How To Talk To Coronavirus Skeptics (newyorker.com) 369
Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviews Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard who has focussed much of her career on examining distrust of science in the U.S.: Chotiner: This idea that we reject science because it clashes with our beliefs or experience -- how does that explain why people in Miami, whose homes are going to be flooded, reject global-warming science? Is it partisanship?
Oreskes: The phrase I used was implicatory denial. What we found in "Merchants of Doubt" was that the original merchants of doubt, the people who started the whole thing, way back in the late nineteen-eighties, didn't want to accept the implication that capitalism, as we know it, had failed -- that climate change was a huge market failure and that there was a need for some kind of significant government intervention in the marketplace to address it. So, rather than accept that implication, they questioned the science. Now these things get complicated. People are complicated. One of the things that's happened with climate change over the last thirty years is that, because climate-change denial got picked up by the Republican Party as a political platform, it became polarized according to partisan politics, which is different than, say, vaccination rejection.
And so then it became a talking point for Republicans, and then it became tribal. So now you have this deeply polarized situation in the United States where your views on climate change align very, very strongly with your party affiliation. And now we see a cognitive dissonance. Let's say you live in Florida, and you're now seeing flooding on a rather regular basis. This is completely consistent with the scientific evidence, but you don't accept it as proof of the science. You say, "Oh, well, we've always had flooding, or maybe it's a natural variable." You come up with excuses not to accept the thing that you don't want to accept.
Oreskes: The phrase I used was implicatory denial. What we found in "Merchants of Doubt" was that the original merchants of doubt, the people who started the whole thing, way back in the late nineteen-eighties, didn't want to accept the implication that capitalism, as we know it, had failed -- that climate change was a huge market failure and that there was a need for some kind of significant government intervention in the marketplace to address it. So, rather than accept that implication, they questioned the science. Now these things get complicated. People are complicated. One of the things that's happened with climate change over the last thirty years is that, because climate-change denial got picked up by the Republican Party as a political platform, it became polarized according to partisan politics, which is different than, say, vaccination rejection.
And so then it became a talking point for Republicans, and then it became tribal. So now you have this deeply polarized situation in the United States where your views on climate change align very, very strongly with your party affiliation. And now we see a cognitive dissonance. Let's say you live in Florida, and you're now seeing flooding on a rather regular basis. This is completely consistent with the scientific evidence, but you don't accept it as proof of the science. You say, "Oh, well, we've always had flooding, or maybe it's a natural variable." You come up with excuses not to accept the thing that you don't want to accept.
That's an odd bit to clip out of the article. (Score:5, Informative)
The title mentions coronavirus (Score:4, Informative)
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Brain fart, I'm sure.
Climate Change became Coronavirus
What gets me is the stupidity of it all (Score:5, Interesting)
The climate change believer who still buys land on the coast, as if his personal carbon sequestering will save his house.
The climate change denier who doesn't care if gasoline goes to $200 a gallon, by damn he's still going to drive that V8.
The coronavirus believer (ok me) who has went out 8 times since February 5th because I have 7 out of ten risk factors for death from this thing.
The coronavirus denier who things that this is a fine time to attend a gay orgy on the beach in Miami, or flock from Portland, OR to Seaside to bring coronavirus to Clatsop County which had previously been unaffected.
Hey, idiots- we're in a few fights for the salvation of the species here. Can you maybe, just maybe, let go of selfishness long enough to join in with this?
Your grandparents and great-grandparents were asked to quarantine from time to time before the invention of antibiotics. They were asked, at ages younger than you, to cancel life plans and go to war.
You are being asked to sit on the couch and watch Youtube. You've got this.
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In fairness, when the boomers were asked to cancel life plans and go to war, some of them stamped their feet and said "no". You know, life the current leadership of the country, which also isn't willing to see a hit to their side-hustle of running a hotel empire (I kid, that's the main job. POTUS is the side-hustle) and instead is telling the country to get back to it.
They're the ones refusing to close beaches, etc. At least the kids who are like "I'm just going to spread it and kill not-mes because I'm
Climate Science is Real (Score:3)
... and climate change is serious.
Too bad that when market-based solutions were proposed, all the greenies ran away shrieking. When climate change becomes serious enough not to filter valid solutions based upon their politics, then we'll all be on board.
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You mean like cap and trade? That idea got a lot more stick from the right than the left (even if it was initially a right-leaning idea, like ACA was).
Incorrect premise (Score:2, Insightful)
The premise is that somehow capitalism has failed because people didn't accept the theory of the climate cooling and another ice age in the 70s and 80s.
Capitalism is the only thing that hasn't failed in making the entire population more affluent, less hungry and less death-prone.
