We Can Work It Out - Politics & Philosophy | Page 103 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

lovelyritametermaid said
Errr no thanks– and why just Western civilization? No offense, but that statement just sounds ridiculous to me. Anarchy is foolish and is never the answer.

I’m not fond of Eastern civilization but Western civilization is the one i live in.

As for Anarchy, it depends on how it’s achieved. If it’s achieved through a violent Revolution , then it’ll likely fail but if it’s achieved by the government declaring bankruptcy, then it’ll likely work.

The lockdowns are a temporary solution as stated by health officials and epidemiologists on multiple occasions and is meant to be utilized as a tool to buy them more time while they work on finding a better solution to defeating the virus. And how are people supposed to even survive in lockdown mode with the economy and the government out of the works? People would frickin’ starve and everything would just be utter chaos! And how are health officials and scientists supposed to do anything to aid in the dissipation of the pandemic if the economy is collapsed? If anything what you’re wishing for will just make everything 10x worse.

The government gives everyone UBI until it can no longer sustain itself and has to declare bankruptcy and once they do so, everyone’s free.

More people will die if Western civilization has to frickin’ rebuild from the ground up if it collapses. A complete redo of civilization isn’t going to do anything to help the dissipation of the pandemic– Western civilization needs to stay intact now more than ever if this virus is to ever be defeated.

It’ll take quite awhile for Western civilization to collapse and by then, the virus should be long gone.

QuarryMan said
Firstly, DO, you’re confusing anarchy with anarchism. Anarchism is a broad term for anti-authoritarian and anti-state political theory, anarchy is a broad term simply disorder or chaos in the absence of the state. If you want to learn more about anarchism, I’d recommend this reading list, but I can assure you actual anarchists do not simply advocate for Max Max-style chaos or the absence of government of any kind. In fact, the distinction between the state and government is one of the key tenets of anarchist theory.

Interesting, i never realized there was a difference.

Maybe your plan is for governments to pay out so much in UBI that they bankrupt themselves and then collapse, leaving behind a space for nebulously-defined ‘anarchy’ to take its place. But in reality, unless this happened to a majority of world governments all in quick succession, all that would happen is that world powers like the US, Russia or China would simply step in and establish a puppet government loyal to themselves, as has happened so many times before when governments lose control of their economy and/or their territory. Now, anyone who knows me knows I am not the biggest fan of the USA, but would you really rather be under the rule of Russia or China? Their governments aren’t exactly cuddly, even by Trump’s standards.

I’ll admit that this would only be practical if the whole world did it simultaneously. As much as i dislike our 2 political parties, i’d rather have Trump or Biden any day over someone like Putin. Even if we got lucky and got Canada or the UK puppeting us, it ruins the whole point of deliberately driving ourselves to bankruptcy.

You’ve said yourself that there is enormous wealth inequality

This is due to our system of crony capitalism where the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer because the rich can afford to pass laws that benefit them.

and there is also racial tensions

This is due to a variety of factors but one of them is that the Democratic party fully embraces identity politics and calls people like Donald Trump Neo Nazis, which causes the far right to feel like they’re being oppressed, creating genuine Neo Nazis who push the endless cycle.

political polarisation

But extending the lockdown “permanently” would fix that. While there’s certainly a massive divide on how to deal with the virus, even the most far left statists will be begging for it to end by the time it finally does.

a lack of welfare provisions for the poorest in society, and oh, there’s something I’m forgetting…. oh, that’s it – a worldwide pandemic! You say the pandemic would be long gone by the time such a collapse would happen, but if you had a deteriorating healthcare system, collapsing infrastructure, massive homelessness and a lack of organisation to respond to these problems, it seems a resurgence in the virus, or the emergence of a new deadly virus, would be extremely likely.

While it may seem like an unusual stance from someone who’s in favor of Medicare for all, a societal collapse would lead to the collapse of insurance, meaning that healthcare prices would become affordable. As for homelessness, without the government, there’s nothing stopping you from bunking out in your local state house.

As for how we’d respond to the virus without government, i don’t know. We could take a more Ron Paul stance and argue that it’s up to each community to decide what to do but that has the downside of just turning our federal government into thousands of mini governments. Or we could let each person decide but that also comes with it’s problems.

