I want to return to a form of skepticism, which seems common in the contemporary world, which does not seem skeptical at all to me, and just summarise the other rather long articles on this blog [1], [2], [3], [4].
I’ve called it ‘directed skepticism’.
in its simplest form it appears as “I am a real skeptic. I am skeptical about everything, but I cannot speak to anyone who is skeptical of my positions, as those positions are true, and any skeptics of those positions are stupid and immoral.”
Another possible way of phrasing this view is:
“I do not like this information. It is unpleasant. It comes from someone I justifiably do not like or am suspicious of. I am very skeptical of it. I’m a real skeptic.”
The above statement then often seems to be followed by another implied statement of the form:
“This information I do like. It supports my side of politics. It is reassuring. It comes from someone I like. Therefore it is probably true. I’m still a skeptic, because if I can be convinced its false, then I never really believed it in the first place, even if I’m likely to believe it again if I hear it from another source I like. I’m always skeptical of its refutation, or of the good intentions of those who disagree. I am a real skeptic.”
In general, people might say they are skeptical because they use their senses but, in effect, often what they are saying cannot come ‘directly from their senses’ as the subject being discussed is too big for overall perception, and too slow for the changes to be perceptible, as with climate change, pandemics, the cause of wars etc..
In these cases, our perception is likely to be mediated by what we have heard from others, no matter how much we insist on our independent thinking. That is, what we think is opinion, not knowledge to use an old (and probably largely invalid) distinction. We only have hypothesis.
This might all sound like caricature, but lets look at a few situations….
Climate change.
It seems common for people to say that they are skeptical of climate change. They may even allege that it is obvious that climate change is not a problem, or that climate scientists are lying.
We could allege that the idea that one’s own ‘side’ is undermining one’s life and the life of our children is difficult. It is far more comfortable to believe climate change is not real, than that our imagined allies are killing us (deliberately or not). However, a skeptic might be skeptical about the idea that our side cannot be harmful to us….
I personally do not know how the fakery and harmlessness of climate change could be obvious. Climate change is a big phenomena. No one can observe directly everything relevant that is happening, so it seems odd for a skeptic not to accept even the possibility that climate scientists may be persuaded by the evidence, or the cumulation of evidence, even if they are still mistaken. Whether it is wise to assume they must be mistaken is another question.
However, those people skeptical of the information and motives presented by climate scientists often appear to have little skepticism about the information and motives of the people on youtube or in the ‘mainstream media’ or in their favoured political party who tell them there is ‘no problem’ or that it is ‘not that bad’, or that ‘we can solve it through [imaginary??] technology’.
The ‘skeptical’ person may argue that the consequences of climate change are bad for the economy, and we should therefore be skeptical of those actions and keep the economy going as we need it, and let the free market sort it all out. With this argument, there is no obvious skepticism directed at the idea that the free market will be able to solve all problems. This is not obvious. It would appear to be a dogma. IThe skeptic is showing no skepticism of the idea we need an economy which is destructive to us, or of the motives of those promoting this idea.
It may be that the people telling the ‘skeptics’ there is nothing to worry about are not climate scientists, and have no apparent long-term experience with the issue. These people may still be right, and climate scientists wrong, but it is not inherently likely that this is the case. It is possible, but are non-climate scientists the best people to trust? Can we be skeptical about deciding that people who are not climate scientists must know much more about climate than all those people who have spent years studying the subject? This is skepticism of non-climate scientists is generally not allowed by climate skeptics.
Acceptance of the ‘no case’ case also tends to demand acceptance of the idea that climate scientists are conspiring, or that science is now completely corrupt (when it conflicts with the skeptics dogma). Is it clearly the case that a world wide conspiracy of climate scientists and leftist politicians is more plausible than a conspiracy involving some fossil fuel companies (who directly benefit from ignoring climate change), and some rightwing media and politicians. If it is not clearly the case, then this could sound like choosing to believe what is comforting.
In my experience, directed skeptics may refer to scientific papers as evidence for their view, which they may not have read, as often the papers do not appear to say what they say they say, or perhaps they just wanted to hear something nice which confirms their skepticism.
The skepticism appears to be entirely directed at justifying a particular point of view. It is not applied evenly to the person’s own positions.
Covid
The same appears to be true of Covid. I, at least, met many people skeptical that Covid is real or dangerous. Diagnosing a new disease, and predicting its trajectory, is difficult. It is another process which seems beyond our direct sense perception – we cannot perceive every virus, and every infected person, all over the world as these develop. So there is every reason for being skeptical of the proposition that we know everything we should know, or need to know, about the disease. It could be something we can adapt to painlessly after a while.
However again, these directed skeptics seem largely unskeptical of people who say its a hoax, or a summer flu, or that the death figures for the US are made up, possibly by doctors to get money or to allow Joe Biden to form a dictatorship. Why should we not be equally skeptical of Trump’s claims that covid would just go away, and that it would disappear after the election, when there was no evidence of this at the time.?
ALL THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IS COVID, COVID, COVID. ON NOVEMBER 4th, YOU WON’T BE HEARING SO MUCH ABOUT IT ANYMORE. WE ARE ROUNDING THE TURN!!!
These people may quote doctors worried that long term lock-down will probably have some bad psychological and health effects for some people, as being evidence that Covid is not really a problem, or that dealing with Covid is worse than ignoring it. Another conclusion might be more like recognising that doctors may well be right that there are problems with lock-downs, and these problems should not be ignored.
Again the skepticism seems to be directed at a particular and reassuring result – we are safe all of our family is safe, and the people we support are not sacrificing us.
News
I often seem to be being told that I should not rely on ‘mainstream media’ for political news. This seems good advice as again I cannot observe everything that happens politically as it happens (and I would need to interpret what is happening anyway, direct perception is limited), and the mainstream media has similar limited perception and comprehension. It also probably displays political and other bias, most likely in favour of its corporate or billionaire owners and advertisers. However, it then seems these people assume that Fox or Breitbart or some youtube channel, that appear to have noticeable political slants, can be trusted most of the time and despite their size and influence are not mainstream, corporately controlled media. This is odd. Surely these news sources are at least equally worthy of skepticism?
Elections
We are currently being told at great volume that we should be skeptical of the US Presidential election results (not the House or Senate results, only the Presidential election results). This is also worthy of skepticism.
Election results are often not representative. Electorates can be gerrymandered. Attempts at fairness, or unfairness, can mean particular parts of the population get more representatives than other parts of the population, as when smaller population states get to elect more members per head than do large population states. Small margins in some electorates can change the result of a whole election, which might otherwise have gone another way. People can be turned away from polling booths, some sections of the population can be disenfranchised by what could look like reasonable political action, voting machines could be hacked. There may be attempts to stop mail in voting, or pre-poll voting. ‘The people’ may not be as binary as the major parties claim. Voters can be ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘socialist’ and not support all the policies of the party they vote for. There is even a social theorem which states that a fair and rational voting scheme is impossible.
The idea that political parties in government always represent the ‘general will’ (or something) and have a ‘mandate’ to do whatever they like, deserves skepticism as few people are likely voting for everything the party has proposed or might propose in the future.
However, in this current case, we are just being asked to be skeptical about the voting system being accurate, and policed, enough to award Donald Trump the victory.
We are furthermore being asked to be unskeptical of a person who argued that he could only loose if the other side cheated. We are to be unskeptical that this person has good evidence of cheating which they have so far refused to present in court, where it can be tested, and perjury can be penalised. We are asked to be unskeptical of claims that the majority result of the vote must be wrong by close to 8 million. We are being asked not to consider whether the known frauds were equally, or even majorly, Republican attempts at cheating. We also have recounts which have not changed the results, and the Attorney General, who appeared to have misrepresented the Mueller report in favour of the President, also states there is no evidence of fraud. But we still have to remain unskeptical of a person who does not have a reputation for peacefully going down, or telling the truth.
At the moment, given who is alleging the claims of truly massive cheating, it would seem ‘rational’ to be skeptical of those claims. Especially given that he appears to want to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands (to millions?) of voters by not counting their votes, in order to win.
Conclusion
These directed skeptics, do not appear to have a sense that skepticism which is only directed in one direction is not skepticism – it is a form of belief which refuses to test its own desired truths.
In this case, directed skepticism seems to be being used to further particular dogmas.
It is often said that President Trump recommended that people drink or inject bleach. This is simply not True. The President suggested that research into the therapeutic effects of light, heat and disinfectant, be carried out. Faced with people pointing out that disinfectant taken internally could cause harm, he later suggested that he was being sarcastic. There is no evidence in his phrasing or intonation to suggest that this later statement is true either. He was more likely to be trying to avoid responsibility what he had said.
To me, the whole event resembles the pointy headed boss making an ignorant suggestion, confident in the experience that everyone will go along with him and praise him, because that is what happens in business – everyone knows their place. It’s private, its ‘brainstorming’, and staff may look at each other wonderingly, and say something like “sure boss, we’ll put that brilliant idea out there and see what happens”. They hope he will forget it in a couple of weeks, because he almost always moves on, but if he doesn’t they will either say that its being worked on, or that its a great idea, but its dangerous, or the doctors don’t like it or something – anything to move on…. Business exists to protect the employer, because people’s livelihoods depend on it. You never push the boss into a corner – you just let stupidity be – that is the safest way to go.
Capitalism and hierarchy tend to block sensible decisions. This seems to be a story about a person who shoots off their mouth, no problem there, but can’t admit they might have been wrong, which probably is a problem.
So pardon me while we get some context to try and see what might have been happening.
Injecting what? A suggestion for research
First off, we have the triggering event.
ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus, specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids. And I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes; isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds, and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing — just spraying it on and letting it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster. We’re also looking at other disinfectants, specifically looking at the COVID-19 virus in saliva…..
Bryan has previously mentioned the effects of light on the virus on surfaces… but that is not the problem. Here, Bryan is clearly talking about disinfectants outside the body, but he mentions saliva – which can be a boundary breaking substance.
The President’s response is to improvise ‘ideas’ around this….
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. So I asked Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of, if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it.
The employee has played along as expected – saying ‘great idea we’ll follow that up…’
[THE PRESIDENT:] And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too. It sounds interesting.
ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: We’ll get to the right folks who could.
Employee realises that the boss is more serious with crazy idea than he thought, but he deflects to make it someone else’s problem. But the boss is on a roll.
THE PRESIDENT: Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.
The boss lets his innate skill and intelligence run away with him. If stuff works outside the body, then it should work equally well inside the body. Pure logic
[THE PRESIDENT:] So we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s — that’s pretty powerful….
Maybe the President realises that not everyone here is an employee paid to praise him and he backs off a little
[THE PRESIDENT:] We’ve — I once mentioned that maybe it does go away with heat and light. And people didn’t like that statement very much. The — the fake news didn’t like it at all. And I just threw it out as a suggestion, but it seems like that’s the case, because when it’s on a surface that would last for a long time, when that surface is outside, it goes away very quickly. It dies very quickly with the sun.
He is just acting like a boss, making a vague “brilliant suggestion”. He has forgotten he is President of the US, with followers who believe everything he says, and that this is a health briefing. Careless words cost lives. So he has landed himself into a problem… which is revealed shortly when…..