For being a history person, they sure have an interesting lens through which they interpret history. I guess facts don't matter.
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Agreed. Clearly not a "history person" but a propagandist spreading lies.
>What we found in "Merchants of Doubt" was that the original merchants of doubt, the people who started the whole thing, way back in the late nineteen-eighties, didn't want to accept the implication that capitalism, as we know it, had failed ..
The late 1980s was 10 years after the communist farmers in China said "fuck this." and divided the land into private plots and agreed that whomever harvested more than a set minimum could keep
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That's implicitly true, however; without a stable environment ALL forms of commerce fail.
When it becomes economically appropriate to address specific parts of climate change, capitalism will. And if history is any indicator, it'll handle it far more efficiently ( and better) than anything to date.
Do you want to know why folks don't "trust" science? Because of too many doom and gloom predictions ( malicious or otherwise ). And that's as if distrust in science is a bad thing; that's literally the core prin
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When it becomes economically appropriate to address specific parts of climate change, capitalism will. And if history is any indicator, it'll handle it far more efficiently ( and better) than anything to date.
That is naively cute, too.
What you are referring to is competition that brings efficiencies to the market, and truly you are correct with that. However competition always loses the prisoner's dilemma. Related is the tragedy of the commons.
Re:Incorrect premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus Christ, man, you're still hawking the whole "global cooling" thing? A few scientists wrote a paper, it got blown up by the popular media (in particular newsweek) and now it is one of the first go-tos for muddying the water with respect to climate change.
It isn't an apples-to-apples comparison and you know that damn well, so I would ask that you reflect on the damage people do by arguing in bad faith.
And Capitalism is what made the entire population more affulent, less hungry, and less death-prone. Raw capitalism is extraordinarily brutal. Most Americans believe in regulation of capitalism (even if they don't know they do). The argument is how to regulate and in what ways.
Capitalism absolutely fails to deal with "tragedy of the commons" type things, yes. That is why we need other mechanisms. Naked capitalism is all about externalizing your impact.
Re:Incorrect premise (Score:4, Insightful)
There are variations of capitalism. Taken too far out sucks and is responsible for a lot of the problems we have.
Where the quality of life is the highest they mix capitalism and socialism. Those countries are also leading the way on environmental issues.
Utterly wrong premise! (Score:3, Interesting)
The premise is that somehow capitalism has failed because people didn't accept the theory of the climate cooling and another ice age in the 70s and 80s.
What's worse is that she then explains this failure as people being unwilling to accept inconvenience. So it has nothing to do with capitalism at all it is just due to people's (small-c) conservative nature that they do not want to deal with change unless absolutely necessary.
Indeed, while capitalism is certainly far from perfect, I would argue that it is now beginning to solve the climate problem because companies are starting to realize that there is profit to be made in renewable, green sources of en
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As someone old enough to remember, there were people in newspapers and science articles talking about a "little ice age". There was also considerable concern about nuclear winter.
Are we talking Corona virus or economics or... (Score:2)
Way to take something that "the expert" believes oh sorry science and declare capitalism has failed. Also, making this a climate change belief, oh sorry science. And about politics.
If you want to really say something, remove your beliefs and trashing of who is obviously your opposing views and make the same comparison. This expert instantly discredits themselves. Maybe that's a reason there is Corona virus skeptics: They don't believe you, by how you present material. Of course that would take the "ex
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On topic: How do we define what a Corona skeptic is? Doesn't believe it exists? Not that big of a deal? Don't care, I'm not in the age/vulnerable set of people? Should we be shutting down our economy? etc.
A Corona Skeptic is someone who doesn't agree with me.
Our species evolved to take advantage of death. (Score:2)
We grow only in adversity which hardens us and forces us to be strong.
âoeThe discipline of suffering, of great sufferingâ"know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness
Maybe not so complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
What also doesn't help is that the climate issue may require a serious change in our way of life, and all manner of progressives are jumping on the climate bandwagon in order to push their own idea of how society should be organized. Conservatives by their very nature oppose such change, which does nothing for their acceptance of the core of the climate issue. Thus the divide across progressive / conservative lines.
People like to tack on their ideology. (Score:2)
What do you need to talk to skeptics? (Score:2)
Trinity: "What do you need?"
Neo: "Guns! Lots of guns!"
For both Coronovirus and Climate change.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The people who reject either do so because they are given no comfortable choices and they will do anything to believe that it just isn't the case.
For climate change? Cut back your energy usage, get a new car. In general, go without or spend money you don't have. Faced with that or just reject that circumstances are inflicting hardships, and the mind will go to rejecting that hardship.
