Mister Roboto
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To repeat, my thinking on Covid lockdowns is that they do their own brand of harm to the economy and to individual people, and they’re not effective at stopping Covid on account of the virus being so very airborne-contagious with such a long asymptomatic incubation period. In this world where people move around as much as they do, how do you stop Covid from reasserting itself once the lockdown ends? And considering the detrimental effects of lockdowns, they do have to end at some defined point. Lockdowns should only be used in cities/ counties where the hospital system is in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by real cases.
I think Tim Conway’s “old man” character from “The Carol Burnett Show” would have been a hilarious Joe Biden, but unfortunately, Mr. Conway died right around the time Joe Biden formally entered the presidential race.
I have noticed that Covid isn’t really quite as bad as so many feared back in March and April. For one thing, none of my co-workers at the grocery store or anybody in my smallish apartment building that I know of has become sick with it, and back in March, I really thought somebody would by now. One Facebook friend who was a school-acquaintance back in the eighties became ill with it while visiting DC, but she recovered as one might from a severe bought of the flu. As I said in another comment recently, its main manifestation in Milwaukee has been putting overweight, older (and presumably poor) black men in the hospital.
So here’s what I see right now: Covid seriously targets the elderly, poor people with co-morbidities, and people who live in cities with very polluted air. There is also a significant handful of younger and otherwise healthy people whose immunological allotment from the genetic lottery fails to protect them from getting severely walloped by Covid. Reading the accounts of their affliction with the virus on Twitter is…beyond harrowing. And also personally worrying to me as a 53YO type 2 diabetic. (I’m on oral meds which get a little boost in keeping my blood-sugar under control from a small amount of basal [once-a-day administered] insulin.) But I recognize at this point that it’s not the Spanish Flu.
However, because it targets poor people with health problems the way it does, it hits big industrialized countries with extreme wealth inequality (the United States, Brazil, India) especially hard. I think it really is an indictment of how America treats its people of least account that we have less than five percent of the worlds population but lead the world in actual cases per capita. And the ueber-capitalist way our society is set up really set us up for Covid catching us with our proverbial pants down around our ankles. As a knee-jerk bleeding-heart libtard cuck, this just makes me livid to even think about it too much. And as a former matter-of-faith Democratic voter, it makes me even more determined than ever to be “done with Dems” knowing full well they will never, ever to anything substantive to alleviate this utterly disgraceful situation.
So all we can do for now is wear face-masks in crowded indoor settings and public transportation in order to afford some measure of protection to the most vulnerable among us. Those who find this to be some measure of encroaching totalitarianism really need to get a grip and grow the fuck up.
I think the big central banks of the world are covertly on Trump’s side. For pity’s sake, starting the very afternoon after US Election Day 2016, they flooded the world’s financial markets with an overwhelming tsunami of printed money. Just look at a graph of any of the three major US stock-market indexes, and you will see it start to go steroidally up, up, up starting in exactly mid-November 2016. Why this would be so, I’m not sure. Perhaps these bankers understandably wish to see the horny-for-a-nuclear-war-with-Russia US Deep State reigned in. I’m pretty sure few of any of us would be here to talk about this topic if Hillary Clinton had won that election.
Well, since mail-in voting was brought up in today’s series of articles, I’ll describe my experience with mail-in voting during Wisconsin’s primary. To put it simply, I didn’t like it at all. For one thing, I needed a witness to filling out my ballot, and it would have to be someone not so nosy as to insist on knowing who I was voting for. My next-door neighbor in my apartment building is a nice person (despite bringing bed-bugs into this building, which isn’t entirely her fault, as Milwaukee has a hellacious bed-bug problem and this aging structure was probably going to get those critters sooner or later) and was glad to be my non-nosy witness. But being the self-sufficient loner I’ve always been, it was just awkward asking someone I didn’t really know for help with something as simple as voting.
What I really disliked was how very, very tiny you have to write on the front of the envelope for the ballot before you send it in. I had to practice pen-printing letters that very, very tiny on another piece of paper, or else I wouldn’t have been able to do so successfully.
But what really turned me off on mail-in voting was what happened with the mail-in votes here in Wisconsin. I know my vote was counted because our state’s “MyVote” website records me as having voted in the spring primary. (I made sure I got my mail-in voting done as early as I could manage.) But after the primary, whole big sacks of uncounted ballots were discovered after the primary at one or more Wisconsin post offices. And I don’t think it was any sort of political skullduggery. It was almost certainly just a case of the USPS being insufficiently competent to handle this new phenomenon of so very many people voting by mail on account of the pandemic. This would certainly qualify as a example of what people mean when they disparagingly say, “as efficient as the Post Office”.
