04-05-2020, 05:48 AM
(04-05-2020, 12:32 AM)Ragnarök_62 (you in blue) Wrote: (Warren Dew, to whom I have responded, in green)
Quote: would agree if Covid-19 were a real threat to the lives of many citizens. It's not, though. It's only a threat to the lives of old people, which category happens to include most of the economic and political elites.
This (Oklahoma City? Tulsa? Muskogee? Bartlesville? Lawton?) is the US where it's obese city. Oklahoma's case fatality rate has lots of young The US also has no public healthcare system at all because austerity and Reaganoid idiocy. So it is a greater threat for the whole population in the US than say Europe or even Russia which has a public healthcare system. The lack of access to healthcare also matters.
As I see it, the first people to get COVID-19 in America seemed to fit the profile of "frequent flyer", or people who travel heavily due to their work (academics, entertainers, creative people, business executives, educated professionals, and traveling salesmen) who travel through airports (cosmopolitan places) and especially on jetliners. As I have often heard, no place is so capable of spreading a contagious respiratory infection as a jetliner, typically a crowded place recirculating the same infected air everywhere. People going from one jetliner to another in a week or so may already be contagious from the last trip. (In Iran it seemed to be connected to religious pilgrimages, very often the last treks that people who know that The End is approaching, take).
But in general these people are in good shape for their age because they have good incentives to take care of themselves. This will certainly not be so with people with horrible habits such as alcoholism and drug use. Poor people who already must live lives of compromise will also get hurt.
Quote:Quote:It's kind of like when the elites dupe the commoners into supporting war.
And how they duped the commoners to accept stupid pull up by the bootstraps stuff. That doesn't work in an oligarchy. No can compete against stuff like Amazon, Google, General Mills, etc. etc.
The oligarchs will keep duping people until they fail catastrophically, as in a breakdown of food supply, a war that floods America with body bags, or horrific failure to meet a natural disaster. An entity such as Amazon seems to sell books without judging the content, so it can sell both the iconic works of Rush Limbaugh and Karl Marx at the same time. Google can get me to porn just as easily as it can get me to Liberty Baptist Church (associated with the late Jerry Falwell).
One political theory, the Skowronek Cycle, suggests that the inhuman individualism that Ronald Reagan offered in 1980 has run its course. The idea that the common man must compete in a race to the bottom (low wages, high rents, brutal management, and gross insecurity even if overworked and underpaid) while elites get to monopolize at will might have been good for lowering expectations about forty years ago -- but that is over. Political polarization develops as economic inequality intensifies, underinvestment in basic industry leads to job losses, speculative bubbles lead to panics, and demagogues flourish. We are headed to something else that will likely be a rejection of the Reagan-Trump era.
Let us remember that Amazon.com would not work if such entities as Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Borders Books did not fail. As Sears dies, you can expect Amazon.com to sell what Sears used to offer uniquely, including Craftsman tools and even Kenmore appliances.
Quote:Quote:But in the general outlines, yes, the Covid-19 crisis is very much the kind of thing you'd expect in a Crisis period.
Yup, it's the perfect thing to expose all of US's institutional failures for all to see. Inequality, shitty healthcare, shit jobs that are "essential", but no hazard pay make for a pissed off populace.
When grocery-store workers start getting very sick and very dead, then things could get very bad very fast. I can imagine stores starting to charge admissions for timed appointments, and the alternative will be to pay for delivery. That will make things very expensive.
But such happens in a culture of greed that sees workers as livestock at best and vermin at worst so that elites can live like sultans. All paradigms eventually fail due to staleness, but the ones with the weakest connection to rational thought and to moral decency fail fastest and worst.
Late in a 4T, events overtake plans and dreams. As the Christmas carol from the time of the American Civil War puts it. "The wrong shall fail, the right prevail"...
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.