You know how there's this rhetorical trope of calling things socialism where [they] are in no way socialism?
What the folks doing that mean is "some political system that isn't (some mix of) keep-the-loot mammonism and patriarchal white supremacy".
That's it; it's a perfectly consistent (if galling binary) usage.
There's an increasing concern for disabled people; it's clear that they don't get any additional support despite the pandemic and it's worrying that "you should die for the economy" rhetoric is solidly mainstream. It's not very far between that and "we'll kill you for the economy", especially since that's what various governments' COVID policy amounts to in functional terms, just a little more random.
This tends to focus on "a drain on society" and the (entirely obvious from a disabled perspective) "I'd contribute more if you'd spend more", either on making economic contribution possible (e.g., the refusal to allow work from home prior to the pandemic; lots of folks could have a job if they can work from home, and not if they have to commute) or on providing basic support (e.g., public provision of mobility devices).
There's a couple-six tactical mistakes in all this.
Firstly, "drain on the economy" in "you cost more than you pay in taxes" terms isn't answerable; that's why the frame is used. (Generally by people who seek to lower their own taxes to zero; presenting in complete seriousness a plan to cull oligarchs as unproductive might be a useful rhetorical response.)
Secondly, mammonism tries hard to present itself as factual, but isn't in any way; it doesn't accept falsifiability of anything, never mind its axioms. No amount of pointing out material error will do anything because no mammonite is the least bit interested in being correct. It's a sort of distributed mystery cult.
Thirdly, most people sincerely believe that it's OK to kill you for not being normal.[1] Their entire childhood was structured around social norms where you hurt people until they acted normal, they were themselves certainly hurt for not acting normal, and their conviction that you must be normal is axiomatic, irrational, and close to absolute. (And immutable; success with gay acceptance, such as their was and what there was of it, rested on "I don't want to kill someone I know fairly well" squeems. There was no general expansion of normal and there was no refutation of "OK to kill you for not being normal". There were a bunch of personal exceptions and an agreement that you should be allowed your personal exceptions if you were normal, since, well, yeah, having to beat someone to death when you kinda liked them would be icky.)
Fourth, no one (aside from a few marginalised economics hobbyists) wants to optimise productivity, economic participation, or any general measure of contribution; they want to optimise how much money they have. Even when people aren't outright mammonites; what you hear repeated becomes true, and the degree of repetition of mammonite axioms is well past saturation. Security arises from wealth, you must obey greater wealth, and there are no permissible collective forms of organisation save those which reinforce the gradient of wealth. (why, yes, that does describe a slave society,and yes, they do mean that as a constraint on laws.)
So what do they want?
They really do want to kill you for not being normal. It's a construction of virtue, in part because the people doing the construction derive their social power and standing from participating in the definition of normal. (Every time you see complaints about "kids these days" and novel communications platforms? The base complaint is "they're getting their construction of normal from a source that isn't me". It's a real threat to the existing general social construction of power if the source of the definition of normal shifts.)
Everything else is a rationalisation for how they can want that and be a good person. None of it is any more falsifiable than any other faith statement or any other rationalisation; no amount of pointing out that money is an entirely profane collective rationing system for agency that doesn't function without a state guarantor makes a dent on mammonites, because they know that money is the materialisation of the love of God and you can't have it, and you certainly can't have any of theirs. (When it's not and can't be your money; money is inherently and inescapably socialist. Agency isn't; agency is inescapably and particularly your agency. That difference in scope is where much of the problem comes from once, structurally and socially, money and agency are equated.)
Is there a more helpful frame?
I think so; removing friction. All this implicit difficulty in stairs and curbs and narrow stairwells and so on is a cost, and just like the deaths that lead to carbon monoxide detectors being required, it's a cost there's a general social motivation to reduce.
Places where ramps come in, splitting stairwells, the ramp gets a lot of use by people with roller luggage, garment racks, and so on; it perfectly straightforward to point that out as general utility. Perfectly straightforward to point out that current escalator design optimizes the wrong thing. It's not normal to want to make regular daily life more difficult, is it?
(Well, yes it is; it provides display opportunities, and thus status. Trick is to move the basis of status.)
The city engineer should be seen about towing a little instrumented cart, and public roads rated by where the greatest force is required; places of business should be rated by the ability to move a volume frame around in them. You get the fire marshal and emergency services to do that one; can we get the stretcher to you? stuff. Only you make sure it's one of those scissor-lift gurney things in current use, not an old-school pole stretcher. If this coincidentally improves mobility devices, and if there are much less-publicised mobility device requirements, well, the point is to make the regulation harder to argue with. It's normal to want them to be able to get the stretcher to you.
(This general idea of not making things difficult can and should be extended all over the place.)
From there, there's the idea that there's a general public responsibility to expand possibility. Not for the worthy; not for immediate, direct, economic reasons, but because that's what it is normal for a society to do. A society which pretends to prosperity by denying opportunity is both weak and a lie. [2]
(One could, in past times when some people believed in being judged after death, sometimes get somewhere with notions of duty and obligation; pretty much everybody getting hurt by COVID in the Anglosphere is that way because of government failure, and the successor government acquire an obligation thereby. Nobody actually believes this today.)
So, yes, there's an immediate need to worry about all this and to care for the stricken in the specific and in general; insisting that it's wrong to measure people's worth with money won't work, because to a first approximation no one here in late capitalism believes that. Pick a value of normal people want and advance that. It might work. "This is cruel" won't work; it never worked when they were kids, after all, and now they know what virtue is.
[1] it is OK for drivers to kill people if the people aren't in cars because driving is normal; walking and riding a bicycle aren't. It is entirely that simple, which is also why it's so wretchedly intractable.
[2] "medical technology unable to free you from specific constraint is insufficient, and should be improved with the goal of attaining sufficient capability to free you from your specific constraints for all the values of you in society" would be a controversial statement. (in large part because people correctly suppose that corporates would get the tech first, and make being able to edit you a condition of employment.) It's still the appropriate social goal, and one where part of the goal has to be a social and systemic context where it's possible to have the capability as an increase in general possibility; your agency is increased by this, not decreased.
One of the obvious things about COVID-19 has been the clear demarcation between "people will act collectively" and "people won't act collectively" societies; the former do vastly better handling infectious disease outbreaks.
Why?
People ascribe legitimacy to a government which, minimally, does not frustrate their purposes. Ideally, it will advance their purposes, but in generally it's sufficient that it not frustrate their purposes.
I think it's obvious that societies where people won't act collectively don't ascribe much legitimacy to their governments.
There's three reasons for that.
All of these things are systemically fixable; it's possible to get back to a general legitimacy of collective effort, which we are certainly going to need. Nobody is going to do any better on climate change than they did with COVID-19, and COVID-19 isn't an existential threat.
None of these things are fixable in a mammonite social context. And since the mammonite elect have effectively all the agency, this does present serious logistical challenges.
Less than agriculture breaking without a backup plan in place, though.
Like pretty much anything that gets widespread media push, "politics is becoming polarised" is not helpful.
Firstly, there's only one issue.
Agriculture breaks in this generation. The agency to address this is concentrated in a tiny group of people who are actively and resolutely in favour of agriculture breaking. (Which is equivalent to "current policies are to be extended until at least 99% of the population is faced with a choice between abject submission and starvation." Those current policies are a problem, but they're not the issue. The issue is the goal constructing society as a machine for producing submission serves.)
This is an outside-context-problem; it's never happened before. (Years of dearth are not the same thing as agriculture breaks; years of dearth occur and end. Years of dearth can be address by transportation, because they're local. Agriculture, once broken, stays broken for anything resembling a human time scale.)
An outside-context-problem means no one has a suitable cultural response. It also means that nigh-every available cultural response is inappropriate.