So this general election, when I write-in vote for the Green Party candidates that state Democratic Party used political skullduggery to keep off the ballot, I will probably use the early voting method at City Hall that I have used since the 2004 election, back when I was still voting for Democrats as a matter of faith. I think that should be okay now that mask-wearing is widely accepted and mandated. The City Clerk’s office will probably also have sanitizer on hand for use before and after you fill out your ballot. I’m less keen on voting at polling stations on Election Day on account of so many poll-workers being senior citizens, many of them over 80.
Kendrick makes a good point, though it bears pointing out that the number of cases continues to rise in the US. I think there’s a very obvious explanation for that. The US, especially the hard-hit southeast, has a disproportionate number of poor people with co-morbidities than countries such as France and Sweden. And everything about the way our ueber-plutocratic society is set up makes us a lot less well-equipped to deal with a pandemic than countries such as France and Sweden.
I do think local lockdowns are justified when the hospital-system of a city is in danger of being overwhelmed. Yes, lockdowns have severe consequences of their own, but in that situation, it’s a lot like applying a tourniquet to a severely wounded limb. It certainly is dangerous to cut off circulation, but it’s even more dangerous not to take measures to stanch the bleeding. The sad thing is, we wouldn’t have so very much bleeding if we weren’t such a hopelessly dysfunctional society on so many levels!
I will believe it’s “over” for the US when our death-rate starts seriously dropping. Right now, it doesn’t even seem to be slowing down.
The main reason I’m skeptical of lockdowns these days is on account of how very contagious Covid is. It’s because of this extreme contagiousness that whatever you gain with an economically debilitating lockdown could be lost again very easily when the contagion comes roaring back out of seemingly nowhere. Covid might not be the apocalypse many of us feared it might be back in the middle of March, but it nonetheless poses a serious threat to those over 80, people who live in places with very bad air quality due to pollution (this is why NYC was hit so very hard by severe cases and fatalities back during spring of this year), and poor people with one or more co-morbidities. (In Milwaukee where I live, the people who were ending up in the hospital with severe Covid in March and April were very disproportionately older, overweight black men.) In fact, I think that a lifetime of dire, abject poverty should be thought of as a sociological co-morbidity if not a medical one.
Don’t know if it’s shoddy reporting or shoddy regulations, but “mask orders” or “mask mandates” are not terms anyone should use. After 9 months, it’s all turned into oppression.
That is just a stupid generalization. Mask-wearing is more about protecting other people (especially senior citizens and poor people with potential co-morbidities) than about protecting yourself, so it really only works when nearly everybody is wearing them. But we don’t think about other people in ‘murka because muh freedumb.
Okay, this is very tangential, but what I find weird about all the Russia hysteria is that to listen to it, you would think that the current Russian state is worse than the one that existed forty years ago at this time, when clearly and obviously the reverse is true. Though I suppose you could argue that the same Russian Deep State that was behind the previous one simply discarded an ideology that wasn’t working anymore (if it ever really did) in favor of something more modern and functional. I would certainly be hard-pressed to call the Russian Federation a real republic, but then again, the same thing could be said about the USA.
I really have to say, I had a lot more more respect for Paul Craig Roberts before his descent into bargain-basement neo-Confederate white nationalism.
Wearing standard face-masks is more about protecting other people than it is about protecting yourself, which is why they only work when everyone is wearing them. That won’t happen now that it’s become yet another thing in this country that’s about damn politics, so I’m glad that at the very least major stores are requiring that people wear them while on the premises. I’m considering ordering a mask I saw online that has inscribed on it: “Wearing a mask isn’t a political statement. It’s an IQ test.”
I would also add that a country that is the way the USA is, is of course going to be very poorly positioned to do a lockdown. For one thing, our culture is full of people who won’t accept or tolerate it and will do everything they can to try and defy it. More importantly, we expect our working class people to “sink or swim” without as little government help as possible, so the economic effects of any lockdown are going to be just as devastating as any virus for so many people here. Though for an airborne virus as super-contagious as Covid, I wonder if lockdowns really are a solution. After all, after the lockdown is ended, which it really has to be at some point, the contagion could just come roaring right back so easily.
I certainly don’t object to the idea of mask-mandates for the pandemic, but I think such decisions should be left to the state governments.
I think even Democrats who are drinking very deeply of the Kool-Aid know that the less that is expected of Joe Biden these days, the better.
It seems odd that popularity-polling in the mid-thirties is solid support. I’m sure it is by today’s standards, but that today’s standards are so different only makes the case that Zogby brought up that we’re a very badly divided and polarized society now.
It’s worth noting that if you decide to donate to BLM through their website, you will get taken to the website of ActBlue, which collects donations for Democratic Party candidates. That doesn’t necessarily mean the BLM takes all its “marching orders” from the DNC, but it certainly implies that they are part of the same nexus of political activism. At first, I didn’t want to believe that the protests were some kind of Democrat-orchestrated “color revolution”, but there are too many signs that it is (the biggest one being the pallets of bricks that would mysteriously show up in areas of cities where protests were happening).