I had a conversation with someone who initially was concerned about coronovirus, but after a week of being stuck at home, started to reject it hard. They started missing all the activities they were used to and that frustration had no where to go but to be frustrated at everyone for making a big deal out of it. First they started doing comparison of total flu deaths in a season to the data. Then I sent a chart showing H1N1 plotted against COVID19 at time scale to show how bad it already was. The argument shifted to 'oh, well they must just not be using good data from H1N1, and way underestimating the death toll it must have had'. They had made up their mind and just can't accept that the correct move is for them to be stuck at home for perhaps quite a while longer. This is a person who normally understands exponential growth, but the magnitude of the personal inconvenience has caused something to snap.
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I don't think that's even remotely close to the full picture. Like for example anti-vaxxers only seem to create hardships for themselves but that doesn't shatter their convictions. You see a lot of people get stuck on ideology and even though the evidence is pretty overwhelming that's not how it works or that it doesn't solve that specific problem it must mean you're doing it wrong. And if you point them to other places that have made it work then that's not applicable here. And the strange thing is it's no
How to talk to a coronavirus skeptic (Score:2)
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And this is the REAL problem.
People that think there is a binary skeptic / believer, like this professor. That if you question an aspect of something, then you must be THE OTHER SIDE.
If I criticize one thing about an issue, say, covid-19, you think I'm a science denier! If you question one thing about global warming, you're a denier!
But of course, if I point out that scientists say people shouldn't eat meat, to help with climate change, it's mostly dismissed by those previously science loving believers.
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An actual online forum skeptic recently responded along the lines, "But it's only a few hundred. You liberals said tens of thousands would be dead by now. You are drama hippies."
Some left leaning pundits may have indeed made a higher prediction. But that's cherry-picking out wrong predictions after the fact, and is thus a poor statistical sampling of "you liberals".
I can't fix every bad link in their spaghetti logic chain. I would have to charge tuition if I spen
Oh we'll find out how bad this really is (Score:2)
What is a covid skeptic? (Score:2)
Is a covid skeptic someone who denies covid is happening, or denies it's dangerous, or disagrees with policy, or generally doesn't trust science? The slashdot article title seems to imply that this label exists in the scope of what the interview is talking about, but by the time I skimmed the first few paragraphs they'd already gotten into people who mistrust science in general, and I didn't have the patience to read onward to try to figure out what the mindset of the article was on what covid skeptics mig
Flooded? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, both Al Gore [latimes.com] and Barack Obama [nationalcenter.org], who not only don't reject this particular science, but are very prominent promoting it, have purchased very expensive ocean-front homes for their families.
Evidently, a belief in the upcoming flood has no bearing on the real-estate decisions.
Or, maybe, it is the unscientific imprecision of those predictions, that are the key? Al Gore's Florida warnings [washingtontimes.com] are from the early nineties — in his "Earth in the Balance", published in 1992, he writes:
Technically, he was not wrong:
Of course, both of the above make the whole statement non-falsifiable, and thus unscientific, so, perhaps, the good professor — and his softball-throwing interviewer — shouldn't be using the term "science" here at all?
Ah, the infamous Oreskes (Score:2)
Never misses an opportunity to promote fascism.
OMG WERE ALL GOING TO DIE (Score:3, Interesting)
Sometimes it feels like anything less than OMG WERE ALL GOING TO DIE LOCKDOWN LOCKDOWN LOCKDOWN makes one a skeptic.
Yes, we have a problem. It's no joke. We also have brains and resources. Let's use them.
...laura
at best, half right (Score:3, Interesting)
climate-change denial got picked up by the Republican Party as a political platform, it became polarized according to partisan politics
Singling out the Republican side w/o also mentioning what the Democrats do is disingenuous. Both major parties have latched on to certain parts of the issue (not just the Repubs and the denial side) and politicized it.
I'm neither a Republican nor a climate change denier, but I will say that for a long time it's been really grating to hear about climate change from the U.S. political left because:
1) so much of the highest profile messaging has been done via condescending celebrities (some of the least credible messengers)
2) it was politicized from the get-go as justification of poor policy, "the climate is being harmed, ergo we must support this [impractical and/or irrelevant] legislation"
3) hesitation or an honest attempt to explore ideas outside of a certain dogma are immediately equated with apostasy and met with swift condemnation
(and yes, the U.S. political right is also guilty in all of this, but unsurprisingly - this is the New Yorker magazine after all - the left is largely incapable of seeing anything beyond that)
SImpler than that (Score:4)
From mid to late January I (and most people) understood Coronavirus was going world-wide. Yet it never occurred to me to sell stocks even though it was obvious that a pandemic was very likely.
It's easy to spin convincing "everything will change" narratives, that we learn to be skeptical of them is a necessary adaption.
