COVID-19: Unwinding the Lockdown and Long Term Epidemic

[daylen]

Institutional racism in this country has been written out of the institutions. Systemic racism ... that I have a hard time defining in a useful way. But there are patterns (borrowing that term from Bret Weinstein) that have been set up that date back to the Jim Crow era, and maybe all the way back to slavery itself.

This is essentially what I meant by institutional racism. Even if the explicit rules of the system are not obviously biased, they still allow for these patterns to persist.

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By the Fe-Ti statement, I just meant that if movements like BLM are going to emerge without clear leadership, then perhaps having reasonable conversations about what they could represent is more constructive than dismissing them. I know you are not dismissive, just speaking generally.

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The degree of individual responsibility is a tricky problem. As @ID mentioned, many of these kids are taken in by the culture at a young age. I think this goes back to the agency problem. No one has complete control of themselves and any control requires an understanding or acceptance of what is beyond control. Teaching kids about the inhospitable environment of space gives them reason not to invest energy and hope into the future of space and instead focus on Earth. Similarly, I do not see a problem with teaching kids biological and social history, which may allow them to infer that the world is unfair and harsh at times.

This should be balanced with the development of agency over what can be persistently controlled, of course. Everyone needs some confidence and independence.

[IlliniDave]

This is essentially what I meant by institutional racism. Even if the explicit rules of the system are not obviously biased, they still allow for these patterns to persist.

They do, and allowing them to exist isn't the same as causing them. So if the patterns can be broken there's at least a chance better patterns can take their place.

I edited and added to the prior source the podcast where I heard Weinstein talking about it.

[Jason]

That's one of the points brought up regularly by black conservatives. Not sure what can be done about it, but their assertion is the dissolution of "the black family" over the last 50 years has been more steep than with any other group (all have growing numbers of kids raised by single parents), making the mountain to overcome that much taller.

William Julius Wilson has dedicated a lifetime of scholarship to this issue. It's a confluence of all the issues that come up in these discussions. One factor that needs to be thrown into the mix is that the African American community, migrating from the South to urban areas, was allowed to participate in the post WW-II manufacturing boom and thus were hardest hit upon its demise. There is a direct correlation between the rise and fall of urban manufacturing and the dissolution of the nuclear African American family. It does not negate the other issues, but it renders the reductionism to systemic racism as the sole cause of the problem as historically indefensible. People forget about the time Harlem flourished and its impact on the wider culture. It's demise was not due to systemic racism but economic factors.

That being said, did FDR purposely omit domestics from the social safety net? Yes. Was there a crack/powder cocaine distinction? Yes (when Newt Gingrich apologizes, you know it's bad). Was there contract purchasing, redlining etc. in real estate? Yes. So systemic racism is there. But IMHO, what goes on with the cops is the class side of racism, which is found on ground level. Why did it take so long for Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier? Racism, yes, but the real issue was jobs. You do have billionaire racism, of course. Donald Sterling comes to mind. But this time of violence/virulence is usually expressed by those most threatened financially/culturally. And that's what I see is the issue with the police incidents. From my understanding, there is not a flourishing KKK Chapter in Silicon Valley.

[ZAFCorrection]

I see the goals of BLM as palliative care. Black poverty and criminality is a facet of the kleptocratic neoliberal system which creates a discontinuity between the precariat and the upper middle class. The African American community started with less, so when social mobility started to crumble, they got hit the hardest. The opioid epidemic is the more genteel white version. No one this side of the Reagan revolution wants to take on the current economic order, but maybe BLM can achieve a slightly less caustic approach to policing.

[daylen]

The idea of "cause" and "effect" do not make much sense at the social level. Any systemic, institutional, or economic factors may as well be considered inseparable because delineation does not work very well. I mean, you can try, but any attempt is going to have ambiguity upon closer inspection.

Non-linear feedback processes or cyclic thinking do not presume origin or resolution. Another technique is recursive self-definition. Else, arguments always point to something else.

[daylen]

In most cases, ultimately the only person responsible for your condition is yourself, and the sooner people understand this the sooner they can escape their victim mentality.