Doctors emphasise that it is not safe to inject bleach and disinfectant, as they are toxic [that is why they work to kill bacteria and viruses] and so please do not do it. For example:
FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, who is an employee found it harder to comment, and appeared to prevaricate on an interview….
DR. STEPHEN HAHN, COMMISSIONER, FDA: So, I think the data that were presented at the press conference today were really important in terms of what kills the virus. And I believe the president was asking a question that many Americans are asking, which is, okay, this is what kills the virus, it’s a physical agent, in this case UV light. How could that be applied to kill the virus in, for example, a human being?
We have plenty of examples in medicine where light therapy has been used for treatment of certain diseases. So, it’s a natural question that I as a doctor would have expected to hear from someone as a natural extension of the data that were presented.
ANDERSON COOPER: But — but just from a medical standpoint, I mean, you wouldn’t — would you — I mean, there are — there’s people who are listening, obviously, to the president of the United States and — and take what he says very seriously.
Are you concerned at all, from a medical standpoint, of somebody, you know, injecting themselves with a disinfectant or, you know, hearing what the president said and — and trying to experiment on themselves, thinking that might be something worth looking at? There’s — is there any evidence about taking a disinfectant that’s used, you know, on the table where I’m sitting and using it internally? That doesn’t seem like a good idea from my — I mean, am I wrong?
HAHN: Yes, I think it’s an excellent point you’re making. You — you — we certainly wouldn’t want, as a physician, someone to take matters in their own hands. I think this is something that a patient would want to talk to their physician about. And — and no, I certainly wouldn’t recommend the internal ingestion of a disinfectant.
No condemnation, no explicit statement the President’s suggestion could be dangerous – just he would not recommend it
[HAHN:] Again, this is a conversation that occurs every day in America between a patient and a doctor. I’ve been in that position. I’m sure Dr. Gupta has as well. And it’s really important we address them because people will ask those questions of us.
Really? Every day, patients are asking you if they should be injecting disinfectant to fight their disease?
GUPTA:… I mean, there’s no — those questions may be getting asked, but there’s absolutely no merit to that. That doesn’t need to be studied. You can already say that that doesn’t work, right?
HAHN: And I — and I think, Sanjay, that — that that is exactly what a patient would say to a doctor, and that would be the answer of the medical experts to anybody who answered that question.
COOPER: It does not work.
But it can’t apparently be said by the FDA Commissioner, that the President’s suggestion was not one that doctors would think plausible.
We also might need to point out that the President was also supporting the use of hydroxychloroquine at the time. An official announcement said:
28 million tablets of Hydroxychloroquine have been shipped across the country from the Strategic National Stockpile.
There was some dispute as to whether the substance was of use for Covid. When asked one time, the President said.
[THE PRESIDENT:] I never spoke to a scientist. But I will tell you this: I did speak with the President of Honduras just a little while ago, and I didn’t bring it up; he brought it up. He said they use the hydroxychloroquine. And he said the results were so incredible with hydroxychloroquine. This happened an hour ago.
I just spoke to him, President of Honduras, and he said — and I guess we made some available to them or whatever. He was thanking me. And I said, “How has the result been?” And he said it’s been incredible.
So let’s move on to Trump’s defense of his statements.
Can he simply say “I was making a suggestion for research, for research, and I was wrong not to think that people might take my words more seriously than I’d intended. So let’s be clear no one should inject disinfectant at home.” Or something else simple and to the point, which accepts his responsibility for clearing things up.
The answer seems to be ‘no’. He has lived as a boss who is never wrong, and who fires people for disagreeing with him. Face is far more important than truth.
Q Mr. President, can you clarify your comments about injections of disinfectant? They’re quite provocative.
THE PRESIDENT: No, I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you, just to see what would happen.
The fault is clearly in the unperceptive reporters who don’t understand his wonderful sense of humour. Nothing to do with him. He has no responsibility for their stupidity.
[THE PRESIDENT:] Now, disinfectant, for doing this maybe on the hands, would work. And I was asking the question of the gentleman who was there yesterday — Bill — because when they say that something will last three or four hours or six hours, but if the sun is out or if they use disinfectant, it goes away in less than a minute. Did you hear about this yesterday?
But I was asking a sarcastic — and a very sarcastic question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside. But it does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands, and that would make things much better. That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters.
Okay.
‘Ok?’ indeed. Let’s make this clear. This is Not My Fault. Not my fault. It’s you who are the idiots who don’t get my sophisticated wit.
Q But you were asking your medical experts to look into it. Were you being sarcastic with them?
The response is “Let’s change the subject from disinfectant.”
THE PRESIDENT: No. No, no, no, no. To look into whether or not sun and disinfectant on the hands — but whether or not sun can help us. Because, I mean, he came in yesterday and he said they’ve done a big study. This is a study. This isn’t where he hasn’t done it. This is where they’ve come in with a final report that sun has a massive impact, negatively, on this virus. In other words, it does not live well with humidity, and it doesn’t live well with sun, sunlight, heat. It doesn’t live well with heat and sun and disinfectant. And that’s what I brought out. And I thought it was clear.
Okay? Anything else?….
Later in the same interview he is faced with another set of questions from a few reporters, which seem to reveal the enormous trouble the President has with the suggestion he was possibly wrong. It is just totally unnerving for him.
Q Mr. President, just to follow up on the comments from yesterday, you said you were being sarcastic, but some people may have misunderstood you. Do you want to just clarify to America?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I wish they wouldn’t — I wish they wouldn’t —
No he really can’t bring himself to even clarify.
Q Do you want to —
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think I did.
This is a boss or an immature teenager. “I’ve already done it” when they haven’t.
Q Can you just clarify to Americans —
THE PRESIDENT: But I do think this —
Q — that you don’t want people to ingest that?
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. I do think that disinfectant on the hands could have a very good effect.
He shifts back to a different defensible position, because he can’t say, “please don’t inject it, or ingest it”.
[THE PRESIDENT:] Now, Bill is going back to check that in the laboratory. You know, it’s an amazing laboratory, by the way. It’s amazing the work they do. So he’s going to check.
The doctors are going to do the experiments with disinfectant internally? Perhaps he is implying that they are going to check the effect of disinfectant on the skin – which they have already done?
He made a great, sarcastic suggestion, which will be followed up. This seems to be typical spoilt boss behaviour. Again, even though he is defending himself by saying he didn’t mean it and it was a trap to trap dumb reporters, he still can’t let his brilliant idea go.
[THE PRESIDENT:] Because a hard surface — this is a hard surface, I guess, maybe depending on whose hands you’re talking about, right?
People’s hands are like formica? or steel? He still can’t admit that the ingestion idea was not sensible for normal people to try out.
[THE PRESIDENT:] But this is a hard surface. And disinfectant — the disinfectant has an unbelievable — it wipes it out. You know, you saw it: Sun and heat and humidity wipe it out.
And this is from tests. They’ve been doing these tests for, you know, a number of months. And the result — so then I said, “Well, how do we do it inside the body or even outside the body, with the hands?” And disinfectant, I think, would work. He thinks would work. But you use it when you’re — when you’re doing your hands. I guess that’s one of the reasons they say wash your hands. But whether it’s washing your hands or disinfectant on your hands, it’s very good.
So he flips from inside to outside, because despite him being sarcastic, of which there is no evidence, he still made a good suggestion. Anything to avoid being wrong.
[THE PRESIDENT:] So they’re going to start looking at that. And there is a way of, you know, if light — if sun — sun itself — that sun has a tremendous impact on it. It kills it like in one minute. It goes from what was it? Hours to, like, one minute. It’s dead.
So I said, “You got to go back and look.” But I’d like them now to look as it pertains to the human body, not just sitting on a railing or sitting on a wall. I’d like them to look as it pertains — because maybe there’s something there. They have to work with the doc — I’m not a doctor. They have to work with the doctors. But maybe there is something to light and the human body and helping people that are dying. Okay?
Q But just to clarify — just to clarify that, sir: Are you — are you encouraging Amer- — you’re not encouraging Americans to ingest —
THE PRESIDENT: No, of course — no. Of course.
Q — disinfectant?
THE PRESIDENT: That was — interior wise, it’s said sarcastically. It was — it was put in the form of a question to a group of extraordinarily hostile people, namely the fake news media.
Okay. So —
Lets come back to this being some one else’s fault for not understanding me.
Q Some doctors felt they needed to clarify that after your comments.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, of course. All they had to do was see it was — just, you know, the way it was asked. I was — I was looking at you.
He breaks into confusion. And starts attacking the reporter.
Q No, you weren’t, sir. I wasn’t there yesterday. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: I know. I know.
He can’t even be wrong about that – he knew he was mistaken, a sentence ago?
Q [different reporter] You were looking at Dr. Birx.
THE PRESIDENT: What’s that?
Q You were looking at Dr. Birx.
THE PRESIDENT: I was looking at Bill. I was looking at the doctor. I was looking at some of the reporters. I don’t know if you were there. Were you there? I don’t think you were there.
Q I was there, and I watched you ask her.
THE PRESIDENT: No, not you. Not you. Not you. You were there. You — if you’re there, I never forget. You were —
Breaks down into confusion when challenged again
Q I wasn’t there yesterday, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: You were not?
Q No, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, I didn’t think you were there.
Yes he was right all along. Of course.
Q Just, Mr. President — Mr. President, I know that you continue to say — you’re obviously —
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, hold it one second.
Q Yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: Any other questions from any other people?
Okay, thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.
Breaks it off. Its too confusing when people listen to him, and don’t give him the breaks a boss is entitled to.
This is probably just what you don’t want in a President, but apparently common in business.
I have previously discussed “positive thinking” as a way that Neoliberalism engages in information distortion and suppression. Let’s look at this in more detail with the case of Covid-19.
There is a lot of use for some kinds of positive thinking. Realising that life presents problems, that solving problems can generate more problems, and that persistence and a willingness to learn from failure and mistakes, by changing tack rather than giving up, is useful. Life is complex, and enmeshed in complex systems – it is not easy for most people to do much of anything. If I can quote a relatively famous musical philosopher – John Lydon…
“Every problem at first seemed insurmountable,” he says. “Until one worked harder and harder at solving it. It’s a process I enjoy.”…
“I try to say that in the book,” he says. “Everything is a test. You’ve got to solve these problems. You can’t just run away and hide, shirk your responsibility. You’ve got to meet it head-on, get on with it. Sorry, there it is. These are the cards handed to you and you’d better play the game.”
This seems to be relatively realistic, if you assume Lydon also learns from mistakes. Gratitude and thanks for life and for what you have is probably good for you as well.
However, neoliberal positive thinking seems to insist that one should focus on imagined success and not focus on the problems. In the version of life it promotes, it seems you only get what you attract by your thoughts. If you think positively you attract good things, if you think negatively you attract bad things. Therefore, if you are miserable, poor or sick, it is your fault for choosing bad thoughts, and the successful are always virtuous and strong. They control their thinking so it is always positive, always envisioning what they truly desire.
This is far more problematic, especially with the implied addendum, that given a free market if you are virtuous and hardworking then only good will happen to you, if you think good things and are good. This acts as a way of reinforcing inequality and plutocracy – bad things only happen to bad, uncontrolled, or weak people.
