The Coronavirus

[pbrower2a]

(05-06-2020, 08:04 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(05-06-2020, 02:08 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: My values must be more practical/realistic than your values. Reds  view death as part of life and reds aren't as afraid of death and accept it better than  blues. I assume that economics are no longer a reality/concern for most blues these days which makes sense for a have-have not culture/banana republic. I don't care if you and others spend the next year hunkered down and protecting yourselves  from certain death/COVID19. Minnesota has set a goal of 20,000 tests per day which is about a month of testing if they intend to test everyone who lives in the state. I'm curious to see if I already had it because if I have then it was already here in early January. I had a weird cold in early January along with several other people that I know personally.

I don’t know that ‘practical’ is the right word.  R0 is just low for you, and you don’t care that it is much higher for others, or that you are forcing others to roll the dice with their lives.  For you it is about me me me.  Others can drop dead.

Then too are the values involved.  The unraveling is a time of selfishness.  Solving the problem at the core of the crisis involves working together for the sake of the community.  Some are just locked in the unraveling mode.

...Indeed (really more to Classic X'er than to Bob Butler), we must be willing to scrap some long-cherished values (let alone prejudice) when we find that those values cause great harm. It can be a conflict of values, with one value (in my case law and order) overpowering my long-held contempt for homosexuality. When someone proved to me with a threat of serious physical harm to me out of a perception that I was a homosexual I decided then and there that full legal equality for homosexuality would make life safer even for straight people. Identity? Likewise. 

We have made great sacrifices in the past to stave off a shared danger, including the greatest nightmare in American history: a victory of the Axis Powers. I have seen predictions from four-digit predictions of deaths from COVID-19 (now a daily toll) to millions (if every American gets it). With the 5% death rate that I have seen (deaths to total cases), and the knowledge that such deaths do not even include the shortening of expected lifespans among survivors, I could imagine worse. Far worse. See also rheumatic fever that causes heart damage that shortens lives. 

(now more to Bob Butler) Bad habits that become commonplace even among people who should know better in a 3T precipitate the sheer nastiness of a Crisis Era. Maybe society can get away with the common man indulging in self-destructive practices because the common man typically hurts himself and his loved ones alone. So it is with proletarian types who deny science and history, or adopt cranky political ideologies. The personal heartbreak and ruin that one gets is obviously limited in scope if proles having little influence bear the brunt on small scales. When the elites do such things and impose their will that others do much the same or at least influence the proles do so on a mass scale, then the damage is far greater. Ideally any elite status or position comes, in a wholesome order, more responsibility for those with the privileges that society gives them out of necessity. Just consider that although life is better in many ways for an officer than for an enlisted soldier in any branch of the Armed Services, the officers are not allowed to get away with such things as defaulting on gambling debts, going bankrupt, or having extramarital affairs. 

So it is rightly with such professionals as certified public accountants, engineers, architects, physicians, attorneys, veterinarians, and even such people who might not quite be considered high-level professionals as cops, stockbrokers, insurance salespeople, real estate brokers, and teachers. OK, a cost accountant in Chicago might have the discretion to use a company car to go to Fort Wayne as needed to determine that proper accounting procedures are being done in Fort Wayne if something is suspect. Someone on an assembly line in Chicago might be obliged to wear a diaper rather than take bathroom breaks. If that assembly-line worker takes the company car to see his aunt in Fort Wayne he will be fired and likely prosecuted for grand theft auto. Some people have more discretion than others, which is to be expected. 

In a 3T the Establishment often finds that it can get away with behavior that will ultimately hurt others (like speculating with other people's money) while taking the gains and insulating themselves from the personal risk. They may support politicians who lie, cheat, and steal because those politicians make the profiteering of the elites (which may involve lying, cheating, and stealing) far easier and more rewarding.  Ponzi schemes and pyramid games flourish toward the end of a 3T only to collapse as happened with Bernie Madoff. 

Economic calamities happen on a large scale as the reality of bubbles, large-scale embezzlement and corruption, and trickle-down ideology prove catastrophic. Bad times bring out the worst in politics in some places, and that worst can make things even worse by enforcing elite privilege or starting the persecution of scapegoats. 

We are fortunate in a way that the Trump Administration has been as incompetent as it has been. Trump has a despotic personality, yet he failed to suppress his opposition before purging his own Party. Contrast Hitler, who successfully suppressed the German Left before acting as a despot. A real American dictatorship would have probably dispatched me fast had I not emigrated fast enough. I would be in Argentina, perhaps, and I would be doing my blogging in Spanish and using a fake name. "Cervecero" would be too obvious, would it not? I of course hope that we get through this Crisis with our constitutional protections solidified instead of weakened and that Americans have learned some good habits.

1. We need again to become a nation of savers.
2. We need disabuse ourselves of the idea that conspicuous spending is evidence of real wealth.
3. We need to make rational thought a habit along all vocational groupings.
4. We need discredit cranks, demagogues, hucksters, sadists, and poseurs.
5. We need more, and not less, social inequality for the sake of the children, at the least.
6. We need recognize the necessity of precedent, protocol, and integrity even when such are inconvenient.
7. We need attach responsibility to every manifestation of administrative, intellectual, and even economic privilege.
8. We need shore up family and community as cells of patriotic loyalty.

Maybe you can think of more.