Post-Pandemic Response to Failed and Fascist Leaders

wrath
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I still cannot give this new topic my full attention, so please bear with me while I try to make my point more clear.

I already said I’m sorry to have brought it up as an answer to @tigerberry. What happens in Hungary is frightening on another level. I look at Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines, Venezuela and some others with similar horror, but I can’t focus on this. See above.

I try to clarify this:

Expanding each statement here might help clarify my intention.

  1. My concern is the pandemic, and the effects in my immediate surroundings. If anyone is interested, l can expand on this, but I think many of you can relate to this focus. I didn’t want to downplay the importance of other, especially political news, but I cannot follow all of this. I’m in fact glad @tigerberry posted about the situation in Hungary, because I would probably have missed this.

  2. I do expect more authoritarian leaders using the crisis as an opportunity to push through their agendas and to enhance their powers. Which brings me to my major point which, I think, was terribly put.

  3. I am convinced that blaming someone for the pandemic is going to be a key issue in the upcoming political fights.

I expect this not only from current authoritarian leaders, but also from other politicians (and political as well as religious and other societal groups) which up until now did not gain power, or who were in checks in your (or mine) current society and cultures.

  1. I also believe you and me to be susceptible to blaming someone. (I might expand on my personal experience later, which has nothing to do with politics, if someone is interested). That could even mean that I or you support a move to power by someone we wouldn’t in any other time. Or enable someone we would have liked to see in power in other times, but not accounting for if the pandemic changed their belief or policies to the worse.
    It could also mean that you or I will try to get rid of someone who we blame for the pandemic and facilitate the rise of someone to power who we think might have the right answers to address the pandemic. (To be clear: I am sure that @tigerberry doesn’t even support Orbàn in their worst nightmares.)

My next lines were meant to challenge everyone to be self-contious about what I just described as my belief of everyone being susceptible to blame others for the pandemic.

I tried to make clear in subsequent posts that it is important to keep record of who decided what and when. But I will try again to clarify my point: the pandemic itself, the virus spreading around the world, and the direct effects - including deaths of many many people - are not something we can control. We can only mitigate. An event like this has been predicted for decades, and despite nice little fictional films and novels and short stories and whatnot which claimed otherwise, I strongly argue it is not controllable or containable.
We thus can’t blame someone for it.
And I hold this to be especially self-evident on the level of any nation state or comparable entities. There is no such thing as a completely closed society.

It is not anyone’s fault that this virus exists, that it adapted to human hosts, that it spreads. When someone - including myself! - blames the pandemic on someone else, we are in the business of scapegoating.
And everyone looses then. I am convinced of that.

We can discuss details, e.g. if someone who is clearly incompetent and does not even take responsibility for their own policies needs to be removed from office. But they aren’t to blame for the pandemic. And I will fight for this to be recognised. Even against my own political beliefs. I will not give anyone a pass who is using this pandemic for their own political gain.
Including myself.

I hope I made myself clearer?
Or did I confuse the matter even more?
Sigh

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I also would like to see the perception from people in those countries.
I can give my impressions regarding Brazil, but I’m not following it very closely, because most news are awful and don’t offer anything new.

My impression is that it is the opposite in Brazil.
Despite being one of the new authoritarians that rose to power recently, Bolsonaro is completely incompetent (from his past actions) and his response to the pandemic might end his mandate, and hopefully his political career and new founded party.

He is still in the denial phase, claiming that COVID is not serious enough to deserve attention, but he’s also starting to enact new emergency laws (that still depend on congress approval) that are completely misguided, like allowing workers and employers to agree to suspend the work contracts for 4 months without any compensation (he proposed it last night and already back down).
Additionally, he is trying to nullify the initiatives from state governors to declare local emergency state and restrict non-essential business from keep operating and incentive self-isolation with the argument that it will hurt the economy, which he could no make grow enough in his first year, and consequentially his image.

It feels like if he is not removed soon, his inaction will allow local authorities to increase their powers to deal with the pandemic, but I’m not sure if will persist after the virus is gone.
And, I don’t think he would have enough support for a coup, the military would probably support his impeachment in favor of his vice, a general from the army.