This post is rather long, so in summary:
Neoliberal positive thinking
ignores experience,
plays down a whole range of problems,
blocks information flow,
denounces those with different views, no matter how knowledgeable they might be, and
leads to lying, shadow politics and scapegoating.
It also leads to unjustified optimism about:
‘solutions’ which have not been properly tested but which feel good, and of
the ruler’s better understanding of the problems than people who have studied the areas involved.
By helping people to turn away from real problems, it makes the situation worse.
Trump privately recognises the Danger
We now know that Donald Trump confessed on tape to Bob Woodward on 7th February 2020, that he knew the Corona virus was a problem:
You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. The touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. People don’t realize, we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year here. Who would ever think that, right?…
This is more deadly. This is 5% versus 1%, and less than 1%. So this is deadly stuff….
Young people too. Plenty of young people…..
I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.
A standard defense of the President’s reaction to Covid-19 is that he was distracted in early February by an Impeachment in the Senate, which the Republicans were never going to agree to proceeding, that no one could possibly be aware of what would happen in the future, and that he stopped travel from China when other people warned against it. However, in this interview, he clearly shows that he understood the danger of the problem, but he presented a completely different view of its magnitude to the public.
Publicly Trump plays down the Danger
About three days later, on the 10th February, at a public session at the White House, he showed his strategy of playing down the danger. He said:
Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.
I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.
There is no evidence to assume that the President received further information in this period which could justify modifying his position, (certainly he has not claimed this, that I have seen) so we can assume that his downplaying of the danger was based entirely on wanting to be positive.
This neoliberal positivity went into the policy. It was reported, and confirmed, by Dr Fauci that he and other Trump administration officials had recommended physical distancing to combat the spread of coronavirus in February, but were rebuffed for almost a month – and this despite Trump’s apparent awareness of it seriousness, as revealed by the Woodward tapes. However, Trump seems to have been seduced by wanting to play it down. In neoliberal positive thinking, if you do not focus on the problem, but on how the problem is diminishing or the dawning light, then you will succeed.
what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.
The President did not make public social distancing recommendations until 16 March. [Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing]. He can be said to have consistently undermined these recommendations, by a refusal to wear masks or be physically distant, except on occasions. He also seems to have attacked State Governors who tried to enforce, or recommend, distancing. I suspect that the worse the pandemic became the more he rejected caution as a mode of showing he was in charge.
An interview on Fox got to the point about optimism, but illustrated how it is tied up with flattery and boosterism:
Bill Hemmer: Mr. President. Thank you. Did we get out here in the light? Right about now – a big part of your job is to be an optimist. Donald Trump: Right. BH: You say that yourself. DT: My life…. We have to do what’s right for our country. And, you know, we have a very optimistic country, but this was a very sad thing that happened…. our people are incredible. And the way they’ve handled it and what they’ve done and what they’ve gone through is to me, it’s it’s really sort of shocking because as we discussed, they want to go back.
They want to go back to their restaurants and they want to go back to their places where they work. They want it. This is our country was built on that whole concept. I never realized how much. But they want to get it back. But we have a great country and our people are just truly amazing people.
Much later at a press meeting at the White House, 7 to 8 months after the Woodward tapes were recorded, and just after they were published, President Trump explained:
The fact is, I’m a cheerleader for this country, I love our country, and I don’t want people to be frightened. I don’t want to create panic, as you say. And certainly, I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy.
We want to show confidence. We want to show strength. We want to show strength as a nation. And that’s what I’ve done. And we’ve done very well. We’ve done well from any standard. You look at our numbers, compared to other countries, other parts of the world. It’s been an amazing job that we’ve done….
you cannot show a sense of panic or you’re going to have bigger problems than you ever had before.
Looking at the numbers, shows us that the US has done amongst the worst of all nations, in terms of deaths per head of population, but recognising that would not be positive or amazing (in a good sense).
As Dr. Fauci said:
There were times when I was out there telling the American public how difficult this is, how we’re having a really serious problem, you know, when the president was saying it’s something that’s going to disappear, which obviously, is not the case. When you downplay something that is really a threat, that’s not a good thing.
Another relatively positive technique is to emphasise how bad it could be so by comparison everything looks good. And then decide on the lower figures as reasonable.
we did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would have had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe 2 million people dead. Now, we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people. That’s at the lower — as you know, the low number was supposed to be 100,000 people.
We now know 50-60,000 was an a considerable underestimate (at time of writing it is 217,000), and the US deaths and serious illness are likely to increase. The more people get sick, the wider the transmission and the harder it is likely to be to halt. We now don’t know how badly the country will do from now on, even if people do start facing the problem. Trump’s remarks about over a million people could be more to the point now, almost whatever is done.
Addenda:
We are now in the last days of the election campaign. The president is continuing the optimism, and saying how bad not being hyper-positive is.
Joe Biden is promising a long, dark, painful winter. Did you see him at the debate? Did anybody see the debate by any chance? No, he said, “A long, dark winter.” Oh, that’s great. That’s wonderful. That’s just what our country needs is a long, dark winter and a leader that talks about it….
Just like he said on the debate, “You’re going to have a dark winter.” That was really depressing. It was even depressing even though he did so badly in the debate, I was depressed because I said, “It’s such a depressing thing he said.”
A few Republicans, such as Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, pushed the same public line as the President writing:
Thankfully, the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress, and the Trump Administration.
On the 24th of February it is reported that senior members of the president’s economic team, privately told board members of the Hoover Institution, they could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy.
“What struck me,” [A consultant at the meeting] wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”…
traders spotted the immediate significance: The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.
“Short everything,” was the reaction of [one] investor, using the Wall Street term for betting on the idea that the stock prices of companies would soon fall.
It is possible that anyone with a sense of realism could have worked out the same advice, but the formal information was only directed at particular people.
Panic elsewhere
Despite his proclaimed desire to avoid panic at all costs, Trump does seem to manage to promote panic when it serves his political purposes – panic at ‘rioters,’ ‘liberal communists’, Anti-fascists etc., just not when it could lead to over 200,000 dead Americans, and no one yet know how many mutilated and long term sick.
Suburban voters are pouring into the Republican Party because of the violence in Democrat run cities and states. If Biden gets in, this violence is “coming to the Suburbs”, and FAST. You could say goodbye to your American Dream!
The Democrats never even mentioned the words LAW & ORDER at their National Convention. That’s where they are coming from. If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, “Friendly Protesters”.
There is apparently no positivity spare, to try and reduce racial discrepancies in deaths at the hands of police. Positivity helps boost fear of problems you don’t want to solve, and helps shadow projection
Positively control information
This kind of determination to be ‘positive’ about particular problems, leads to a position in which lying, ignoring or suppressing data, and hiding the reality is inevitable. Being positive in the neoliberal sense, creates a fear of real data and a desire to blame those who try to uncover the extent of the problem.
Suppression or hiding
As early as March an anonymous official told AP that
The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.
Dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room…
Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings… “We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,” one official said. “These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary.”….
‘Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilit[ies]’… are usually reserved for intelligence and military operations. Ordinary cell phones and computers can’t be brought into the chambers.
No one outside ‘the elite’ is to know what is discussed, even people who might know something about the problem. Information is suppressed.
‘Shoot the messenger’
Information which cannot be suppressed can be attacked and ignored. A report from the Inspector General of Health and Human Services, based on interviews between March 23-27 with administrators from 323 hospitals, gave its ‘key takeaway’ as:
Hospitals also reported substantial challenges maintaining or expanding their facilities’ capacity to treat patients with COVID-19. Hospitals described specific challenges, mitigation strategies, and needs for assistance related to personal protective equipment (PPE), testing, staffing, supplies and durable equipment; maintaining or expanding facility capacity; and financial concerns.
severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients and staff. Hospitals reported that they were unable to keep up with COVID-19 testing demands because they lacked complete kits and/or the individual components and supplies needed to complete tests. Additionally, hospitals reported frequently waiting 7 days or longer for test results.
ibid: p.3
Trump responded, by politicising the report and dismissing the authors:
It’s just wrong. Did I hear the word “inspector general”? Really? It’s wrong. And they’ll talk to you about it. It’s wrong.….
we’ve done more testing and had more results than any country, anywhere in the world. They’re doing an incredible job. Now they’re all calling us. They want our testing. ‘What are we doing?’ ‘How do you do the five-minute test?’ ‘How do you do the 15-minute test?’
So, give me the name of the inspector general. Could politics be entered into that?…
Any information which presents problems, to the positive view, has (in that view) to be provided by people who are actively hostile, or politically motivated. There is therefore no need to pay attention to any information they might give. This reinforces information suppression.
The House Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus reported that the White House coronavirus task force privately warned state officials that they faced dire outbreaks over the summer, but top Trump administration officials publicly downplayed the threat:
“Fourteen states that have been in the ‘red zone’ since June 23 have refused to impose statewide mask mandates per Task Force’s recommendations — including states with severe case spikes like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee,” the subcommittee says.
Regardless of how the reports line up with the administration’s messaging, public health specialists have repeatedly called for the reports and data contained in them to be made public. Such information can help local and state officials as well as individuals to better respond to the outbreak
“We’ve got a lot of Covid response-related data that’s all ready and prepped to be shared with the public and it just isn’t being shared,” Ryan Panchadsaram, who helps run a data-tracking site called Covid Exit Strategy, told CNBC in an interview in July.
According to the same news report, the White House condemned the committee for being partisan, with “the purpose of falsely distorting the President’s record.” Again we have the dismissal of problems. There was nothing to take on board here, everything was going well.
Politico reported that:
emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the [CDC] agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump’s optimistic messages about the outbreak…
The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer…
since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.
CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening… that was the aim and that’s how it reads and its disingeneous. Very misleading by the CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear. This hurts any President or administration. This is designed to hurt this Presidnet for their reasons which I am not interested in. I am interested in this or any President being served fairly and that tax payers money not be used for political reasons. They CDC, work for him.
ibid. [spelling and grammar as reported]
A unreviewed study from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences Columbia University argued that:
Counterfactual simulations indicate that, had these same control measures been implemented just 1-2 weeks earlier, a substantial number of cases and deaths could have been averted.
As we have seen, Fauci and other advisors had recommended control measures in mid February while the President did not introduce them until mid-March. President Trump’s response was, again, to damn the report and its origin:
Columbia is a liberal, disgraceful institution to write that because all the people that they cater to were months after me, they said we shouldn’t close it. I took tremendous heat, you know this. When I ban China from coming in, first time anything like that ever happened, I took tremendous heat…..
And I saw that report. It’s a disgrace that Columbia University would do it, playing right to their little group of people that tell them what to do.
It was clearly unnecessary to say more than something like “There are always disputes about models,” or “they have the benefit of hindsight,” or “I acted on the best information available” or, assuming he had really seen it, “that this article is not yet reviewed – there could be considerable problems with their method or conclusions”, but instead he has to try and make them motivatedly bad and imply their research was subservient to an otherwise unknown “little group of people that tell them what to do”. An evil conspiracy is the only possible explanation for suggesting the Trump government could have done better.
