COVID-19: Unwinding the Lockdown and Long Term Epidemic

[Jason]

but a true post-modernist would just chuckle and shake head and think “Oh, sweet child...” listening to youthful radical stating that “defund the police” really means “take a break in which we might imagine alternatives.”

I disagree. The post-modernists recognized and worked with the inherited "text." Maybe they changed the structures, changed the hermeneutics, but ultimately, they acknowledged a historicism and that they were historically embedded creatures as were those in the past. Now "we" desire to be "textless." Jefferson owned slaves? Rip up the constitution. This is not the reader imposing meaning upon a text. This is "there is no meaning beyond self." There is only ad hominem. And to be fair, it's on both sides of the twitter feed.

[7Wannabe5]

One problem with Trump is that he is kind of like the Robert Kiyosaki of economic leaders. I think he honestly wants to help people make the leap from working class to affluent class, hopping right over upper middle class. It’s easy to dismiss upper middle class values at the level of the ambitious individual, but one thing I learned from my reading and hanging out with members of the affluent class and their helpers is that affluent class membership is unlikely to be maintained through multiple generations without integration of upper middle class values. Biden is like a weak cup of stale tea with a tab of saccharine, but he does represent re-integration of upper middle class values.

[7Wannabe5]

@Jason:

I must not have expressed myself clearly; I agree with you. Post-modernism is like romance, it has great value, but it can only persist given complex, “expensive” underlay. The “child activist” I quoted is likely imagining a “West Side Story” version of underclass society.

[Jason]

If there is an intellectual antecedent to this movement, I would offer The NY Times "1619 project" (Couldn't post link), which unapologetically and in opposition to all previous scholarship, changes not only the date of the US's founding but its entire purpose to the mere perpetuation of slavery. This is not a media entity publishing fake news. This is a media entity publishing fake history. The US founding is the most papered event in world history. There is no evidence of The NY Times thesis found anywhere in the writings composed during the time of its inception, or subsequently, through two hundred years of scholarship undertaken by people from every people group/demographic dead or alive. Until now. That's not post-modernism. That's de-historicization. Or post-de-historization. And I have to think it has some bearing on what we are watching on the news.

That being said, note the qualifications and mixed demographic of this group fighting not only The NY Times claims but the repercussions of its claims.

https://1776unites.com

[7Wannabe5]

@Jason:

Interesting. I had a personal experience that demonstrates that this is not just a white/black issue. A couple of years ago, on a lark excuse for road trip, my more left-leaning sister, son and I went in search of papers/sites related to our paternal name ancestor who came over on the second voyage of the Mayflower and founded a fairly large city in New England. The city was named after his wife, so their is no historical doubt regarding founder. When we arrived at the city’s historical museum, which had recently been expanded at new location, we were surprised to learn that there wasn’t even a single display related to the city’s founding family; the history of the city had been recast to begin with the waves of immigration during early industrial growth era. IOW, first 17th century British origin settlers had been pretty much wiped off the map and replaced by celebration of 19th and early 20th century Irish and Italian working class immigrants. Obviously, this made good sense from the perspective that most middle class people currently living there would have descended from this wave of immigrants. The museum staff actually felt compelled to apologize to us for this “disappearance” of our heritage, and gave us all sorts of information regarding location of university basement where documents might now be stored. We just smiled and continued on to visit site where our witch ancestress was hung while still voicing her disbelief that such a thing could be happening to her.

So, I believe there is some level on which some sort of rewrite was bound to happen eventually. Generations Z and After-Z are extremely multi-cultural compared to Boomers/X. I would estimate that approximately 1/3 of affluent and poor urban kindergarteners are of some sort of mixed racial heritage. There are a great many kids who look white, but identify as black or look Hispanic, but identify as Filipina, look black, but identify as Middle Eastern- etc. etc. Therefore, I can almost see this as a transitional phase prior to the racial identification checkbox card having to be thrown in the trash itself. Hip hooray for strong human outbreeding tendency!

