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No, it's doing bad. Canada should, by all means, be doing much worse than the EU, being a politically low-power country. Being roughly the same as the EU is ba

No, it's doing bad. Canada should, by all means, be doing much worse than the EU, being a politically low-power country. Being roughly the same as the EU is bad. Australia basically has eradicated covid. Japan has the pandemic largely under control as well. The EU, for all its socialism and condescension of the US, should by all means be clobbering the US. But it's getting clobbered.

FpUser 6y ago
>"The EU, for all its socialism and condescension of the US, should by all means be clobbering the US. But it's getting clobbered." The US has never lacked the decisiveness and the ability to mobilize.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The US has never lacked the decisiveness and the ability to mobilize. It's dithering in both World Wars (among many, many other examples) would lead many people to question the decisiveness side of that.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    Not sure about WWI events but from what I understand WWII did not pose immediate danger to the US and there was no pressing need for them to decide. From what I understand they were even happy to trade with the Germany. Once Pearl Harbor happened it changed the picture.
- astrange 6y ago
  The US lacks decisiveness ("you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing after all other options are exhausted" etc) but has the ability to mobilize (state capacity). We're just only good at one thing - war metaphors. So we can't keep a lockdown going because that's not a war. But we can do vaccines great, that's just metaphorically shooting people.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    >"So we can't keep a lockdown going because that's not a war." I am not from US (live in Canada) but my impression is that the US population is in general way less subservient to the government comparatively to other countries. This could be just the reason you could not lock them up.
    - FpUser 6y ago
      >"But we can do vaccines great, that's just metaphorically shooting people" I find this conflation very poor

FpUser 6y ago

>"The EU, for all its socialism and condescension of the US, should by all means be clobbering the US. But it's getting clobbered." The US has never lacked the decisiveness and the ability to mobilize.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> The US has never lacked the decisiveness and the ability to mobilize. It's dithering in both World Wars (among many, many other examples) would lead many people to question the decisiveness side of that.
- FpUser 6y ago
  Not sure about WWI events but from what I understand WWII did not pose immediate danger to the US and there was no pressing need for them to decide. From what I understand they were even happy to trade with the Germany. Once Pearl Harbor happened it changed the picture.
astrange 6y ago
The US lacks decisiveness ("you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing after all other options are exhausted" etc) but has the ability to mobilize (state capacity). We're just only good at one thing - war metaphors. So we can't keep a lockdown going because that's not a war. But we can do vaccines great, that's just metaphorically shooting people.
- FpUser 6y ago
  >"So we can't keep a lockdown going because that's not a war." I am not from US (live in Canada) but my impression is that the US population is in general way less subservient to the government comparatively to other countries. This could be just the reason you could not lock them up.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    >"But we can do vaccines great, that's just metaphorically shooting people" I find this conflation very poor