We generally don't really believe a change is coming until we can lay our hands on concrete incontrovertible evidence. For a lot of people predictions based on science they don't understand just isn't tangible enough.
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From mid to late January I (and most people) understood Coronavirus was going world-wide. Yet it never occurred to me to sell stocks even though it was obvious that a pandemic was very likely.
Same here, my only excuse was that I failed at predicting Europe and Trump's inaction for the two months that followed. I had always assumed they would follow China's footstep and would lockdown around 100 cases, then it would be over in a month. I planned to buy up a bit more and that's it.
It didn't become apparent to me until around March 10 that, to my surprise, they were no going to act responsibly. By then it was already a bit late to sell.
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No, see.... Communism is the one thing you're NOT allowed to be skeptical of, no matter how many times it's failed.
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Why is it impossible that both "capitalism" and "communism" have failed? In both cases, the supporters will tell you "it's because the government interfered with the market"; "it's because the Soviet government was corrupted"; "it's because there was too much regulation", "it's because the proletariat wasn't ready", "it's because the outside enemy was interfering" (this one works for both. If your system for fixing the problems of people is so delicate that some little bit of government interference/misun
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:4, Interesting)
Because neither cases are true.
It's not the ism that fails. It is the "greedy & evil" humans that each "ism" has a weakness against.
I only benevolent people ran each ISM they would ALL succeed, but this is an unrealistic scenario. Instead to best succeed you must find a system that appeals to human nature, and that means "Free Market Capitalism WITH Socialist controls only at the extremes. But you see, no one wants a free-market, they just want to do whatever they want to do while no one else is allowed to do whatever they want.
For everyone saying that capitalism has failed I can show you a blistering idiot that is making up garbage on the spot. How? Because they call things that are not capitalism capitalism. They do the same when they call countries democracies when they are not democracies. You catching on what is happening here? The entire idea of saying something has failed is really just a bald faced lie being told to make people falsely believe that there is a cure for "human corruption" and there just is not one.
It's the same thing... everyone can promise you that they can fix all of your problems if you just give them total and absolute power. Bernie is guilty of this one when he said "real socialism has not been tried yet". This comment reveals a very deep and profound naivete that pervades socialists. The idea that Bernie will be able to keep control of all the people between him and you, the voter, under control. It's just not possible and not even sane to think it. If Bernie gets his way, sure he might do a good job at first... but soon after evil people will literally have him murdered if they find they cannot shadow puppet him and anyone else in their way to seize that power and turn the state into a despotism. We are having more than enough trouble with the police, judges, and politicians abusing their power as it is. There is not a sane person alive that thinks socialism is going to fix that. It makes the problem worse because socialism give government too much power. It blows my mind that socialist simultaneously complain about government abuse and ask for more government in nearly the same breath! The only reason it is not in the same breath is because they are often so vapid about it they can only form another thought if run out of breath.
Communism, Socialism, Capitalism... they ALL WORK if they have benevolent people in total control of them. Until then... they all need to be only working in the areas they help the most.
Capitalism for 80% of the market and Socialism for periphery issues that Capitalism creates. No one can ever earn 1 Billion dollars a year for example. They can however stand on peoples backs and use regulations to "claim" 1 Billion in revenue however.
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
No system can avoid the problem of human frailty. Any that attempts this will create remarkably more misery than would have occurred otherwise. You can't ignore or suppress human nature. You have to account for it and harness it.
You have to engineer systems based on the way things are. Not how you wish they were.
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The problem is all systems need adjustments (Score:3)
The problem is people want there to be perfect and permanent solutions. They want to be conservative. And I mean really conservative. As in, no changes. People don't like change because change is usually for the worse, especially in the last 40-50 years.
So when you start talking about the real, hard wor
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently you're not allowed to be skeptical of free market 'capitalism' either. Even the slightest hint of wanting to moderate it will cause a horde of screeching harpies to descend.
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No, the problem is not skepticism or being critical.
The problem comes down when you say things like "Free-Market Capitalism" has failed when you don't have free-market capitalism. So if you don't know yet, its the lying or ignorance that gets people angry at you.
Everyone knows that Capitalism is not perfect, and sure it sucks... but it sucks less than all of the other ISMs we have tried.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This video illustrates what I am saying. Socialists think that Social-ISM is a cure for
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you for proving my point.
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm tired of people insisting you have to pick one. Oh, you're building your house with brick? It's got to be all brick, no wood anywhere. You want to build with wood? Better not use any metal, etc.
