemic has been disastrous. The latest data shows that the USA:

• now has the world’s highest number of active coronavirus cases at 480,427, nearly five times higher than Italy, second with 96,877;
• now has more than 38% of the world’s active cases, despite having only 4.25% of the world’s population. This is up from 27.5% 12 days ago;
• has the highest total deaths, having overtaken Italy and Spain yesterday; and
• has a death rate at 61.8 per million citizens, up from just 12.3 at the end of March.

Most Americans are unaware of these facts, however, because the Trump Government is loudly proclaiming the opposite. ... There is no sign that the spread of the pandemic in the USA is slowing. Friday saw 33,752 new infections, 35.7% of the world’s new cases. This was the 18th daily increase in the last 20 days and the second-highest daily increase on record. Friday saw 2,035 more deaths, 29.2% of all deaths recorded across the globe. This was the 15th daily increase in the last 20 days and the highest daily increase on record."

Antinatalism is not really a philosophy, a free questioning towards truth or towards better ways of thinking or living(!) — jamalrob

Yep, yep, yep.

Before I start though Streetlight, I might have wished you had left my post separate for a little longer from this overwhelming thread, just to see if some of us, other then me/I ( never could work that bit of grammar out.) picked up some threads and ran with them while I slept — rob staszewski

Unfortunately coronavirus threads are as infectious as the disease itself. They need to be contained otherwise they spread through the forum and kill all the philosophy topics. Most will be quarantined here for the safety of others. It's the best option for the economy of threads on the front page too.

One of the possible strategies could be the fragmentation of the image of the centralized subject. Accordingly, we could consider subjectivities, agencies, assemblages, or multitudes, constituted by the parts that are independent of the whole. And, an individual thinking process would become just one of their working parts. — Number2018

One of the things that attracts me to thinking-for and thinking-with is precisely that they make thought a matter of transindividuality in the first place. To think-with the hammer makes the hammer a part of thought: it's lopsided weight in my hand, the dynamics of my swing, the need to avoid bashing my finger in - thought here is already a matter of 'assemblage', a looping circuit from body to environment and back again, immediately sensuous without intellect being bracketed off into a autarkic space of it's own. Alphonso Lingis (writing under the aegis of Heidegger) conducts a nice phenomenology of this:

"What understands that it is possible to pound in the tack or the spike with this hammer is not a logical intellect that represents alternative positions of terms identified, but our practical power to grasp hold of the hammer and manipulate it. Sensing the recalcitrance of things, our hand senses its possible impotence.... An agent who forms his forces according to diagrams read off from the implements fits himself into a series of equivalent and interchangeable agents. One takes the place another has vacated before the punch press and makes the operations with the rhythm the punch press dictates, making oneself another punch press operator... The world disintegrates into discontinuous functional units, but the agent experiences himself as continuous with other agents" (Lingis, Sensation)

Similarly with thinking-for - in fact more obviously so. To think-for is to have to comport our thoughts in a certain way for the sake of what impels it: language, dance, loving, hunting. Thought here is directly implicated with an outside without which there would be no thought at all. The danger to avoid is in believing that there is thought that is 'for itself' before it is for anything else: all thought is in a certain sense thinking-for, all thought is already implicated in an outside long before it becomes a self-enclosed reification. Descartes was wrong long even before he existed, and all idealism is derivative trash.

Re: Subjectivities - yeah, again, another connection I hadn't thought to make but you're totally right. Although I will say that here the topic is much narrower - in the previous threads I tried to think subjectivities as a series of capacities of capacities for action, and in terms of collective subjectivities, I tried to think how the very form of subjectivity could itself be transindividual from the start. Here I think I'm dealing with one particular capacity - the capacity for thought, although I'm not entirely clear about how to articulate this with the notion of subjectivity. In all three cases I'm trying to implicate an Outside directly into what is traditionally considered self-enclosed and autonomous, injecting an irreducible measure of heteronomy (as a condition of autonomy!). But the exact relation between the subject and modes of thought is something I think to consider more extensively.

The latest Republican nut narrative can be summarized as follows: shutting down everything worked therefore it was a bad idea — Baden

:up:

We'll see how your eggdar is.

Tag rob!