I had the impression from your original messages (and now I’m more sure) that your focusing on a semantic point.
I (and I think the others) agree with you that no one can be blamed for the pandemic itself, as you said it was a natural phenomenon that happened by chance, but when we say that someone will/has to be blamed, we are talking about the actions that led to the current propagation of the disease in the relevant country/region, but it is easier to just shortcut it when talking.

I also share the idea that it will be used for political disputes, and, in my opinion, rightly so, because it shows how unfit some people are to hold positions of power by putting people’s lives in danger for preserving their own images, or that their ideologies are not enough to deal with people’s needs.

But, I’m not sure if I’m looking exactly at what you are saying, because I see it as more local than a global blaming.
From Brazil’s perspective, blaming China for the mishandling of the virus when it appeared is the same as blaming nature, as we don’t have any control over it, and any attempt to punish them would only backfire at us.
(In our case, it is also strange to blame China since, for us, the virus came from Italy and after it was clear how it was spreading and how to mitigate it.
It is a clear point here that it was the rich people who were traveling abroad and didn’t take enough precautions that brought it here and contaminated other people.)

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Yes, this a a bit clearer to me, so thanks for taking the time to expand on your thoughts.

For me, we have to understand the concept of there not being such a thing as a natural disaster. By that, I don’t mean that natural disaster don’t happen, but that governments do make choices and policy decisions, and in the case of major disasters or pandemics, or the like, it often happens at a rapid pace with little or no public input. This is often necessary to ensure that things run smoothly to be able to save lives. But when politicians make choices that make the pandemic worse, then blame NEEDS to be apportioned out. Human decision making can worsen something like a pandemic. That’s what we mean by “there is no such thing as a natural disaster.”

Let’s compare South Korea to the US. The government there made choices that saved lives. They did exactly what needed to be done, they listened to medical experts and took care of their citizens. The government there took actions which made this pandemic far less damaging to the human beings that live there. That is a human-centric response that acknowledges the need to have wide-scale responses to major problems that are global in reach.

The US government, by way of contrast, is still offering up false and DANGEROUS information and dragging it’s feet on a response, precisely because the president is afraid of looking bad. The president is employing eugenicist language to justify doing nothing in order to save the markets! Let’s not sugar-coat that. He will very much see thousands, maybe millions die, if he can ensure that he can have his people dole out cash to his buddies. Much like Orban using this to consolidate power, that is very much something we can blame on the current administration. The only thing that will mitigate this will be if local and state officials step into the breach and take responsibility. Some will (Gov. Cuomo or Gov. Newsom, Mayor Lance-Bottoms here in the ATL, etc). Others will not or at the very least drag their feet.

If the people who actively made this pandemic worse (the American president) by preventing the saving of lives, then, yes, I think we can very much blame their asses and vote them out of office and shun them from public life for good. I’m 100% okay with that. We all should be.

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This+. The virus itself is not of human origin. The response to it is. In contrast to what @LutherBlisset posted, swift and decisive leadership, especially in countries that were in the 2nd/3rd wave of exposure like the US and UK, would have made the difference of perhaps millions of lives. The leaders who made bad decisions, especially in self-interest, are directly responsible for that loss of life. My proposal would be that such leaders, once we’ve gotten through to the other side of this thing, face the pandemic equivalent of a war crimes tribunal.

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Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Will try to react later.

Very shortly one developing thing: South Korea had a massive super-spreading event, and contained that. They will now have multiple entries of infection clusters which they likely cannot contain in the same way, I.e. following infection chains. It will be very interesting to see how they continue. Caveat: their culture will play a huge role.

Reason for posting this: I assume some people (not you) might get the idea that adopting SK’s strategy will work elsewhere, and point the finger at politicians who don’t. My warniy: careful with that, might bite us in the arse.

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I just don’t buy that. The government made a choice and saved lives. We can do the same or not.

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Quick reply: if it’s normal to wear masks in public (like basically all over Asia), people will do if the government tells them to.

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Again, I don’t think we need to be so reductionist here, especially on issues of ethnicity and race. Culture plays a role, but it’s not so over determinative that we can’t look at what other governments do and adapt their practices, especially when it saves lives.

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Generally true, but ignoring the natural (mathematical and biological) characteristics of an epidemic in combination with cultural norms is paramount.

FTR, example: German health minister mentioned using mobile phone data for tracking. Culturally not feasible, since Germans will not accept this politically. Also not technically sensible, based on the characteristics of the virus (infectious before symptoms occur), multiple possible sources of infection clusters, and the logistics growth characteristics with an R0 of ~3 to 2. You would have to trace and isolate too many people.