[Jason]

It's really hard not to address this without becoming preachy but (1) those who forget history blah blah blah; (2) Woodrow Wilson had moral failings. Who doesn't. But can we at least have an intelligent discussion before tearing down statues, changing placards, spray painting BLM over Jefferson's face on Mount Rushmore? By today's standards, both sides who fought during The Civil war would be classified racist. To expect anyone during that time to hold the same views towards race as we do today is unfair, just as we will be judged to have come up short by future generations. Change should not require validation by erasure of times when things were different . If you don't maintain history, you lose the reality of the progress that has actually occurred and the reasons for the fight to continue progress. Jefferson owned slaves and believed that men were created equal. In 1776, it was acknowledged as uncomfortable, maybe even hypocritical, but it was a Faustian bargain that was required at the time. It was settled 100 years later. Life is awful and complex and awful in its complexity. Raging against it doesn't eradicate it. Yesterday or today. In the 18th century there was multiculturalism, but it existed in religious form and it was evidenced in geography - Maryland was Roman Catholic, MA was puritan, Rhode Island had religious freedom, PA was Quaker etc. It was different and the same. I personally think it shouldn't be forgotten nor claimed anachronistic nor erased. Ok. I'm done.

[7Wannabe5]

@Jason:

Again, I agree with you. However, what should happen and what does happen don’t necessarily have huge Venn diagram overlap.

I am essentially a novelty seeker (Ne), but I highly value the preservation of rare books and other complex aspects of the past, because they represent the very best ingredients towards new recipes. Therefore, small hopeful note I might offer would be that even if it comes to pass that all statues of Jefferson are demolished, it will still remain the case that Jefferson ideals are as enmeshed in multitude of artifacts of our culture in the manner that the music of opera is enmeshed in our cartoons. IOW, the theme may remain vibrant long after attribution is lost. Burning down museum replica of Edison’s lab won’t suddenly cause all MP3 players to stop functioning.

[Mister Imperceptible]

So I understand that money is not most important to people. It is not most important to me, just a means to an end. But when the financialization/gameification has advanced to the point where you are bamboozling 17-year-olds to take out six figures of debt for marginal degrees, when you begin to issue stocks available for purchase in companies that are already bankrupt, it becomes so brazen that it is impossible to defend.

Defense of a system so corrupt they have infiltrated every level of its infrastructure.

I understand that the Big Money (producers and directors) have purchased the political system and the politicians and the media (actors) in this farce we call the US economy. I understand that some dude in China or Mexico is way cheaper to employ than an American hillbilly writing his elegy, but if you do not make stuff, there is no stuff. Every pyramid scheme eventually collapses because there are no new buyers at ever higher prices. So in perpetuating the Long Now they are killing the golden goose. I guess an oligarchy is dehistorical in the sense that it does not know or appreciate the origin of its wealth, and has no interest in preserving and building upon it, so just live it up like Caligula and Nero. Capital decumulation/consumption. Eating the seed corn.

What is the incentive to be an honest hardworking person? If the oligarchs are used car salesmen, we then have a society that selects for used car salesmen. Like Reed said in the link I posted at the end of page 13 up thread, the government becomes so big and corrupt that society has become a competition to seize the machinations of government and redirect wealth towards your friends and donors. To be honest and hardworking is to be a tax donkey and a cuck. I paid more in taxes in 2017 and 2018 than did Amazon, and so did anyone who paid taxes. And what do those taxes pay for? @7’s multicultural After Gen-Zers will be nothing more than ignorant destitute slaves looking for a dole. I guess you can troll but it falls firmly in the category of Extremely Dumb Shit.

[jacob]

From my teen-level understanding of history, history is not so much a bunch of recorded facts as much as a framework for the present to learn from the past rather than about the past. In that regard, Germany's way of acknowledging its WWII atrocities might offer some useful lessons for the US in terms of slavery? Rather than packing "the evidence" away in museums, the concentration camps, V2 launch sites, pillbox bunkers, flak towers, etc. are still standing much like they were. They have not been destroyed or moved into museums. Some are left to decay in the wild (e.g. bunkers) and others are maintained (e.g. concentration camps) with an explanation of what you're looking at. Schoolchildren are (I presume) still taken to multiple excursions of such sites and in some sense acknowledging this history or the indoctrination if you will becomes a major part of what it means to be German (Possibly not phrased correctly. Hopefully you know what I mean.) leading people to make sure it doesn't happen again both in terms of not doing it themselves but also in working against other people or nations who might go down a similar dark path. In short, the artifacts stand as a warning of how history could repeat itself if those lessons aren't continuously relearned. Various policies ensure that practically everybody are exposed to these warnings.