Secondly, money is a means of rationing agency. This does not have to be passively so; it can be actively driven as policy, as we presently observe it to be.
The confusion between wealth and virtue serves a narrative that those who are not wealthy deserve their fate, whatever that should happen to be. It's possible to presume wealth is certain evidence of divine favour and to tangle all of politics up in discussions about how much virtue attaches to wealth and whether anyone's fate should be altered and if so, who, and thus prevent any discussion of the actual issue. We observe this absolutely everywhere across various mechanisms of government. (Which tells us a whole lot about the degree of meaningful difference at this scale between modes of government.)
Thirdly, any suitable cultural response -- any construction of society, law, politics, etc. -- will in a meaningful sense have to be new in order to address the outside-context-problem. That's what "outside context problem" means in operational terms; a new solution must be devised, existing systems cannot solve this.
That people retreat to rigid views under threat and high levels of stress isn't surprising; that advertising and grift culture increase stress levels is obvious. What is less obvious is that no one has any idea what will help, and the closest available approximations -- ideas like uniform justice and egalitarianism -- are intolerable threats to the folks with all the agency, who do their best to make these ideas inexpressible. What gets lost is that no one has any idea what to do. This is a lot closer to panicked flailing than polarisation.
Calling it polarisation allows a "red sweater or blue sweater?" narrative, though, leaving aside any mention of it's both hot and raining and no sweater will help.
That's the generally clever Nick Harkaway, falling prey to the assumptions of Christian eschatology.
There will be no redemption; there will be no salvation. Those happen in the afterlife, which doesn't exist.
The folks getting rich off of open-loop extractive capitalism -- that would be everyone who is in any sense rich -- don't think a future in which they're not doing that is positive. They've been making that decision for forty-odd years now, and it behoves us to listen. (There was totally, is totally, the option of a decision to get rich some other way. It's been actively disdained.)
If we want a future with a smaller mass extinction, there are a number of thing we must do. Cease fossil carbon extraction; cease outdoor illumination at night (yes, really; it's at least as lethal to insects as pesticides, and it's much harder to evolve around); acknowledge that if what makes you middle class is owning your house your house is still worthless. Stop using synthetic materials that do not either rot nor get recycled. Recognise that going on a binge with capital is not income, no matter how long or how much or how habituated the carbon binge has become.
The current oligarchy isn't going to do that for the sake of a positive future; they're mammonites, and the only requirement for a positive future is having all the money. Having all the money in a complex, healthy ecosystem and having all the money in an underground bunker dependent on filtered air and mushroom-farming based on a steadily decreasing supply of frozen corpses is much of a muchness to a mammonite.
The current oligarchy probably wouldn't do that if the certain alternative was public unanesthetized auto-orchidectomy with a charity shop cheesegrater.
So the hope, if you must descend into the weakness of hope, is not for a less damaged world than there might have been; the hope is not for a quiet passing of extractive capitalism, that supreme engine of war; the hope is the hope of victory.
Victory is having the leisure above survival to fix stuff; victory is having no more oligarchy. Victory is the prospect of a human population who does not regret their precarious existence.
You don't get that through hope, or wrath, or righteousness; you get that through planning. You get that through not flinching away from the purpose of the system is what you observe it to do. (The government of Ontario exists to kill as many people as necessary to ensure the cash flow of the existing rich.)
It's not that it looks like one; it's that it is one.
People have been working since the sixties to make it one.
Once you've got a plurality of the population (and a majority of the white settler population) who think it's illegitimate, it just is. That's the definition of a failed state, even before you get into the "institutional armed groups who are not subject to civil control" and "widespread terrorism" and "institutional authority not accepted" (for example, Congress not enforcing subpoenas because collectively they can't imagine that they're allowed to do that.)
So, yes, people voted for Trump; they're voting to legitimise the state they believe in, which is a white ethnostate where there are no facts. ("Educational divide" is excessively abstract; the complaint is that facts are those things that reduce their social status. You cannot imagine how intensely they're against facts.) This is why conspiracy theories are popular; it's a way to explain why what they want is necessary.
Lots of people did NOT vote for Trump. They're voting for what they believe in, which includes notions of legitimate collective action, limits to profit, and a cosmopolitan inclusiveness that accords rights to everyone. Thing this groups has not figured out is that the other group is incapable of admitting error, so traditional political processes involving compromise don't produce improvements to the circumstances.
I keep hoping they're going to learn.
Rationalisation is infinite; you're not.
The stuff under the rationalisations is simple; it's affirming a hierarchy. The thing wrong with AOC's photo shoot is that it accords AOC the trappings of status, and the people complaining know that AOC cannot have status, so it's wrong, and will rationalise why it's wrong -- they're not good at thinking clearly about the system they're embedded in -- infinitely. The real problem is that the hierarchy is not functioning correctly.
The hierarchy, the ability to say what is prescriptively normal and derive social power from control of that definition, is the simple core of everything in authoritarian systems. It's simple; it copies itself effectively. That's about all it's got going for it.
This is where the disdain for facts comes from; facts are an understanding of a consistent material world. You can't have facts as an individual; it requires the ongoing collective effort, it requires falsifiability, and it requires discounting feelings. (If you've put twenty years of career and life and effort into something, and you've just falsified it, you have to tell people. That's difficult. It's not what how you feel about it wants you to do.) If you accept the utility of facts -- facts are useful, enormously so, but you don't have to accept that -- you oblige yourself to accept that "what does this do?" is a more important question than "How do I feel about this?", which is corrosive to the structures of authority.
Eventually -- it takes generations and centuries, but eventually -- it comes down to a core political conflict over "What does this do? Do we want that?" versus "How do I feel about this?" as the mechanism for reducing public and personal insecurity.
There is no possibility of coexistence when the decrease of insecurity on one side increases it on the other. You can disagree about barbeque, sportsball, Abrahamic god, or vi vs emacs and co-exist happily, but you can't finesse increasing insecurity. This does not and cannot end with getting along.
And, yes, it's a little more complicated than that; mammonism as a construction of authority is particularly awful, the end of the Carbon Binge is excessively dread, and there's a whole lot of collapsing imperial power increasing the insecurity of the great. But underneath it does all come down to whether we're going to take the collective-determination-of-present-understanding-of-facts approach, or the stable-social-hierarchy-derived-from-an-authoritative-declared-prescriptive-norm approach.
I'm a materialist and pro-facts, if that's not obvious. I'd think it was, but then again I'd think it was plenty obvious what the relative utility of the two systems of social organisation are based on the outcomes of pandemic public health efforts.
We're heading into the boreal winter with Canada, the UK, and the US seeing rates of COVID infection increasing. This is likely due to sending children back to school. American Thanksgiving, and from the sound of things UK Christmas, are going to be additional clusters of spreading events.
We know a few things about COVID-19. Dose -- how many virus particles you were exposed to -- matters to severity. Most people who get infected don't infect anybody else, but about one person in five is a super-spreader and infects many people. Aerosol spread is much, much more likely inside, if there's talking, if there's singing, and as the time spent inside increases.
With less understanding, we know you can get COVID-19 twice, and nothing says it's less severe the second time. And various learned persons have pointed out that there's no actual reason to suppose COVID-19 isn't seasonal -- worse in the winter -- just because it demonstrated greenfield spread in the summer.
My take is that this winter the ongoing or pending mass evictions due to COVID-19 related job losses are going to push people into tight quarters with inadequate sanitation at best, and that we're going to see people caught in multiple super-spreading events between forced job attendance, winter forcing people inside, and the inadequate testing to identify the infected. Exposure to multiple super-spreader events will make back-tracking or contact-tracing impractical even if the infrastructure to do it is in place (it's not), and the ability to control spread cannot now be implemented in time to prevent this. The dose increase from being caught in multiple events will push mortality and morbidity up.