..or no human is responsible for the human condition.

[IllustriousLord]

@7wb5
Well I mean its great that you've had some positive experiences with older, successful black men. But I can tell you that in the local police data report I mentioned, in the male 50+ category you were something like 16 times more likely to be street checked by police than a white male in same age group. Tellingly, a prominent black politician related some 'anecdata' at the press conference for the report that her similarly successful black husband was put through the ringer a few months back because he was driving his wife's car and his name wasn't on the documents...they were in their late 60s.

I was on a call with a black senior federal prosecutor a few weeks back who has faced similar bullshit, and had to give the standard black community coaching to his teenagers about what their rights were when they will inevitably be hassled by police. Pretty sure their mother was not a teenage, drug addled incompetent. Doesn't change the police harassment.

When something is a near universal concern in a community, irrespective of social class, yeah I think I'm going to listen them over white guys with some questionable data analysis. Go check out the youtube series "black in japan". Its a pretty common theme for black people to feel safer outside of the US.

Frankly, I'm not surprised that some folks here don't believe in systemic blank-isms. There is a certain level of sensitivity that is required to notice the small interactions that occur all over the place that build up to produce different outcomes based race or religion or some other ground.

My favorite observance of this phenomena was in the context of a middle class elementary school, watching blue eyed blond haired Johnny do the most shit head things repeatedly only to get the lightest scolding. Whereas Omar his swarthy compatriot does the exact same thing once and the authority flips her shit immediately and formally disciplines him. You think these kind of things don't matter, but they do, and they happen constantly and consistently.

[7Wannabe5]

@IllustriousLord:

Oh, I agree that it is more likely that a man who is black will be regarded with more suspicion. I also agree that we live in a systemically racist society. I have observed this first hand when I have been in relationship with black, brown or green men. For instance, once when I was walking to dinner with an African-American date, several likely drunken white guys in their 30s started yelling “Giddy-Up” “at us in an offensive manner and when we didn’t respond, started following us and yelling “I said Giddy-Up!”

My Muslim “husband” was attacked in his own front yard and taught me to shoot a gun, because he was so concerned about self-defense.

What I was attempting to convey was something along the lines that people will attempt to evince their own personalities and ambitions in spite of obstacles. Also, it has not been my experience that every given black individual is going to be in favor of “defunding” the police, any more than I am necessarily in favor of the rhetoric of the “Me Too” movement just because I am female. In fact, I dated a black man who claimed to like Archie Bunker, because at least he was upfront and not mealy-mouthed with his opinions. Unfortunately, he also said that one of the reasons he liked me was that I reminded him of Edith Bunker.

[ZAFCorrection]

To be less snarky, the reason for my so-called projection is conservatives frequently come up with this silly standard that stories they don't like need to be discussed exclusively in terms of personal responsibility. It's patently silly. Government policy does have some application. If you don't think it can have any application here, fine. Maybe you should explain why.

And, yes, compromising with people is often a good way to get some peace. On the other hand, infantilizing them is probably a good way to accelerate insurrection.

[IlliniDave]

Of course liberals often come up with the converse standard, that "stories they don't like" need to be discussed exclusively in terms of identity politics and government intervention, while disparaging anyone who dares bring another perspective.

A balance of conservative (let's preserve what is good) and liberal (let's change what's not) has been the key to a relatively stable republic that's survived a lot over ~250 years. One of the key tenets at the founding was the idea of individual sovereignty (whose flipside is individual responsibility/accountability). Just from a centrist perspective, I think the burden of justification should be on those who want to marginalize individual sovereignty for the sake of empowering government.

So there is likely a role for both government seeding and individual responsibility in a balanced approach to breaking some of the undesirable socioeconomic patterns. Fundamentally good people occupy both sides of the discussion.

[jennypenny]

What responsibility do black people have in these situations?

I think everyone has a responsibility here. In my example I was trying to show that all sides have some responsibility but that problems on one side don't negate/excuse the problems on the other. Everyone is responsible for their own behavior, and teaching anyone that their own handicaps are an excuse is wrong, whether done on an individual or societal scale.