To contrast, I've also been to one of the Holocaust Museums in the US. This museum also had a floor dedicated to the history African American slavery. However, learning these lessons from a museum creates nowhere near the same impression as walking through a concentration camp and seeing small mountains of glasses, shoes, ... taken from millions of people and the similarly large piles of canisters of poisonous gas used to kill them. Or just seeing your beaches still "littered" with remnants of the Atlantic Wall whenever you go there. Repeated exposure provides a kind of cultural inoculation against fascism that creates a viscerally allergic response when encountering its antigene. Goose bumps, anger, fear, ... and the feeling of wanting to punch someone. When most people feel like that, it makes it harder for such an ideology to take root again. Conversely, expressions of racism in the US does not seem to generate the same widespread immune reaction. Indeed, part of white privilege is in not experiencing these feelings and basically being immune (blind) towards the racist pollen that's still very much part of the environment. Perhaps this suggests a potential fix? A somewhat ongoing truth and reconciliation effort that's not ended by concluding a commission but rather exists as an ongoing effort of acknowledging the past and perhaps using it to set an example for the rest of the world of what not to do and what to do instead.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

You may be right, but vaccination through education alone requires new round every generation. The only true “cure” for xenophobic discrimination is free inter-marriage of genes and memes towards disintegration of boundaries.

[Mister Imperceptible]

I think the discussion of monument destruction and removal might be forgetting what that monument destruction and removal is intended to symbolize.

I had a discussion with my mother and asked her about all this. She said she does not feel racist, but if she was walking down the street and saw a bunch of black guys, that she would cross the street. But if she saw a bunch of white guys, she would still cross the street. Making that statement makes her neither racist nor misandrist. But if she said “there must be a law that enforces all men to stand at least 6 feet away from passing women and not congregate on designated sidewalks where women are known to pass by, so I never feel afraid or uncomfortable,” I think we could agree that would be ridiculous. We can retain the ability to make value judgements without constantly apologizing for it, or legislating against it.

Now if you ask my sister, who is out there protesting, she would say, as she did to my mother and I, that we are brainwashed white supremacists and need to repent and check our white privilege. But then again it took my sister 12 years and several refinancings to pay off of her freaking Scion. The cultural Marxist memeplex seems especially attractive to those allergic to responsibility.

I worked with a Pakistani project manager once who was extremely effective. If I were ever in a position to hire someone in that capacity I would hire him over the set of white project managers I know who are clowns. I can retain that value judgement while simultaneously believing his daily periodic prayers to Allah was batshit crazy.

Again, the virus and the race war are very convenient distractions away from the $3 trillion Wall Street bailouts that the media is not talking about.

[nomadscientist]

People aren't poor; I don't see involuntary poverty anywhere. George Floyd seemed to do fine paying his bills with funny money, and he had a job. The Coronavirus response seems to have increased the income of most poor people, including those made unemployed. People who want to live 1950s family lives have money problems and also other problems but increasingly the youth just opts out from that lifestyle, maybe because it's officially disfavoured. That makes people unhappy and causes all sorts of other social problems, but they're not problems of poverty.

Voting out Trump is going to make this explode.

The left tried to overthrow the government by semi-military means (protests/riots/colour revolution). Trump demonstrated he had the loyalty of the military, ending this attempt. And that's when the left sicced the corporations on everyone. The point of all those BLM ads and emails isn't to appeal to customers to buy more product but to put employees on notice that they will be fired into a mega recession if they resist the left programme. From poll numbers, looks like it's working.

If the Democrats get control of the presidency they can take the military off the table and then they will run wild. They will kill Trump, his family, and his close associates, or something inconsequentially different. That's the end of democracy. Sure, you can try to run a genuine opposition candidate against them, but know that the unofficial penalty for anything less than total victory is death.

Then they will unleash the rage they've felt the last four years by imposing the most extreme domestic policy programme they can think of and get away with.