Am I wrong? Hopefully.
However locked down you can get still seems only prudent through at least March.
Even if COVID-19 goes away tomorrow out of some inexplicable miraculous mercy, try to remember, next summer and the next time you vote, that this didn't have to happen; that we've got ample demonstration that a competent public sphere has several effective options for containing this disease. Try to remember that the purpose of a system is what you see it do, not what might be claimed about it. The "Western democracies", especially and particularly the English-speaking ones, are now sufficiently mammonite that they care considerably less about the health and well-being of their citizenry than traditional communist Vietnam or the dystopian autocracy of the PRC have been seen to do. (Never mind Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, or Singapore. Or New Zealand, who have apparently escaped the mammonite curse through being small and agrarian.)
An insidious hazard is one which is easily overlooked and ignored because they are not usually conspicuous (seen, tasted, smelled, or felt).
People in general have trouble with insidious hazards because there are only two things you can do about an insidious hazard; you can ensure that the hazard isn't present, or you can continuously maintain precautions for the hazard. And it's usually not there, so it involves a lot of effort and attention over nothing. Basic brain wiring tries to insist that this thing that doesn't happen isn't important.
Carbon monoxide is only mostly insidious (you can tell it's there, but you will probably mis-attribute your symptoms); there are laws about carbon monoxide detectors anywhere there's a combustion furnace because of this. Inert gas suffocation (when you walk into a cloud of, say, methane and pass out before you realise what's wrong) is another insidious hazard.
Mercury is an insidious hazard; actual things containing mercury have mostly been dealt with via the first method, by getting rid of the thing with mercury in it. This is only somewhat helpful because while there are sometimes regulations designed to limit the amount of mercury released into the environment by industrial activities like burning coal, these are generally not effective because they're seen as an intolerable limitation on profit. (I suspect this would be true even if it was readily possible to point to specific corpses.)
In other contexts, fixing stuff down manholes or dealing with silage could, in principle, use expensive laser spectroscopy or other detection mechanisms to ensure an inert gas hazard isn't present; one could, in principle, always wear breathing apparatus if there might be an inert gas hazard. In practice, people don't; it's too expensive and it's too slow. The occasional death is seen as preferable to the cost of mitigating the insidious hazard.
COVID-19 is an insidious hazard. You won't notice when you catch it; you won't notice who might spread it, because people are most infectious before they have any symptoms at all.
I find myself thinking that the Ontario government's response to COVID-19 is exactly like their response to air pollution (for most, most of the time, an insidious hazard); yes, this kills a lot of people. Not killing those people would be expensive, in the immediate term, for those presently wealthy. We won't do anything about it.
(Note that this policy position is, from a long term financial perspective, flat wrong; the economic case for not killing those people is simple and obvious and strong. So there's no "grim monetary need" case to be made for the necessity of accepting the deaths. It's nothing but preference.)
Wearing a mask, washing your hands, staying away from other people -- never mind the specific distance, the thing is airborne; "as far as you possibly can, and if that's not far enough, don't" -- are the second response to an insidious hazard; always take the precautions. You don't know and won't know and can't know when you're going to need them, so you always need them. Put the mask on before leaving your dwelling and leave it on until you return. If you can't do that, don't do the thing. (If the employee can't do that, don't you go and make them do the thing. If they work for you, fix it.)
Annoying, inconvenient, unwelcome? All of the above.
Sensibly avoidable, heading into a boreal winter where we're severely uncertain we're going to avoid overlapping super-spreader events?
No.
Canadians spend a bit more than twelve to a bit more than fifteen percent of their income on food. (It varies by quintile.) The overall is just over fourteen percent. (14.1%). Canadians spend about half of their income on shelter and transportation. (If you ever wonder why real-estate developers seem to have infinite political power, roughly 30% of everything goes to housing.)
I'd argue that food security is iffy now for the bottom quintile; I'm further going to argue that food security won't matter politically until the upper quintile is experiencing a standard of living drop due to increased food expenses.
That's somewhere around doubling the real price of food; the food budget expanding to about 30% of total expenditures. I figure that'll happen by 2030; we're not getting nice linear climate change. Someone with a real data set could probably predict this much better; the linear extrapolation is the outer/upper bound.
The essential question remains whether we can replace agriculture before hitting that bound. (And we have to have a de-carbonised replacement if we want it to actually help.)
Could wish there was a lot more political focus on this.
SARS-CoV-2 is not a bat disease; it reproduces in humans, and is a human disease. It's descended from a bat disease, and may thereby retain some characteristics of bat diseases.
Most bats are tiny and have trouble meeting their metabolic needs; you'll see stylised facts about how bats can eat their own body weight in insects every night, and so on. What this means to a bat is that it is bradymetabolic, with two metabolic states; the fast one for flapping around, actively hunting flying insects, and the slow one for roosting. If the bat (tiny, big heat loss area from its skin-covered wings) tried to maintain the fast metabolism all the time, it would starve to death because it couldn't eat enough to get itself through a long summer day.
What this means for bat viruses is that they're a virus; they don't have enough DNA or RNA to carry one set of biochemical machinery for the warm temperature and one set for the cool temperature. It's one or the other. Either way, the bat won't stay in that state for long; it will switch by going out to hunt or to come in to roost, and then the virus gets subjected to the equivalent of a high fever or a medically induced coma depending on whether it's got the biochemistry for conditions in a cool bat or a warm bat. It means bat viruses are hasty; the time window to reproduce enough to spread is short.
COVID-19 isn't that contagious, except when it is; a disease that doesn't spread very well most of the time spreads like measles sometimes. The average comes out to worrisome, but the distribution has a "meh" arm and a "red alert!" arm.
We're not bats. We are automatic endotherms; we're not as warm or as cool as a bat. The "go for it, go for it, now now now" mechanism in SARS-CoV-2 doesn't trigger all that often or all that reliably. When it does, and the person the virus is going into maximal-shed-mode in happens to be inside with other people, we get a super-spreader event.
One also has to note that the super-spreader events we know about don't correlate to anything in terms of the person who arrives infected; the event requires people being inside, lots of talking, poor air circulation, etc., but there's absolutely nothing about the infected person that indicates why they might be a greater source of contagion. In this just-so story, it's pure bad luck; their infection happened to trigger "go for it!" mode at just that time.
Couple-three things to watch out for:
It's necessary to finish Reconstruction.
The unreconstructed are in the way of addressing both the current pandemic and climate change. The pandemic isn't an existential threat on species scale, but climate change is.
This can be viewed as particularly pressing in Canada, where Reconstruction was never formally started.
When Ulysses Grant left office, he went back to being Mr. Grant. Sure, he'd been a general (he'd been the general, but he wasn't serving any longer) and he'd been president (but the whole point to being President, rather than a king, is that you stop doing it). So, by address, Mr. Grant.
At least since President Carter, that hasn't been true; it's still, by address, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama.
That's a mistake; that's making the presidency holy, instead of a job. Once you do that, you can't think about it accurately; it picks up this nonsensical air of immutability rather than being a job, and the current holder of the job being subject to material evaluation.
Holiness has been undone before; the House of Hohenzollern is still rich, still owns (and sometimes inhabits) castles, but the head of the house is Mr. Hohenzollern. And that was with a fair number of people who did not want it undone, rather as there are a fair number today who demand a king and will not have the president be anything other than holy.
One of the best simple things a hypothetical Biden admin could do would be to change the protocol rules, and get real strict about former presidents losing the title of address. Yeah, sure, you had the fate of the world in your hands for awhile, but you put it down. The brimstone whiff of the mushroom cloud and soulless glint of the market attend on you no longer.
