8 ms·

The more I learn about the Plague of Justinian the happier I am that our current plague is relatively "mild". I am also amazed how much of an impact these kinds

The more I learn about the Plague of Justinian the happier I am that our current plague is relatively "mild". I am also amazed how much of an impact these kinds of things can have on the world. I wonder what the long term fallout of the current situation will be (will there be a large one?). Death tolls are nowhere near past plagues, but the lockdowns have had a large economic impact for some countries. It's an interesting thought experiment, what do people here think?

ngold 6y ago
>Plague of Justinian: the bubonic plague's first-known visit to Europe, in 541 CE. The first wave of plague killed 20 percent of the population of Constantinople. Infection also devastated the trade port of Alexandria. Over the next 160 years, wave after wave of plague may have carried away up to half the population of the Byzantine Empire. Imagine looking at a crowd and 1/5 to 1/2 of everyone is just gone.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  It shrank the empire so much that after the war with Persia, the Levant was heavily depopulated. ...and it was that void that the army of Mohammed filled in the rise of Islam when they conquered the Levant, Egypt, Persia, Messopotamia, and the rest of North Africa in a short period. Those plagues tremendously changed history. Historyofbyzantium podcast is stellar, btw.
  - ngold 6y ago
    On a side note. Mike Duncan's been silent since april 7th. At least on revolutionspodcast.com.
- vondur 6y ago
  The plague and it’s after effects is what basically of what some people call the Dark Ages and is a pretty clear line to demarcate late ancient to the Middle Ages.
- foobarian 6y ago
  What is it about that time period that made the plague so contagious? Lack of antibiotics? Not knowing how it spreads? I would think that it doesn't take a modern scientist to figure out not to let rats into the house, and this was possibly not that hard to achieve even with ancient materials. So what gives?
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Keeping rodents out of places isn't really all that easy.
    - Avicebron 6y ago
      Keeping the fleas out of those places isn't easy either. As far as I know that's the most commonly accepted theory as to where this came from and how it spread.
  - emiliobumachar 6y ago
    Germ theory really seems obvious after it was hammered into our collective skulls a thousand times. Yes, it does take a modern person, though not a scientist, to figure out not to let rats into the house.
  - pasabagi 6y ago
    I think there were a number of factors. Widespread instability led to people clustering in densely packed cities, where you could live behind walls. This was obviously good if you want to avoid being sold into slavery by a roving gang of barbarians, obviously very bad if you want to avoid catching diseases from the ten neighbors you have in your tiny room. Grain production and shipment was pretty centralized, and as it so happened, the disease turned up first in Alexandria, which was the biggest port of Egypt, which was the bread basket of the empire. So with the grain came the rats, then with the rats, the plague, and since Egypt produced a large portion of the grain eaten in the aforementioned overcrowded cities, y. pestis was delivered directly to all the places where it could do the most damage. As other commentators have noted, it's really hard to keep rats out of something they want to be in. Even harder if you live in insanely crowded wooden tenement blocks, as most people did at the time. I also don't think it would have been particularly obvious that the plague was coming from the fleas - the buboes turn up on lymph nodes, not on the flea bites. Worse still, it's also contagious through coughing. So even if they had somehow (and I think it would be impossible) kept the rats out, they would probably still be at risk. The roman empire at this place was pretty dirty, nobody was bathing, dirt floors were the norm, and honestly, y. pestis is a really nasty disease. If you have it today, you're really likely to die. I don't know if it would have been technically possible to stop it given the technology of the day, even if you had all the requisite knowledge. Keeping the rats/fleas out would likely be impossible short of literally burning most cities to the ground - and because of the disease essentially being delivered to all the major population centers, by the time anybody was aware, it would probably be too late anyway.