The US is going to cease to be a capitalist country as control of all corporations by left cadres turns labour allocation into a Soviet-style system of assigning sinecures based on influence within and loyalty to the Party. Loyalty is more assured by incompetence, i.e. no one is going to betray the party when he owes it everything. Like in the Soviet Union this is not going to usher in some age of equality but age of mega inequality while also buildings will start falling down.

[Jason]

Xenophobic discrimination will never not exist. On one side of the coin, Holocaust museums have not proven to be a complete deterrents to subsequent genocides. Never forget does not translate to never repeat. On the flip side, removing the artifacts does not remove the reality of the past. Disallowing Confederate flags from NASCAR events does not remove confederate flags flying in the hearts of men. I lean on the side of preservation. Abraham Lincoln lived during a time where relocation of African Americans to Liberia was seen as progressive. Just because he freed the slaves didn't mean he wanted them living next door to him. These issues, IMHO are worthy of on-going consideration in front of his memorial.

If the Democrats get control of the presidency they can take the military off the table and then they will run wild. They will kill Trump, his family, and his close associates, or something inconsequentially different.

By the time they get it through committee, President Baron Trump III will veto the kill order.

[7Wannabe5]

@MI:

When I was in high school, boys would congregate in one fairly narrow passageway, through which girls would necessarily have to pass in order to get to their classes, and make lewd or otherwise inappropriate masculine gaze based commentary, such as “8?”, “Nah, more like 6.5.” Should this behavior be disallowed given girls were compelled to attend school?

[Mister Imperceptible]

I doubt Trump will lose because I do not think it matters if 99% of California and New York votes Biden because I do not think Biden can win the key swing states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania that was the key to 2016. The insistence by Corporate America and CNN that Trump is a white supremacist and therefore must lose simply is not resonating in those places that already felt alienated by the Democratic Party and probably even more so as they watch BLM burn these cities. Of course that will not stop CNN from hyperventilating about the inevitability of their prophecy.

Likely cause for civil war will be if there is a forced seizure of assets by the central government from whites and redistribution, coupled with with an attempt to abolish Second Amendment rights that would make this necessary. This is likely only to happen if cultural Marxists win the Presidency and take complete control of Congress- think President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes- because clearly the best the faceless mob can do without seizing an existing apparatus is take down statues and steal from Foot Locker.

At which point the military will be faced with obeying the orders of President Ocasio-Cortes, or defending the Constitution, as described by @white-belt several pages up thread. I would expect divided loyalties in the military, so were that to come about the winner would be the group that can augment their forces with civilians more capable of organization and who are already armed.

You should see my gun collection.

[Mister Imperceptible]

@7

I would expect the behavior is already disallowed. Comes down to whether teachers enforce it? I would think that having to endure such behavior would lead you to think those boys were jerks, but today that some boys behave that way means we have waged a war on masculinity itself. Which makes sense from the oligarchy’s perspective- a docile population is easy to control.

In any case, I am sorry I was not there to read you a poem, give you a flower, and tell you that I thought you were pretty.

[Stahlmann]

@jacob
hmm.
my tutor says that average German is being told that there were bad guys during WWII and they automagically evaporated after it :-DDD
also, "let's make some people so poor that they will need to move to us to work"-meme/quote from some Nazi dignitary (I don't think most of you gonna get this, let's ponder why :-DDD)

on the other hand, average Pole suffers from persectution and victim complex (don't stare at me guys :-DDD). but what can you expect when you keep "animal" in small cage and constantly poke it?

(discussion on "privilege" on top of Ivory Tower is interesting to see as person who roams small market nearby said tower)

[7Wannabe5]

@MI:

Actually, my take remains pretty much the same as it was in 1980. I’m more opposed to compulsory education than free sexual banter. However, if I could go back in time, I would work harder at overcoming my shyness and coming up with a very good retort to “Hey baby, got any fries to go with that shake?”

I was just curious about your generational perspective.

[horsewoman]

Schoolchildren are (I presume) still taken to multiple excursions of such sites and in some sense acknowledging this history or the indoctrination if you will becomes a major part of what it means to be German (Possibly not phrased correctly. Hopefully you know what I mean.) leading people to make sure it doesn't happen again both in terms of not doing it themselves but also in working against other people or nations who might go down a similar dark path. In short, the artifacts stand as a warning of how history could repeat itself if those lessons aren't continuously relearned. Various policies ensure that practically everybody are exposed to these warnings.

