if China decides not to export such supplies due to a "China first" mentality (or any other reason) during a global crisis. — dclements

This won't happen. Not because China doesn't have 'nationalist' currents, but because putting China first means precisely expanding China's reach overseas, by way, primarily, of trade. Chinese politicians are also not as utterly fucking stupid as American leaders. The Belt and Road Initiative is China's Marshall Plan, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Capitalists will be - and have been - all too happy to hitch a ride on the expended circuits of logistics and market expansion that it provides - irrespective of the fact that it comes with the price of ceding of sovereignty and local interests to China, all across Asia and Africa.

When you just think that nearly all dangerous epidemics and pandemics have come from China — ssu

What? Who sold you this rubbish and why do you think this is true? H1N1 ('swine flu') was North and Central American. Zika was Brazillian. Ebola was North/West African. BSE ('mad cow') was UK. H5NX (bird flu variants) was largely of American and European providence. MERS ('camel flu') was largely Arabian. SARS, I grant, had its origin in China.

Anyone seen Joe Biden around?

"For almost a whole week, as the crisis has exponentially worsened by day, Biden seemed to have vanished off the face off the earth, surfacing only last Friday in a call with the press. He was “desperately” trying to “be in daily or at least, you know, significant contact with the American people and communicate what I would be doing,” he told reporters, as if regular, successful livestreaming hadn’t already been accomplished by both his opponent and millions of teenagers. To be fair, a source told ABC, Biden’s house in Wilmington had low ceilings, making lighting tough."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/3/joe-biden-coronavirus-pandemic-presidential-campaign

It’s more a race to the top. — NOS4A2

So we look for cheaper manufacturing costs in maybe Vietnam or Bangladesh. — NOS4A2

lol.

+

This pandemic has made apparent our reliance on Chinese manufacturing, even for the most basic of products, and hopefully altering the supply-chain to a better deal will begin shortly after. — NOS4A2

lol^2

Banks, governments, corporations, investors, individuals - part of the problem is that everyone owes each other and uses debt to pay for debt and because money has been so cheap (credit is - or was - so massively available) it's gotten easier and easier to think this bonanza can just keep going.

COVID and the looming debt crisis:

"According to the Institute of International Finance, total debt reached $253 trillion in late 2019, or the equivalent of 322% of global GDP – the highest it has ever been. Now that large parts of Europe and North America are following China in imposing far-reaching lockdowns, concerns are growing over the viability of this enormous debt pile. In the sharp economic contraction of the next few months, widely expected to become the worst in peacetime history, countless borrowers will struggle to repay their debts. This in turn risks unleashing a major international debt crisis that will make the market crash and global recession of 2008–’09 look like child’s play.

[In '08]...The world’s leading central banks soon joined this effort to preserve the financialised world economy, cutting interest rates to historic lows and pumping the equivalent of over $11 trillion worth of new money into circulation through their quantitative easing (QE) programmes. These dramatic monetary interventions helped stave off a total collapse of the global financial system, but they came at the cost of a fresh wave of speculative investment and a rapid increase in global debt levels, which has left the world economy extremely vulnerable to an unforeseen external shock.

And what a shock we got: a near-complete shutdown of productive and commercial activity in some of the world’s leading economies, combined with a collapse in the oil price followed by a synchronised and virtually instantaneous crash of money and capital markets, which threatened to freeze up international credit and payments systems, amidst concerns over collapsing global supply chains and skyrocketing unemployment levels. If ever there was a perfect storm, this has to be it.

...Unlike the new strain of coronavirus that triggered this medical crisis, however, the mountains of debt that now threaten to sink the global economy are no force of nature: they are man-made, and largely a consequence of the particular ways in which policymakers chose to deal with the last financial crisis."

https://www.tribunemag.co.uk/2020/03/the-coming-debt-deluge

This pandemic has made apparent our reliance on Chinese manufacturing, even for the most basic of products, and hopefully altering the supply-chain to a better deal will begin shortly after. — NOS4A2

As long as capitalism exists, this will never happen. It's been a race to the bottom to secure the cheapest labour and manufacturing costs, and the world will continue to rely on China no matter how much anyone pays lip-service to orienting the supply-chain domestically. The one way it could happen of course, is to devastate and immeserate local populations so that others can compete which China at the same level. Which, given what COVID is doing, just might happen.

We don't have to wish we knew how to take it - we can try to figure it out. — csalisbury

Right now I think one of the things that can be done is to consistently hammer home some of the obvious points that the pandemic have brought about; one big one that comes to mind is the asymmetry between what we are told is important (during a 'normal' times) and what, with the virus, is blindingly clear is in fact important. This article makes the point really nicely (at least with respect to the US) so I'm just going to quote it:

"All over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest. Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it’s a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place.