The problem is often in the delivery of the message. In my example about women being victimized, I don't think it's the job of the police to lecture the woman right after she's been abused. IMO, the message is most palatable when coming from one's in-group. In my example, that means women cautioning other women on their risky behavior and men holding other men accountable with social mores like drunk women are off limits.

Bill Cosby (bad example now, I know) used to call out black youth for idolizing gang culture instead of looking toward educated black men who were successful despite obstacles. Again, that message had to come from him. It's not an argument white people should be making, especially in response to an unfortunate death or public instance of racism. Not the right time or messenger.


I know it's hard to explain the subtle effects of having to deal with this stuff. Most of the men I've worked with in my life have been terrific, but there have been a handful who truly thought men were better at the working thing than women. I learned to deal with them but it's tiring, and sometimes disheartening when the other men involved stay silent or make a weak rebuke to a sexist comment for the sake of social cohesion or tell me that's not really what he meant (a rationalization). There are times I avoided work/groups/activities because I wasn't up for dealing with the one or two men who would make it difficult. <-- That's one way it can hold back people who are part of the out-group. Is it on me for not persevering? Sure, and I teach my daughter that. But I can't fix those men, only other men can, if that makes sense.

^^that experience x10 for minorities



If police would call out other police who cross the line instead of protecting them or running them off to other police departments (see gypsy cops), it would go a long way towards solving the problem and easing tensions between communities. It's just like the Catholic priest issue ... people understood the profession would draw some deviants, it was the churches response -- to hide them instead of immediately calling them out for the criminals they were -- that was/is most disturbing. That's one example of systemic racism, where it's not necessarily that the institution is racist but where its commitment to self-preservation perpetuates racist, abusive, or inappropriate behavior. It's also another example of in-groups refusing to police their own.

I added the last paragraph because I think expanding the issue to include all racism doesn't solve anything and catches too many non-racist people/institutions up in the net. We should address specific and obvious problems and build off of those successes. If we do that -- together -- it will no longer be framed as an us v. them issue or a black v. white issue. If there are bad cops or racists who like to bully minorities, why isn't that everyone's problem to fix? I believe, like others here, that there aren't that many of those kinds of racists left, they are just more visible and held up as an example of 'most' white people. I agree that's bullshit, but that means we (non-racist white people) have a lot to gain by trying to drive it into the abyss once and for all. I'm tired of Antifa's antics and hearing about white privilege and being told I have some internal racism I need to atone for. I'd like it to go away.

[IllustriousLord]

Of course liberals often come up with the converse standard...

Why do you think the centrist perspective is somehow enlightened or superior? Also, positions considered centrist in the US would be considered fairly right wing by many western democracies.

The burden generally lies with whoever is making the claim. But there is no consensus on standard of proof. Is it balance of probabilities? I think there is enough of an evidence package out there for that wrt police racism against blacks.

re topic:

Does trump's rally accelerate a re-opening. Even cautious people I know are throwing previous measures to the side and socializing freely in my area. A leading youth mental health hospital has come out against school shut downs for the fall after there were rumours circulating.

How can Biden run a campaign without backtracking on his stances towards the severity of covid so that he can hold rallies and actually turn out the vote. I think the election has nuked any real possibility of people following lockdown orders if there is a second wave in the fall. So what was the lockdown for again?

What a goddamn disaster.

[IlliniDave]

Why do you think the centrist perspective is somehow enlightened or superior?

I don't. I just wanted to be up front about what my perspective, or you might say bias, is.

[7Wannabe5]

@jp:

I’m not sure that paternalistic in group messaging is likely to be any more successful than maternalistic out group messaging, except when you are interacting with the very young. I mean, would you truly appreciate a group of women telling you that maybe you shouldn’t have let a man be alone with you on a first date? I know I wouldn’t have, even though I did come up with my own personal policy to that effect after I was attacked.

Most adults, rightfully, will feel like they should be able to calculate their own risks and choose whether to run with them. OTOH, everybody loses when the wheel is weighted towards superficial discrimination of any kind. On some level it’s just another manifestation of how we are doomed as a species to the extent that we favor blind efficiency over thoughtful appreciation of the complex.