Trump is not alone in the denunciation of people saying coronavirus is series. Dr. Fauci and other health officials, and their families have received death threats [2]. Even people appearing in anti-covid announcements can suffer similarly, presumably in an attempt to silence them, and stop the negativity about the virus. Fauci said:
I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that people who object to things that are pure public health principles are so set against it and don’t like what you and I say, namely in the world of science, that they actually threaten you…
There’s one thing about that nonsense that I do object to, and that is the effect that it has on my family…. Because when you get death threats that require you having security protection all the time, and when they start hassling your children on the phone and at their job and interfering with their lives, that pisses me off, I must say.
On the other side, some people with Coronavirus have also received threats, but its not clear, from what I’ve seen, whether that was politically motivated or not – fear of people with a contagious disease is fairly normal if not the best behaviour.
As said in the previous post, shadow politics tends to be denunciatory, rather than curious or information gathering, and that is certainly the case here.
Dislike of Data Leads to Information Mess
The President does not seem to like data and has apparently blamed testing for a rise in cases. Right at the beginning, there were some Americans on a cruise ship, the Grand Princess, which was denied entry into San Francisco, because of the presence of Covid. While the President allowed other people to make the decision, he made his preferences clear.
I’d rather have the people stay, but I’d go with them. I told them [the officials] to make the final decision. I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.
That wasn’t our fault, and it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship, either. Okay? It wasn’t their fault either. And they’re mostly Americans, so I can live either way with it.
A few months later on Fox news he made a similar argument, that implies testing for disease increases knowledge of the numbers of those infected, and thus was not a positive thing.
[Chris] WALLACE: Then — then it [Covid] went down and now since June, it has gone up more than double. One day this week 75,000 new cases. More than double…
TRUMP: Chris, that’s because we have great testing, because we have the best testing in the world. If we didn’t test, you wouldn’t be able to show that chart. If we tested half as much, those numbers would be down.
Cases are up — many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases. Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing….
I’m glad we do [testing], but it really skews the numbers….
You know I said, “It’s going to disappear.” I’ll say it again…..
It’s going to disappear and I’ll be right….. Because I’ve been right probably more than anybody else.
When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please.
A review entitled Tracking Covid-19 in the United States, authored by a group led by led by Tom Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2009 to 2017, was released a few days after the interview above. It claimed that the US “does not have standard, national data on COVID-19. The US also lacks standards for state-, county- and city- level public reporting.” In the press release for the report, the group said:
The report found critical gaps in the availability of information necessary to track and control COVID-19: across the 50 states, only 40% of essential data points are being monitored and reported publicly. More than half the essential information—strategic intelligence that leaders need to turn the tide against COVID-19—is not reported at all….
because of the failure of national leadership, the United States is flying blind in our effort to curb the spread of COVID-19.
In other words, there is no pressure, or direction, to gain clear information about Covid, or to make that information generally available. Information is a mess, because in the world of positivity, we do not need that information and do not attend to ‘negative’ information. Accurate information may possibly make the Administration, and the situation, look worse, and that would make the problem worse.
As a footnote it may well be the case that because the reporting is of cases and deaths, we automatically ignore or play down those people who seemed injured by Covid, or who do not recover their full health. Thus the situation could be far worse than is suggested by focusing on death and assuming that if people don’t die they have fully recovered.
Imagined Optimism
The President also positively promoted treatments for the disease, based on early projections of success, rather than waiting for test confirmations – even against his medical advisors’ advice. He said things like:
Look, it may work and it may not work. And I agree with the doctor, what he said: It may work, it may not work.
I feel good about it. That’s all it is. Just a feeling. You know, I’m a smart guy. I feel good about it. And we’re going to see. You’re going to see soon enough….
You know the expression: What the hell do you have to lose? Okay?
There is no evidence I am aware of, that this harmed people who then insisted on receiving the unconfirmed drugs from their doctors, but it could have. It did boost pharmaceutical company profits through increased sales. The New York Times reported:
Prescriptions for two antimalarial drugs jumped by 46 times the average when the president promoted them on TV
His repeated declarations of support for the malaria drugs have resulted in shortages for people who need them.
U.S. hospital orders for chloroquine jumped by 3,000% from March 1 to 17, according to Premier Inc., a group-purchasing organization for hospital supplies. Hydroxychloroquine orders were up 260%.
Optimism must be everywhere – especially if it helps the corporate sector.
Positivity leads to suppression, or smearing, of dissent, as we have seen. Trump’s optimism about the medicines meant that people who insisted on better evidence for those medicines were clearly sabotaging his efforts to cheerlead and guide America.
The following report may possibly be based on false information, but it fits in with what we have observed so far:
Dr. Rick Bright was abruptly dismissed last week as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and removed as the deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response. He said that he had been pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.”
“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines, and other technologies that lack scientific merit… I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.”
It sometimes appears that the President positively assumes he knows more than specialists, can easily pick things up and is massively intelligent. Talking about medical knowledge, he said.
I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.
By the way, it’s a disease without question, has more names than any disease in history. I can name, “Kung flu.” I can name, 19 different versions of names. Many call it a virus, which it is. Many call it a flu, what difference?
There are plenty of YouTube videos showing Trump declaring he knows more about a particular subject than anybody…. This is not unique to the President, and can be seen in many positive thinkers. It is a way of positively discounting problems and empirical disruptions, while ignoring advice from people who have studied the problems.
However, this kind of behaviour means that it is less likely that people will report bad news to the President or his Cabinet, because it will, at best be ignored, most likely not be welcome, and possibly be greeted with punishment. This increases the likelihood that the leaders wander in a cloud of positive misinformation, and actually do not know how bad things are, and thus are likely to consider people who report bad things as being misleading. After all nobody they trust told them any other than that the situation was good.
A recent Cornel University Study has suggested “that President Trump was quite likely the largest driver of misinformation during the COVID pandemic to date.”
Positivity and Shadow Politics
As we have seen, positivity demands negativity towards others, who disagree or are more cautious – which easily turns into shadow politics, as it involves trying to shift all mistakes and evil onto others.
The Case of Travel Bans: Denunciation of select opposition
President Trump has continually insisted that people resisted his action to prevent travel from China.
I could say I’m fully responsible. But, you know, one day, we had a virus When I took early action in January to ban the travel and all travel to and from China, the Democrats and Biden, in particular, called it “xenophobic.” You remember that? Joe was willing to sacrifice American lives to placate the radical-left open-border extremists. And we saved tens of thousands of lives, probably hundreds of thousands of lives. And we saved millions of lives by doing the closing and now the opening the way we did it.
According to Paul Offit, chair of vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, those kinds of [anti-restriction] opinions were in the minority at the time the president made his decision.
“I don’t know anyone who thought the travel restrictions were a bad idea early on,” Offit told us in a phone interview.
When a virus like that is restricted to one location, as it appeared to be early on, travel restrictions can lessen the odds of it spreading to this country, Offit said. Over time, however, and as cases began to be identified in the U.S., travel restrictions make much less of a difference, he said.
Epidemiologists and former U.S. health officials told Time that the initial travel restrictions were valid and “likely helped to slow the spread of the virus. The problem, they say, is that once it was clear that the virus was within our borders officials did not pivot quickly enough to changing circumstances.”
Although Democratic leaders and Democratic presidential candidates have been highly critical of Trump’s response to the coronavirus, we couldn’t find any examples of them directly and clearly criticizing the travel restrictions.
In a Feb. 4 letter to Trump, Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey, chair of the Appropriations Committee, and Rose DeLauro, chair of one of the subcommittees, wrote that they “strongly support” the president’s decision to declare a public health emergency in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, and they specifically cited the administration’s actions to impose “significant travel restrictions.”
For what it is worth, the New York Times reported:
From the beginning, the Trump administration’s attempts to forestall an outbreak of a virus now spreading rapidly across the globe was marked by a raging internal debate about how far to go in telling Americans the truth…. [health experts] faced resistance and doubt at the White House — especially from the president — about spooking financial markets and inciting panic…
By Thursday, Jan. 30, public health officials had come around. Mr. Azar, Dr. Redfield and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, agreed that a ban on travel from the epidemic’s center could buy some time to put into place prevention and testing measures….
The debate moved that afternoon to the Oval Office, where Mr. Azar and others urged the president to approve the ban. “The situation has changed radically,” Mr. Azar told Mr. Trump.
Others in the room urged being more cautious, arguing that a ban could have unforeseen consequences. “This is unprecedented,” warned Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor. Mr. Trump was skeptical, though he would later claim that everyone around him had been against the idea.
Let us be clear, we will probably never know the full story of these events, and the accounts are ambiguous, but it seems unlikely that the President initiated the stand for banning travel from China, against the advice of everyone, and with ‘everyone’ objecting to that that stand.
However, if people did oppose the travel restrictions it was not just the “radical left”, as the President asserts. For example, the Cato Institute has argued.
U.S. airports recorded nearly 10.7 million entries (mostly by travelers without U.S. citizenship) directly from countries with confirmed COVID-19 cases as of April 7….
Even if they [the bans] were much stricter toward other noncitizens and much earlier, it wouldn’t have mattered. Too much travel had already occurred, and too many U.S. citizens travel. … the evidence shows he [Trump] should have focused far more on domestic measures.
The problem isn’t that Trump acted too slow. It’s that he fixated on international travel almost exclusively and long after the U.S. became the world’s leader in COVID-19 cases….
America needed a leader who sought out novel tools to stop a novel virus, rather than returning to his favorite tool again and again.
Trump does not point out the opposition from his own side and, in fact, did not initially ban travel from China, he restricted it. Travel from Hong Kong and Macau was still allowed – which may not have seemed unreasonable at the time – and
more than 27,000 Americans returned from mainland China in the first month after the restrictions took effect. U.S. officials lost track of more than 1,600 of them who were supposed to be monitored for virus exposure.
Since Chinese officials disclosed the outbreak …. on New Year’s Eve, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, including nearly 40,000 in the two months after President Trump imposed restrictions on such travel, according to an analysis of data collected in both countries….
Nineteen flights departed Wuhan in January for New York or San Francisco…[before the ban, but after the disease was known] For about 4,000 [of these] travelers, there was no enhanced screening….
In interviews, multiple travelers who arrived after the screening was expanded said they received only passing scrutiny, with minimal follow-up.
the United States had already accepted more than 436,000 passengers from China (mostly non-U.S. citizens) since the outbreak there was reported on December 31.
Among these Chinese passengers were more than 6,000 from Wuhan — the center of the outbreak. One of these Wuhan travelers entered the U.S. in Chicago on January 13, the first known entrance of a person with a COVID-19 infection. Even after the president restricted travel, another 43,000 passengers entered the country on direct flights from China
about 2.6 million entries (again mostly non-U.S. citizens) had occurred from countries with COVID-19 in Europe and the British Isles [before the ban on flights from Europe]….
Sealing borders is a standard way of trying to deal with pandemics. It is a form of “social distancing” in that the idea is to keep people separate and reduce possible transmission.
One of the reasons that a global pandemic has been feared for so long is the extreme difficulty of confining a highly contagious disease in one country any more. Air traffic and passenger movements are truly enormous, and more or less uncontrollable, in the small amount of time needed to stop disease spread. The World Air Transport Stats for 2019, for example states there were 1,811,324,000 international passengers in 2018 and 2,566,346,000 domestic passengers in the same period (p.17). They remark: “Almost 22,000 city pairs are now connected by airlines through regular services” (p14). These figures should give some idea of the difficulty of stopping disease spread in a highly interconnected world. However, we should not forget that cruise liners can also act as incubation factories as with the Ruby Princess in Sydney.
