Speaking of which, this is also probably why the BLM movement gained widespread support. Statistics showing unequal policing have existed for a long time, but they are easy to ignore. Any person who watched the 8:46 video of a man being suffocated couldn’t ignore it.
We like to think we’re data driven, but we’re actually emotionally and visually driven. Statistics should convince people, but it doesn’t. A video of towers falling or a man being suffocated are much more likely to change people’s minds.
You often only tip if you see the person. If you don't see them(e.g. line cook), you don't tip. Such a strange way of compensating people.
If you work a job where you you're expected to put on a smile and maybe banter with the customer, even though your dog just died this morning, you might qualify for a tip. If your job allows you to frown occasionally, you don't.
Radio and video you can elicit emotion. Video, more-so. Ever listen to Tucker Carlson? His voice is almost hypnotic and he feels like a friend, one I'd love to punch, esp. for making me think that.
Limbaugh? His voice probably makes some people trust him, or build a rapport with him.
It's all about psychology, just an observation I've had recently. I find if you try to listen to news without 'clinging to personalities' and 'personal biases' (not an easy task), you can get more 'facts', than 'opinion'. Sticking to print media from trusted publications is another way, but then - 'trusted by who' leftists, rightists, centrists?
I'd love to see a media network that's all round table discussions - but you've got like TYT vs FOX vs CNN vs MSNBC hosts on each round-table. At least you get ALL view points, opposed to one.
From the president down to the people, there's a fundamental problem in the US society in how people view this as a 'non-issue'
This seems to me to be trying to make coronavirus into an emotional threat, which I'm sure is arguably a good idea. But this comparison is, fundamentally, nonsensical. 9-11 is not a good measure of deaths. The damage 9-11 did was never the number of deaths, it was the symbolism and the hysterical response that caused the real losses of life, liberty and prosperity.
And actually I learned recently that in 1988 George HW Bush gave this passionate speech about how the USA needed to fight climate change head on... but by the time republicans got the presidency again the party sided with oil companies on a pro fossil fuel message.
Why do we politicize science like this? Or is it inherently political? Is it just that lobbyists influence political parties differently and so issues that have nothing to do with Democrat or Republican end up getting attached to those identities?
I don’t really know what the answer is. But I do think if the USA had all taken the science seriously and did not politicize the issue we’d have at least 100,000 more Americans alive today.
-- Diffuse vs. concentrated in who is affected
-- Slow and steady vs. acute and sudden
-- Apparently familiar / understood vs. unknown / frightening
Maybe this is just our vulnerability as a species, and takes inordinate amount of effort to fight against.
Confronting climate change falls into the same category of course.
My American model of capability and competence turned out to be horseshit. I had a view of Americans as brash, somewhat obnoxious but generally genial, certainly industrious. The incredulous, self-centered and fundamentally deluded zeitgeist that seems to define current American society was a surprise to me. I think many people were sensing the decline of American society, certainly Americans, and MAGA perversely tapped into that.
America's decline is already affecting Australians with China signalling its disapproval of Australia's current 'republican' rhetoric with the current trade war. I suspect this year was a turning point for geopolitics and it won't favor western style democracies, not as what used to be the ultimate model of those turned out to be the way it has.
However, in defense of US citizens, the truth was always IMO this one: «You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else -- Winston Churchill»
There are other flavours that do better.
US COVID deaths per capita ~~ytd~~ yesterday: 0.0009%
SK COVID deaths per capita: 0.001%
NZ COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005%
SG COVID deaths per capita: 0.0005%
TW COVID deaths per capita: 0.00002%
China: 0.0003%
Ok, you may argue that the numbers may be fake, but is there any reason to believe that the ones for the countries you cited are any better? Anyways, even if the numbers are off, there is no denying that China is doing much better than others.
Side note: I think by SK you mean Sri Lanka (LK), not Solvenia. Slovenia has a global death rate of 0.02%. Relatively good for Europe, but not particularly remarkable.
Vietnam: 35/95540000 = 0.00003%
Thailand: 60/69799978 = 0.00009%
That's not the frail cohort you're making them out to be.
And that was only true of the first wave. The second wave is seeing death in younger people.
I haven't seen any evidence that the infection fatality rate for younger demographics is higher for the second wave. Do you have any raw statistics to back that up?
You can do a better job comparing apples and oranges as they do correlate on the basis of nutrition value.
Modern media is just... pathetic.
Individualism breaks down when you have to do something more for everyone else than yourself.
When the pandemic first got started in China and my Chinese friends started buying particle filter masks en masse, it did not feel like they were doing it for the benefit of others. Same with individual municipalities setting up road blocks or requiring quarantine for travelers from other parts of the country. They were just selfishly trying to keep the virus away.
In contrast to that, once the pandemic reached Germany, I assumed the government would handle it somehow. Turns out a large part of the government response is just telling people to behave as if they were trying really hard not to get infected.
Lol, what a crock of shit. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generou...
The issue is not individualism, it’s that a significant portion of the country literally thinks COVID is overblown and that we are shutting down for “a bad flu”. I’m extremely individualist but I take covid seriously and don’t spread it to others.
