Biden Pandemic Adviser Calls for Four to Six Week National Lockdown

[pbrower2a]

(03-15-2021, 05:20 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-14-2021, 09:45 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I have made it a habit to list the crisis problems of late.  No one seems to contradict my personal list explicitly.  COVID has caused a half million deaths and collapsed the economy.  There were big time protests of racism last summer.  Red violence steadily escalated during the Trump years leading to the January 6 insurrection.  Global warming is slower, has not resulted in as obvious a single trigger, but is worth at least an honorable mention and does not lack fire and hurricane catalysts.  If those were just catalysts, I would hate to see the trigger.

These are all on the agenda.  There are other things on the Biden agenda, but none I think have risen to the crisis level?

Is that the right list?  If not, how would anyone change it?

Biden's agenda seems to hit all of the above.  If I complain that the prior administration was oriented to not solve problems, those were the problems I meant.  If you can't fix the economy without beating the bug first, Trump was on the wrong side of all of it.

And yet, here there is a claim that Americans put their heads in the sand.  Over on the Generational Dynamics thread, they are still predicting wars and were recently wailing about civilization's collapse.  Some reds are working themselves up about Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head.  It seems a lot of people are not focused on solving what seem to me to be the obvious problems.

Anyone real have a different list?

My list and yours overlap, but differ a bit. Here are my 5 must-dos, not that we will actually, you know, do them:

1. COVID.  Clearly the most important in the near term, but it's coming under control, or it will if the "freedom-to-die" crowd will allow it.  Luckily, it appears that the never-vaccers are losing steam.  Let's hope the decline gets the job done without even more misery.
   
2. Global Warming.  This speaks for itself, but it's worth noting that this issue operates by its rules and on its timeline.  That's why I would normally put it first ... that and the degree of seriousness.
   
3. Rising Inequality.  The rate at which this is amassing wealth for the few and penury to many -- all that in the world's wealthiest nation -- shows how quickly we can revert to something akin to Feudalism.  We can control this, but it requires the will to oppose the richest and most powerful among us.
   
4. Paranoia and Conspiracy.  With the arrival of Deep Fakes, the ability of large numbers of otherwise rational people to fall through a rathole just got bigger.  Since this is not limited to the US, I may have to move this up the list in the future.
   
5. Decline of the Commons.  Infrastructure decay is the most obvious example of this, but even the vaunted military is now just another cash cow for the .01% who effectively rule us.  But this isn't limited to physical decay, the phenomenon described in Bowling Alone has only gotten worse.  As social institutions fade, the connection of Americans to one another is bent and finally broken.  This is one the government CAN'T fix.  We need to solve this on the human level.
   

So that's my shortlist.  Other than COVID, we're not making a lot of headway on any of them.

1. The current President treats COVID-19 as a risk on the scale of a Crisis war. The solution for a Lincoln or FDR is to get it over with as quickly as possible at the expense of the ruin and suffering of the Enemy. We can safely treat a nasty little virus with the vehemence that Hitler had for the Jews, except that the Jews are human and COVID-19 is as far from human as an enemy can be. He has the Army delivering many of the inoculations. If you want to get something done that nobody else can do and the consequences of failure are far greater than the cost, then turn to the Army to get it done. 500 thousand dead so far indicates the cost, and if we Americans could erupt in anger about far lesser death tolls such as those of Pearl Harbor or 9/11... well, guess what we do. 

2. Global warming isn't causing mass death yet, but it is on the brink. How ineptly we as Humanity deal with it will decide how large the death toll. Humanity can get away with a slow sequence of events involving global warming, but that depends upon agricultural productivity catching up to human needs in what are now northern Russia, Siberia and most of Canada. Whether the food that feeds 150 million people comes from Finland or from Bangladesh matters little. People can relocate as their world becomes insufferable or unavailable -- if they have the means. But if the farmland upon which hundreds of millions of peasant farmers feed a few more people than themselves disappears under the oceans, then what can those people do if they have nowhere to go?

There is no techno-fix for hunger. It is easy for people to neglect the role of agriculture in the world economy, but if agriculture fails, then all else is irrelevant except wars waged as callously toward soldiers in World War I or the Iran-Iraq war (about which Henry Kissinger said of the opposing belligerents "I wish they could both lose") and the genocidal attitudes toward pariahs among Axis leaders in World War II. Indifference toward human suffering and death can have the same effect as a masterfully-designed genocide.   

If you thought the Holodomor and Holocaust horrific, then just consider what is possible with global warming with its inundation of huge areas of heavily-populated farmland and desertification of much other productive farmland.

3. This will likely reverse. The ethos of the last forty years among the economic elites was that the vast majority of people are to be overworked and underpaid because such creates the capital (through profit) necessary for investment in plant and equipment that create jobs -- well, the exploitation appeared as large dividends and unprecedented levels of executive compensation, so it has proved nothing more than exploitation), and that those who are nominally successful are to be fleeced through gouging and inordinate levels of personal debt. The neoliberal era that began with Reagan and became a sick parody under Trump has likely gone under. This economic exploitation has gone as far as it can without achieving anything other than elite indulgence incompatible with a democratic society. It has not created a level of prosperity that has made inequality a trivial matter. 

4. The January 6 insurrection demonstrates that our political culture has some screws loose. Before that we could all take for granted that elections operate in accordance with rigid rules that clearly define who wins. Maybe some electoral hanky-panky by local pols (Florida in 2000?) or even by foreign actors (disruption of the campaign of Hillary Clinton by foreign interests in 2016?) is possible, but we generally accepted the results. We have the Electoral College, a relic of the time in which the Founders believed that the right way to keep the nation from splintering was to ensure that the States elected the President. That is how things worked in 1896, 2000, and 2016... and not that someone can change the rules at a whim to ensure victory under any circumstances. That is how Duvalier (either one) did things in Haiti and how things are done today in Belarus. 

We need to redevelop a consensus on what is rational thought and explain clearly whether it is preferable even if it is transitorily inconvenient. This is not deference to "dead white males" even if the "dead white males" once did an adequate job. We know a few more things, and we have more temptations; besides the snake-oil salesmen of our time vend more dangerous wares these days. The fundamentals of logic may be all but identical with common sense, but too few people can look outside their desires to see reality. Maybe if they could adapt to reality they could better use it to achieve their desires. 

5. The decline (often called tragedy) of course results from people thinking that if they can manipulate everything to their advantage, that all will go well.  Such hurts others, and if enough people hurt others, then almost everyone is hurt. A few may profiteer, but those become objects of hatred.