Cutting air traffic was a good idea, which few medical officials opposed, but it is not enough once the disease has breached those borders, or if tens of thousands of people are let in anyway, especially if they are let in without testing or quarantine. Trump seems to be distorting the reality to get a simple positive message and blacken the names of out-group members.
General Negativity Towards Critics
Likewise, in a rally speech on the 28th February, the President emphasised his negativity towards critics, to help justify himself, and his position, saying:
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue…..
One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax
We went early, we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement….
the Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and wellbeing of all Americans. Now you see it with the coronavirus, you see it. You see it with the coronavirus. You see that. When you have this virus or any other virus or any other problem coming in, it’s not the only thing that comes in through the border. And we’re setting records now at the border. We’re setting records. And now just using this, so important, right? So important. I’m doing well in the polls despite the worst fake news and worst presidential harassment in the history of the United States. We’ve got phenomenal numbers. No, it’s true. The worst presidential harassment in history.
Anything that [Democrats] can use to try to hurt Trump, they will. Anything he does in a positive sense, like you heard from the reporter that was just suspended from ABC, they will not give him credit for. The playbook is old at this point.
But for them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here, and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning, is a new level of sickness. You know, I don’t know if this is coronavirus or Trump derangement syndrome, but these people are infected badly.
When questioned about this Vice President Mike Pence went along with allocation of blame to one side alone, despite obvious hesitations:
Well, I think what the president said earlier this week and his charge to me is to remind the American people that the risk is low, to assure the American people that we’re ready, but also to say, as the president said, this is no time for politics.
And, frankly, I — I think that was Don Jr.’s point, that there has been some very strong rhetoric directed at the president by some members of Congress and political commentators…
But what the president has charged us to do… is to set the politics aside on this and to work the problem.
that’s exactly what we’re doing. And with — with the exception of some barbs being thrown by some of the predictable voices in the public debate on — on the left, the usual shots the president will — takes, and that I have really heard… what I’m telling you is that this is really a time for us to come together…
Positivity was also present in the popular pro-Trump media. This is Rush Limbaugh showing his priorities:
Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump…. Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks….
The stock market’s down like 900 points right now. The survival rate of this is 98%! You have to read very deeply to find that number, that 2% of the people get the coronavirus die. That’s less than the flu, folks. That is a far lower death statistic than any form of influenza, which is an annual thing that everybody gets shots for. There’s nothing unusual about the coronavirus. In fact, coronavirus is not something new. There are all kinds of viruses that have that name. Now, do not misunderstand. I’m not trying to get you to let your guard down…
Nobody wants to get any of this stuff. I mean, you never… I hate getting the common cold. You don’t want to get the flu. It’s miserable. But we’re not talking about something here that’s gonna wipe out your town or your city if it finds its way there.
Trump developed the habit of dismissing or insulting reporters who asked awkward questions or who were not equally positive. To give just one early example:
Q: What do you say to Americans who are scared, though? I guess, nearly 200 dead; 14,000 who are sick; millions, as you witness, who are scared right now. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?
THE PRESIDENT: I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say.
Go ahead.
Q Mr. President, the units that were just declared —
THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people. The American people are looking for answers and they’re looking for hope. And you’re doing sensationalism, and the same with NBC and “Con-cast.” I don’t call it — I don’t call it “Comcast,” I call it “Con-cast.”
Let me just — for who you work — let me just tell you something: That’s really bad reporting, and you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism.
Let’s see if it works. It might and it might not. I happen to feel good about it, but who knows. I’ve been right a lot. Let’s see what happens. John?
Q Can I get back to science and the logistics here?
THE PRESIDENT: You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Again, all the President needed to have said to be positive, was something like “200 cases is not too bad, with good management, and people being careful, we can slow this down, and we should be fine”, but positivity demands more shadows than that.
Spreading positivity, with the apparently necessary projecting of shadows onto others, cannot be carried out by one person alone. It requires considerable collaboration and whether a deliberate attack on the American people to protect the neoliberal economy or not, is helped by the possibility that people are operating in a political and conspiratorial environment in which deceiving others “for their own good” is normal – and that is what I am suggesting – that neoliberalism promotes conspiracies and disinformation in order to keep power.
Tucker Carlson of Fox, who at one stage tried to get the President to believe the virus was a serious problem, explained how the politics of this was likely to work:
I understood what our viewers thought… “If [the mainstream media] is telling me Trump must lose because of some virus from China, [then that media] are probably overstating it because they hate Trump”. And I don’t think that it is an irrational thing to conclude.
Supporting the President more or less required people to be positive, or at least dismissive of bad news, because that bad news came from what they reguarded as hostile sources. A Trump voter quoted in the Guardian indirectly backs this take, saying:
I think that a lot of the news media, they don’t tell the whole story. They tell the piece that sounds the most damning and they don’t add the other piece,
The positivity also sets up a false binary – you either play the problem down or panic. Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Commission makes the binary as hard as possible:
What would it mean if the president came out and said, “The sky is falling and everybody should be panicked”? He presented calm and a steady hand and a plan. And that is what a president should do. You know, we just commemorated 9/11 this week. And I watched Andy Card walk over to George Bush and say, “The second tower has been hit. America is under attack.” And George Bush didn’t stand up and say, “America’s been attacked by terrorists. Everyone panic.”
Panic or playing down the problem are not the only options. Facing a complex problem realistically, and entertaining some uncertainty, was still possible. We might even wonder if the Bush Administration’s being so positive that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11 and that the conquest of the country would be easy and quick, was a good thing? Perhaps they should have explored the issues further with less determination that there would a positive result from an otherwise unnecessary war?
Positivity as policy and behaviour
Positive from the Beginning. What could they teach us? What could we learn?
It appears that President Trump’s administration was positive before the pandemic, that they did not need to prepare for a pandemic, despite it being a common expectation that a pandemic would affect the world at some time.
In October 2019, the Trump Administration decided to discontinue a Republican program expanded under Obama, called “Predict”, that monitored the transmission of animal-born diseases to humans, the possible origin point of Covid-19. The program had helped discover more than 1,000 viruses. In its 2021 budget, the Trump administration wanted to reduce CDC funding by 16 percent and aimed to reduce contributions to global health programs by $3 billion [paragraph based on Mother Jones, 3 March 2020].
We might add that one explanation for the New Administrations’ refusal to attend briefings by their departments or prepare for transition, as detailed by Michael Lewis in his Fifth Risk, was because they were so positive they could deal with anything; they were smart and governing could not be that difficult – possibly as it was normally done by public servants. All that was needed was for the Departments to be obedient. The other reason was that Trump did not want to spend money on preparing for after the election. He reportedly said…
Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.
Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.
He was persuaded that a refusal to pay would be seen as lack of confidence in his victory, but was apparently resentful about the continued loss of money from his campaign.
As Lewis states, the government bureaucracy polices a huge portfolio of catastrophic risks such as nuclear accident, cyber-attack, catastrophic weather events, pandemics etc:
A bad transition took this entire portfolio of catastrophic risks – the biggest portfolio of such risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world – and made all the bad things more likely to happen and the good things less likely to happen…
On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?
ibid.
This account by Lewis implies positivity in the New Administration about how easy everything should be for them. This is not surprising, as the dogma of neoliberalism primarily exists to protect corporations from government or public ‘interference’ and the holders of this dogma believe that the only times that anything ever goes wrong is if the government is involved.
If people in the Trump Administration subscribed to this neoliberal dogma, then it is perfectly believable that the incoming Trump neoliberal administration dismantled important offices and programmes. Given their positive view of the world, they probably had little idea of what was important, and little propensity to listen to advice because they believed everything would turn out for the best, if left to business.
With these attitudes, they might well have a tendency to prefer not use the State to do anything to stop the spread, and trust to the ‘normal’ processes of the corporate market – which seems to be largely what they have done.
Targets and Predictions
Returning to the period after the pandemic had begun. Just over a week after he agreed to recommend social restrictions, the President declared his simple priority:
we have to put the country to work.
Look, you’re going to lose a number of people to the flu, but you’re going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression. You’re going to lose people. You’re going to have suicides by the thousands. You’re going to have all sorts of things happen. You’re going to have instability. You can’t just come in and say, “Let’s close up the United States of America.” The biggest — the most successful country in the world by far…..
I would to have it open by Easter. I will — I will tell you that right now. I would love to have that — it’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’ll make it an important day for this too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter (Easter Sunday 12 April).
This is an overly positive target, but can be forgotten as soon as it has passed. Around April 23 the Vice President was saying:
If you look at the trends today, I think by Memorial Day Weekend [23-25 May] we will largely have this coronavirus epidemic behind us… State and local officials will begin to reopen activities, you’re going to see states ahead here begin to do that
There was no reason to believe the epidemic would have passed by then, this was pure positivity alone. Perhaps the neoliberal panic about ‘the economy’ overruled everything else? This is not to say economic collapse is not a problem, but it is not the only, or even the primary, problem. This problem and the other problems magnify each other in complicated ways – disease in itself can undermine economies.
Even now in October with a resurgence of Covid cases and the prospect of winter ahead, the President is still claiming the virus is on the way out, and praising an as yet undeveloped vaccine:
The vaccine will end the pandemic but it’s ending anyway. I mean, they go crazy when I say it. It’s going to peter out and it’s going to end, but we’re going to help the end and we’re going to make it a lot faster with the vaccine and with the therapeutics and frankly, with the cures.
…you know what, without the vaccine it’s ending too. We’re rounding the turn, it’s ending without the vaccine. But the vaccine is going to make it go quicker. Let’s get rid of it. We want to get it the hell out of here.
Although this may not be the the President’s fault on 27th October the White House issued a Press Release which claimed one of the Trump Administration’s achievements was
ENDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Administration has taken decisive actions to engage scientists and health professionals in academia, industry, and government to understand, treat, and defeat the disease.
The White House later admitted this was badly phrased and that the actual report did not claim the disease was over, but it is in keeping with their positive philosophy.
Rushing a Vaccine; Trusting pharmaceutical companies
The President’s main strategy to save the economy has been to rush a vaccine, lessen safety checks, and to say how good American vaccine manufacturers are. He said:
Then, my administration cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest-ever, by far, launch of a vaccine trial for this new virus, this very vicious virus. And I want to thank all of the doctors and scientists and researchers involved because they’ve never moved like this, or never even close.
The Food and Drug Administration has swiftly approved more than 130 therapies for active trials; that’s what we have right now, 130. And another 450 are in the planning stages. And tremendous potential awaits. I think we’re going to have some very interesting things to report in the not-too-distant future. And thank you very much to Dr. Hahn.
It’s called Operation Warp Speed. That means big and it means fast. A massive scientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project. You really could say that nobody has seen anything like we’re doing, whether it’s ventilators or testing. Nobody has seen anything like we’re doing now, within our country, since the Second World War. Incredible.