[jacob]

The problem is often in the delivery of the message. In my example about women being victimized, I don't think it's the job of the police to lecture the woman right after she's been abused. IMO, the message is most palatable when coming from one's in-group. In my example, that means women cautioning other women on their risky behavior and men holding other men accountable with social mores like drunk women are off limits.

I could have responded to several messages above (and I have but ended up deleting it before posting) but this caught my eye.

I've been thinking along similar lines in trying to understand this. Despite having lived in the US for 16 years, I'm still an outsider in these regards (gender and race) having mainly worked in professions that didn't expose me to the issues (physics and finance is 95% comprised of white guy nerds and 5% other nerds---but 100% nerds(*)) and so I brought along my Nordic-Euro values along in that regard w/o updating them to US conditions. This caused some foot-in-mouth behavior on my part wrt gender/feminism 10 years ago. I eventually came to a better understanding of these issues from the US perspective, but it required a lot of listening and reading to resolve.

(*) It's amazing how easy it is to live one's life in a bubble when the bubble is not readily apparent.

I've noticed that the primary request from BLM to white supporters/sympathizers is to "shut up and listen" before imposing their/our own interpretation. This suggests that the sociological system is trying to get from K3 (group-based) to K4 (groups-based). The request to shut up and listen to other perspectives is an attempt to drive this growth/transition. The reason is of course that it's hard/impossible to live as another gender or another race to experience their [lived] framework. (Accounts from people who have transitioned their gender are generally )

My best way to grok this is, not surprisingly, to drag out and apply my favorite systems for understanding "anyone who is not me": Wheaton, Keagan, ... For example, learning that there was such a thing as first, second, ... wave feminism was very helpful in understanding why I suddenly found myself getting harassed on the American interwebs for "he or she" vs "he" pronouns. As far as I can tell, I grew up in a culture which in most ways are ~50 years ahead of the US wrt gender values, that is, my values correspond to fourth wave feminism. This is practically bleeding edge state of the art in the US but for me it's like water to fish. So from a Wheaton level perspective (which I lacked at the time), my reaction to second wave talk about writing "letter carrier" instead of "mailman" was to think that these objections are actually shooting themselves in the foot and making it worse. Two Wheaton levels away. And the feeling was mutual. Arguing was not constructive at all though. It was like fatFIRE debating with leanFIRE about who was more extreme.

This is why I've been reluctant to comment on race issues in the US. I know that there's a lot I don't know coming from the outside. However, knowing the structural framework for analyzing and somewhat resolving such issues, I also have an idea of where/how misunderstandings obtain. I can tell that there's a lot that those having grown up in the US don't know (grok) either. (It's telling watching one-generation old stuff from the Rodney King events that very little has changed.) I'm wondering if there's anything similar to the waves in feminism when it comes to African-American issues? Can those lessons be applied? Especially the lesson that this is a generational thing that suffers from the innate inability to get out of K3 via the usual means of travel, relocating, going to out-of-state college, or joining the military?

The point about trying to be Black in Japan or elsewhere as opposed to the US is a good one. I saw a similar youtube vid by a Black guy in Germany. He loved it---practically blew his mind. In the Euro framework I drag around, (group) belonging is not about race but very much about shared cultural values. My focus as an immigrant is thus to "act American" (which I guess I'm not doing a superlative job at) focusing on accent, clothing style, holidays, ... and values. This would parallel the advice to "act White", but that seems bizarre since America is not white by construction---therefore one can not insist on acting white even if it might work on an individual basis. Besides, focusing on cultural differentiation comes with its own baggage. Also, it does not escape me that my solution model (a framework of acting/behavior) is not how Americans frame it (or should frame it).

Anyway my point with all this is in terms of rewiring society or building a movement, there are probably many structural parallels between racism and genderism or consumerism. Identifying those parallels would be helpful in terms of creating a strategy for advancing the change or at least getting out of the way/not inadvertently obstructing it. At least the parallels might be helpful to understand it.