The suggestion was shot down immediately.

South Korea did this. And successfully, since they had testing very early on and were able to ID the first wave of spreaders. (For what happens now there, this will likely not work, since we are in a later stage.) They will probably have more success doing this a while longer since people are wearing masks and thus protecting others from being infected.

In Germany, mask-wise, you can count people wearing masks and bandanas on the fingers of your hands. If you meet someone, they very likely have a different cultural background. Besides, it’s not sensible, since we need those masks for health workers and since we don’t have the culture of wearing a mask during rhinitis season, noone except a few like me has some at home.

Of course we can learn. But we have to see contexts, and culture is a big one.

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Culture is not biologically driven, nor is it some kind of destiny. Asians are not more prone to listening to authority than Europeans are. let’s not forget that South Korea was an authoritarian state until relatively recently, so that likely had more do with the state’s ability to enforce these measures than did some nebulous “culture”.

We are making choices here, and sometimes, you have to make hard choices that are not in line with your culture and proactively.

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Never would dream of saying this!

I didn’t mention “authority” at all. Mask-wearing in public is a cultural habit in many parts of Asia. People wear masks all the time, it is normalised.

In Europe, it is not.

Also, as mentioned, Germany has a culture valuing the freedom of movement and privacy dating back almost 200 years, and strengthened very much by the experience of two authoritarian regimes, one nationalsozialistisch, one realsozialistisch.

This is why you don’t see a formally declared curfew in Germany, but a “Kontaktverbot”. This is why a suggestion to use personalised mobile phone movement data is dead in the water. This is also why politicians have been easing in the current measures bit by bit. (NB as a sidenote: I didn’t agree with this and would have welcomed a curfew as of March 12th when I saw the figures and a comparison of Hubei and Wuhan numbers with other regions in China. But I have to concede that it might have been a politically sensible way of doing this. I’m still convinced it’s ethically wrong, but here we are in realpolitik.)

Yes, we are making choices, and some are hard. And yes, US government seems very much inept to do the right thing. But arguing post fact, and even talking of murder and war crime equivalent, dear @DukeTrout, is very dangerous territory.

Choices must be made, and it must be the best possible choice. Our call is to make it happen, sometimes with political pressure. But I caution everyone against oversimplified assumptions and already putting blame on someone for the pandemic.

As for the measures taken and if they they are successful, I caution not to fall for anyone telling you that “we should have done exactly this”. There is no “exactly this”. There is no patent recipe which can be applied everywhere. We have to account for cultural diversity, amongst other things.

But of course there are big no-noes. And frankly, the US president and some congresspeople are working hard to cover those bases, FFS. As, e.g., does Bolsonaro. I can’t even believe what I am reading there.

As soon as someone identifies a lawful lever, please pull it and get rid of 45.

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Have you been to an anime convention? I promise that plenty of non-Asian people wear masks there. So, it’s recent, specific cultural thing that has little to do with them being “asian” I’d argue. Nor is it universal, I’d wager. It seems to be more about living in a place with high levels of unhealthy air and in places that are densely packed. It’s a strategy for better health, not a peculiar cultural trait.

I’d argue that saying it’s cultural, hence harder in the west, is a bit of simplification. As the case of anime conventions shows us, culture is entirely “transmissible” and we should not assume that people won’t do it if governments put out guidance for it.

I’d also argue that the western “trait” of individualism is less about something inherent in Europeans (and European Americans) and more about the culture of capitalism. There is plenty of communal culture in the history of Europe, especially prior to the rise of the global capitalist system. We’ve changed much of that due to capitalism.

Nor did I say that. I said we should look at what has worked in other places that have dealt with this pandemic and what they’ve successfully done, that’s all. The US here is not doing anything other than denying…

Why, if the choices being made clearly make this worse? Should we never hold people in authority to account for making clearly dangerous decisions? It’s not the pandemic that will kill people, it’s an anemic response from right wing governments that will do it in this case.

No one is blaming Trump for the pandemic. We’re blaming trump for making it worse and for causing deaths that could have been saved by his inability to listen to figures with deep knowledge of how these things happen and how we curb them and save lives. This is not the 13th century where we have no idea how to deal with the spread of disease in an effective manner. WE VERY MUCH HAVE THIS KNOWLEDGE, and not taking advantage of that is very much a death sentence for more people. There is no such thing as a natural disaster.

We are trying, believe me.

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Trump once quipped that he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and his supporters would still stand by him. Now he’s well on the way towards having murdered 5% of New York City. Perhaps we should give him tea and dumplings?

There is a trade off inherent to leadership. When one seeks leadership, there are the positives of power and status. Those are balanced by a higher standard of behavior and greater responsibility for bad behavior. These properties aren’t codified in law; they are woven into the social contract.

ETA: And the thing is, he could have been very self-serving and been a hero in this crisis. As soon as it was clear that the US was going to get hit (which was in late January, when the President and Congress were briefed by experts), he could have closed down the NYSE and frozen stock prices at their contemporary level; ordered nonessential businesses to close, essential businesses to operate at minimal staffing, pushed a similar bill to what was passed yesterday, with the government covering the payroll shortfalls of business affected by COVID-19, extended unemployment insurance an additional 90 days, assured medical supply to hospitals and healthcare providers, etc. etc. etc. That all could have been accomplished by early February.

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Right, and it’s not scapegoating to point out policies that are obviously going to lead to a great number of deaths. It’s being accurate in our description of reality. No one is “blaming” trump (or China, or anyone) for the actual disease. We are blaming trump for his policies which are making it into a major global disaster that will lead to thousands, if not MILLIONS of unnecessary deaths. We can lay blame when it’s warranted.

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Next week, I start my second-to-last class before I get my degree. My final “class” is supposed to be an internship capstone this fall. Will there be an economy that will make internships viable at that time? Will the community college where I’m taking these classes still exist? Hell, will there still be a proper system of government in place? If I get the rug pulled out from under me at the 11th hour thanks to greedy, incompetent pricks in the White House and in Congress, I’m not gonna be in a forgiving mood.

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The one I teach at has just gone online, as has the one my daughter takes duel enrollment classes.

I’m unsure how they’ll handle an internship, other than maybe push it off, or do it remotely if possible.

Good luck!

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I am speaking of whole societies, not of geek (sub)culture. Of course societies can learn, but if you impose measures on them, they will react according to local culture and habits.

Sorry, I didn’t want to imply you did.

This is a difficult conversation between other duties, and I am often mixing general points with direct replies. My bad.

I would not say that. The US had, for example, a very bad start in testing, since they centralised this crucial resource in the beginning. They have, as far as I heard from the podcast of Christian Drosten (virologist, FTR: his group developed the WHO-adopted test), they changed that policy. Still playing catch-up now, while the needed reagents are scarce on the market. Difficult situation, to say the least.

The downplaying? The idiots going to meetings after known exposure? That’s a different shitshow. I can’t even.

The contrary, they should been hold accountable by all lawful means.

“Murder” charges are not among those, in my opinion.
And post-fact interpretation of a situation in combination with ex postfacto law is going to be as toxic as the current US admin.

We will not recognise the world of tomorrow.

And I am already full of sorrow that righteous anger will be so strong during this pandemic that many people will call for heads to roll.

Not figuratively. Literally.

And I have read some history books on where that leads.

Since I started to reply, some other posts came in.

Never said this.

Intention was warning against scapegoating used by power-hungry arseholes, and falling for that. Was also trying to point out that even the ones condemning Trump for the pandemic and shouting murder may be guilty of that, and we should not fall for that. Populism can also exist on your side of the political inclination.

Emphasizing again:

keeping record of the bullshit of populist “leaders” is important.*

Do that. But at the same time take note that noone has a completely right, evidence based, feasible plan how to not end up with a global pandemic disaster. This is about mitigation, and it has been from the very first day.

Yes, quite OBVIOUSLY Trump is making things worse.
But it’s not his fault alone, but a systemic result.

ETA:
I started typing yesterday. I stopped, since I don’t see much point in arguing with you on something we may even in some principles agree on, but apparently cannot find common ground on some others.

But I like to emphasise that we must try not to fall for populism in our anger.

I can’t keep up with the other topic, just scrolled a bit.
Saw this, by @anon15383236, which I hold on high regard, BTW.

Soon, we will not recognise the world we live in.
I just hope that humanism prevails. On all sides.

I’m out of spoons.

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