People thrown in jail for minor offenses? San Antonio is one of many jurisdictions to announce that, to keep jails from being crowded with sick citizens, they’ll stop doing that. Why were they doing it in the first place?; The federal government charging interest on loans to attend college? Well, Donald Trump has instructed government agencies who administer loans to waive interest accrual for the duration of the crisis. But why on earth is our government charging its own citizens interest anyway?; Police helping landlords evict tenants in times of financial trouble? Due to the coronavirus, not anymore in New York, Miami, and New Orleans. But—and you see where this is going—why do the police aid evictions when tenants are stricken with other, noncoronavirus illnesses?

In every single one of these cases, it’s not just that most of these practices are accepted as “standard.” It’s that they are a way to punish people, to make lives more difficult, or to make sure that money keeps flowing upward. Up until now, activists and customers have been meant to believe that the powers that be could never change these policies—it would be too expensive, or too unwieldy, or would simply upset the way things are done. But now, faced suddenly with an environment in which we’re all supposed to at least appear to be focused on the common good, the rule-makers have decided it’s OK to suspend them."

This is the stuff people need to remember when 'things go back to normal'. Every time someone says 'but we need to do these things for the "economy"' - we now have a reply: utter, total, bullshit. For decades we've been told: you can't have social services because its too expensive - and at the drop of a hat they pump trillions to 'secure' finance markets (which are falling anyway). Another big one that comes to mind is how the bailouts are going to play out, and what we can learn from them: the airlines right now are a good example. Those guys having been living it up with billions in profits that go straight to shareholders, and now they're asking for bailouts? Again, others have put things better than me, so I'm just gonna quote Jodi Dean (a political philosopher) on this one:

"The airline industry request for a bailout is maddening. It is yet another instance of capital using a disaster to concentrate profit in its own hands, to use every means at its disposal to accumulate... People will say a bailout is necessary if we are to have airlines. There are other options: any airline that gets a bailout is nationalized. Restrictions are placed on how bailout money is used. Airlines are required to have fewer seats on the planes, more space between them, substantially better conditions for all employees. The disaster of this pandemic has to be used to move us toward communism, not an authoritarian national socialism where benefits accrue to the owners, landlords, rich, white, and distant and risks are born by the workers, renters, poor, racialized who don't have the luxury of space"

(quoting from a FB post of hers which I won't link, although it's publicly accessible)

The other important point to make is to emphasize the utter non-autonomy of the economy from the rest of society. One of the things this is exposing is that the economy doesn't exist. There is no 'the economy' - there is just a fucking fabrication of certain agents to the benefit of certain powers that could afford, for the longest time, to let the 'non-economy' go to shit as they profited off of it: but now we know - now we are reminded - that healthcare, worker protections, affordable housing - are not extra-economic embellishments, they are the fucking core upon which there would be no economy. Every time someone says 'Bbbbut-bututtbut the economy!' from now on they should be treated with nothing but disdain.

It's lessons like these we need to bring out and disseminate in the wake of this. And then there's the question of our agriculture practises and how it was always going to lead to this bullshit. This is something I really need to understand more, but the fact that no one is talking about it makes me utterly mad. This is one of the few places I've seen anyone discussing this and it drives me insane that this kind of thing isn't required reading:

"Contact tracing linked infections back to the Hunan Wholesale Sea Food Market in Wuhan, where wild animals were sold. Environmental sampling does appear to pinpoint the west end of the market where wild animals were held. But how far back and how widely should we investigate? When exactly did the emergency really begin? The focus on the market misses the origins of wild agriculture out in the hinterlands and its increasing capitalization. Globally, and in China, wild food is becoming more formalized as an economic sector. But its relationship with industrial agriculture extends beyond merely sharing the same moneybags. As industrial production–hog, poultry, and the like–expand into primary forest, it places pressure on wild food operators to dredge further into the forest for source populations, increasing the interface with, and spillover of, new pathogens, including Covid-19."

The fact that agriculture is entirely absent from our public conversation about this stuff is utterly crazy. Instead we have fucks talking about the 'Chinese virus' - as if this wasn't a capitalist virus through and through, where we have enjoyed cheap shit from China for years and have active encouraged it to destroy it's environment so we can get that cheap shit. The racism that this virus has dredged up in some quarters if appealing not just because its racism, but because it's an utter misdiagnosis of why this kind of shit happens. There are so many lessons that this thing teaches us, and right now I'm just trying to track them so they can be used later on. I have a whole thing about the elderly and childcare too, but I've written to much already.