jvm_ 6y ago
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispatches-1918 https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispa... I was running while listening... The US president negotiating the terms of Germany's WW1 surrender/repayments was trying to get a fairer deal, and France's president was negotiating for German punishment. In the days long negotiations, the US president fell ill (possibly with Spanish Flu), and was much weaker/combative when he returned to the negotiating table. Maybe if the flu hadn't hit him, Germany would have gotten a fairer deal and not felt unfairly treated which was a cause of WW2. Also India's rebellion from the British was during that time, the British suppressing the rebellion's and the added pressures from the flu ravaging their country helped move that process along. I wonder if the same could be said about the George Floyd protests. Part of it was the timing of everyone being off work/unemployed and having the time to go protest.
- est31 6y ago
  That's an interesting story. Another component why the Versailles treaty was so harsh was that Germany had made a similarly harsh treaty with Russia before that, so the western powers gave Germany the same treatment that Germany gave Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk Ultimately, the Ottoman empire received probably the most harsh treatment of all, although they were the only country out of the group of Germany, Austria-Hungary and them which managed to reclaim some of the lost territory and keep it up until today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_S%C3%A8vres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_S%C3%A8vres
  - masklinn 6y ago
    The treaty germany imposed on france in the war of '70 was no less harsh either. Versailles really wasn't that harsh by the standards of the time, the germans just got good propaganda out of it, for some reason.
    - keldaris 6y ago
      Although the issue is complex, a very dominant part of the "some reason" was that the German army never really experienced an unequivocal final military defeat (although it was clear to the high command that the war could no longer be won, this was far from obvious to the population) and remained in effective control of Germany, allowing them to consciously disseminate propaganda for their own ends as well as taking full advantage of the ensuing popular unrest after the end of the war.
evan_ 6y ago
> I wonder what the long term fallout of the current situation will be (will there be a large one?). I'm thinking that the rest of our lives will basically be dealing with the fallout of these last six months in one way or another.
- balladeer 6y ago
  You meant to say dealing with - indirect consequences such as a very late recovery of economy, social habits changed for ever, - or literally keep dealing with this pandemic (resurfacing again and again), - or direct consequences such has ravaging other parts of body in an unseen manner which would become seen later? Of course there could be and would be all of these but anything that would be very pronounced kind of a single major consequence?
  - evan_ 6y ago
    I would say all of these and more.
pasabagi 6y ago
I remember thinking when coronavirus was a new thing that it was an almost perfect mix of harmless and deadly, harmless enough that most people would carry it asymptomatically, deadly enough that it would reliably kill the vulnerable. I figured that something like bubonic plague, which is absolutely lethal in comparison, wouldn't get very far against modern surveillance tactics and medical practices. Since then, my estimations of our ability to deal with pandemics has taken a few hard knocks. It seems to me that even a comparatively nasty disease, with correspondingly obvious symptoms would probably be able to reach pandemic status, just because so many countries are a chaotic mess. Obviously, even with a South Korea level competent response, I guess it's possible to have a disease that stays asymptomatic but remains contagious, then kills a large number of carriers after some length of time. Doesn't seem likely though - contagion more or less involves some kind of symptom (sneezing, coughing, etc) and it's hard to imagine a body developing a really high viral load or bacterial population without becoming feverish.
- staplers 6y ago