Its objective is to finish developing and then to manufacture and distribute a proven coronavirus vaccine as fast as possible. Again, we’d love to see if we could do it prior to the end of the year. We think we’re going to have some very good results coming out very quickly….
Typically, pharmaceutical companies wait to manufacture a vaccine — a vaccine until it has received all of the regulatory approvals necessary, and this can delay vaccines’ availability to the public as much as a year and even more than that. However, our task is so urgent that, under Operation Warp Speed, the federal government will invest in manufacturing all of the top vaccine candidates before they’re approved…
Everything is going faster and better than ever – at Warp Speed! However, even without the vaccine everything would be ok, because there was no real problem.
And I just want to make something clear. It’s very important: Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back. And we’re starting the process. And in many cases, they don’t have vaccines, and a virus or a flu comes, and you fight through it. We haven’t seen anything like this in 100-and-some-odd years — 1917….
you know, it’s not solely vaccine-based. Other things have never had a vaccine and they go away. So I don’t want people to think that this is all dependent on vaccine, but a vaccine would be a tremendous thing.
ibid.
Similar optimism was present in September:
We’re on track to deliver and distribute the vaccine in a very, very safe and effective manner. We think we can start sometime in October. So as soon as it is announced, we’ll be able to start. That’ll be from mid-October on. It may be a little bit later than that, but we’ll be all set.
This was probably never going to happen. At about the same time
CDC Director Robert Redfield said any vaccine is unlikely to be widely available to most Americans before the summer or early fall of 2021, given initial constraints on supplies if and when a vaccine wins approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). [Even if a] vaccine… will initially be available some time between November and December
Likewise, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the FDA and a member of Pfizer’s board of directors said:
for most people, they will not have access to a vaccine until 2021. I think maybe the first quarter of 2021, probably the first half of 2021. And that’s assuming that these vaccines are demonstrated to be safe and effective in these large trials.
ibid.
But the boosting continued.
Under Operation Warp Speed, my administration is on track to deliver a safe and effective vaccine in record time. We’re doing very well with the vaccines, as most of you know.
Four vaccines are now in the final stage of trials. The day the vaccine is approved by the FDA, we’ll begin distributing it within 24 hours, with hundreds of millions of doses to follow very quickly. We’re all set to go. We’re all ready….
Tremendous progress is being made. And I say, and I’ll say it all the time: We’re rounding the corner. And, very importantly, vaccines are coming, but we’re rounding the corner regardless. But vaccines are coming, and they’re coming fast. We have four great companies already, and it’s going to be added to very rapidly. They’re in final stages of testing. And from what we’re hearing, the results are going to be very extraordinary.
While it may be a good idea to speed and encourage vaccine production, it usually takes a long time for safe testing, and not all viruses can be successfully vaccinated against (AIDS for example), or they require continual innovation due to virus mutation, or revaccination because the antibodies do not last for a long time.
Only in neoliberal positive thinking, is having a fully tested and implemented working vaccine, which is widely accepted by the population, the same as having plans for one, so everyone can stop worrying and get on with socialising and work. Other strategies need to be pursued as well.
Dr Fauci also pointed out that the President has not seen the data on the testing.
These are blind placebo-controlled trials. The only ones who see the data intermittently is the safety data monitoring board…. a single unblinded statistician…. Those data are not public data, no one can know what those data show. That person looks at the data and says, ‘OK, let’s keep the trial going, we don’t have enough data to make a decision.’ Or that person can look at the data and say, ‘You know, there really is a very strong signal of efficacy, let’s make it known.’ We bring in the company, we tell the company, then the company can make up their mind, whether they want to use that data to go to the [Federal Drug Administration for approval].
So we can conclude the President is likely repeating, or creating, optimistic business hype:
In the First Presidential Debate, the President implied that he trusted Pharmaceutical companies more than scientists, saying….
I’ve spoken to the companies and we can have it a lot sooner. It’s a very political thing because people like this [Dr. Redfield and Dr. Slaoui, the head of ‘Operation Warp Speed’] would rather make it political than save lives….
It is a very political thing. I’ve spoken to Pfizer, I’ve spoken to all of the people that you have to speak to, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and others. They can go faster than that by a lot. It’s become very political because the left… Or I don’t know if I call them left, I don’t know what I call them.
His own CDC Director says we could lose as many as another 200,000 people between now and the end of the year. And he said, if we just wear a mask, we can save half those numbers. Just a mask. And by the way, in terms of the whole notion of a vaccine, we’re for a vaccine, but I don’t trust him at all. Nor do you. I know you don’t. What we trust is a scientist.
President Donald J. Trump: (24:25): You don’t trust Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer?
ibid.
Against Caution about Vaccines
Positive thinking also promotes shadow politics. The president’s optimism requires him to condemn those who wonder if vaccination is enough or if the results will be in quickly enough, as being “anti-vaccine”.
I’m calling on Biden to stop promoting his anti-vaccine theories because all they’re doing is hurting the importance of what we’re doing. And I know that if they were in this position, they’d be saying how wonderful it is. They’re recklessly endangering lives. You can’t do that.
And again, this is really a case that they’re only talking — just started talking a little bit negatively, and that’s only because they know we have it, or we will soon have it. And the answer to that is very soon.
…we may very well have the vaccine prior to a certain very important date, namely November 3rd. Once they heard that, the Democrats started — just to show you how bad the intention is, they started knocking the vaccine. Had nothing to do with a vaccine, it was totally made up. It’s all disinformation….
[Democrats] started knocking the vaccine as soon as they heard that this actually may come out prior to election. Now, it may or may not, but it’ll be within a matter of weeks. It will be within a matter of weeks from November. It’s ready to go and it’s ready to — for massive distribution to everybody — with a focus, again, on seniors.
ibid
Joe Biden’s anti-vaccine theories are putting a lot of lives at risk. And they’re only doing it for political reasons; it’s very foolish. It’s part of their war to try and discredit the vaccine, now that they know that we essentially have it. We’ll be announcing it fairly soon.
If people are interested, Biden’s official policies can be found here.
A Possible Future Solution Justifies Spreading the Problem?
Even after the disease had killed over 200,000 Americans – which is far more than any flu seems to have killed per year in the last 50 or so years – members of the Party seemed to be convinced that they could not get the virus, would not get it seriously, or were afraid of being seen as weak or negative. Pictures of Republican Party parties and events, show people crowded together without masking.
copyright Washington Post/Getty Images
Apparently knowing he had been in contact with Corona Virus, Trump attended a Republican fund raiser inside his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where no one was warned, masks were not worn, and buffet food was served in contravention of New Jersey anti-covid health regulations. This is another way of positively asserting that Coronavirus is never a problem – and which demonstrates the President’s victory over the disease.
Current leaked figures suggest that “34 White House staffers and other contacts” where infected from the one event.
After Trump was recognised as having Coronavirus, his main effort seemed to be to persuade people that he was healthy, possibly immune, and that the virus was nothing to worry about, tweeting positively:
Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!
He also suggests that Joe Biden, who is much more cautious, would be hiding in a cellar, apparently using doctored images to make his point – again falsehood is true if it shows how heroic and virtuous the neoliberal President is.
It may be that the President is immune, but that does not mean everyone is immune, or able to get free medical care and experimental drugs, and there would still be no reason to emphasise that mask wearing is unnecessary to protect the health of others, particularly those white house staff who cannot afford the kind of medicines given to Trump, which may not work for everyone anyway.
The point seems to be that in neoliberal individualism and positive thinking, the successful isolated wealthy individual overwhelms fears of death or prolonged illness in many unknown others. Trump is continuing to cheerlead the country, rather than face the complexities of the situation.
Positivity falters
There seems to have been a moment in mid to late March in which the President’s public positivity faltered. Tucker Carlson had warned him the virus was bad and Trump had had a reaction to what he had seen in New York
I grew up in Queens, New York, and right next to a place called Elmhurst, Queens. And they have a hospital that’s a very good hospital — Elmhurst Hospital. Right? I’ve known it. I’ve known where it is. I can tell you the color on the outside, the size of the windows. I mean, I know it very well, right? That was near my community where I lived.
And I’ve been watching that for the last week on television. Body bags all over in hallways. I’ve been watching them bring in trailer trucks — freezer trucks; they’re freezer trucks — because they can’t handle the bodies there’s so many of them. This is in my — essentially, in my community in Queens — Queens, New York.
I’ve seen things that I’ve never seen before. I mean, I’ve seen them, but I’ve seen them on television in faraway lands. I’ve never seen them in our country. Elmhurst Hospital — unbelievable people. I mean, I — when I see the trucks pull up to take out bodies — and these are trucks that are as long as the Rose Garden. And they’re pulling up to take out bodies, and you look inside and you see the black body bags. You say, “What’s in there?” It’s Elmhurst Hospital; must be supplies. It’s not supplies. It’s people. I’ve never seen anything like it.
But while mentioning the same scene he swiftly moved into positivity.
And you also see where you have friends that go into the hospital and you say, “How is he doing?” two days later. And they say, “Sir, he is unconscious” or “He’s in a coma.” So things are happening that we’ve never seen before in this country.
And with all of that being said, the country has come together like I’ve never seen it before. And we will prevail. We will win. And hopefully, it will be in a relatively short period of time.
Within two weeks he was critcising Democrat governors for following the regulations he had issued, and stating that he would open the economy irrespective of what they wanted. He also started to tweet that people should Liberate Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia The inference, is that positive thinking requires shadow politics for it to seem valid, and that it acts as a way of defusing distress.
Conclusion
Early on the President knew the Coronavirus was bad, but he says he decided to play it down, and say it was going to clear up, to avoid panic. He seems to have acted together, with others in the news media and his political party, to mislead people as to the seriousness of the disease, to reduce any Federal co-ordination of the Response and to blame, or scapegoat, Democrat politicians for the problem, including the past administration and State governors where possible. The President delayed, and undermined, recommendations of distancing and hoped that an imagined rapid and unproperly tested vaccine would solve the Country’s problems. This may have later led the President to play the disease down to hide how badly the administration had done – partly because they were so positive that things would go well.
Another possible reason for the positive thinking, is that it is often asserted that consumer and business confidence is the root of economic activity. It could be assumed that if people fear the disease they will both spend and produce less. For example:
Because consumer sentiments are what really drive economies, a return to any kind of “normal” will only happen when and not before confidence returns.
Schwab, K. & Malleret, T. COVID-19: The Great Reset (pp. 43-44). Forum Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Severe slowdown is likely to lead to companies sacking staff (especially without taxpayer support particularly geared at keeping staff employed or paid), and that will lead to a further fall in demand (as people lose income, and increase saving – where possible), and hence to more unemployment.
This realisation could easily slip into a position in which optimism and downplaying the seriousness of the disease, together with attacks on those who thought otherwise could become almost compulsory, if the authorities wanted to keep profit turning and avoid an otherwise inevitable collapse in an election year.
Whatever the case, it seems it was more important to win the election, keep the neoliberal economy going and get people back to work, than it was to protect the American people from the disease. Indeed, it seems likely that the positivity made the situation far worse than it could have been.
The main policies the President seemed to have, were to downplay the disease, keep the share market high by positive spin, attack his political opponents, blame China and hope for a vaccine to be developed quickly – and apparently hope that it did not have bad effects because it was being rushed, as Pharmaceutical companies are trustworthy. Everything else went up and down. He does not even seem to consider the possibility that the disease effects could become worse as the country moves into winter.