Individualist != selfish.
While it's true USA'ians are probably more individualistic than many other cultures and that may translate some way even to selfishness, the above quote is a gross, incorrect and offensive description, and I'm a brit.
Please don't broadbrush entire cultures.
Such is how U.S.A. political issues tend to be decided.
Pelosi was encouraging people to go out and visit Chinatown in February, while Trump was talking about shutting down travel from China in January.
Which one of those approaches sounds like containment to you?
I'm not saying the US doesn't have the worst numbers, but just that there's still a lot of mismanagement and denial in the rest of the world too.
What's the correct tradeoff between an individual's right to life/liberty vs. well-being of the whole/society?
People fall on different sides of that tradeoff all the time, and that question is at the core of almost all political disagreements.
I am fairly certain there wouldn't be any of this hand-wringing about "tradeoffs" between rights and liberty.
Deficits only matter when the other party is in charge, elections are only fraudulent when we lose, and science is a hoax when conclusions don't support what we wanted to do anyway.
My main fear is this: Reality may have a "well-known bias" but it also has the benefit of being true and backed by the physical laws of the universe. Eventually reality catches up. We are damn lucky that COVID wasn't much worse.
We're also very lucky Trump is not a great policy maker and surrounds himself with sycophants and loyalists rather than ruthless movers and shakers. But he laid down the template and I have no doubt would-be dictators and evil people in both parties are salivating at the prospect of replicating his methods but with much more competence. That is extremely dangerous and something we should all be very afraid of. And I really mean the threat is coming from both directions. Republicans have certainly proven they have no principles, but imagine a populist Democrat cut from the Trump cloth with a dash of competent leadership who decides term-limits are for suckers?
I remember in the 90s when Republicans were all about winning people over with their ideas and actually championed making it easier to vote because if you have good ideas and policies why would you be afraid? You should be able to win hearts and minds. Who knew we'd end up here? One of the many reasons I left the party.
I think the real question is, why is US politics becoming even more extreme than it already was?
I'd also argue that folks have been killing others for centuries, including in terrorist-like attacks, so you could argue that 9/11 was just a natural part of being human.
These things can be compared, even without using numbers.
But more importantly, we are often reminded of the death toll of 9/11, so it is apt to be compare the two. This isn't the "pathetic media". IT is people not wanting to die because others refuse to do basic things to help others.
Just mentioning datasources and asking people to look can attract a lot of downvotes. People just suppose the data might point into a direction they don't accept - nobody looks at the data.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/--did-the...
Murders do happen, it's a thing, but that doesn't make them normal.
Your smallpox example it's as sensationalist as the stupid article. Everything around us can be turned into a weapon. One can murder another with a rock. Are rocks deadly now? Do we need to ban fire, because it can be used in incendiary bombs to level down cities?
Compare this pandemic to other pandemics. What about this is so hard to comprehend? Don't compare it to states of war, because that is stupid. I know it's clickbaity and such an irresistible lure for easily influenced people that bite on anything without giving it an ounce of though, but it's so trivial to catch it.
Again - Compare this pandemic to other pandemics.
Then if you want to classify deliberate murder as something natural, i can come and simply murder you and it will be perfectly OK. And as viruses have killed more people than the sum of all wars and homicides, it will be literally of no relevance to anyone.
I don't know how long you've been living on this planet, but not knowing the difference between being murdered by someone who shot you and dying from a disease speaks of immaturity i can't do nothing about.
No it’s not the murder of Al Qaeda but I feel that it’s negligence (of leadership) that leads to death.
Compare the negligence that allowed terror to flourish and eventually lead to the global War or terror to happen to the same negligence that allowed WW2 to happen.
Compare the response to COVID to the response to other similar pandemics.
A lot of the things the Chinese government did was only possible because they're not a democracy which has to answer to the courts
That, probably, is restaurant specific. Some places pool the tips and the kitchen staff is also part of the pot in other places the server gets to keep the tips.
The American model of tipping (like 20% essentially mandatory) really annoys me. I say that as a person who usually tips quite generously, but it's really not my business as a paying patron to be responsible for the staff salaries.
Raise the damn prices already and let a tip really be a tip.
And I'm not even including the perverse incentives of constant bajulation of the customer, the fake happiness and cheery attitude ground me quite a bit after the third or fourth restaurant...
I don't need that, I need a menu, someone who can see when I want to order, bring my food and drinks and let me be and enjoy my meal. The constant pestering by waiters if I wanted something else, if I was ready for this or that, it just made me feel like part of some machine to extract as much revenue as possible in the least time.
I ate in quite a few places in the US, from street food vendors to high-end restaurants and I have to say I barely enjoyed most of the experiences, it's just too much.
It's not like private nursing homes, increasingly casualized work, and an insane weath gap aren't a thing in Australia either. Everybody slobbering Dan's knob conveniently forgets that the second outbreak could have been avoided if the government hadn't subcontracted out all the hotel security.
Australia's neoliberal death march has yet to reach the brutal conclusion that America arrived at, but it's trodding along. And smug complacency certainly won't reverse that course.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt#Biological_... [2]https://archive.org/stream/fortpittlettersf00darl#page/n103/...