  something like bubonic plague, which is absolutely lethal in comparison, wouldn't get very far against modern surveillance tactics and medical practices. This is probably true given the drastic measures used for ebola, MERS outbreaks. If the mortality rate of covid was 50% you wouldn't hear people bitching about masks, hoaxes, fake science, etc.
- wahern 6y ago
  > Doesn't seem likely though - contagion more or less involves some kind of symptom (sneezing, coughing, etc) and it's hard to imagine a body developing a really high viral load or bacterial population without becoming feverish. AFAIU, the profile depends on the class of virus, though obviously not all hosts behave similarly. Evolutionary strategies differ. From the MIT COVID-19 page (https://medical.mit.edu/faqs/COVID-19 https://medical.mit.edu/faqs/COVID-19): > evidence indicates that people who are infected with 2019-nCoV may be at their most contagious in the 48–72 hours before symptoms are noticeable. In addition, it is now estimated that up to 25 percent of infected individuals remain asymptomatic and may unwittingly infect others. Knowing what we know now about significant aerosol transmission from merely speaking, it should be obvious now that coughing or sneezing isn't a prerequisite for highly contagious respiratory viruses. It should have been obvious before as we already knew that viral host reservoirs often remain asymptomatic. Bats, for example, are common reservoirs for respiratory viruses because a) they roost in dense groups, b) have strong selective pressure for consistently high function (flight is exhausting), and c) they've evolved immune systems that can handle a high viral load (a consequence of (a) and (b)), so don't often exhibit symptoms. I would presume many bird species make good reservoirs for similar reasons, though birds aren't mammals, which might complicate jumping to humans. IIRC, a friend of mine, who had been researching rhinoviruses for several years at the time, explained to me that the coughing and sneezing fits from some types of cold viruses are caused by viral fragments rather than primary infection, in such cases symptoms peak at the tail-end of infection as fragments build up, and the fits might even be incidental/accidental from an evolutionary perspective. Some human cold viruses are specialized to infect children, who usually exhibit no symptoms or, at worst, a runny nose (again, latter might be incidental). Asymptomatic respiratory infections run rampant among children.
nwatson 6y ago
I think the fallout in certain religious communities, especially American Protestant Evangelicalism, will be very interesting. Before you dismiss the group as irrelevant to mainstream American life and the current COVID-19 pandemic and the present U.S. political situation, consider that: - the voter turnout for this group may be proportionately large in the 2020 November election - components of this group form a large part of U.S. president Trump's most loyal base - this group is a key contributor to Trump having been elected for his present term - components have been increasingly anti-science for several decades, prone to believe in conspiracy theories instead - components of this group are among the least likely to consider seriously the established/being-established scientific causes, countermeasures, treatments, and prevention measures for COVID-19 If I were a sociologist the intersection between this community, COVID-19, and the hopefully-soon-to-end Trump presidency would be my study area for the next 5 or 10 years. I am Evangelical myself (though pro-science, evolution-friendly, I'm not too proud to be a monkey). American Protestant Evangelicalism is at an interesting crossroads and is deeply divided. Old-style denominations (large formal groupings of individual churches with legal-entity centralized management) are losing ground to "Independent Network Charismatic" (INC) Christianity [1], of which the "New Apostolic Reformation" (NAR) is a big part [2]. The INC and NAR are decentralized and personality-focused, with individual "leaders" promoting their own organizations but aligning themselves with other "leaders" on project-by-project basis. These INC/NAR leaders raise a lot of money, have huge followings extending deep also into a lot of the Pentecostal/Charismatic older denominations, believe God talks directly to them and as a result espouse new "doctrines" and methods to their followers. (Leadership in older denominations on the other hand general rely primarily on the established Bible text as the basis for belief and teaching ... NAR is fast-and-loose with biblical text.) The NAR also believe it's their mandate to "dominate society", the "seven mountains" or spheres of human activity ... e.g., "government", "business", "science/technology", "entertainment", "family", ... a few others. Traditional Evangelicals have diverse views but most do not believe in Christian domination of society. Many view the NAR folks as heretics and dangerous (as do I). This is getting long ... but a Trump loss in 2020 November will drive a lot of NAR adherents to believe they're being persecuted at large. They'll feel the U.S. is losing its "special status" as a uniquely "Christian nation". They don't understand how much worse things can be than they presently are, e.g., Plague-of-Justinian-type calamity is outside the realm of their imagination, so loss of this election and some economic setbacks will feel real large to them ... with unknowable reaction. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Network-Christianity-Independent-Religious/dp/0190635673 https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Network-Christianity-Independent... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTj5IKzmlYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTj5IKzmlYE (a bit esoteric)
autokad 6y ago
there is no doubt covid-19 is a mild pandemic compared to spanish flu and certainly plagues like the Justinian plague. Note spanish flu consensus prior to the outbreak of covid19 was 20% mortality. After march 2000, a few thousand edits put it at 2%, which I am more inclined to believe the 20% side of it. covid19 is somewhere between .5 and 1% (probably). the flu pandemic of 1957 was around .67%. so we literally went through this not long ago, people didnt freak out and destroy their economies for decades like we are trying to do now.
- hvac 6y ago
  That 0.67% was the CFR, not the IFR.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
>>The more I learn about the Plague of Justinian the happier I am that our current plague is relatively "mild". Worst case, AFAIK, is that 2% of the world's population dies with Covid. Say, 5% with no meds and a lot of them are infirm and old people. Hardly crippling, once you realize that it is happening. >>I am also amazed how much of an impact these kinds of things can have on the world. When one 1/2 or 1/3 is dying or risks dying, finances, manpower and willingness go away. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/apr/15/historys-deadliest-pandemics-from-ancient-rome-to-/ https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/apr/15/historys-deadl...
WhompingWindows 6y ago
1. In-person gathering professions will be severely weakened. We should lose around 1/3 of restaurants, concerts will be gone for 18+ months, musicians and many others will have their livelihoods set-back. 2. Internet will be strengthened, anything remote-friendly will be enhanced relative to the before-times. 3. People will handshake MUCH less, hug much less, and generally be less chummy/close. I don't think we can just abandon 18 months of social distancing, it'll be "baked into" us somehow. 4. Mask wearing will become a regular sight forever...I know if I'm sick in future, I'll probably mask up...I never masked up EVER until March 2020. 5. The USA may come to a reckoning and deal with its healthcare, environmental pollution, chronic health problems...or maybe the US will slowly incrementally change and it still won't ever be enough. 6. Personal vehicles will become King once more...mass transit is going to take a MAJOR hit here. 7. A few hundred small, non-elite universities will die out, many of them can NOT afford to stay open and justify MUCH higher costs for a much lower value of "information into head". The pandemic will have pulled up the wool from our eyes on this issue: most education is overpriced. 8. I and many others will experience a lot of depression/loneliness, though I personally do cope with it better than I used to.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Plenty of Resturarants open in NYC right now. I'd say the outdoor dining has given them a strong presence relative to other things than ever before. Hopefully the outdoor dining becomes permanent. Knowing shitty US politics, it might, but transit should not take a hit. [1] I hope the bigger wave in Florida than was in New York helps fix the message here---Florida is hardly a capital of public transit! [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene-theater/614599/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hy...

ngold 6y ago

>Plague of Justinian: the bubonic plague's first-known visit to Europe, in 541 CE. The first wave of plague killed 20 percent of the population of Constantinople. Infection also devastated the trade port of Alexandria. Over the next 160 years, wave after wave of plague may have carried away up to half the population of the Byzantine Empire. Imagine looking at a crowd and 1/5 to 1/2 of everyone is just gone.

koheripbal 6y ago
It shrank the empire so much that after the war with Persia, the Levant was heavily depopulated. ...and it was that void that the army of Mohammed filled in the rise of Islam when they conquered the Levant, Egypt, Persia, Messopotamia, and the rest of North Africa in a short period. Those plagues tremendously changed history. Historyofbyzantium podcast is stellar, btw.
- ngold 6y ago
  On a side note. Mike Duncan's been silent since april 7th. At least on revolutionspodcast.com.
vondur 6y ago
The plague and it’s after effects is what basically of what some people call the Dark Ages and is a pretty clear line to demarcate late ancient to the Middle Ages.
foobarian 6y ago
What is it about that time period that made the plague so contagious? Lack of antibiotics? Not knowing how it spreads? I would think that it doesn't take a modern scientist to figure out not to let rats into the house, and this was possibly not that hard to achieve even with ancient materials. So what gives?
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Keeping rodents out of places isn't really all that easy.
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    Keeping the fleas out of those places isn't easy either. As far as I know that's the most commonly accepted theory as to where this came from and how it spread.
- emiliobumachar 6y ago
  Germ theory really seems obvious after it was hammered into our collective skulls a thousand times. Yes, it does take a modern person, though not a scientist, to figure out not to let rats into the house.
- pasabagi 6y ago
  I think there were a number of factors. Widespread instability led to people clustering in densely packed cities, where you could live behind walls. This was obviously good if you want to avoid being sold into slavery by a roving gang of barbarians, obviously very bad if you want to avoid catching diseases from the ten neighbors you have in your tiny room. Grain production and shipment was pretty centralized, and as it so happened, the disease turned up first in Alexandria, which was the biggest port of Egypt, which was the bread basket of the empire. So with the grain came the rats, then with the rats, the plague, and since Egypt produced a large portion of the grain eaten in the aforementioned overcrowded cities, y. pestis was delivered directly to all the places where it could do the most damage. As other commentators have noted, it's really hard to keep rats out of something they want to be in. Even harder if you live in insanely crowded wooden tenement blocks, as most people did at the time. I also don't think it would have been particularly obvious that the plague was coming from the fleas - the buboes turn up on lymph nodes, not on the flea bites. Worse still, it's also contagious through coughing. So even if they had somehow (and I think it would be impossible) kept the rats out, they would probably still be at risk. The roman empire at this place was pretty dirty, nobody was bathing, dirt floors were the norm, and honestly, y. pestis is a really nasty disease. If you have it today, you're really likely to die. I don't know if it would have been technically possible to stop it given the technology of the day, even if you had all the requisite knowledge. Keeping the rats/fleas out would likely be impossible short of literally burning most cities to the ground - and because of the disease essentially being delivered to all the major population centers, by the time anybody was aware, it would probably be too late anyway.

jvm_ 6y ago

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispatches-1918 https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispa... I was running while listening... The US president negotiating the terms of Germany's WW1 surrender/repayments was trying to get a fairer deal, and France's president was negotiating for German punishment. In the days long negotiations, the US president fell ill (possibly with Spanish Flu), and was much weaker/combative when he returned to the negotiating table. Maybe if the flu hadn't hit him, Germany would have gotten a fairer deal and not felt unfairly treated which was a cause of WW2. Also India's rebellion from the British was during that time, the British suppressing the rebellion's and the added pressures from the flu ravaging their country helped move that process along. I wonder if the same could be said about the George Floyd protests. Part of it was the timing of everyone being off work/unemployed and having the time to go protest.

est31 6y ago
That's an interesting story. Another component why the Versailles treaty was so harsh was that Germany had made a similarly harsh treaty with Russia before that, so the western powers gave Germany the same treatment that Germany gave Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk Ultimately, the Ottoman empire received probably the most harsh treatment of all, although they were the only country out of the group of Germany, Austria-Hungary and them which managed to reclaim some of the lost territory and keep it up until today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_S%C3%A8vres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_S%C3%A8vres
- masklinn 6y ago
  The treaty germany imposed on france in the war of '70 was no less harsh either. Versailles really wasn't that harsh by the standards of the time, the germans just got good propaganda out of it, for some reason.
  - keldaris 6y ago
    Although the issue is complex, a very dominant part of the "some reason" was that the German army never really experienced an unequivocal final military defeat (although it was clear to the high command that the war could no longer be won, this was far from obvious to the population) and remained in effective control of Germany, allowing them to consciously disseminate propaganda for their own ends as well as taking full advantage of the ensuing popular unrest after the end of the war.

evan_ 6y ago

> I wonder what the long term fallout of the current situation will be (will there be a large one?). I'm thinking that the rest of our lives will basically be dealing with the fallout of these last six months in one way or another.

balladeer 6y ago
You meant to say dealing with - indirect consequences such as a very late recovery of economy, social habits changed for ever, - or literally keep dealing with this pandemic (resurfacing again and again), - or direct consequences such has ravaging other parts of body in an unseen manner which would become seen later? Of course there could be and would be all of these but anything that would be very pronounced kind of a single major consequence?
- evan_ 6y ago
  I would say all of these and more.

pasabagi 6y ago

I remember thinking when coronavirus was a new thing that it was an almost perfect mix of harmless and deadly, harmless enough that most people would carry it asymptomatically, deadly enough that it would reliably kill the vulnerable. I figured that something like bubonic plague, which is absolutely lethal in comparison, wouldn't get very far against modern surveillance tactics and medical practices. Since then, my estimations of our ability to deal with pandemics has taken a few hard knocks. It seems to me that even a comparatively nasty disease, with correspondingly obvious symptoms would probably be able to reach pandemic status, just because so many countries are a chaotic mess. Obviously, even with a South Korea level competent response, I guess it's possible to have a disease that stays asymptomatic but remains contagious, then kills a large number of carriers after some length of time. Doesn't seem likely though - contagion more or less involves some kind of symptom (sneezing, coughing, etc) and it's hard to imagine a body developing a really high viral load or bacterial population without becoming feverish.

staplers 6y ago
something like bubonic plague, which is absolutely lethal in comparison, wouldn't get very far against modern surveillance tactics and medical practices. This is probably true given the drastic measures used for ebola, MERS outbreaks. If the mortality rate of covid was 50% you wouldn't hear people bitching about masks, hoaxes, fake science, etc.
wahern 6y ago
> Doesn't seem likely though - contagion more or less involves some kind of symptom (sneezing, coughing, etc) and it's hard to imagine a body developing a really high viral load or bacterial population without becoming feverish. AFAIU, the profile depends on the class of virus, though obviously not all hosts behave similarly. Evolutionary strategies differ. From the MIT COVID-19 page (https://medical.mit.edu/faqs/COVID-19 https://medical.mit.edu/faqs/COVID-19): > evidence indicates that people who are infected with 2019-nCoV may be at their most contagious in the 48–72 hours before symptoms are noticeable. In addition, it is now estimated that up to 25 percent of infected individuals remain asymptomatic and may unwittingly infect others. Knowing what we know now about significant aerosol transmission from merely speaking, it should be obvious now that coughing or sneezing isn't a prerequisite for highly contagious respiratory viruses. It should have been obvious before as we already knew that viral host reservoirs often remain asymptomatic. Bats, for example, are common reservoirs for respiratory viruses because a) they roost in dense groups, b) have strong selective pressure for consistently high function (flight is exhausting), and c) they've evolved immune systems that can handle a high viral load (a consequence of (a) and (b)), so don't often exhibit symptoms. I would presume many bird species make good reservoirs for similar reasons, though birds aren't mammals, which might complicate jumping to humans. IIRC, a friend of mine, who had been researching rhinoviruses for several years at the time, explained to me that the coughing and sneezing fits from some types of cold viruses are caused by viral fragments rather than primary infection, in such cases symptoms peak at the tail-end of infection as fragments build up, and the fits might even be incidental/accidental from an evolutionary perspective. Some human cold viruses are specialized to infect children, who usually exhibit no symptoms or, at worst, a runny nose (again, latter might be incidental). Asymptomatic respiratory infections run rampant among children.

nwatson 6y ago

I think the fallout in certain religious communities, especially American Protestant Evangelicalism, will be very interesting. Before you dismiss the group as irrelevant to mainstream American life and the current COVID-19 pandemic and the present U.S. political situation, consider that: - the voter turnout for this group may be proportionately large in the 2020 November election - components of this group form a large part of U.S. president Trump's most loyal base - this group is a key contributor to Trump having been elected for his present term - components have been increasingly anti-science for several decades, prone to believe in conspiracy theories instead - components of this group are among the least likely to consider seriously the established/being-established scientific causes, countermeasures, treatments, and prevention measures for COVID-19 If I were a sociologist the intersection between this community, COVID-19, and the hopefully-soon-to-end Trump presidency would be my study area for the next 5 or 10 years. I am Evangelical myself (though pro-science, evolution-friendly, I'm not too proud to be a monkey). American Protestant Evangelicalism is at an interesting crossroads and is deeply divided. Old-style denominations (large formal groupings of individual churches with legal-entity centralized management) are losing ground to "Independent Network Charismatic" (INC) Christianity [1], of which the "New Apostolic Reformation" (NAR) is a big part [2]. The INC and NAR are decentralized and personality-focused, with individual "leaders" promoting their own organizations but aligning themselves with other "leaders" on project-by-project basis. These INC/NAR leaders raise a lot of money, have huge followings extending deep also into a lot of the Pentecostal/Charismatic older denominations, believe God talks directly to them and as a result espouse new "doctrines" and methods to their followers. (Leadership in older denominations on the other hand general rely primarily on the established Bible text as the basis for belief and teaching ... NAR is fast-and-loose with biblical text.) The NAR also believe it's their mandate to "dominate society", the "seven mountains" or spheres of human activity ... e.g., "government", "business", "science/technology", "entertainment", "family", ... a few others. Traditional Evangelicals have diverse views but most do not believe in Christian domination of society. Many view the NAR folks as heretics and dangerous (as do I). This is getting long ... but a Trump loss in 2020 November will drive a lot of NAR adherents to believe they're being persecuted at large. They'll feel the U.S. is losing its "special status" as a uniquely "Christian nation". They don't understand how much worse things can be than they presently are, e.g., Plague-of-Justinian-type calamity is outside the realm of their imagination, so loss of this election and some economic setbacks will feel real large to them ... with unknowable reaction. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Network-Christianity-Independent-Religious/dp/0190635673 https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Network-Christianity-Independent... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTj5IKzmlYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTj5IKzmlYE (a bit esoteric)

autokad 6y ago

there is no doubt covid-19 is a mild pandemic compared to spanish flu and certainly plagues like the Justinian plague. Note spanish flu consensus prior to the outbreak of covid19 was 20% mortality. After march 2000, a few thousand edits put it at 2%, which I am more inclined to believe the 20% side of it. covid19 is somewhere between .5 and 1% (probably). the flu pandemic of 1957 was around .67%. so we literally went through this not long ago, people didnt freak out and destroy their economies for decades like we are trying to do now.

hvac 6y ago
That 0.67% was the CFR, not the IFR.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

>>The more I learn about the Plague of Justinian the happier I am that our current plague is relatively "mild". Worst case, AFAIK, is that 2% of the world's population dies with Covid. Say, 5% with no meds and a lot of them are infirm and old people. Hardly crippling, once you realize that it is happening. >>I am also amazed how much of an impact these kinds of things can have on the world. When one 1/2 or 1/3 is dying or risks dying, finances, manpower and willingness go away. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/apr/15/historys-deadliest-pandemics-from-ancient-rome-to-/ https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/apr/15/historys-deadl...

WhompingWindows 6y ago

1. In-person gathering professions will be severely weakened. We should lose around 1/3 of restaurants, concerts will be gone for 18+ months, musicians and many others will have their livelihoods set-back. 2. Internet will be strengthened, anything remote-friendly will be enhanced relative to the before-times. 3. People will handshake MUCH less, hug much less, and generally be less chummy/close. I don't think we can just abandon 18 months of social distancing, it'll be "baked into" us somehow. 4. Mask wearing will become a regular sight forever...I know if I'm sick in future, I'll probably mask up...I never masked up EVER until March 2020. 5. The USA may come to a reckoning and deal with its healthcare, environmental pollution, chronic health problems...or maybe the US will slowly incrementally change and it still won't ever be enough. 6. Personal vehicles will become King once more...mass transit is going to take a MAJOR hit here. 7. A few hundred small, non-elite universities will die out, many of them can NOT afford to stay open and justify MUCH higher costs for a much lower value of "information into head". The pandemic will have pulled up the wool from our eyes on this issue: most education is overpriced. 8. I and many others will experience a lot of depression/loneliness, though I personally do cope with it better than I used to.

Ericson2314 6y ago
Plenty of Resturarants open in NYC right now. I'd say the outdoor dining has given them a strong presence relative to other things than ever before. Hopefully the outdoor dining becomes permanent. Knowing shitty US politics, it might, but transit should not take a hit. [1] I hope the bigger wave in Florida than was in New York helps fix the message here---Florida is hardly a capital of public transit! [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene-theater/614599/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hy...