I guess: this allows us to recognize the lies of 'normal' society for what they are - fucking lies, and we need to carry that through to whatever happens next. Like I said, not hopeful, but it's all there for anyone who has eyes to see.

I haven't spoken to so many strangers as I have in recent days, spontaneously, while going about things. Although that will probably change as we've just gone into partial lockdown here. But yes, there's a definite sense of concern for one another that's kind of hard to fathom as being in place at any other time. My dream is that this sense of mutual care gets translated into our ways of social organization, and prompts us to rethink what and how we value things as a society. There is, among all this horribleness, an opportunity to use that 'shimmer' as a window into that better world, I wish we knew how to take it.

I am pretty pessimistic about it all. The worst possible thing will probably happen: things will go back to being just as they were before, after some time.

If you felt safe and at peace the first time, there's good reason to think you will feel the same if you commit yourself again. Do such institutions do 'consultations' or something similar? I think it would be a good idea to at least speak to a professional to assess your situation. Whatever it is, don't let yourself hurt yourself, or anyone else.

Looks like!

There's cases of that of course, but as a blanket statement it's largely false.

Lmao Sanders will be VP when hell freezes over.

Besides the VP is going to be a WOMAN because Biden is WOKE.

I fully look forward to indulging, with full measure of schadenfreude, liberals and democrats asking with incredulity 'But how could this have happened???' upon Trump's next electoral win.

People around me express a keen interest in philosophy all the time, and in my experience the hunger for it is not matched by appropriate resources that would allow people the time and space to explore it. My biggest issue has not been a lack of interest - it's been rather quite the opposite, the lack of infrastructure that would enable people to study it on their own terms. People don't know where to begin, how to continue, or where it might lead. This is a failing on the part of philosophers, partly. But the ideas always attract people.

Mars anyone? — unenlightened

Why Mars? Nah, just cancel all debt, cancel all mortgages, communalize the means of production, appropriate the rich, destroy capitalism, and we're all good, right here on earth.

Ergo, given what practice is and how my story reveals that changing the key physical quantity involved in a sport can turn you from a pro to a beginner, it must be that our brains do math — TheMadFool

This doesn't follow at all. Just more idiotic reasoning, as with all of your posts.

:up:

Sounds very mathematical — TheMadFool

Sorry, I should have realized I needed to translate my quote into dumb. Thing move, I move, must make it so that one thing move in certain way in relation to other thing; if move good, catch ball.

what's stopping a corporation from buying back most of it's own stock at a higher price for the sole purpose of convincing others that it's value has increased? — creativesoul

Nothing. Share buybacks are a thing.

That all said, depending on one's area of jurisdiction, there can be and are certain rules regarding the transparency of shareholder ownership, which usually come into effect at certain thresholds of ownership. Lots of ways around this through - shell holdings and so on.

Is this a matter of public record? — creativesoul

No, but it doesn't particularly matter. This isn't some grand conspiracy. Economic conditions are shit right now, which means alot of people will be looking to sell their shares.

How can so many people be selling if there are no buyers. — creativesoul

There are buyers. The price of a stock indicates the last price at which a stock was traded at (the last time a buyer and seller 'agreed' on a price). Stop thinking in terms of 'dsicounted price': there is no 'discounted price', just the price, that's it. It just happens to be low (in relation to where it was in the past).

You make it sound as if the buyer is driving and/or establishing the actual share(selling) price. Is that a misreading? — creativesoul

Not a misreading, that's exactly right. Or at least it is in this case, where it's a buyer's market. Again, it's just supply and demand dude: there's alot more supply than there is demand, so the price falls. Economics 101.

From Andy Clark's Being There:

"Consider the act of running to catch a ball. This is a skill which cricketers and baseball players routinely exhibit. How is it done? Common experience suggests that we see the ball in motion, anticipate its continuing trajectory, and run so as to be in a position to intercept it. In a sense this is correct. But the experience (the "phenomenology") can be misleading if one believes that we actively compute such trajectories. Recent research suggests that a more computationally efficient strategy is to simply run so that the acceleration of the tangent of elevation of gaze from fielder to ball is kept at zero. Do this and you will intercept the ball before it hits the ground.

Videotaped sequences of real-world ball interception suggest that humans do indeed — unconsciously — use this strategy. Such a strategy avoids many computational costs by isolating the minimal and most easily detectable parameters that can support the specific action of interception"

In other words: catching the ball isn't a matter of 'computation' so much as keeping constant a certain relation of movement between ball and person: an attempt to keep something invariant in your visual field.