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
In any case, I wouldn't doubt that the victims had their lives cut short by several years. The same could be said about other illnesses where most fatal cases are among the elderly, e.g. if the typical elderly victim of cancer hadn't contracted it, they would likely have lived for several more years.
And it's curious that you focus on Chinatown in February instead of 300 days of minimising mask wearing and calling for LIBERATING states from coronavirus restrictions.
And if you think that one set of containment measures is better than another (masks vs shutting down travel vs closing down public places), then that's a separate discussion to OP's comment who clearly stated that one political party tried to contain it while the other one did not, which is complete tribal nonsense.
PS - you should apologize for the racism comment.
Shutting down flights from China was for show. The virus was already spreading inside the US, and infected people continued to fly in from Europe. Trump's brand is being tough on borders, so he shut down travel from China, declared victory, and then did nothing.
Months later, after nearly 300k confirmed deaths, Trump still boasts about closing down travel from China - one minimally impactful measure he took early on.
Here's what real containment would have been in late January and early February: ramping up testing and contact tracing as quickly as possible, maybe even locking down cities and grounding flights. That might have been politically impossible back then, but Trump wasn't pushing in that direction at all. He was worried about reassuring the markets.
If you are talking about deaths, it is natural to compare it to other high-death abnormalities. War and pandemics are the easiest to compare absolute death numbers, and helpful for pointing out people's inconsistencies - like caring for 3k deaths in a day when it is an act of violence, but not caring if it is disease. Change things for the folks for 9/11, but not for continuing deaths - some of which are preventable. I'll go right ahead and compare.
Smallpox links: [1]https://archive.org/stream/fortpittlettersf00darl#page/n103/... [2]https://archive.org/stream/fortpittlettersf00darl#page/n103/...
9/11 was direct act of violence against the US, of course people will take that more personally than something that not only is a whole separate kingdom from the one we're in, but it doesn't even qualify as a living thing. Had it been proved to be used as a weapon and the pandemic - a deliberate attack, people everywhere would take it so personally and dearly that nuclear weapons would be casually flying every day since March.
Therefore, 9/11 and the weaponized germs stuff you linked just doesn't make sense in our context. Go make another thread dedicated to weaponization of stuff, you can even include k-t extinction event as well for color, sky is the limit.
Liberty winning may seem counterintuitive but not everyone sees it that way. Most wars have been fought by people that value their form of liberty over death.
Most wars have been fought by conscripts, slaves or soldiers who otherwise only wanted to come back home alive, pawns in chess games played with human lives by the elite powers. Even the American Revolution was for the most part a tax revolt by the wealthy against the British Crown.
And none of those wars have been against the tyranny of medicine and science. Benjamin Franklin, the man responsible for the famous (and almost universally misapplied) quote about those who trade a little freedom for security deserving neither, lost his son to one of the many smallpox outbreaks in the early US. In his autobiography, he mentions bitterly regretting not having given his son the smallpox vaccine[0]. He did not once declare that affording his son the "liberty" of dying from smallpox was worth the sacrifice versus the "temporary safety" of vaccination - and this was during a time when vaccination was new, still controversial, and much less safe than now. Rather, he became a passionate advocate for vaccination and public health.
So believe what you like, but the Founding Fathers very likely would not have been on the side of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers or their form of liberty.
I don't think you've spent much time with US military types if you believe this to be the case. Willingness to die for a country or cause was even more prevalent in the past than it is now.
I agree the Founding Fathers would very likely not have been on the side of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, they were generally intellectual and on the side of science. However I'm not so sure about the lockdowns, they would almost certainly oppose giving the federal gov. the power to issue a lockdown but may have been okay with local lockdowns.
No. Not a thing. Certainly not the election of an African American President, the Republicans normalizing conspiracy theories like birtherism in a cynical race-baiting attempt to regain power through neo-revolutionary proxy movements like the Tea Party, or the election of an extremely divisive President who pushed the Overton window of American political and social discourse so far to the right that beliefs which would have been too insane for talk radio are now standard discourse.
Definitely do not look too deeply at American culture itself and study the deeply rooted, endemic issues which have been festering for decades and only allowed to burst forth in a pusculent river of hate and paranoia when the lunatics started running the asylum. It has to be social media and cannot be anything but social media. Everything is Google's fault.
A lot of what you have raised are topics/movements/messages pushed/strengthened via social media, easier publishing, etc. I didn't raise social media to blame Google; I was thinking of what these tools enable alongside the cooking blogs and DIY videos.
As far as social media goes, I see it as a catalyst - it doesn't create the problems but it does help their effect spread. Deplatforming and regulation of social media might help stop the spread (although I support the former and not the latter) but we still as a society have to address the underlying issues. Something like QAnon doesn't take off simply because it's a viral meme, but because it resonates with people's existing fears and beliefs.
Not 2020, surprisingly. 1918. Idiots have been getting upset about mask mandates for a while.
They would probably be split on that, but also would probably agree that lockdowns in some form were not unreasonable, so long as they were temporary and based on sound science.