@lasttwo: Yeah, pretty much. At least you’ll have more fun playing your guitar and singing songs. 🙂
I expect the next three months to be…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krD4hdGvGHM
Well, I, for one, stopped reading when I realized this was a screed from another anti-mask crank. “Dr. D”, whoever the hell he is, might be interested to know that many employees of stores with mask-wearing policies have been assaulted by cranks like him for doing their jobs and trying to enforce these policies.
Welp, in my home state of Wisconsin, there was at least one instance this weekend where the gratuitous violence came from the police, and this, in turn, precipitated unrest and property-damage that has the City of Kenosha on edge today.
Well, now that wearing face-masks is so widely mandated and accepted, unlike during the very uncertain and anxious primary-season of this year, I think it should be okay to show up to City Hall to early vote the way I normally do. And I’m pretty sure the city clerk’s office will have hand-sanitizer ready in abundance for people who are coming in to fill out their ballots for the election.
One thing that the Washington Examiner piece glosses over is that people, including combat veterans, not getting the medications upon which they seriously rely in a timely fashion is becoming a dire systemic problem in this country. If the Trump Administration would willing to help these people get their medications on time, I might be more willing to listen to the other points the author makes in the WE article.
I live in a swing state (Wisconsin), and my conscience tells me to vote no more for the institutional duopoly, and that holding on to false hope by voting for likes of Biden and Harris is but a form of enabling. The Democratic Party faithful really only care about preserving the position and perks of the big-city, blue-state neo-liberal elites, who are singularly indifferent to the sufferings of Flyover Country folk under aegis of economic globalism.
If I’m going to be completely honest, Biden could have my vote if he would pledge to sponsor legislation that would put a cap on how much Big Pharma can charge for insulin. But I know damn well that his campaign and the DNC are so beholden to moneyed interests such as Big Pharma that this would never happen, despite the fact that such a little demand would be considered perfectly reasonable and moderate in a western European country.
But what it really boils down to is that our politics are hopelessly sick and broken because the societal context in which they exist is hopelessly sick and broken and offers nothing worth trusting or believing in. That’s why despite how much I hate what Trump is doing to the US Post Office right now, just to give one example, I can simply accept that “it’s all over except for the shouting” and realize that whatever is going to happen will simply happen. That said, if voting for Biden makes it a little bit easier to sleep the night of election day, then go right ahead and do that with my blessing, for whatever little that’s worth. 😉
My understanding is that hydroxychloroquine was considered a fairly safe medicine before it became associated with the Bad Orange Man.
What I’m hoping for WRT Covid-19 is that we’ll soon reach a point where the pandemic has picked most of the “low-hanging fruit” in terms of death and serious illness.
@teri: I agree that it’s dismaying that some people feel the need to defend the likes of Donald Trump just because Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and the DNC are very lousy excuses for public servants. The USA is a declining hegemonic power, and everything about it now reflects this fact.
Forgive me for regurgitating the patently obvious, but I think Biden’s lead over Trump may be shrinking because he is coming across like the first major-party “figurehead candidate” in US history. He’s probably never going to debate Trump (the former veep would probably have to be pumped up with way too many chemical stimulants for such debates for that to be a good idea), and he’s not even going to attend the convention events in Milwaukee in person (though one could argue about how much that matters, as so much of the Democratic Convention this year will be virtual/ online). You really have to wonder how much confidence such a candidate can possibly inspire in the voters. Though we can be sure the DNC does no such wondering!
Covid denialism and conspiracy-theories kill people. The latest casualty is Herman Cain.
Some useful pandemic perspective can be read in this article from New York Magazine: Death cult: Why has the Republican response to the pandemic been so mind-bogglingly disastrous?
The Democrats like to take their constituents out to a nice little movie first (preferably a romantic comedy with no bad words in it) and at the end of the date, they rape you. The Republicans don’t want to spring for a movie and popcorn – they just hit you over the head and rape you with no foreplay.
Well said, teri, well said. 🙂
One thing that guy in the “reality will win” article about Covid-19 neglected to mention is that a lot of people who had severe cases of Covid-19 are still suffering with various serious afflictions even months after they have supposedly recovered. I know the crackpot-right will cling to the “It’s Just A Flu, Bro” narrative until the bitter end, but if you watch Chris Martenson’s video series on Covid-19 on his “Peak Prosperity” website, it’s painfully obvious that it’s not “Just A Flu.”
The idea of Joe Biden being some kind of far-left Trojan Horse has to be one of the most laughable things I’ve read in a while, but also entirely predictable considering this claim was penned by somebody whose job it is to shill for Trump. The most Biden will likely do with the recommendations of the “unity platform” is pay very vague lip-service to the ideas and proposals expressed within it. I really hope this blog hasn’t joined the march to the crackpot-right that has become something of a fashion in the “doomosphere” in the last few years.
Your description of Thatcher’s legacy made me think of Alec Baldwin’s profanity-laden “1, 2, 3” speech from the movie *Glengarry* *Glenn* *Ross*.