What difference does it make how many shares are being sold/bought, so long as they are? — creativesoul

What matters is the price that they are being bought and sold at. People are still buying, but they are buying at lower and lower prices. Reciprocally, sellers are selling at lower prices too (because buyers are only willing to buy at low prices). It's not the volume or rate of shares traded ('more buying and selling') that makes the difference, but how much people are willing to pay to acquire stocks.

The rough reason they are dropping is that people are worried about the profitability of the companies they hold shares in, which is dropping across the board because are people no longer spending money on things (like flights, entertainment, retail, etc). People not spending money = no profits. No profits = no return on investments in stocks = better to unload (sell) those stocks.

The other rough reason is the self-fulfilling one that if others sell, then stock value drops, so you have to sell too in order not lose money on your investment. Example: if you bought a stock at $100, and it's now selling for $40 and the price is falling, you've made a 'paper' loss of $60, and you risk losing even more by holding onto the stock. Better to 'get out' and take the real loss now rather than wait for it to fall further and make a bigger loss down the track. The big problem is that if everyone thinks like this, everyone sells, and you get a reinforcing cycle of panic selling which drives the stock prices down sheerly because everyone is worried about everyone else selling - and therefore sells.

The more that news that comes out about shutdowns in the wake of CV, the more I keep thinking back to this passage penned by the anarchist outfit le Comité Invisible just 6 years ago (in their To Our Friends):

"In a world where the organization of production is decentralized, fluid, and largely automated, where each machine is now but a link in an integrated system of machines that subsume it, and where this system-world of machines, of machines producing machines, tends to be unified cybernetically, each particular flow is a moment of the overall reproduction of capital's society. There is no longer a "sphere of reproduction" of labor power and social relations distinct from the sphere of production, which itself is no longer a sphere, but rather the web of the world with all its relations.

To physically attack these flows, at any point, is therefore to politically attack the system as a whole. If the subject of the strike was the working class, the subject of the blockade is whoever. It's anyone at all, anyone who takes a stand against the existing organization of the world. It's generally when they reach their maximun degree of sophistication that civilizations fall apart. Every production chain is now reaching such a level of specialization through so many intermediaries that if one of them disappeared that would be enough to paralyze, or even destroy, the whole chain."

This was a point that left a deep impression on me at the time, but I never imagined that the vector of attack would be not the dispossessed, but a simple, mindless, virus. There's a recent interview with Zizek which I really like too, where he maintains his blessed optimism for a better world among - perhaps especially because of - catastrophe:



Capitalism has never let a good disaster go to waste however, so the fight over the social and political significance of the virus is one still to be waged.

A good philosophy acts as a force multiplier to thought; it forges connections between the disparate, as elaboration on world and word. A good philosophy constantly surprises, pulls one along a forceful current of thought that propels a mind from one element to the next, and leaves one hungry for more. It inspires creation in thought and serves as a launchpad to thinking otherwise, always. It refers one constantly to an elsewhere and an outside that cannot be captured within that philosophy but on which it always draws upon, augments, and edifies.

Man I was hoping the toilet paper thing sparked a bidet renaissance; ever since I went to Japan I've been hoping that bidets become a standard thing everywhere, but alas, we're stuck with paper :rage:

Yo this is the CV thread can we keep talk about infectious diseases to the Trump thread pls.

lol

Why is anyone taking fish seriously he thinks Hillary might be nominated this disqualifies him from adult conversation.

*laughs as I eat my toilet paper omelettes*

Why in the world would you appeal to a principle of sufficient reason, if change is not accountable for in terms of sufficient reason? — Pneumenon

I think part of the confusion here stems from working with an inadequate vocabulary ('change' is possibly even worse than 'flux' insofar as change implies a *thing* that changes, subordinating difference once more to identity!). In any case, bracketing that problem for the moment, what I said was simply that variation provides the sufficient reason for the invariant. But the invariant just is what is to be accounted for. Recall the question to which the PoSR responds: why is there some-thing rather than no-thing? A: because variation. But variation is no *thing*: it is the pre-individual, it is that out of which, or from which, there are *things* - as things, as structure - to be accounted for at all.