You presume correctly. I've been to Dachau KZ (concentration camp) twice in my school days and at least in the 90s, it was still mandatory that all school children (who lived in a reasonable distance from a concentration camp) visit such a place. IDK if it still the case today, but I would think so.

Unfortunately, it seems that it is not nearly as effective as one might think when it comes to the larger population. In the last few years, the AFD (an openly xenophobic party, which flirts a lot with prominent members of the former NPD, a banned extremist right-wing party) gained a lot of support. In 2018, they managed to get 10% of votes in Bavaria - home of the KZ Dachau. In Saxony, it was 27.5%, a result that shook Germany to its cores. We have massive problems with well-connected neo-nazis in elite units in police forces and the military. There was a scandal a few years back where a special force of the Saxon police had emblems embroidered on to the seats of their vehicles, which closely resembled the "Reichsadler" of nazi Germany. Just imagine how secure those guys must have felt in their beliefs to order such an emblem. It's outrageous! Neo-nazis getting more and more daring, flaunting swastikas and other symbols, special greetings, and such stuff. There are laws against these things, but if the right police officers (pun intended!) are around at such occasions, arrests are few. Last year, an outspoken left(ish) local politician was executed by a shot to his head on his porch by neo-nazis. These people are ruthless, organized, and heavily armed. I could go on, but it makes me sick.

To contrast, I've also been to one of the Holocaust Museums in the US.

the Boston Holocaust memorial was pretty poignant to me. Maybe it was more so for me because I'm a) German and b) had seen those "showers" for real in Dachau, but I found it rather oppressive to walk through the beams with the mist clinging.

Anyway, a lot of people in Germany are not happy with the fact that we as a nation still feel responsible for what happened during the "Third Reich" . They think it has nothing do do with us today and refuse to learn from history. Its really sad, and scary to be honest.

[jacob]

@horsewoman - The Danish "indoctrination/inoculation" is (or was) similar. Every school trip involved a KZ visit when possible. I've been to Auschwitz I and II and Theresienstadt on two separate trips. There was from our educational perspective little focus on the war itself, but tons of focus on what led up to it. I'd surmise that if everything was added up between first grade and end of highschool, half a year of history lessons was dedicated to why it happened, that is, vastly more than any other subject or era. You might have seen this (if not, prepare to be ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V4bmm6yJMw ... I'm fairly confident that the average Danish high school student can (or could) easily answer every single question. Knowing this stuff [in the video] by heart makes it easy to have "allergic" reactions whenever politicians talk about building walls, rounding people up, marking them, interning them, or getting rid of them. I can only imagine what knowing about racism (history, current stats, ... ) to a similar level of depth would do.

In contrast, I've also been to the Illinois Holocaust Museum. It was a more "abstract"/typical museum experience. Almost like learning about the ancient Egyptians by going to the Field Museum. A 1:200 scale model with clay figurines and old B/W pictures did not leave the same impression as standing inside or near the real thing where it actually happened. There was, as far as I remember, no moral "lecturing" from the teachers in connection with those visits. The showers/chambers, the ovens, electric fences, straw bunk beds or more like shelves, gallows, etc. were left to speak for themselves---that this was real---with students drawing their own conclusions. While the full ramifications weren't as deeply appreciated at age 14--18 during the trips, I do think the knowledge/experience was foundational for more mature perspectives developed later on.

As 7wb5 pointed out, it's [an education] that has to be repeated for each generation lest the newest one forget. I think this gets harder as the old generations die out. For example, my parents' generation still speak of it as "the war" (even if they were born right after it) whereas my generation already objected with "which war?" (there has been many since already). I don't know what the current attitude is but it's still my impression that anyone dabbling with Nazism or any other kind of fascism practically is met by some kind of intervention/social sanctioning. Racism/slavery is another matter because the history of that has basically been buried until recent years. IIRC, our history lessons never covered our role in that. I do think it's fair enough that people should feel less guilt the further back in time things get. I think the lesson that remains eternally important is that "humans are capable of such things" and that can be taught by simply showing the reality of what happened w/o moralizing about it.