Different systems have strengths and weaknesses. A large majority of people would benefit from a little bit of socialist protections in their mostly free market. Some subcombonents seem to consistently fail under any private scenario and probably ought to be communized. Other muddling community freebie ideas might make tremendous strides if incentivized in a competitive financial market. You can pick and choose; it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Re: "...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:3)
Don't be an idiot. Black and white thinking is perfectly fine when we know what works nd what doesn't. Socialism has never worked anywhere. There is not single socialist nation on the planet today which you would want to live in. There are however lots of capitalist nations with generous social safety nets which you would like to live in - and fools like you equate that with socialism.
Re: "...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:3)
Nonsense. Social safety nets and socialism are two completely different things. Idiots who believe the two are synonymous cause far more harm than any other group in our society today.
Where, besides China, are you not allowed (Score:3)
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What they really can't stand is when deniers are denying the obvious and want THEM to assume the risks. If only the deniers would face the consequences, the message from the other side would be "good luck with that!"
I was actually reminded of the Three Stooges when Curly accidentally got his feet encased in cement blocks and Moe decided to blast claiming it's fine because 'dynamite always blows down'.
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:4, Interesting)
So when someone says "be careful not to mythologize the Corona Virus into a pandemic Godzilla", are they a denier? In your world, is one allow to say "maybe we've panicked a bit too much here"? Or can one only agree with the received wisdom of the media priests (who, let us not forget, are making clickbait for profit)?
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
You're allowed to say it, but it puts you firmly in the company with the guy in the straitjacket with the funny Napoleon hat on
So, no matter how much we're panicking, we're never panicking too much? You're suggesting the right condition is infinite panic? I don't hink you've thought this through.
If we weren't seeing signs that we didn't over-do it, such as hospitals actually running out of space in their ICUs while the number of cases is still rising exponentially
That's going to happen regardless. It's a question of quantity, not of will it happen. And hoarding toilet paper isn't going to help that. At all.
There are reasonable steps that need to be taken. And there is unreasonable panic. The world is big enough for both those things.
That is exactly YOU denying the obvious and expecting me to take the risk right along with you
Or you're denying the obvious, and forcing economic harm on everyone else right along with you. Like every interesting question in life, there are trade-offs and the extremes are the only thing we can be sure are the wrong answers.
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:4, Interesting)
Some places are in absurd panic when there are as yet just a handful of local cases.
Given a problem that naturally grows exponentially, when there are just a few cases is exactly the right time to do what it takes to prevent even one more. Had that been done in China, the whole damned thing would have burned itself out by December and probably wouldn't have been more than a 30 second blurb on the news. Had the rest of the world blocked travel out of China in early January, there would likely be zero cases of it outside of China now. But no, that might have caused a 5% dip in the Dow!
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I'm not saying China wasn't draconian enough, I'm saying they weren't timely enough. They could have been LESS draconian and more effective had they not buried their heads in the sand (even going so far as to warn doctors to shut up about it or face 'consequences') for 2 months before acting.
As for Italy, they would have had a lot less cases and those they did have would have blown over by now with similarly strong and decisive steps. Note, I said now, not January, update your calendar.
Meanwhile, the rest o
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You fail at math. And logic.
Infections don't magically stop at 10,000 cases, so why do you stop there? In your example, 78 infected and 3 day doubling result in 10,000 (well, 9984) infected after 3 weeks, but 250,000 (well, 254,164) after 5 weeks.
So, just about 25 times more than with 5 day doubling.
Oh, and for 10 weeks? It's 825 million vs. 1.28 million. Admittedly, somewhere before that, exponential growth will stop due to lack of local population left to infect, but you get the picture.
That's not the sam
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such as hospitals actually running out of space in their ICUs while the number of cases is still rising exponentially
In my county, we have a grand total of 39 cases... out of a population of over 500k. That's not hospitalizations, that's total positive tests. Our hospitals are not running out of space, and the cases aren't rising exponentially. In fact, we have so FEW cases that they won't release any information about who is infected because of privacy laws. There are so few that officials are worried you'll be able to figure out who is infected.
We've STILL shut down everything. School is out until May 1st. They'v
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I have actual evidence, much like general knowledge of the world suggested to Curly that setting off dynamite within an inch of your feet could go very badly.
Re: "...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Interesting)
The coronavirus won't kill us all. That's a fact. Most people that get it don't even need medical intervention, some don't get any symptoms at all, and those that do often can't distinguish it from allergies.
The ones who die from it are those like me with a chronic illness. In my case, kidney transplant. In my mom's case, being on chemotherapy.
Re: "...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
You've just described the flu as well as a large array of obscure pathogens.
Re: "...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd add to that list all the people who aren't sick with coronavirus, but who will die because they cannot receive life-saving or life-sustaining care from an overwhelmed medical system.
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Robustness is inefficient. This is what you get when you try to run what should be essential services as a business. You get a race to the bottom.