A Realist and positive approach does not avoid problems
A real positive approach would have recognised there was a problem, and a problem which was barbed. If people did not self-isolate or practice physical distancing then many people would die or, as it turned out, suffer prolonged illness. However, it is difficult to run a modern country if everyone had to self isolate. It is also possible that if hospitals are shut down, or people are scared to attend them, then people will die unnecessarily from other diseases. There are also likely to be significant mental problems, because humans are not the isolated independent individuals of neoliberal fantasy. These are problems which all have to be recognised, and no doubt there are still more problems needing to be dealt with.
The President could have admitted these problems, could have discussed it with many people, could have encouraged people to be cautious and not to spread the disease, but to keep up socialising, rather than insist on them working in harmful conditions. However, work seems to be the only legitimate social activity for strict neoliberals. He could have helped cities in difficulty rather than try to attack Democrat States and praise Republican States. He could have accepted there might be many approaches which would need to be tried out. He could have accepted hard work and constantly corrected science was necessary. But he didn’t, he floundered in positivity that refused to recognise a set of serious and complex problems, and which continually engaged in shadow politics to try and boost the positive vision that there was no problem.
Positivity creates an unconscious
It is based on panic for the really important thing – the economy, and fear of learning the true extent of the problem. It allows the magnification of fear of lesser problems – such as riots. Positivity creates a negativity towards possible reality, obscures and punishes attempts at understanding, and proposes false dichotomies in order to make the behaviour seem reasonable. It also leads to behaviour which may intensify the problem – particularly as no attention is given to unintended consequences, or unpleasant results.
Neoliberal thinking on Climate change
There is a fair chance this kind of positivity explains some of the neoliberal approach to climate change. If they look after and protect the important things – ie corporate wealth, power and liberty, then (by not focusing on the problems this generates), those problems of climate will disappear in boundless wealth and opportunity. The only real problem comes from those who refuse to be positive, and who do focus on the problems of the world’s slowly disintegrating ecology. These negative people affect the positivity of everyone else, and by pointing to the problems, actually create those problems. Therefore negative people have to be silenced, as they are destroying the capitalist paradise which would otherwise be present.
This hypothesis is a slight refinement of the hypothesis that neoliberals would prefer that large numbers of people should die, rather than that the people are enabled have any liberty to constrain corporate action, or any independence from the corporate system, but it adds force to the idea that this position may often come from a positive cultivation of ignorance rather than malevolence.
The population of the US is about 13 times greater than that of Australia. So if all things are equal, US figures should be 13 times greater than Australian figures.
Today’s figures 8 September 2020:
Australian cases: 26,322 US cases: 6.3 M
The US currently has about 239 times as many cases as Australia.
The pattern over time is as follows:
10 April 77 times as many cases as Aus 29 April 130 times as many cases as Aus 29 May 246 times as many cases as Aus 27 June 330 times as many cases as Aus 08 Sept 239 times as many cases as Aus
We should note that testing is going to be difficult with those US numbers. But it would appear cases have significantly gone up in Australia.
Australian deaths: 762 US deaths: 189k
The US has 248 times as many deaths as Australia
The pattern is as follows:
10 April 309 times as many deaths as Aus 29 April 673 times as many deaths as Aus 29 May 1000 times as many deaths as Aus 27 June 1221 times as many deaths as in Aus 08 Sept 248 times as many deaths
A significant decline in the US increase of death.
We still have no figures for those left incapacitated by the virus
I’ve read a lot of pro-Trump material, and it seems to me that Trump officially recognises and publicises one main true message. Whether he does anything to make it better is another question. This message is:
Most of the American people have had their incomes lowered, their sense of security diminish, and their sense of participation in US political and social life scratched. They feel powerless. They feel that they have no chance of social progress. Even worse they feel ignored, and set upon. They feel mocked and scorned by the elites, and not listened to by politicians and the State. They feel most media does not ‘get’ them. They feel outsiders in their own country. Some of them also feel that they get to participate in irrelevant and pointless wars which leave ordinary people, like them, scarred, injured or dead.
These positions are pretty correct for many people, and they are angry that this is happening.
Trump is seen by most people as successful businessman – ironically largely because of promotion in the mainstream media, certainly not through most people’s encounters with him or his companies. He is seen as a person who has little to do with the elites, and who is also scorned by those elites. Unlike many politicians, he says what he thinks, irrespective of whether it’s nice or not. He speaks ‘ordinary American.’ He appears down to earth. He is not a politician and not compromised by political action. He does not listen to politicians, he listens to his own sense of the situation. Every time someone, who his supporters see as being elite, criticises Trump for being redneck, for stupidity, for lying, for adultery, for corruption, or for not understanding foreign policy, or economics or whatever, they see his outsider status confirmed. By the attacks on him he is confirmed as one of them, fighting for them. This is one reason why the President continually emphasises he is a victim, and it does not misfire with his supporters, even when he starts the fight.
Trump supporters see Trump as speaking directly, and without polish, to them via Twitter because he can’t get fair coverage elsewhere. The fact that he sometimes says silly things shows how unvarnished and genuine the comments are. His typos also show his messages are real and not vetted. If people criticise the typos, that’s just snobbish elites in action and shows how distant those elites are from real Americans. No President has previously had such an intimate and constant contact with his supporters. They tend to feel that he works to keep in touch and tries to tell them what is really going on. This appears unusual in US politics and, again, means he can be trusted – at least more than anyone else in Washington.
They see Trump as a person who keeps his promises – because that is what they are told by the President himself, and his media. It gets a bit harder when it comes down to listing what he has actually done with accuracy. But they see any failures as resulting from obstruction. Obstruction by people who are, by definition, against ordinary people. These failures through obstruction, again justify the President and his fight. But if you are confident the President’s successes would not be reported by the elite media, then the lack of reporting of those successes could be further confirmation of his struggle.
While the complaints about contemporary US life are accurate, I would suggest the diagnosis is not entirely accurate.
To be clear: Yes people are more precarious than they were, yes people no longer feel taken notice of, or being counted as part of the country. Yes people are angry about this. Some of this anger may express nostalgia for a time that never was, but some of it points to times (the 1950s and 60s) in which many people did have valid hopes of social mobility, greater prosperity, greater support, and a sense of political relevance.
However, most of this disappointment could well have been generated by what we might call the “five points of Republican policy” since Reagan turned away from Carter’s warnings of hard times to come over 40 years ago. These policies have been largely supported by the mainstream media, politicians and corporations. Most Democrat politicians have also gone along with these policies, or policies with similar consequences, but with a little more restraint. Resentment against Democrats is not undeserved, but they are not the primary culprits.
The main policies.
Supporting the transfer of wealth, power, liberty and support to the corporate class, under the disguise of ‘free markets’ and ‘liberty’. This is pretty close to socialism for the wealth elites alone.
Promoting the removal of wealth, power, liberty and support from the middle and working classes, also under the disguise of ‘free markets’ and ‘liberty’.
Encouraging destruction of environments and the emission of pollution to help reduce corporate costs and increase corporate profit, largely under the disguise of ‘free markets’ and ‘liberty’. This also makes life for ordinary people, particularly farmers, more precarious.
Encouraging culture wars to disguise the three main policies.
Conduct the culture wars with marked violence and rudeness, so as to encourage the left to respond likewise, so it becomes impossible for people on either side to discuss anything across the divide, or even realise the others have a point. The aim here is to make strong social categories, which only minimally overlap, and which do not trust each other.
Such policies will generate not only precisely what Trump voters feel and live, but attempt to make sure they do not blame the parties who are mostly responsible.
The culture wars help persuade voters that “the real elite” are intellectuals, journalists, Democrat politicians, socialists etc, rather than Corporate bosses, billionaires, members of corporate think tanks, or Republican politicians etc. This works so that people generally do not blame the real elites, or look at how Republican policies largely benefit those elites alone. With the social categories established by the culture wars, the victims of the main policies may even identify as Republicans campaigning in favour of liberty and traditional morality.
This may be one reason why the Republicans have worked against public health measures, because they can claim to represent the freedom that ordinary people don’t have. Campaigning for the freedom not to wear masks is great, as it will hardly effect any of those who are wealthy enough to self isolate. It will mainly kill or injure ordinary folk. It also does not risk an attack on established wealth elites or corporate power.
If the culture wars can persuade people they are part of something great like America, which is under attack by the (fake) elites, and that the President aims to ‘Make America Great Again’, which they interpret to mean ‘to restore their lost possibilities’, then this seems to contrast with those who would exclude them from belonging to anything of value altogether (because they are ‘rednecks’ or ‘Christians’ or whatever convenient abuse can be found…).
If the Culture Wars can further convince people that some of their problems are generated by people who are, in general, equally or even less powerful than they are, or with only small amounts of privilege, such as migrant workers, feminists and black people, then you have a handy set of scapegoats. It gives the disempowered and ignored groups someone to blame who is unlikely to be able to retaliate, or whose retaliation can be crushed without sympathy.
The aim of the culture wars, and the Republican elites is to produce unity amongst supporters and passionate divisions between the supporters and everyone else. Trump is really good at intensifying this process, hence he seems the natural result of the strategy. But even if he gets voted out, and if he goes without encouraging violence and civil war, then someone else will eventually take advantage of the same system, and the situation will get worse.
Improving conditions for voters might even cause the Republicans to lose their political leverage, so it is unlikely to happen with their support for a while yet…
From my amateur alchemical/medical historian point of view there are some obvious human ‘knowledge disruptors’, that can lead to problems with medicine, which may need to be rendered explicit. These are:
1) Tradition and authority 2) Reaction 3) Misguided Logic 4) Anecdote and self-confirmation 5) Self-interest 6) Ethical staunchness
There may well be further obvious knowledge disruptors; this is not an attempt to limit them.
Nearly all medical problems are intensified, through the interaction of these human knowledge disruptors with biological complexity. However, these disruptors are not just present in medicine, they are likely to generate problems in people’s attempts to deal with complex systems of all types.
Furthermore, these knowledge disruptors all tend to be boosted when there are social groups, or social conflicts, involved.
If other people agree with you, praise the genius of those who agree with you, praise the ethical rightness of agreement, or condemn those who disagree with you as stupid or immoral, then that reinforces the knowledge disruption. As I have said many times before: for most of us, in most situations, knowledge is socially verified. Thinking we are independent, probably means we think similarly to those we classify as fellow independents.
1) Tradition and Authority.
This disruptor usually takes the forms of: “We have always treated the disease this way, and this way alone,” or “Galen, or Paracelsus, or Steiner or ‘some other important figure’ say we should treat this disease or this problem this way, and this way alone” or “We have always lived this way and it was really successful, so we should continue to live this way”. “Those other people who disagree with tradition and authority are traitors, and are at best misguided.” “Altering our treatments and behaviour would be immoral.”
There are several problems with these claims and procedures.
The first set of problems is that the tradition or authority may:
a) never have worked in the first place,
b) never worked without problems,
c) the makers of tradition came to their decisions by applying some of the other knowledge disruptors, or
d) have been enforced by violence, not through effectiveness.