And, yeah, sure, Trump hasn't got his own fate in his hands. Trump's haplessness is not the point; the point is that which is public is not, after all, that which is holy. If you try to make the simple material necessity of the public sphere -- the requirement to keep the minimum qualification for civilisation and maintain for all citizens the odds of dying of violence or starvation so low as to be immaterial -- a holy thing, you wind up with something that isn't civilisation or in any respect holy.
You'd think more people would notice.
Civil authority exists so those entrusted with public office -- elected or otherwise, the auditor general or the chief medical officer or an appointed judge hold public office just as much as the premier does -- can at need exercise it for the preservation of the public welfare.
So when Fort Mac is like to burn, or there's a flood around Winnipeg, the exercise of civil authority is not -- and should not be! -- "you might wish to consider evacuating"; it's "Out, now." And the authority suffices to have you removed involuntarily.
This applies to public authority in the context of a pandemic. We can look around at where the control measures have worked with COVID-19, and where the control measures haven't -- Ontario is a strong "haven't" -- and note this difference; everywhere the pandemic control measures have worked have a positive construction of civil authority. Some states are straight up authoritarian -- Vietnam -- and some are open democracies -- New Zealand -- and there are a whole bunch in between (Singapore somewhere in the middle) but they've got this common element of a general legitimacy of the idea of exercising civil authority for the general public good.
So the worrying thing is not, in its way, that a whole bunch of people are going to suffer needless harm; it's that the political mechanisms to confer and use civil authority to the degree necessary to avoid general harm are busted. (This is apparently irrespective of political party inside Canada; it's not a uniquely conservative failing.) I'd put this down to the slow mammonite radicalisation of the last couple generations; the only legitimate purpose of government is to not tax the rich. (Yes, I know that sentence makes no sense. Take it up with the mammonites.)
Going further into the century of angry weather with no exercisable construction of civil authority sufficient to avoid general harm is a distressing prospect. Everyone individual dies, and I have no expectation of surviving the first big failure of agriculture, there's too much I can't eat. That's, well, it's a lapse of civilisation when people start dying of starvation. Lapse is not end, and no functioning construction of civil authority is end.
It don't leave me feeling hopeful.
(Ontario is a "strong haven't" because we're getting a second wave and because the current policy overtly and consciously includes killing and maiming teachers and school children in preference to taking the (obvious, simple, known) steps necessary to extirpate the disease. The purpose of the system is what it does; that this goes on the same pile as the customary ~10,000 annual excess deaths from air pollution doesn't render it excusable or palatable.)
The line goes that the Best Fencer in the World is not worried about the second best; they're worried about the worst, because they cannot predict what the idiot will do.
Lots of people are getting a certain distance into the UK government's pro-hard-Brexit stance, and how this is playing out in ways that are going to force the EU to economically isolate Northern Ireland in ways the UK government can then use as domestic "blame the EU" exculpation for the economic disaster of a hard Brexit. (And how this is really rash in a good-governance sense and how it's obviously unlawful and so on.)
People doing this analysis tend to be careful, professional, and knowledgeable; something of a handicap when examining mammonite intentions. (Remember that the whole point of mammonism is to make a counterfactual a god. It's not sensible stuff, and it's not followed by sensible people.)
What they're after, what the whole "new global trade", etc. is all about, is going after the legitimacy of national borders with respect to trade.
From people who are completely about national borders with respect to the movement of people this seems odd, but remember they've already done this about capital; barriers to entry (or exit) for capital existed in living memory, and the free movement of capital is a problem (if the capital can move freely and the people can't, you've got a system for producing at best serfdom). But free movement of capital is not enough of a problem if you're a mammonite; the goal of mammonism is to have all the money, and you can't do that if there's a government with the power to tax. So the government has to go, and part of the incremental project of removing the government is to remove the legal framework for having customs and border controls for goods and services. It's quite likely the plan is to declare that the UK has no customs and border controls, won't create any, won't perform any, and will do nothing except check for legality of residence (which if you don't have, they'll murder you).
This presents something of a problem for the EU. (Putin wants to get rid of the EU, remember, and is a significant shareholder in the the UK's Mammonism, LLC rebrand of the Conservative and Unionist Party. This is not solely about a fire-sale looting spree.) Making the UK implement customs checks requires straight-up conquest; impractical against a nuclear power and permanent security council member. Insurance blockade, well, difficult; lots of ongoing and annoying enforcement costs. (Starting with the resulting general starvation in the UK, which will neither affect the the people in power nor look good to the EU's membership.)
There will be US-sourced hulls available to transport UK goods; lots of American mammonites with shipping companies. The short-term cost-optimal thing is to just not bother with customs checks yourself, but that's equivalent to surrendering the European project, so you have to eat the increased cost and commercial drag, which only gets worse as Trump's second term involves declaring a duties-customs-and-fees holiday for everyone except China.
(Which holiday also bans trade with anyone who doesn't reciprocate.)
Well, first off, simple.
Second off, material results.
I have gone on and on and on at other times about scale of feelings (appropriately personal, not policy), how it's a system with feedback, how the objective has to be cohesive (every action is constrained to not make any part of the objective worse off [1]), and the impossibility of retaining the status quo amid these several apocalypses. None of that seems to convey much, so I'm going to try a different idea.
If you're responsive, you lose. Responsive protest is an agreement to get shipped to the incinerator.
If you make the other party react to you, you might win; you might be able to constrain the outcome to one that you actually want, as distinct from slowing the rate at which bad things happen to you.
So!
Observation 1; the GOP has gone full mammonite. There is only one rule; that rule can be expressed as "I always win" or "I get all the money" but it's the same rule. It's a very, very simple rule, and thus a huge advantage in sub-generational scales. (It will totally break the economy, but if you've got a seat when the big game of musical chairs stops, you might prefer that. No more threatening innovation that could diminish your status.)
Observation 2; if you're trying to follow a different, complex set of rules, you're going to lose. It's exactly like trying to negotiate with a toddler. It can't work; the capacity for negotiation is not present in the other party. You may express the rules to a two year old in better or worse ways, but the rules are the rules; the point of the rules is to get to some place in later years where you can negotiate with the entire person who has slowly accreted around the toddler. But when they're two, there's nobody there capable of negotiation. Same with a convinced mammonite. There isn't enough complexity in their system to negotiate anything but prices.
Observation 3; wait, isn't that dehumanising?
No. That's recognising that their political point is to remove everybody who isn't them from political life. "I always win" is the position of profound weakness, because it's acknowledging that if they have to compete fair they're going to lose. They act like it; you can't sensibly pretend that's not what they're doing while they're doing it.
"What future?" is a terrifying question. "What future?" _starts_ at "the coastal cities are going to drown" and "agriculture breaks" if you have any will to facts in you whatsoever. The next century defines all human history, by either ending it or not ending it, and we didn't need to do this to ourselves. Mammonites did this for their immediate profit.
It's still the question; what future?
The GOP answer, the mammonite answer, to that question says anyone who isn't rich can suffer and die; they shall have luxury, and they shall have no accountability to anyone, because they always win. Bronze Age collapse pirate band, smutting the throne-room frescoes with the sputtering grease of stolen mutton.
Other answers?
You're not special.
Everyone or no one.
Profit's a legitimate measure; it's an illegitimate goal.
That means, well, ethnogenesis; time not merely to stop being white but to be something else entirely. Can't stop being easily sunburned but long past time to acknowledge that "we're better and smarter so we can steal everything" has ended in failure. The Anthropocene is a vast disaster; it was in no way required, it was a choice, and it was a white supremacy choice as much as it was a mammonite choice. It's a failure so vast that it will certainly produce at least this much change; mere ethnogenesis would be limiting the damage.
That means, find the people who have emerged from the chiefly disadvantaged and put them in charge, armoured brigades, launch codes, power to tax, power to execute, in charge. You only get a generation before the answer changes and the answer OUGHT to change to "we don't have that group anymore", but today the answer in the US is black women.