Re: "...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure what that has to do with capitalism, even socialist states were dealing with the same thing in the 80's. If you want to associate it with industrialization, that's fine, but the economic system doesn't seem to do much beyond the capitalist economies being able to scale a lot higher than everything else.
Re: "...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Capitalism has failed" is not the same as "capitalism is a failure".
Ty Cobb was the most successful MLB batter of all time, with a career average of .366. That means he failed to hit the ball 63% of the time. In his career he struck out 680 times. After any of those you could say "Ty Cobb has failed."
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Insightful)
Market failures are well known in economics. Hell, history and economic classes cover the fencing in of grazing lands, eliminating the tragedy of the commons, as a turning point in English agriculture.
Pointing out a market failure doesn't make someone not a capitalist. Nor does disliking capitalism automatically make you a communist.
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This is exactly one of those partisan issues where anything less than capitalism is automatically branded as communism or inevitable communism. And it also highlights another facet of this were people get all riled up about a small little aspect of an argument that's been made and use it to invalidate every single thing that's been said.
Skins have been getting very thin in the last decade. So many people seem to be on a hair trigger these times.
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:5, Interesting)
What this means is that pure capitalism with zero government control has failed. Capitalism is clearly alive and well, even in Communist China. But the free market is not the panacaea that cures all ills, and corporations will not save us if left to their own devices. What's he's saying is that people started denying climate change because the solutions involved dealing with a government that would regulate industry and business, and such ideas were anathema to the market purists.
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What should we do about our socialized roads, O great and wise capitalist?
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Sell them to make them toll roads, of course. Also, no regulations on how well they're repaired. The companies will see to that when their profits start going down because no one wants to drive on their potholes. If we just do that, there will be plenty of good roads! Oh yeah! No speed limits either - that's just unnecessary government regulation.
The moral? Stupid people are everywhere - a decent society means protecting the rest of us from their stupidity.
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We don't have capitalism. The US Dollar is constantly being held down by the fed printing money just to hide the problems. What you imagine as the free market is being manipulated from the top.
Why do we have to pick a single unified theory of economics? Why can't we take the best bits and pieces of everything that's been tried and drop the religious devotion?
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We don't have capitalism. The US Dollar is constantly being held down by the fed printing money just to hide the problems. What you imagine as the free market is being manipulated from the top.
"We don't have unregulated capitalism" is not the same thing as "we don't have capitalism".
Why do we have to pick a single unified theory of economics?
I didn't say that you had to. I asked OP, since he appears to believe that capitalism has failed, to point to something more successful than capitalism.
Why can't we take the best bits and pieces of everything that's been tried and drop the religious devotion?
We can. That doesn't answer the question I asked though.
If you can't find anything more successful than capitalism, then it's hardly fair to call it a failure.
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So we don't have pure capitalism, but you want to take credit for it under the capitalism banner so your team wins?
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So we don't have pure capitalism, but you want to take credit for it under the capitalism banner so your team wins?
We don't have pure anything, that doesn't mean we don't have anything. IOW, everything has regulations. Whn you find something without regulations, let us know.
Capitalism as we practice it has been a roaring success wherever it is practiced (even in Communist China). If you have evidence of something that works better than capitalism in making peoples lives better, then by all means point it out.
I kinda understand that you want to make the argument that any regulations that work means that more regulations
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You get to work where you want and you get to own property. In socialism you are not allowed these things. Society owns/controls your productivity and all property under its purest form.
That is not socialism, that is some form of Marxist or Communist dictatorship.
At it's very most basic essential description, socialism is just: "helping your neighbours when random fuckery happens to them" and that's it. Anything else is your own fabrication.
Like if their house burns down because it got hit by lightning, or they get cancer and can't work without treatment, or a swarm of locusts devours their whole crop - then the costs are shared publicly, rather than hold individuals to account financially
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At it's very most basic essential description, socialism is just: "helping your neighbours when random fuckery happens to them" and that's it.
No dictionary agrees with you. If you have to redefine the meaning of words to make your argument work, then it is your argument that is broken, not the dictionaries.
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Even China and the Soviet Union only had relatively pure forms of Communism for brief periods. Lenin was forced to back away from more extreme collectivization because the Russian economy would have collapsed. Stalin forged ahead with collectivization in agriculture, and caused a famine (a similar thing happened in China with the Great leap Forward). As well, the rapid industrialization projects in both countries often muddy the waters, since both countries were still largely rural and agrarian at the time
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There is not "PURE" anything....
What we have is close enough to defined capitalism...therefore, everyone knows what we're talking about when we say that is the type society we have.
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A mixed economy with a significant portion of both capitalism and socialism.
Re:"...Capitalism has Failed" (Score:4, Informative)
Free market economy is the term you want (Score:3)
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besides Authoritarian Communism, right?
There is no other type of communism. Can you point to a nation that has a socialist or communist economy and does NOT have an authoritarian style of governance?
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Democratic Socialism for one. And there are dozens of countries with Socialist governments that are not Authoritarian. At least of the "Democratic Socialist" vibe. Norway, Germany, France, the UK, Canada, Australia, etc, etc. These are all considered "Socialist" by the American Right Wing's standards (since they're in line with Bernie Sanders' positions, and he is called a Socialist).
First, Bernie isn't "called' a Socialist, Bernie calls himself a socialist. There's no labeling here, just the very words he chooses to use for himself.
Now, about the countries you listed. Those are Capitalist economies [wikipedia.org], not socialist.
Additionally, those countries are WAY to the right of what Bernie wants; after all, you can still buy private health insurance in those countries - something that Bernie wants to ban [washingtonexaminer.com].
In all those nations, people can still become millionaires and billionaires; Bernie used
Re:There are other systems besides Capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two significant problems with Marx's theory. First and foremost, the underpinning class theory of Marxism is that workers revolutions will happen in industrialized states. In his view, feudal or agrarian states had to enter a capitalist free market phase before they transitioned into Communism. Other than Hungary's very brief flirtation with Communism in the 1920s (which never controlled the whole country and only lasted a few months), no industrialized state had any workers' revolts significant enough to topple their governments, and most industrialized states brought in many reforms; regulations to stem the worst free market excesses, legalization of trade unions and other initiatives to protect workers' rights, free primary education, increasing the voting franchise, and so forth. The French Revolution (which was Marx's most significant inspiration) taught a lot of countries of the age a lot of lessons. The major Communist revolutions happened in countries like Russia and China, which were still largely agrarian, and by strict Marxist dogma, not yet ready for the glories of Communism.
The second problem with Marxism was the "dictatorship of the proletariat", that period during the transition from capitalism to Communism where a dictatorship would have to oversee the revolution, and make sure the Bourgeoisie didn't manage to regain sufficient influence to mount a counter-revolution. Of course, what actually happened was the "Bourgeoisie" either fled or were stripped of their capital, but the Communist states never actually transitioned out of hte "dictatorship" phase, and the Communist rulers simply replaced the aristocracy at the top of the food chain. Communist countries never actually became Communist at all, and Marx's vision of a collectivist democratic government fell prey to the predictable desire of any authoritarian regime to hold on to power.
Communism, at least in the Marxist sense, is a Utopian theory. It sounds great in theory, but never takes into account the realities of politics and human nature. I can't imagine any circumstance under which such a Utopian government could ever take hold. Whomever was the top dog during the "transition" would engineer situations in which counter-revolutionaries were right around the corner waiting to betray the revolution. They could use that threat to monopolize power (as Stalin did, when he chased Trotsky from power, and then chased him around the globe for over twenty years). In both Russia and China there were endless parades of show trials as both Stalin and Mao both manufactured imaginary threats to their power and made sure any real threat was neutralized (usually involving a bullet to the head).
I'd argue this is a flaw of any kind of Utopian political theory; whether it being Communism, Anarcho-capitalism, or Libertarianism. They all imagine that somehow if humanity is unbound from whatever real or imagined chains they want to break, then their perfect system will arise and self-sustain itself. I don't hold the utterly cynical view that humans are governed solely by self-interest, but neither do I think most humans are all that terribly enlightened. Whether you had some sort of pure libertarian state where the government did nothing more than patrol the borders, put out house fires, that you would end up with a huge divide between rich and poor, and the rich would game the system to their advantage. And Communism, by trying to race in the opposite direction, accomplished the same thing; it never freed anyone, but just find clever new chains to bind them in.
The real secret to success, such as it is, is to just admit that no pure system can be established, and that governments should governed by pragmatism, and not by rigid ideology. Utilitarianism is the secret to success. As Bentham said "The greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people." You can't solve all the problems, and you need to balance individual liberty with the needs of the wider society, but lean towards personal liberty to stave off the tendency for humans to form class hieararchies.
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I'm sorry, but this professor of "the history of science" is full of shit.
Why ? Because she's a woman ? Because she says things you don't like ? Because she's an "intellectual", part of the "elite" ?
All of the above ?
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Issue #1 is that in wrapping her political agenda in the flag of "science", she forgets that science doesn't give a shit if coronavirus kills every living person or climate change destroys the planet. Those value (normative) determinations have to come from elsewhere. Science has no input on the question.
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She says that "capitalism has failed," which is false and not what she meant. What she means is that "capitalism hasn't solved the climate crisis," which is true but not the same thing.
So her biggest failure is
Pre-history (Score:3)
anti-science has been a thing since at least the 1800s
I'm pretty sure it goes back a lot further than that. Indeed I would bet that the first cavemen who learnt to start a fire were probably regarded as dangerously crazy until people realized that they did not tend to die during cold winters, were far better nourished by cooked food and tended to get eaten by wildlife less often thanks to a ready supply of burning torches.
That's the great thing about science: when it comes to life-or-death situations most people believe it and those that don't tend to remo
Re:I tuned out at "denial" (Score:5, Insightful)
Because she's a woman ?
Ah yes, the omnipresent -ism-defense. Another reason why people distrust this agenda-driven nonsense. If your first line of defense is hiding behind gender, you know yourself that your argument is weak.
And you thought genitalia. Must reduce CO2 by 30% (Score:3, Insightful)
If we don't immediately cut CO2 emissions by 30%, New York City and major cities in California will be underwater within 30 years. So days the UN global warming report. Thirty years ago.
If you haven't noticed, NYC and SFO aren't underwater. The #1 reason that people doubt claims made by global warming advocates is their consistent exaggeration. Most every testable claim has turned out to he false, because there is a consistent trend of vastly exaggerating. That's why thinking people doubt most pro glob
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If you actually wanted to learn skills, you would have go
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She just makes me lose respect for Harvard,
Why would have any respect for Harvard to start with? It's just a degree-mill for legacies...
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>And your point is ? Only the stupid leave autocorrect on.
You have an extra space between 'is' and the question mark. In proper English, there is no space there. Congratulations, you have joined the stupid crowd.
Re:Liberal Elites = thought police (Score:5, Insightful)
Or are they expert in the area, who have spent a lot of time thinking about the problem, testing their methodologies, working with other experts who will challenge their ideas.
Also I seem to get nice long Lectures from Conservatives where if I were to challenge any hole in their logic I will be called a Libtard and shown that it is proof I am part of some Liberal Conspiracy.
Dude if there is a Liberal Conspiracy I want in, I want that sweet tax exempt liberal conspiracy money. Because it seems that most of the experts seem to put a lot of their reputation on the line for that low middle class life style they are reporting.
Climate Science is not (Score:2)
I keep posting this challenge to Climate "science" adherents, and no one is able to fulfill the quest. Maybe, those experts you're listing are as common as unicorns?
The challenge: list several (3 or more) falsifiable predictions made by the Climate Scientists, that actually came true in due time — within, at least, 30% of the pr
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Your post is basically "what about" ( whataboutism ), but for that it's a fair critique of "the otherside". Let me ask you though; does poor behavior on one side justify poor behavior on the other?
There are reasons to be skeptical of doom and gloom, life altering predictions.
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Liberals always happy to tell you how to think, how to talk, and what thoughts are ok. Dont be guilty of Wrong Think comrade!!
Liberals do no such thing. Authoritarians do, and they come from both sides of the spectrum. You're probably looking for the word "Progressive" when you say "Liberal" though plenty of "Conservatives" will also cheerfully tell you how to live your life and what you can see, read, do, and think.
Re:Coronavirus skeptics? (Score:4, Informative)
From your link:
The Chinese embassy in Spain on Thursday said the Spanish government bought a batch of faulty Covid-19 testing kits from an unauthorized Chinese company...[named]Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology.
“The Chinese Ministry of Commerce offered Spain a list of certified providers, on which Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology did not feature. Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology has not yet been licensed by the Chinese National Medical Products Administration to sell its products.”
In a message on Twitter, it [Chinese embassy] said the order had not been part of the 432-million euro ($466m) contract with China that the Spanish government announced Wednesday, which would include the delivery of 5.5 million testing kits. “The purchase of medical materials announced by [Spain's] Health Ministry being processed and the materials have not yet left China.
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The ones that China "donated" rather, the Czech Republic [praguemorning.cz] had to pay for? Remember China was just lauding earlier that they donated all of these test kits. 80% of them are faulty, missing components, or have an error rate so high that flipping a coin is more useful.
Re: I was wondering when the 'shaming' would set i (Score:3)
It's not a wasted test if it keeps you informed of how widespread the disease is, even when it tells you where it's not.
The alternative is assuming you are on one side of "we have it contained, and are doing contact tracing" or "way more people than we know actually have it, ignore all the stats, assume you have it", and not know when it changes.
So with 97% "wasted" tests, you are confident those numbers represent the infected population well right?
And 35/300 people required hospitalization in your state?
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Ubiquitous testing would let us know what percentage of the population were asymptotic carriers and to identify new areas where infections are starting, and logistics could be adjusted to minimize death and economic impact. It is EXTREMELY important that accurate testing, and at least ten times as much including random sampling, be done to plan proportional measures.