The Coronavirus

[pbrower2a]

(08-30-2021, 08:12 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: What we've got here is, failure to communicate. That's the essence of the covid crisis today. And those who are going to the hospital and dying of covid now, are "getting it."

Getting it...of course, in the wrong way.

I have typically assumed that the Hard Right distrusts any intellectual construct, but this one seems universal and nearly self-evident from the experiences that I have had and have seen in others:



(Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs)

Put people in excruciating pain, get them desperately hungry or thirsty, threaten them with violent death, freeze or burn them, deny them sleep, or have them gasping for breath, and such becomes the focus of life. The scariest situations in which I have ever been in are 

(1) two gay-bashing incidents, and
(2) seeing four large dogs charging a door in front of me, the door having a latch too flimsy for my comfort. 

I ran away or drove off from the gay-bashing incidents and walked away from the dogs to my car. Dogs are as dangerous as bears and Big Cats except for one thing: good behavior -- yours and that of the dogs. I was doing Census work, and the dogs must have thought that I was a burglar, and thus meat. I do no stupid stuff around dogs. 

I have seen people dying of cancer, lupus, respiratory failure, and cirrhosis, and it isn't pretty. As a substitute school teacher I have told students who talked about their tobacco use and told them what awaits them in emphysema and lung cancer. It is safe to say that you do not want something like your breathing to be the focus of your life. I have seen small animals mangled partially, but not fatally, in confrontations with motor vehicles, and it is ugly. 

Death by COVID-19 comes from respiratory failure. I do not smoke, and I do not take chances with COVID-19. 

Quote:Almost all of these new patients, over 100,000 new patients a day now in the USA, are unvaccinated. Chuck Todd on Meet the Press posted statistics that the 40 or so counties with the most covid infections voted for Trump by a 40% margin. The surge is concentrated in the southeast area of the country. Some Republicans seem to have decided that the best way to beat Biden and re-elect Trump is to stay unvaccinated and not wear masks. That way the covid crisis will grow, and Biden as the president gets the blame as his approval rating goes down. Biden is entirely blameless of course; this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated; the second-worst surge of the crisis.

In the first wave, COVID-19 struck
 
(1) the demographic known as "frequent flyers", on the whole a well-educated lot, and
(2) urban populations, especially minorities who live in high-density locations even by urban standards. 

Both groups skew Democratic, and they got hit hard before the medical community could get its act together. Indeed, medical staff were especially vulnerable.

COVID-19 may have made the 2020 election closer than most wise people thought because it killed a disproportionate share of minority voters, including some who had already voted but whose votes proved not to count. From here on, COVID-19 seems to be killing people largely on the reactionary side of the political spectrum. That alone could greatly reduce the GOP vote in subsequent years. COVID-19 did not seal the deal for the Republican Party in 2020, and things stand to get even worse for the GOP even if one ignores possible disillusionment by those who have lost loved ones to COVID-19. People who have lost loved ones to COVID-19 do not have liberals and Democrats to blame. 

Quote:Such Republicans seem to have decided that to go unvaccinated and unmasked and to protest mandates and masks is good political strategy. The pandemic gets worse then, and so Biden is blamed for what THEY themselves did. Many Americans can't discern the difference, because Americans of the USA are so willfully ignorant, as George Carlin called them. But this little bit of politicking may cost the deniers their lives. It is already costing the lives of many of their comrades. I guess they feel it's worth it. Nothing would be finer than to get their narcissist bully conman hero back in office. Maybe they just think if Trump is president, their taxes will go down again, and fewer immigrants will cross the border. Well, maybe there's no taxes in heaven, and God can paint the streets with gold anyway. It seems like the approach of the Muslim suicide bomber to me. Maybe they think they are martyrs for the cause.

In a political order as polarized ours is, at least for now, demographics mean more than does quality or even economic interest. The people who will die of COVID-19 will be those who have made stupid choices that put them at pointless risk. Except in super-repressive regimes in which the ability to think outside the box is likely to make one a rebel or a suicide risk, stupidity is not a survival tool.  We just went through a few hours in which America was in grave risk of becoming the sort of social order in which being a pliant dullard is a way to avoid every problem except those inevitable in the poverty that usually goes with stupidity. 

Of course if anyone believes any part of the generational theory, one can reasonably expect a more conformist, socially-unified political life in which extremism of any kind becomes a severe detriment to the quality of life. The sorts of politicians that I expect are going to act more like Barack Obama (really a typical 1T leader before America is completely ready for him) than like Trump even if a conservative. That means sobriety, rationality,  the respect for protocol and precedent, limitation of risk, acceptance of the hierarchy of talent and skill, recognition of the desirability of law and order at the least as a protection of civil liberties, an expectation of moderate levels of economic hierarchy, and the promotion of education and learning for their own right. We will have set for a time the idea that we all mostly succeed together or fail together. 

In education I expect the norm for people not mentally retarded to get at the least two years of inexpensive, if highly-structured, formal education beyond K-12. My suggestions for the syllabus:

1. basic philosophy -- so that people can learn how to think
2. economics -- microeconomics (consumer/worker/firm and macroeconomics (the overall economy) 
3. psychology  -- so that people can recognize scams 
4. world history -- rather recently I thought Spain in the 1930's a scary analogue for America
5. comparative religion -- to reduce the potential for religious bigotry
6. music and art appreciation -- nice use of time. These have kept me out of the mental ward. 
7. comparative political systems -- the consequences of the rejection of democracy
8. freshman composition  -- so that one can communicate effectively
9. foreign languages (start earlier -- one Romance, one Germanic, and one Slavic, one of which will have to be at the college level)
10. more literature
11. probability and statistics -- enough said on their importance  

Basically, as complex as our economic life and social realities are, our youth will need the basic liberal arts. Three languages? Learn one Slavic language even if it has a small population of speakers (Hello, taramarie!) exp-ands one's intellectual universe greatly. 

So what if it makes certain parts of the current political spectrum irrelevant? If it is the Trump cult -- great.