(Indigenous women in Canada.)
Scary? Sure. Your feels do not matter even a little; this is a survival situation on the scale of policy. How you feel about it is a vast quantity of no never-mind.
Everyone or no one, well, we're not in a good place with a lot of stuff. Agriculture collapses this century, even if you go by the IPCC's optimistic projections. But let's start with collective action, the collapse of legitimacy, and the collapse of the idea of the rule of law.
"Rule of law" needs replacing; it's pretty much entirely crippled as an advocacy by the carceral state, whose advocates -- slavers and torturers -- have called that the rule of law.
Let's go for _uniform justice_, a system constructed so that your social standing is carefully, thoroughly, entirely removed from questions of law. Let's start _that_ by recognising that it needs to be created by collective action in a context where the slavers and the torturers are going full authoritarian and getting set to wholesale murder anyone who says they're bad people.
The choices here are do whatever suffices to get them to stop -- to reduce them to a condition of obedience to the public authority -- or to go to the incinerator. There's no middle ground in the structure of the politics or the present time of angry weather.
So the goal of collective action isn't protest; it's victory. Make double-damned sure that it's a materially defined -- for reals, not as a rationalising cheat -- systemic victory. (The French Revolution failed hard by not changing institutions, just who happened to control them.)
That last one? The naked mammonite heresy about how the profit motive is destructive? that's factual; it's NOT just that lots of things ought not to be done a for-profit basis at all (because no single entity's optimal corresponds to systemic optimal, or even encourages it), it's that making profit a goal destroys value. (Value is the ratio of benefit to cost; if you're trying to increase profit, you have to reduce the benefit or increase the cost.) This is entirely the wrong time to be destroying value, though the systemic cost is always eventually crippling if you permit the feedback.
It's also a hint; there is one and only one meaningful feedback to mammonites, and that's "how much money do I have?"; costing them money isn't really effective (they'll come up with reasons to suppose they will turn the situation to advantage and make more money), but making them poor is. Structurally, systemically, permanently poor; last in every line and dependent on the kindness of strangers to get out of the rain.
[1] in former days one might encounter keep-the-good conservative Americans who would espouse the four-box theory of political involvement to maintain liberty. The boxes are soap, ballot, jury, and cartridge, with a big USE IN THAT ORDER warning sticker. Any time you attempt to act collectively, you had better make sure the collective's all at the same general place on the box continuum.
The point to take from the current dismantling of the USPS is not that mail-in votes will be suppressed; the point to take is that the GOP incumbents will not permit an election result which causes them to lose power.
That's the problem; it's not a question of logistically enabling people to cast votes, it's that one side has already decided the result.
This is a situation in which the status quo has already perished.
OODA is "observe–orient–decide–act" and it's fundamentally tactical; it occurs at the level of operations. Those can be pretty big operations, campaign level, but someone else has provided the objective. It's an approach for getting the thing done when you've been provided the thing or the thing is reactive -- don't let the opposition do their thing.
Lots of emphasis to "getting inside the opposition's OODA loop"; they will at that point be reacting to what you were doing, not what you're doing now. It's an approach to substitute operational excellence for power, whether power is expressed as numbers or resources.
Western everything is driven by advertising. Advertising is inherently very short term; annual is an eternity in advertising, and everything about modern media acts to shorten the loop time. The entire internet runs on advertising, and it's been structurally altered to that end.
Which means that, operationally, everything is very tight and very fast.
It also means that the system as a whole is utterly vulnerable to anything patient. OODA loops operate in a context; someone sufficiently patient and sufficiently well-resourced to seek to alter the context is both invisible and invulnerable.
There are a whole bunch of political applications of this; the obvious one is how mammonites have succeeded by refusing to react to circumstances in any way. This shouldn't work, but starting with most of the money gives you options most entities don't have. It becomes the same process as being strangled by a python; every time you exhale, the snake tightens.
The really immediately relevant application, though, is COVID-19. It's a disease; it doesn't have a decision loop. It doesn't respond; it just keeps copying as many copies of itself as its circumstances permit. It can alter those circumstances on the organism level; it certainly cannot, short term, at the population level. (And long term, population level gets worse for it; it's busily providing selection pressure against being particularly susceptible to becoming infected by it.)
The goal with a disease is "sufficient public health response", which is long term, requires defining goals against trade-offs, and which does not benefit in any way from trying to either minimise the cost nor maximise the return for anyone involved. You're trying to minimise the systemic cost, which is not any individual entity's cost. If all those entities try to minimise their costs, you get pretty much exactly the disaster we're having. (There is not market for not dying of a disease, and there can't be.)
Note that all the successful COVID-19 responses were built around What certainly stops transmission? Whatever that was, for the available resources, that's what was done. Cheaper overall, for everybody? Absolutely. Requires setting a strategic objective? Well, yes, yes it does. Could a system staffed by mammonite officials obsessed with minimising costs to them, personally, their class, secondarily, and oblivious to the concept of system, generally, achieve that?
No.
Not against an easy-mode opponent; a virus incapable of learning or directed change.
That's a worry.
I think people are missing the crux of the conflict a little.
Some otherwise sensible commentators have been remarking that it's clearly a mistake for statues of US Grant to be toppled.
Well, no, it really isn't.
Much like Obama, Grant is an example of a US President with a blameless personal life, relatively humble beginnings, and significant accomplishments.
What that view—Grant commanded the armies that broke the Confederacy! what do you want?—misses is that people want systemic change.
This is the difference between wanting a good king and wanting no king at all.
So, sure, Grant did devise and enact the strategy to break the Confederacy; Grant as president did break the Klan. But Grant was also president of a nation inextricably involved in white supremacy, which means an economy built on looting which in turn means conquest to provide opportunity for looting. There is not getting away from it; you can't be president and not do terrible things. This applies to the truly bad people (Wilson, for example) and the generally decent people (FDR) and even the few actually-humble-beginnings-arguably-great (Lincoln, Grant, Truman) examples.
If you want no king; if you want an economy built on something other than loot; if you want a movement sufficiently powerful to guarantee Jeff Bezos dies poor [1], you certainly do topple Grant's statues along with every other president. If it's time for ethnogenesis and justice, you can't keep your aspirations of just kings.
[1] if you don't have that much power you can't get rid of extractive capitalism.
This privilege language going around is in material error for two reasons.
The first reason is that it's in the passive voice; "shots were fired". You can legitimately use the passive voice for the works of indifferent natural forces; that's not what's going on in a human society. It might be a diffuse network of choices, there might be a lot of coercion involved in producing the particular choices observed, but it's choices.[1]
The second reason is that there's not such thing; it's like blaming an outcome on someone else's invisible friend. The real thing is power; in specific, the kind of social power which threatens or delivers harm in response to deviations from a prescriptive norm.
It's possible to point out that power based on defining a presumptive social norm and punishing (to death, if necessary) deviations from that norm is not the best way to construct a society. It's possible to point out how white supremacy works by bribing a large class of "not frustrate your purposes" people into tolerating public power being used to advance the purposes of a small class of oligarchs. And how this necessarily creates a class of people whose assigned place in the prescriptive norm is to have their purposes frustrated, to be sure the people whose purposes aren't frustrated know they're special.
Lots of people have done that, at great and scholarly length. That's not (for this particular rant) the point.
The point is that the minimum useful change can be framed as "remove enforcing a prescriptive norm as a social ordering principle". You can't do that with morals because nobody ever agrees about morals; any time you need collective action or a strong public sphere, you can't use morals. (If you use morals, you get nigh-infinite splitting, inability to produce consensus, and a narrative that pig-headed obstinacy is laudable conduct.) You especially can't do it with morals because the folks who derive the majority of their power from defining the norm, all the way up from the determined person at the PTA meeting and the folks on the volunteer board all the way up to noted churchmen and opinion columnists, are already there; they've got every advantage, starting with early childhood conditioning.
