Being an anti-scientific chucklefuck kills people.
The US went through some hardship and, with a great deal of hair-pulling from the elites, and unemployment from victims of the gig economy, the outbreak rate was starting to turn down. It looked like we might be out of the woods, so the anti-science crowd began yammering (from their isolated locations in The Hamptons) “open back up!”
If you look at a US map, you might notice that the drivers of the current part of the outbreak are mostly southern states run by republicans. But I’m not going to take the easy way out and say “it’s republican chucklefucks’ fault” because it’s anti-science chucklefucks’ fault. The US has a deep and long streak of rejection of scientific conclusions that is necessary to its core identity, which is a religious, white supremacist ethnostate. If you accept scientific consensus you’ll accept evolution, which blows a smoking hole through the heart of christianity’s stupid origins story. If you accept scientific consensus you’ll understand population genetics and you’ll accept that a person’s skin color means nothing more than that they have a bunch of melanin in their skin. America is built on pseudo-science: scientific racism, the “gospel of wealth”, GOOP, anti-vax, pop psychology, and christianity. Those depend on misinterpreting a viral outbreak: the US is an experiment gone wrong.
We have chucklefucks arguing about whether or not masks will protect you adequately from coronavirus but the fact of the matter is: they help. Like wearing a seatbelt (we have subcultures in the US that resist that, too) the facts are in: you are 80% less likely to die in an auto accident if you wear your seatbelt. Not 100%. 80%. That’s pretty good. As Las Vegas ought to teach people by its very existence: play the numbers game and tilt the odds in your favor. I don’t care if my mask is only 20% or even 10% effective. The entire city of Las Vegas was built on a 3% advantage, and good old-fashioned American anti-science (in this case, the science of statistics) ignorance.
It’s as if white supremacist America has realized that it has to hold down black, hispanic, and immigrant people because those people are not chucklefucks and, if white supremacist America doesn’t keep its knee on their neck, they’re going to all wind up working for smart, well-educated, non-white people. That can’t happen soon enough, in my opinion.
I just want to add that I’m happy that so many people seem to be moving away from the idea that a single leader shit-for-brains is the only thing that needs changing.
Here’s an odd thing for you: in the same way that people are trying to come up with healthy masculinity as well as tearing down toxic masculinity, I’ve been giving thought about how I would create a healthy cultural inheritance from white people as well as tearing down the crap one that is lie-vomited on us. It’s interesting as an idea but…. well oozing issues from every pore.
@aquietvoice
I’ve been thinking along those lines, too, but I keep just breaking down and shouting: “Oh, grow the fuck up, already!”
I’m not sure if that’s constructive.
@LykeX:
You know, I think I’d start with a core of just the simple stuff that everyone uses/experiences – love, patience, education, et cetera, in the sense that I’d collect examples of that from a variety of cultures and put them side by side so that people could see that the same humanity expresses itself in different ways.
Then I’d also show a number of expressions of bad stuff ways of thinking we want to avoid repeating, and once again putting it side by side with similar examples from very different cultures.
Finally, you could start working on experiences that developed more from the specific states of being that occurred in european history, and pluck out valuable examples. Stuff like “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” and “All quiet on the western front” to show how these social ideas that many contributed to were not just hollow, but could turn on the very people that made them. Also some stuff about trying a bunch of different legal/social/technological attempts to solve a problem, and how even the strongest of ideas can have weak points somewhere (South sea bubble, battle of the beams).
What do you think? If you had the opportunity to teach everyone a limited amount of history, what would you choose? (Especially knowing that some people will never learn more than this mandatory minimum amount)
To be fair, you can’t blame it all on anti-scientific sentiment. There’s also the fact that the right-wing goons leading both parties were opposed to providing welfare to people who were forced to be out of work for an extended period of time, because they hate people.
Your question from May 14: “Does this look like we’re done with the outbreak?” It didn’t.
Here’s the link to the same interactive chart that I posted in the older thread. In the default one comparing countries, the US rebound over the last month is very noticeable.
Just a reminder that even when you are level on that log-log scale, it is nothing to celebrate. You shouldn’t even be cautiously optimistic about that, because it’s simply bad. And going up is extra bad. The only good way to go is down, as fast as you possibly can, but we’re going the other way.
When you look at it broken down by US states/territories, it looks like the biggest bounce is coming from three big states: California, Texas, and Florida. There are a bunch of smaller rebounds in other places too, as you might expect. Also, many states were never actually declining in the first place, as was obvious at the time, when things “opened up” again. It’s just that they weren’t as bad as some of the worst places like New York and New Jersey, which obviously isn’t saying much at all.
For anyone on the coasts who might believe the vast area in the middle of the continent is just a bunch of farmland, there are pretty significant urban and suburban populations in almost every state. So, you do have those higher-density areas scattered around all over the place (which generally means a worse outbreak), but it makes sense to me that the lower-density human geography around those cities helped to slow the spread somewhat. Until it didn’t, because we stopped trying to contain the problem. Why buy ourselves more time, when we could spend that money on … I don’t know, booze I guess?
Anyway, what I’ve taken from this is that I should never complain about it again, when some dumb horror movie shows its characters making the most obviously dumb choices during the zombie apocalypse or whatever it may be, because apparently that’s what actual people do in real life … even on large scales like a huge country, after lots of time spent deliberating it, etc. For better or worse, they aren’t showing new bad movies in theaters currently, but I’ll try to remember it when the time comes.
Sincerely: thank you for that. It really cheered me up.