[jacob]

Why do you think the centrist perspective is somehow enlightened or superior? Also, positions considered centrist in the US would be considered fairly right wing by many western democracies.

I personally find it enlightening/comforting to project the various factions of the two US monolith parties onto the Euroland party landscape. It makes it clear that human voters are more similar than different even if their voting systems aren't. The main voter variables which are set differently is that individualism and religion are more important in the US. I think this difference is due to population density and [path-dependent] history respectively. Yet, this is what sets the US center equal to the Euro right in terms of individual/collective agency and makes religion relevant in the US while being mostly irrelevant in terms of policy in Europe.

So what was the lockdown for again?

I feel like a "broken" record, but the lockdown was to prevent the hospital/ICU system from getting overwhelmed and returning to 19th century medicine practice however briefly. European countries successfully followed through on that, basically beat the COVID, and are now switching to a suppression strategy. The US also succeeded in avoiding the overload (except maybe NYC) but then gave up in favor of reopening a few weeks before the suppression strategy became viable. As such the US is converging on the Swedish strategy of slowly (timeline of [a few] years) getting to herd immunity while accepting a constant disease burden. This is playing out differently across different US states. See https://covidactnow.org/?s=53768 ... For example, in myState of IL, the disease pressure (basic reproduction number) is still <1 which means the public is acting in a conscientious way to slowly fade the disease burden while venturing out more as it fades---this keeps the disease burden more or less constant as opposed to eliminating it. People in other states are behaving differently, perhaps more volatile. Thus I think whatever happens going forward will depend very much of the level/kind of governance of individual states as well as the cultural values of the people living there.

[nomadscientist]

European politics was reconstructed after the war on the basis of US-facing and Soviet-facing parties. Essentially all native European political thought was wiped out beginning in 1945 except to the extent you regard US and Soviet ideologies as European in origin.

The US-facing parties naturally faced the outward looking parts of the US rather than the inland nativists and those parts are generally left (though aren't exclusively: e.g. neo-conservatives). Another factor is that the US was run by its left party throughout WWII and after, from 1933 to 1952, the period in which this system was established.

This American influence was balanced initially by Stalinism, and later the various attenuated forms of Marxism-Leninism it evolved to become. So, the European center tilts yet a bit further left away from the American center-left. This is a lesser influence today because the Soviet faction has been dead for a generation as a source of funds and mass, all that's still exerting live influence is the American cosmopolitan "center". That is why it's close to the uniform belief set across Europe.

IOW it's wrong to view Europe's alignment with the center-left of US politics as an independent verification of those views or even as a curious accident; it's very much a coupled system.

[jacob]

@nomadscientist - Interesting. In my [current] operating perspective, the European framework is a compromise between the individualism promoted by the US and the collectivism promoted by the USSR resulting in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way as a way of threading the needle of Cold War reality. (Best/compromise of both worlds.)

In practice, I think the proportional representation that is structurally written into almost all of the European democracies makes it A LOT easier to arrive at compromises compared to the first-past-post principle of the US system. I'm probably heavily biased, but in terms of functional governing, I think it worked out pretty well, at least for Western Europe.

[nomadscientist]

The strongest first past the post system in the world is in the UK, which doesn't even have multiple elections, separation of powers, or a constitution*. It has some special features, but I'd still say it fits into the European ideological landscape.

*with rare exceptions one party wins a bare majority in the House of Commons and then has full control of both the executive and legislature for the term of the parliament, controlled in effect by the single party leader, and with no constitutional restrictions on legislative power

[jacob]

Yes, the UK (and the US) is kinda peculiar in that regard. Before Trump in 2016 I really believed that the [first past post] system was the more stable system, because parties would change in order to capture votes along the middle, but now I think/realize/suspect it's more of a bistable system, because social media/alternative realities makes it possible to drive the equilibrium to either extreme allowing it to possibly stick for a while. In contrast the proportional representation system makes extremes quickly and easily visible when they go too far; they, therefore, get corrected within or before the next election cycle depending on how mismanaged things get.

Add: Also implies that post-Brexit UK has "an extreme/bifurcation-event waiting to happen" at/from this point.