If you want to do that, you need to have a measurable material outcome as an objective; you need some kind of political consensus around it (e.g., the observation that absolutely everyone is better off if they don't need to worry about being shot by the cops[2]); you need to identify who benefits from things being that way right now -- material, economic benefits -- and you need to remove those benefits by the least sufficient means.
No amount of self-awareness produces systemic change. [3] You get systemic change from changing the economy, which includes the definitions of licit forms of social organisation.
[1] guilt is a silly bourgeoisie emotion that doesn't pay for anything. I feel guilty, so the moral order is restored! is, at best, delusional. (At worst it's cynical.) Just as you cannot apologise for something you intend to keep doing, you cannot substitute guilt for action. (Action which makes matters worse is not excused by I meant well or I was trying!.)
So, yes, it does look a lot like terminology around privilege was being used inside American Black communities, where there really are things they can't say directly without getting killed. I expect it made sense with that full context; it has been torn out of that context and used as a tool to create a moral hierarchy in wider activist circles, where is is wildly unhelpful, as you would expect both any moral hierarchy and any act of cultural appropriation to be.
[2] "not frustrate their purposes" is supposed to keep white people from being shot by the cops. The general belief that this is reliable unless you're known to be Mammonite White is breaking down and empathy has happened. So the best way to actually guarantee "not getting shot" for anybody is to keep the cops from being able to shoot anyone.
[3] virtue is only virtue in the judgement of history, and what was not exercised is invisible to history.
The last few months have made it extremely obvious why it isn't taught.
Stocks, flows, feedbacks, constraints. The stuff that happens in the short term—the general operation of the system stuff—is the feedback. In severe oversimplification, the stronger feedback wins.
In these terms, when you advocate for defunding the police, you're talking nonsense unless and until you're taking three things into account.
First thing is that the police absolutely will open fire in preference to submitting to civil authority. They've been threatening just that for decades and they've nigh-certainly done that already even to the powerful. (It's absolutely certainly when considering the not-powerful.)
Second thing is that, by defunding the police, you're attacking the enforcement arm of white supremacy. Note what happens to notionally sovereign politicians who attempt to oppose the resource extraction arm of white supremacy; the same response is going to happen if you successfully defund the enforcement arm. (That is, you get a coup and the political process is replaced and reverses the defunding action. The Mammonite preferred outcome, private security forces, is at least not unlikely as a long-term outcome.)
Third thing is that white supremacy is an economic system. It starts as a legitimisation ploy for looting; if you are easily sunburned, you are inherently morally superior and can take anything you have the strength to take from anybody who isn't easily sunburned. This turns into a "hey, wait, let's steal abstractions like sovereignty and economy"; you get colonialism. Somewhere around 1970, out of material stuff to steal but completely unwilling to accept fundamental structural change to the economy, the great and good decided that the purpose of the economy was not to safeguard wealth but to guarantee wealth; the Mammonite faction gets political ascendancy, and the idea that you don't get subjected to systemic looting if easily sunburned goes away. The stack of axioms that permit billionaires, treating labour as a cost to be minimised, or the argument that being rich should free you from paying taxes are, in effect, the Mammonite heresy of white supremacy. (Classical white supremacy sees the common interests of the ruling class as including long term social stability because if you don't have stability you have change. If you're already on top of the heap, all change is bad, because you're overwhelmingly likely to be worse off, you have nowhere to go that isn't worse off than your current position. The heretics aren't zero-sum conservatives; they're negative-sum death cultists. The point is not to preserve existing relative eminence, but to guarantee eminence by reducing everyone else to misery. (misery limits your scope of political opposition to something certainly ineffective. Very important when you're expecting people to submit to being part of the mass extinction.))
So that's what we've got.
What's the least sufficient thing to have stronger feedback?
As a Canadian example, to abolish the RCMP, raze RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, and convert the underlying land to indigenous sovereignty, complete with sufficient funds to remediate it into something other than a hole in the ground. If you don't have the political power to do that in such a way that it sticks despite a dead-eyed kitten eater getting in with a majority government, you don't have enough political power to defund the police.
That's not going to happen as a single step.
All power is unitary. If you want to reduce authoritarian white supremacy's functional power, you go after the thing that funds it; great personal wealth. (It's a system for increasing retained loot! It has never been anything else!) That DOES NOT mean that you insist that people pay their taxes, have the tax authorities do hostile audits (richest first!) or that you start responding to obfuscated assets through forcible liquidation and permanent penury. All that's doing is shifting the direction of hostility from the authoritarian system. (The public sphere equivalent would be making rules that say there are no white cops or male judges for the next hundred years. Emotionally satisfying but ineffective policy.)
The effective steps are producing economic alternatives; removing the limited liability of corporations ("I cannot be held responsible for the collateral damage of enriching the owners") and creating collective forms of land tenure and social organisation. (Remember that the big problem with indigenous anything comes down to land tenure; from the viewpoint of the extractive wing of the authoritarian white supremacy, nothing is permitted to tell them they can't have that. From the viewpoint of the Mammonite wing, nothing is permitted to reduce the cash flow. Look at trends in land tenure since 1950 and you see "only corporate ownership is legitimate ownership" very clearly.) You're after an economy that creates not only a "this is better" feedback but a "we don't need them" feedback. Get it out of the context of control of the authoritarianism -- let the authoritarianism collapse for lack of economic participation -- and then you can start the audits.
So, sure, defund the police. But the human economy has to be there, too, or it shan't stick.
So you want some sort of uniform justice.
You observe that the great and good, faced with what is certainly an increasing risk of human extinction -- there's this chance climate change is going to kill us all, and however large that risk is it's certainly not getting smaller -- and being at least supplied with people who can do insurance calculations, aren't trying to reduce the risk. They're trying to increase it.
You observe that the great and good, faced with a pandemic, want to ignore it. Any number of deaths is preferable to any degree of economic reorganization, even when "any number of deaths" is certainly not the minimum economic damage scenario.
Better approximating some sort of uniform justice is not a won't scenario, it's a cannot scenario. The system we have cannot do that.
That cannot makes the minimum necessary change to get somewhere where that extinction risk is decreasing and the agency of individuals is valued a sustained general insurrection.
The folks presently engaged in protest don't think that's what they're saying; they think they're demanding that the system be permitted to work without specific distortions, and that the consequences of past distortions be corrected.
The established power structure they're talking to? It's hearing "sustained general insurrection", and it's going to react like it.
There's a sometimes-useful observation that reality is that which, when you stop believing it, does not go away.
It's only useful sometimes; if everybody else believes in the thing, you will find that when you stop believing in it, it does NOT go away.
Supremacy does not go away while anybody believes in the taxonomy constructing it.
So if you're currently identifying as white, you're perpetuating supremacy. There is no way to be white and not do that.
The idea of whiteness was a way to construct common colonialist cause with other European powers without altering Europe's civil arrangements. ("We are not one band, but we'll agree everyone in these bands is permitted to loot everyone not in these bands"; think slavers and pirates.) It isn't anything else; it can't be anything else. ("The purpose of the system is what it does"; what it's doing, today, is insisting that the non-white submit to being poisoned to keep the profits maximised.)
(Yeah, sure, class is a thing; there's another bit of rant about how you can expect the state to further your aims or not frustrate them if you're categorised white, and if you're not categorised white you can expect the state to frustrate your ends, and this is the structure of power. The whole moral-hierarchy-of-privilege discussion is meant to (and does!) obfuscate this. The whole political-whiteness thing is meant to use frustration at not being white enough -- the state is frustrating their aims! (in part by expecting them not to engage in overt supremacy behaviours) -- to get people to ignore that the state is furthering the aims of people perfectly content to enslave them or use them for dog food.)
So; whiteness isn't real in the "material universe" sense. It's real because people believe in it.
"Easily sunburned" is material reality. White is not. White is something a bunch of people made up because it furthered their economic ambition to steal all the things[1]. They happen to have been an easily sunburned lot from being descended from folks who were living on oats in the rain at high temperate latitudes, and they used "easily sunburned" as a trivially visible social marker.
I am so extremely pale my optometrist fusses at me about it; it's not expected that the whites of your eyes are visible from the inside, and mine are. I am well advised to never go outside without sunglasses. (Or sunscreen, or a hat.)
So, basically; all of these lists of things white people can do to be anti-racist aren't. They might reduce your ignorance, they might increase your understanding, but you can't be anti-racist or anti-supremacy while inhabiting a category that exists to create and enforce a supremacist social hierarchy.
You can't stop being easily sunburned by force of will; don't try. You can make a decision to stop being white. Do try.
(Identifying at Canadian doesn't presently cut it. I'm having a go at "egalitarian".)
Neighbours and helpful and unhelpful go a long way; it allows you to notice that the folks who won't pay taxes or accept limits to profit aren't in your group unless they can trick you into believing that participating in oppression elevates your status. More social people than I am might find "reliable neighbour" works pretty well as a thing to identify with, but, really; as long as it's not part of a hierarchy of oppression, it'll be an improvement.
Stop being white.
If you take the basic system model components -- stocks, flows, feedbacks, and constraints -- liberty is a constraint. There are these things, and these things must not be done.
One consequence is that the mammonite position -- money is a feedback, so everything can be done with feedback, and no other social organization can be tolerated, never mind accepted as required -- functions to remove constraints.
This is more basic than the slaver desire for free labour; it's a philosophical axiom.
So one consequence is that the concern for erosion of liberties in a time of pandemic is not inappropriate as a concern, but it (like many other problems) reduces to "can't let mammonite axioms into public life". It's not a question of will or enforcement or intent, really; a world defined by money destroys all constraints, including the "these things must not be done" ones.
Rhetorically and generally, money is regarded as a rationing system for value.
(value is the ratio between benefit and cost.)
As this rationing system for value -- having a finite amount of money compels you to decide your preferences as a means of spending yourself into the position which best approximates those preferences, given the amount of money which you have, and thus theoretically providing everyone with the closest approximation of their desires possible -- money is defined as a means of exchange and store of value, and if you're lucky the definition will point out that the value arises from the exchange and the exchange is possible because of the value. Exchange and store of value are not separate properties, the exchange creates the value and the value enables the exchange, you can't pry these two things apart and still have money.
Once you've got money -- your culture has produced the minimum requirements of a sovereign state and sufficiently general organization to sustain the systemic mechanisms necessary to money, including but not limited to compelling sufficiently accurate bookkeeping that the haves don't regularly rob each other -- you find out that value is temporally distributed; you've got fast (I need to buy lunch), medium (I need to buy a house), and slow (I need to buy a transportation infrastructure) and wind up with systemic support for the temporal distribution. That's everything from credit (I can use my medium asset (a house) as the basis for credit that lets me spend on a fast need (lunch)) to bonds (can't pay for the transportation infrastructure out of immediate income, so I need a mechanism everyone recognizes as able to accumulate sufficient money to match the value) to heritable land tenure (there's a great deal of selection pressure attached to conserving slow assets).
Then you get an emergent property; the slower the money is, the more resilient it is. (Lunch is ephemeral; houses are generational, with maintenance; the transportation system is an eternal necessity whether we're talking about moving flint around on donkeys or standard containers via an integrated global shipping network.) That turns into selection pressure to move effort -- the daily production of benefit through work that creates the possibility of value -- into slower time. It starts to serve the abstraction.
Which is in principle fine; you get a society and civilization that way, the basic tradeoff between immediate direct reward and eventual indirect reward that defines civilization.
Except that the slow stuff has preferences; it wants things to be predictable over long spans of time. It really doesn't believe in the possibility of surprise. (Think about how a canal owner felt about railroads. If you believed in surprise, you wouldn't try to create slow money assets.) It's a system and associated institutions; it gets predictable by controlling access to slower money. (Which it can do because it is the slower money.)
So if you want to go from fast to medium, you need a credit rating. You get a credit rating by doing certain things, mostly (in Anglo NorAm) by buying a car and a house and carrying debt. Once you're carrying debt, your behaviour is fairly sharply constrained; you have to keep your job. You then have to devote a lot of your time to commuting, and thus to buying fuel. You get additional parasite layers -- the Home Owner's Association, there to make the credit rating seem trivial -- but the core point is that the slower money gets to say how you can slow your faster money down.
The thing that has emerged in the last forty years is the outright setting of prices; Amazon's core business model is to be the thing that sets prices, for example. The profitability of pharma companies derives from using the patent system to set prices; if you want to live, you have to find at least this much money. (Noting that the patent system is being gamed is missing the point; the point is that the enforcement arm of civilization, the state monopoly on force, has been co-opted to enforce profits for the folks holding slow money. And to transfer slow assets to well-connected individuals.)
So what you get in late capitalism is a situation where money is used not to ration value (something it as a mechanism actually does do pretty well) but to ration agency. "You can only make these choices" (if you want to participate in the economy, if you want any nice stuff, if you want any vague semblance of personal material security...).
Of course someone invents a religion to explain why this is just and good; if people think they're being enriched, they'll come up with a set of morals to explain why god wants this to happen. And the folks getting access to the inflated supply of slow money are absolutely certain they're being enriched. (If you're a billionaire, pretty much all the necessities of life are functionally free. You lose your sense of value pretty comprehensively on the available examples.)
Put this against a time of pandemic, and you get the uncomfortable realization that the system as enacted -- the thing that exists to constrain agency to guarantee that the fast money turns into slow money under its control to the greatest possible extent -- simply hasn't got any way to not kill people. It can't want that; it has no mechanism to observe value, because it broke the utility of money.
Which (I think) renders the political choices before us simple, stark, and urgent.
"Herd immunity" is the level of individual immune response such that, as a sufficient proportion of and sufficiently distributed across a population, a specific pathogen can't spread in that population.
It's usually used about vaccines.
So there are three parts here:
So the written Chinese 猫头鹰 literally translates to "cat-headed eagle" and sensically translates to "owl". (If you are a French speaker, "hibou" rather than "chouette".) German "Kriegsmarine" literally translates as "war fleet" but sensically as "navy". There are arbitrarily many examples.
Which term people pick means something about their intent.
"Wet market", 湿市场, is a term to distinguish a traditional market with fresh produce from a supermarket. Up until supermarkets became regionally popular, the term would just have been "market" or "public market". Since we've known with some confidence for a while now that the important mutation that created SARS-CoV-2 happened in a human -- this is not direct zoonotic transmission -- the focus on misrepresenting wet markets as responsible for the current pandemic reveals layers of agenda.
First off, blame someone else. A pandemic was identified as inevitable a long time ago; certainly there was no possibility of not knowing that after SARS in 2003. Failure to be ready today is just that, failure. Responsible government requires owning up to the failure.
Second off, yes, novel zoonotic diseases are a problem, but it's a problem because humans are over their carrying capacity, on the one hand, and making that worse, on the other, by using an open-loop resource extraction economy. Trying to stuff all of that big systemic problem into "look at the appalling foreign practice!" isn't what could be described as helping.
Thirdly, blame isn't presently useful. Co-operation is. Minimum standards of data-openness are a reasonable thing to ask prior to co-operation. Admissions of guilt absolutely not.
Pay attention to the agenda.
So there have been a couple possible revisions to R₀ for COVID-19 (it could be almost six), and various people talking about "not until a vaccine", and other people going on about how the lethality rate is less, and so on.
The short answer is that, as yet, we don't know a whole lot. We certainly don't know any of those things with confidence.
The reason R₀ matters is that the degree of immunity you need in the population to extirpate the disease is greater the greater the value for R₀ (or, really, R-effective); the formula is 1 - 1/R₀, so if R₀ is 2 (the flu), you get a lot of benefit from 50% immunity. If R₀ is 12 (low end of measles estimates), it's 92%. If we're looking at a COVID-19 R₀ of 6 (ish), that means, absent other efforts to reduce the effective value, you need 83% of the population to be immune.
Only... we don't know any of that. Everything we've got so far is a rough estimate.
To know R₀ with confidence, you have to antibody test the whole population. (with the antibody test we have not yet got!) You have to go back and test the tissue samples that weren't kept from folks who died of pneumonia in March. You have to do a lot of work there simply hasn't been time to do. (We do not, for example, know how much immune response amounts to functional immunity, or how long it lasts. We can't know that; it takes time to find that out.) Once you know R₀ with confidence, you know how effective the vaccine has to be; if R₀ is as high as the folks thinking there's been an enormous number of asymptomatic cases implicitly think it is, any vaccine has to be nearly perfect to be effective. ("can we create a vaccine at all?" doesn't have an empirical answer yet, either.)
Then you have to look at a few things other than "got well"; what happens when you catch it again? Is the immune system panic reaction worse? Has your immune function been generally compromised, as it will be with the flu or measles? Do mild cases confer immunity? Do any cases confer immunity?
If you want to plan, you need to be able to answer all of those questions. Nobody can answer those questions today; a lot of work needs to be done first.
So, really; isolate enough, and long enough, that the rate at which people are dying is decreasing. We can measure that. Make sure there's enough testing to tell what the rate of people dying really is, that the measure we're taking is accurate. Support efforts to get enough information to plan. Don't go trying to plan when we don't know anything.
If you have to plan -- if you just can't cope with not planning -- the only thing to plan for right now is the Uncommon Cold; in an environment with no transmission barriers, you get it every year, there's no vaccine, there's no direct treatment, and it's got at least a one percent chance of killing you every time you catch it.
The transmissions barriers are not only important, they're long term. Minimum time to a vaccine is something like a year. (There's no way to test a vaccine that doesn't involve waiting to see what happens over time to the immune response of the test subjects.) Probable time is much more like "at least two years". This just isn't a short term problem. Getting through it absolutely involves making large changes to social structures and institutions.
Which I found out via twitter, I wrote my MP.
From: Graydon
To: Raj.Saini@parl.gc.ca
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: increasing COVID-19 test capacity
Reply-To: graydonish@gmail.com
Hello!
So I'm one of your constituents and I can do a little bit of math.
It is critically important that we ramp up COVID-19 testing capacity as fast as possible. Not "as fast as could be done in regular circumstances", but as fast as we can do it. It is past time to recognize the depth and severity of the emergency we face.
That means finding a way to have research labs support and supplement the existing public testing labs by running tests immediately, not after a lengthy accreditation process. This means relaxing regulations; this means taking a small risk of tests not being run properly to avoid the certain overload of our health care system. I have no doubt that standard tests already developed in public health labs can be run by highly skilled technicians from research labs under the full supervision of the public health labs, without requiring that research lab techs go through the normal accreditation process. Perfect in six weeks is useless; it has to be in place and running now.
Last month would have been a lot better. It was entirely obvious last month from what was happening in Korea and Taiwan what an effective response would look like. Canada hasn't done this and it's going to hurt us badly and you, sir, are among those personally responsible for this lapse.
It means going abroad for low-cost, quick-response kits such as those being developed by Institut Pasteur, paying the licensing fees, and getting domestic production ramped up like there was a war on. Canada lost under a percent of the then-total population in the Great War; we're looking at losing much more than that in one year if the health care system goes down. This situation is much worse than a war.
So far, the Canadian public response has been marked by vacillation and incompetence from our elected leaders; there's been far, far too much waffling and far, far too much worry about the markets, rather than how to keep absolutely everybody housed and fed for the year or two before we can put an economy back together. An economy with much more primary manufacturing and no fossil carbon extraction, because if we have the means to keep everybody alive we can totally decarbonize while we're about rebuilding things in a more robust form than the current capital-optimizing long supply chains. That'll keep everybody alive for much longer than a year or two.
Vehemently,
signature and address elided
So we're at least twelve months to a vaccine that maybe can't be created. If it can be created, eighteen months wouldn't be surprising. We don't have any strong expectation that having had COVID-19 makes you immune, or immune to next year's strain.
It's looking a whole lot like are no economic choices between full collectivism -- the masses of unemployed will be fed and housed and cared for out of public funds -- and the Bad Place.
I expect this to start showing up in the general political awareness in about a week.
We're all used to air travel and the sort of world where you can go from England to Australia in a short count of hours; being six hours late is a significant annoyance.
Before that, it was steamships; there was a set schedule, and you were more or less good for arrival to the day.
Before that, it's the age of sail; you don't have weather forecasting, you don't have wireless, you don't have any prospect of knowing just what is going to happen. Pirates? could be. So you provision as well as you can, you stock spare spars and cordage and sailcloth, and you don't make detailed plans. You know where you intend to go and you're going to have stuff to deal with along the way.
That's pretty much where we are now; we don't know how things are going to work out with the pandemic, we don't know when or if there will be a vaccine, we don't know how to run the economy in quarantine, and dealing with something indifferent to money or the exercise of power is an outside context problem for pretty much everybody in the halls of power in the Anglosphere. There's going to be a learning experience.
So, here we are: today, we can't any of us make a detailed plan with a timeline. We're back in the age of sail, checking the spare spars and the cordage, being generous to distressed fellow mariners (because it could be us tomorrow), and doing our best to deal with the events our circumstances present.
That has sufficed prosperity before; it may well suffice prosperity again, even if we do all have to make a concerted effort to get used to new rules and approaches.
Herbert Hoover reports that Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, advised him at the start of the Great Depression to “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.”
If you replace "liquidate" with "decarbonize", that's not a bad policy statement.
Decarbonize labour, decarbonize stocks, decarbonize the farmers, decarbonize real estate.
There's a global demand crash going on right now, in response to a pandemic. It's not going to go away quickly; borders are going to be shut, long, complex supply chains are going to contract or truncate, and a whole lot of people will be out of work as various segments of activity are shut down to limit the spread of disease. Even if nothing else goes wrong (we've got trade wars, an oil price war, the prospect of quite distinct financial crises in the US and China, and Brexit all in the offing) that's going to produce at least the Greater Recession. It's going to take significant public spending to put the economy back into a functioning state.
Putting that spending into the existing economy is obvious malfeasance; everybody knows the Oil Empire is over, everybody knows the bill is due for the Carbon Binge, and everyone wants a future they can survive in. Put all that inevitable public spending into decarbonizing and there's some possibility of people believing in some survivable, improving future.
It'd need to go along with a strongly value-driven[1] economic policy and a commitment to egalitarian outcomes (meaning income and asset caps; ten and five hundred times the least of the mean or median income, along with an associated (and necessary!) return of effective taxation on the rich), rather than the "keep the loot" system we have now. Some planning is in order; that's OK, because we've got several months before we can even hope that the pandemic will have been resolved.
[1] Value-driven economic policy is about an economy that returns value; value is the ratio of benefit to cost. Profit maximization destroys value, because to get your profit up, you have either deliver less benefit or raise the price you charge. Something about restricting market interactions to peer entities gets involved, too; for example anyone who thinks there's a free negotiation of terms between a human individual and the phone company is advised to avoid operating heavy machinery.
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