Which is another way of saying that this question: "why does change happen this way, and not some other way?" - is badly formulated. "Change" in the abstract - 'change in general' - doesn't 'happen', only changes to this and changes to that. The right question is: why this change in the structure and not another? In other words the question of sufficient reason can only be formulated at the level of the individuated, at the level of structure, beyond which is simply loses its field of applicability. This is both to de-fang the PoSR and to intensify it. De-fanged (and de-theologized, I might add) because rendered immanent, referring reason(s) to the world and how it is (no longer looking outside it); intensified because no longer taking for granted that there are things at all and demanding instead an account of how they come to be at all.

It is a positive fact about nature that organized systems require difference. But this is no less juridical than the negative interpretation. — Pneumenon

Huh? That systems are maintained by energetic difference is not some kind of stipulative rule: systems not maintained because they require difference but because without such difference they would dissapate. To cast this in the form of a 'law' would be nothing but an anthropormorphism, putting the legal cart before the perfectly natural horse, as it were.

Why does the flux have this positive property, and not another? — Pneumenon

I don't understand your question: I said the flux provides the sufficent reason for structure, not that the flux (I really dislike this word btw!) is accountable for in terms of sufficient reason (confusion of expalnanda with explanandum here).

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2020/03/11/capitalist-agriculture-and-covid-19-a-deadly-combination/

An excellent read placing the COVID outbreak within wider capitalist dynamics:

"The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure –or better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary.

.... Capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence. The functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities. In short, capital centers, places such as London, New York, and Hong Kong, should be considered our primary disease hotspots."

The Second Law of Thermodynamics would appear to be permanent, for example. — Pneumenon

It's a question here of how to interpret the standing of such laws. There are two ways to do this: one, by understanding the law as a pure prohibition: entropy in a closed system cannot decrease over time. This is the law understood in a juridical fashion, as it were, a statute written in the Book of Nature (where exactly?). But this is not the only or even most perspicacious way of looking at it. The other, inverse, way of understanding it is as the expression of a positive fact about nature (and not just a negative limitation upon it): energy differentials are productive of order. That is, the second law attests to the fact that every form of organisation (structure, identity) requires the maintenance of difference without which it would collapse into nothingness. Or to quote Levi Bryant on this:

"Substances, entities, or objects are negentropic systems. An object is a highly ordered system. Or, amounting to the same thing, an object is a highly improbable being. I am deeply interested in questions of how there’s any order in the world at all and of the sort of work required by negentropic systems to stave off entropy. How do they do it? Why do improbabilities (highly ordered objects) persist? And if my hypothesis that objects are negentropic systems, it also follows that objects are not stupid clods that just sit there. Rather, objects must be a work, an activity, a process. A brute, motionless clod that sits there would be the exact opposite of negentropy, for entropy is the evaporation of all work, its disappearance, or the descent into equaprobability. Work is the maintenance and continuation of improbability; the unlikely arrangement of parts in a particular order" (cite).

The 2nd law, interpreted negatively, is derivative of this primary fact of nature, which, again, attests to the primacy of flux. The 2nd law is 'permanent', but it's permanence is parasitic upon the permanence of - you guessed it - change.

@Pneumenon - btw I realised I missed out a crucial 'not' in my post above, just corrected that, sorry about the confusion.

the vital thing is to show how e.g. the individual molecules provide sufficient reason for the laws of physics. — Pneumenon

No, no. It's not about the 'individual molecules'. Individual molecules are not 'change' (what would that even mean?) It's about the relations between them, the minimisation of forces between molecules. In other words: regulated change. Not relata but relations are primary.

The individual bonds are not indifferent to their context at all — Pneumenon

I didn't say this: I said they were indifferent to global structure, which they are. Swat a soap bubble and you get a cascading wave of local bond-breaking which travels across the bubble. The bubble doesn't pop instantaneously: it takes time.

And there's nothing about the laws of physics which the primacy of flux denies: indeed, what do the 'laws of physics' bear upon? Change. Without which they would be laws of nothing at all.

if only because consistency of behavior between invariant structures begs the question of an organizing principle. — Pneumenon

Don't think this is necessary. One of my favourite examples is the soap bubble: why does it have the form it does? Because the sphere is the shape that best minimizes surface tension. But the minimzation of surface tension is a 'local' phenomena: each molecule of the soap bubble only interacts with the molecules next to it, and the bonds that form are indifferent to the global structure: yet the sphere nonetheless emerges from the sum of these local interactions. Finally, 'minimization of surface tension' is of course a modulation of difference.

Another well-known example might be the behaviour of swarms of birds, which can be said to be roughly governed by similar 'local laws': move in the same direction as your neighbours; remain close to your neighbours; avoid collisions with your neighbours (note that as with the bubble, all three 'rules' have as their 'content' regulation of change, which is primary). Modulate correctly, and you get: