4 ms·

I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that Vietnam took all appropriate precautions and in a country with 95 million people they’ve only had about 35 to

I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that Vietnam took all appropriate precautions and in a country with 95 million people they’ve only had about 35 total deaths of covid. And they experienced positive economic growth this year. Meanwhile in the USA I think wealthy people were worried that these measures would harm the economy so we let states and counties all decide on their own how to handle things. And the issue of mask wearing became weirdly politicized. And actually I learned recently that in 1988 George HW Bush gave this passionate speech about how the USA needed to fight climate change head on... but by the time republicans got the presidency again the party sided with oil companies on a pro fossil fuel message. Why do we politicize science like this? Or is it inherently political? Is it just that lobbyists influence political parties differently and so issues that have nothing to do with Democrat or Republican end up getting attached to those identities? I don’t really know what the answer is. But I do think if the USA had all taken the science seriously and did not politicize the issue we’d have at least 100,000 more Americans alive today.

jfoster 6y ago
US politics has become so tribal that it's pulling new issues in. Anything that makes it into the media will accordingly have two opposing stances on it. I think the real question is, why is US politics becoming even more extreme than it already was?
- prawn 6y ago
  Could it be anything other than the internet? Social media, YouTube, ease of publishing, etc. Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two?
  - krapp 6y ago
    >Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two? No. Not a thing. Certainly not the election of an African American President, the Republicans normalizing conspiracy theories like birtherism in a cynical race-baiting attempt to regain power through neo-revolutionary proxy movements like the Tea Party, or the election of an extremely divisive President who pushed the Overton window of American political and social discourse so far to the right that beliefs which would have been too insane for talk radio are now standard discourse. Definitely do not look too deeply at American culture itself and study the deeply rooted, endemic issues which have been festering for decades and only allowed to burst forth in a pusculent river of hate and paranoia when the lunatics started running the asylum. It has to be social media and cannot be anything but social media. Everything is Google's fault.
    - prawn 6y ago
      I'm not American so I overlooked the US-specific question in my response. Things seem more divided in Australia too. We also have social media... A lot of what you have raised are topics/movements/messages pushed/strengthened via social media, easier publishing, etc. I didn't raise social media to blame Google; I was thinking of what these tools enable alongside the cooking blogs and DIY videos.
      - krapp 6y ago
        OK. I was specifically talking about US politics. Although now that I think about it, a lot of what I mentioned could also be traced back to 9/11 - calling Obama a crypto-muslim wouldn't have been a valid way of spreading FUD about his intentions otherwise. There is also apparently something of a global right-wing/right-populist movement underway. I don't know about Australia, though. As far as social media goes, I see it as a catalyst - it doesn't create the problems but it does help their effect spread. Deplatforming and regulation of social media might help stop the spread (although I support the former and not the latter) but we still as a society have to address the underlying issues. Something like QAnon doesn't take off simply because it's a viral meme, but because it resonates with people's existing fears and beliefs.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    > Around the end of the year, a bomb was defused outside the office of San Francisco’s chief health officer, Dr. William C. Hassler. Not 2020, surprisingly. 1918. Idiots have been getting upset about mask mandates for a while.
aeternum 6y ago
I think the root question is actually political. It comes down to: What's the correct tradeoff between an individual's right to life/liberty vs. well-being of the whole/society? People fall on different sides of that tradeoff all the time, and that question is at the core of almost all political disagreements.
- tremon 6y ago
  I don't believe that's the question that drives the US. The question that drives the US seems to be "how little money can we spend on the rest of society while still maintaining our own billions"?
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  It seems to me not so much "life and liberty" but rather "life OR liberty" - and somehow liberty is winning.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    Consider the quote: "Give me liberty or give me death" Liberty winning may seem counterintuitive but not everyone sees it that way. Most wars have been fought by people that value their form of liberty over death.
    - krapp 6y ago
      >Most wars have been fought by people that value their form of liberty over death. Most wars have been fought by conscripts, slaves or soldiers who otherwise only wanted to come back home alive, pawns in chess games played with human lives by the elite powers. Even the American Revolution was for the most part a tax revolt by the wealthy against the British Crown. And none of those wars have been against the tyranny of medicine and science. Benjamin Franklin, the man responsible for the famous (and almost universally misapplied) quote about those who trade a little freedom for security deserving neither, lost his son to one of the many smallpox outbreaks in the early US. In his autobiography, he mentions bitterly regretting not having given his son the smallpox vaccine[0]. He did not once declare that affording his son the "liberty" of dying from smallpox was worth the sacrifice versus the "temporary safety" of vaccination - and this was during a time when vaccination was new, still controversial, and much less safe than now. Rather, he became a passionate advocate for vaccination and public health. So believe what you like, but the Founding Fathers very likely would not have been on the side of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers or their form of liberty. [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2653186/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2653186/
makomk 6y ago
As I recall, Vietnam completely missed a hospital outbreak in a major tourist destination (having restarted internal tourism some time earlier) until someone who'd visited a patient at the hospital with no other plausible source of infection happened to get tested and came back positive. And then covered up that, their first detected case in a good while, for about a week whilst they searched for ways to blame it on foreigners and failed. Western countries tend to have pretty heavy testing in and around hospitals because they know how bad Covid getting in could be.

jfoster 6y ago

US politics has become so tribal that it's pulling new issues in. Anything that makes it into the media will accordingly have two opposing stances on it. I think the real question is, why is US politics becoming even more extreme than it already was?

prawn 6y ago
Could it be anything other than the internet? Social media, YouTube, ease of publishing, etc. Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two?
- krapp 6y ago
  >Has anything else relevant changed so much in the last decade or two? No. Not a thing. Certainly not the election of an African American President, the Republicans normalizing conspiracy theories like birtherism in a cynical race-baiting attempt to regain power through neo-revolutionary proxy movements like the Tea Party, or the election of an extremely divisive President who pushed the Overton window of American political and social discourse so far to the right that beliefs which would have been too insane for talk radio are now standard discourse. Definitely do not look too deeply at American culture itself and study the deeply rooted, endemic issues which have been festering for decades and only allowed to burst forth in a pusculent river of hate and paranoia when the lunatics started running the asylum. It has to be social media and cannot be anything but social media. Everything is Google's fault.
  - prawn 6y ago
    I'm not American so I overlooked the US-specific question in my response. Things seem more divided in Australia too. We also have social media... A lot of what you have raised are topics/movements/messages pushed/strengthened via social media, easier publishing, etc. I didn't raise social media to blame Google; I was thinking of what these tools enable alongside the cooking blogs and DIY videos.
    - krapp 6y ago
      OK. I was specifically talking about US politics. Although now that I think about it, a lot of what I mentioned could also be traced back to 9/11 - calling Obama a crypto-muslim wouldn't have been a valid way of spreading FUD about his intentions otherwise. There is also apparently something of a global right-wing/right-populist movement underway. I don't know about Australia, though. As far as social media goes, I see it as a catalyst - it doesn't create the problems but it does help their effect spread. Deplatforming and regulation of social media might help stop the spread (although I support the former and not the latter) but we still as a society have to address the underlying issues. Something like QAnon doesn't take off simply because it's a viral meme, but because it resonates with people's existing fears and beliefs.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > Around the end of the year, a bomb was defused outside the office of San Francisco’s chief health officer, Dr. William C. Hassler. Not 2020, surprisingly. 1918. Idiots have been getting upset about mask mandates for a while.

aeternum 6y ago

I think the root question is actually political. It comes down to: What's the correct tradeoff between an individual's right to life/liberty vs. well-being of the whole/society? People fall on different sides of that tradeoff all the time, and that question is at the core of almost all political disagreements.

tremon 6y ago
I don't believe that's the question that drives the US. The question that drives the US seems to be "how little money can we spend on the rest of society while still maintaining our own billions"?
doctor_eval 6y ago
It seems to me not so much "life and liberty" but rather "life OR liberty" - and somehow liberty is winning.
- aeternum 6y ago
  Consider the quote: "Give me liberty or give me death" Liberty winning may seem counterintuitive but not everyone sees it that way. Most wars have been fought by people that value their form of liberty over death.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >Most wars have been fought by people that value their form of liberty over death. Most wars have been fought by conscripts, slaves or soldiers who otherwise only wanted to come back home alive, pawns in chess games played with human lives by the elite powers. Even the American Revolution was for the most part a tax revolt by the wealthy against the British Crown. And none of those wars have been against the tyranny of medicine and science. Benjamin Franklin, the man responsible for the famous (and almost universally misapplied) quote about those who trade a little freedom for security deserving neither, lost his son to one of the many smallpox outbreaks in the early US. In his autobiography, he mentions bitterly regretting not having given his son the smallpox vaccine[0]. He did not once declare that affording his son the "liberty" of dying from smallpox was worth the sacrifice versus the "temporary safety" of vaccination - and this was during a time when vaccination was new, still controversial, and much less safe than now. Rather, he became a passionate advocate for vaccination and public health. So believe what you like, but the Founding Fathers very likely would not have been on the side of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers or their form of liberty. [0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2653186/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2653186/

makomk 6y ago

As I recall, Vietnam completely missed a hospital outbreak in a major tourist destination (having restarted internal tourism some time earlier) until someone who'd visited a patient at the hospital with no other plausible source of infection happened to get tested and came back positive. And then covered up that, their first detected case in a good while, for about a week whilst they searched for ways to blame it on foreigners and failed. Western countries tend to have pretty heavy testing in and around hospitals because they know how bad Covid getting in could be.