Well, firstly, saying that Chinese isn’t a race so therefore using the term ‘Chinese virus’ can’t be inciting racism isn’t exactly true. ‘Chinese’ can refer broadly to people who are citizens of China as well as people who are ethnically Chinese, but the latter use is pretty common, especially abroad. I go to a university with thousands of international students, many Chinese, and I’ve witnessed firsthand the way certain people started treating them as the virus became more serious. Do we know that the use of the term ‘Chinese virus’ increases such discrimination? No, but intuitively it’s rather obvious that if the types likely to treat them this way have the connection between being Chinese and having the virus reinforced and validated by media and authority figures, it’ll only encourage them. It’s obviously unfair to hold the Chinese people to account for the actions of a government they have no control over as you said yourself, so why address the disease in a way that probably harms them? It’s not like ‘coronavirus’ is a particularly hard term to memorise, is it…

And on the point about the disinfectant comment, your response doesn’t really substantiate that it’s fake news. Him basing it off ‘something he heard an expert say’, well, does he remember which expert, and when? Because I’d be seriously concerned if there were ‘experts’ going around saying this stuff. Yes, there are no stupid questions, but he’s the President of the United States, and more to the point he has an army of extremely dedicated followers who treat everything he says like gospel. It is basic common sense that you shouldn’t inject disinfectant into yourself, but if he had to ask the question, couldn’t he have done so in a private meeting where his ignorance wouldn’t have been broadcast to the whole world? I’m sure if a politician like AOC said a similar thing, the right wing press would have a field day, and rightly so. Is it that hard to accept that it’s just a very dumb comment? For what it’s worth, I think Trump is actually a lot smarter than most of his opponents make him out to be, but that doesn’t mean he’s immune to bouts of complete ignorance. 

Beatlebug said

@50yearslate said
They weren’t the ones who dismissed the pandemic response team

I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the pandemic response team was absorbed into other parts of governmental health agencies, part of some boring bureaucratic rejiggering, probably for budget reasons if I were to guess.

If you don’t even know what you’re talking about, why even comment?

and released a flurry of contradictory statements and attitudes about the virus, including the fabrication of statistics, inaccurate comparisons to the flu

Fabrication of statistics? I’d not heard about that. Pray, where have you found these fabricated statistics? I’d genuinely be interested to know.

Based on more recent data I’ve heard about, the death rate is around the same as a bad flu… it’s just that this particular virus spreads so much more easily than a regular bad flu, so more people are likely to get it and therefore more people are likely to die from it, just based on sheer numbers.

The death rate for influenza is 0.1 percent. I would appreciate a link to the data you’ve “heard about” that shows COVID-19 is around the same, because I can’t find it.

Another thing to take into consideration is that this virus is brand new. We have no idea what the longterm consequences will look like, if any. This is not the same thing as the flu. 

and of course the suggestion that we inject disinfectant into ourselves.

I hate to burst your bubble, but this is fake news: President Trump was merely asking a question at a press briefing whether it was possible to administer disinfectants internally, based on something he’d heard some expert texpert say in a presentation — a bit of brain vomit, if you will, that the media blew far out of proportion. I hold that there’s no such thing as a stupid question (Does the earth go around the sun? Is the earth actually round? Should women be able to vote? Are the Rolling Stones better than the Beatles? Okay, that last one actually is stupid ), although the president absolutely did the wrong thing saying later that it was “sarcasm” (bruh wtf? That wasn’t sarcasm, it was an honest, albeit absentminded, question. Liar).

  

There is a such thing as a stupid question, and that was immensely stupid. Inject people with disinfectant? Wow, what a great idea president Trump former reality television star! Nobody in the history of medicine could have ever thought about something like that before! I wonder why that’s not been done already.

Coming from a seven year old it wouldn’t have been stupid, but Trump is not a young child. 

Dark Overlord said
That sounds fair. If you want your freewill, you should have to give up your right to obtain medical services. This way, those who prefer safety will get it, those who prefer their freewill get it, and health care workers don’t have to worry about surges of people needing medical assistance, putting both their lives and their patients lives at risk.

Add UBI and free Medicare into the equation for those who prefer their safety and we can create a scenario where practically everyone’s self quarantining without the need for a government lockdown.

I really like this idea. Put trackers on every single American citizen and track where they go and whether or not they are quarantining and following the suggestions. Maybe even put a camera on them so we can know if they’re wearing masks when they should and washing their hands often. The people who don’t listen are kept from getting medical attention. We could take out a bunch of stupid people without resorting to eugenics and it would keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed. A win win solution, I’d say. 

@50yearslate Completely agree, but I think Bebu’s point was that if you catch covid-19, you’re about as likely to die as you would be with the flu, not that the total annual death toll is going to be the same. The reason the latter is so much higher for covid-19 is because it’s so much more contagious, though the other factors you mentioned obviously influence this as well. This is measured by the R metric, which represents the number of people an average person infects – for covid-19 the R is around 2.2*. This makes coronavirus more contagious than the flu. 

Is this point true, though? Well, it’s hard to tell because although the CDC estimates that between 29,000 and 59,000 die from the flu in the US each flu season*, it’s less clear how many people in total catch it. By that metric, coronavirus has already hit much worse in the US in just three months, though of course we won’t properly know yet just how bad it’ll get. 

* Source: https://www.businessinsider.co…..&IR=T

** Source: https://www.health.com/conditi…..every-year

I remember reading earlier in the year that it’d be 2021 before a vaccine was developed, though maybe with so many resources being poured into it it’ll happen faster than that. We’ve also gotta hope that some selfish prick doesn’t develop it in a private lab and then claim the intellectual property rights and make millions of selling governments the right to use it.