For example the makers of tradition may have argued “Galen used treatment X on a person and they recovered” (Anecdote). Or people may have applied the logic that people with damp conditions should be treated by warmth (possibly Misguided Logic), or asserted that “Paracelsus used the elixir of Gold, which I can sell to you, to cure this disease” (Self-interest). Or they might argue: “Treatment X is traditional and anti-socialist, therefore it will work better than something that looks like socialist medicine” (Reaction and Ethical Staunchness). Ethical Staunchness is also likely to lead to enforcement by violence, in the same kind of ways the religion of love led to the inquisition: it’s how you save people.
The Second set of problems centres on the issue that we have a finite number of descriptive terms which can be applied to any disease. The description may ignore other important factors, which given that bodies have a huge range of possible responses, can render the normal treatment valueless in this case, or in this series of cases.
For example a disease may generate the sense of heat and damp, with a rash. It may be important as to whether the rash is red, pink, brown, mottled etc. Is the patient thirsty or dry? Given the limited vocabulary, diseases can resemble each other in the ways we describe them and yet be completely different in cause, prognosis and required treatment. Diseases are changing all the time, and new diseases appear. So a treatment which traditionally works for this apparent disease (as we describe it), may not work on the disease actually being faced.
Even if we diagnose a person by the presence of a ‘virus’ or bacteria within them then, as we can see from Covid-19, it may have radically different effects depending on its interaction with the system: random variation, the patient’s constitution, age, other diseases or poisonings present, etc… and thus require different treatments.
Even if the ‘same’ disease could be treated by herb X or antibiotic Y one hundred years ago with huge success, the disease may now have evolved to an existence in which those treatments no longer work. Or the medicines may interact, combine, or compound with new background chemicals in different ways and no longer help – the medicines may even harm people nowadays in ways they did not originally. The herbs themselves may have changed, or it may have been a variety of herb grown in a particular field with a particular chemical composition, that was actually effective, and that is not where the practitioner is getting the herbs from, as that variation was unknown.
It is also possible that part of the traditional treatment has been lost, because it was verbal, or imitative, and all we have of the tradition is the bit that seems (logically) plausible.
In summary. Tradition and Authority can be wrong, diseases and situations may change, may look the same but be different, and the items used in the treatment etc can change over time as well. Fear of violence, or being morally wrong (and or being punished for this), can lead to a lack of attention to the actual problems.
When tradition and authority succeeds, it is because the traditions have been useful in the past, and the past is similar enough to the present for them to be effective. The question is always, whether the situation is still the same as it was in the past, or whether the traditional ways of behaving have now created a problem, which further application of those ways of behaving cannot solve.
2) Reaction
This occurs when a group of people don’t like one or other tradition for whatever reason, so they avoid its treatments, even when the treatments seem to work, or when the practitioners take on board their criticism and improve.
Usually if people are in reaction they campaign forcibly to destroy the tradition or people’s use of that tradition, they do not believe it can work or be improved. Potential useful knowledge is lost- the classic baby thrown out with the bathwater situation.
Reaction can be useful if the previous, or other, system has failed. But that attacked system may have advantages which are in danger of being ignored. It is not uncommon for a system to modify itself in reaction to the challenge from another system, then defeat the other system and when that system is gone enforce the old destructive ways more thoroughly.
3) Misguided Logic
This is probably one of the most common ways of getting things wrong. ‘Logic’ is only as good as its assumptions and procedures, and few sets of assumptions and procedures are going to be able to completely deal with, and predict, a complex universe. The Logic and procedures may be faulty as well, but they backs up important assumptions made by the group.
We can see this when people make such arguments as that fatty arteries are found in people with heart problems, therefore no fats must be eaten. However, some fats need to be eaten, as they are essential for human biological functioning, so the procedure based on this fault logic may have bad health effects. Other people might argue that as some fats are useful, humans should eat almost nothing but fat etc. But what if some ‘types’ of people should eat more fat and others less fat, or different people should eat different types of fat. The issue needs ongoing investigation, not to be settled by tradition, logic, anecdote or self-confirmation.
When Donald Trump advised his medical teams to study the effects of injecting disinfectants and using light to fight Covid, he was engaging in apparently misguided logic of the form: “Disinfectants and light may kill the virus, therefore they might kill the virus inside the body.” The problem was that taking disinfectants internally might also be injurious, or even lethal, and many people expected the President to be aware of this, and not make the suggestion in public where it might lead some people to try it out without medical supervision (because of the authority of the President, who is a self-confessed super-genius).
Group logic tends to ignore the variety and complexity of life, the things we don’t know, or don’t value, and the side-effects of treatments. As well, because it is persuasive, the logic may not be tested. If the patient dies from applying the logic, the problem is said to arise from the patient (Self-confirmation). Perhaps the patient did not follow the instructions properly? Perhaps the logic was applied too late? Perhaps it is just one of those things, as the procedure normally works? May be there was a mistake in this situation, but it is generally effective? Much back surgery seems a great example of “follow the logic” going wrong, and the apparently large lack of success has been ignored.
Another logic error, takes the form of “if small amounts of something is good, then large amounts of it are even better”. People might argue that small amounts of substance B, have beneficial, even necessary, properties, so we should take large amounts of substance B, when it could actually be poisonous over a certain level. We can see this most obviously in climate denial were people can argue that larger amounts of CO2 will simply propel plant growth and not cause any problems at all. The logic does not recognise the change of state that can be induced by too much of something which is generally necessary.
In summary, the effectiveness of logic and theory is always limited in a complex universe. A deduction from the theory may be wrong in a specific situation, no matter how persuasive it is. Theory and logic has to be tested repeatedly, and data gathered which shows how effective the deductions are (and whether things have changed). That means someone needs to actively try and disprove the logic, as humans will tend towards self-confirmation, no matter how badly the deductions deliver.
4) Anecdote and self confirmation.
The George Carlin video, in the version discussed earlier, is a great example of this. He says he swam in raw sewage as a kid (or had exposure to ‘germs’ and pollution) and has always been healthy, and that no one in his locale had polio. We may know he did not get polio, but we only have the word of himself, a person who was not studying polio in his area, as to the lack of polio in his area, and we have no study of the connection between the exposure to germs and pollution in the Hudson sewage and the lack of polio that he claims was general. It is also not impossible there may have been a substance in the river which killed polio, while not affecting other diseases, so the success had nothing to do with the factors claimed.
We also don’t know whether people died of other things that we could attribute to such exposure, but which were so normal that they were ignored. We don’t know whether all his friends had life-long health from the same source, or whether some of them where sickly, or died in their thirties as a consequence.
Carlin has not looked for evidence that is not confirming, probably because he is in self-confirmation mode – and possibly because he made money telling his audiences what they want to hear. (“Disease is not threatening, you can get over it by being tough. Pandemics are never a problem for tough people as its only weak people who die. You do not have any responsibility to others, as that inhibits your ‘tough liberty.'”)
He might just be a naturally healthy and robust person. This fact is, in itself, interesting, but it may mean that his discussion of what keeps a person healthy is completely without generalisable value. Perhaps a person who is born robust enough can do things that would normally hurt other people, without any ill effect? We probably all know people who live in ways which would harm us, but which does not effect them that badly.
Self confirmation usually leads to people ignoring evidence which goes against their anecdotes or logics. If you have a group of people with the same biases, then self-confirmation is reinforced by the confirmation of trustworthy others in your group who are your compatriots and friends. And if people outside your group say you are wrong, they are ‘obviously’ untrustworthy and likely to be trying to deceive you. You keep your belief to avoid losing status in your group, or being exiled for heresy
Anecdote can open up interesting discussions, and it may be the only way to proceed at the beginning of a study, it may even be correct, but it is not compelling evidence, because it usually focuses on a limited number of cases, in a complex world of difference.
5) Self Interest
This may occur when the practitioner makes a living out of selling treatment. If you have a system, and someone comes to you, then you are likely use it, rather than wonder if another system might be better in this case. If a practitioner sells medicines, surgery, treatment, health planning etc, then they will try to sell these to their patients, to keep their livelihood. They may be tempted to sell the most expensive and glamorous treatment – because glamour confirms anecdote and gives authority, and because the practitioner might make more money out of it. They may over-prescribe. They may perform recondite surgery because they can and they can charge for it, and so on. Again, if others you admire do similar things then it reinforces the practice.
If a practitioner depends on selling treatment for their livelihood, they have even less incentive to test the treatments in the short term, and more likelihood of self-confirmation, following the authority which pronounces this a good treatment, using misguided logics to justify the treatment, and ignoring counter evidence. This does not mean all practitioners are corrupt by any means, but that many practitioners have an incentive to give unnecessary treatment – which may prove harmful.
Likewise if a researcher receives funding from a body which has a commercial interest in a product or treatment, then they are more likely to keep their funding by praising the product or confusing objections to the product. The purchaser of research may also suppress negative results and keep the positive results, because the negative results must be wrong, and its easier to see why they could be wrong. It does seem to be that Pharmaceutical Company research needs to be independently checked, rather than simply accepted.
6) Ethical Staunchness
Ethical staunchness comes about when a theory becomes identified with an ethical position which is taken to be fundamental. Change in the situation is irrelevant. Modification of the condemned, or the condemned procedure, is irrelevant. Failure of the moral position to generate what it considers to be success is irrelevant – the position is correct irrespective of the results. Ethical Staunchness basically implies that taking in evidence, aiming to find out what is wrong with an approach, or looking at the situation in detail is forbidden. If you criticise the position you are immoral, and not only face expulsion, but you cannot be listened to. People can be sacrificed to morals. Morality overwhelms observation.
Ethical Staunchness seems to be a refusal of complexity or negotiation – which is not the same as saying that ethics are unnecessary or always harmful… And sometimes ethical rigor may be required, to as not to compromise with something the person considers deeply immoral – as when people were staunchly anti-Nazi, and refused to support the persecution of those the Nazis had declared immoral. It may be that recognition of the problem does not lead to easy answers.
Complexity
With complexity it is tempting to try and limit the variations and hesitations that are a normal part of the knowledge and living process, and to foreclose to certainty. This simplification may help action, and to some extent may be useful for a while, but have long term consequences which are disruptive of our ways of living and knowing.
In this blog post I have tried to suggest how socially standard ways of knowing and responding to complexity, may disrupt our knowledge of the world, and our reactions to it.
There is a video of comedian George Carlin being circulated as “George Carlin told us about the Corona panic years ago” This video seems to be receiving rave comments from sensible people, but it also seems completely inadequate as a guide to responses to the ‘panic’.
In summary Carlin argues:
People are encouraged to fear germs and the latest infections and people are panicking, and trying to avoid all contacts with germs…. However, the immune system needs germs to practice on. If you lead a sterile life then you will get sick, and you deserve it because you are fucking weak and you have a fucking weak immune system.
He lived along the Hudson River and ‘we’ swam in raw sewage. The big fear at that time was polio, but no one where he lived ever got polio, the polio never had a prayer. He concludes that he never got infections ever, because his immune system was strong through getting a lot of practice.
This is not all direct quotes. It is paraphrase. Go see the video if you think I’m wrong 🙂
I guess the framing of the video as “George Carlin told us about the Corona panic years ago” is meant to imply Carlin is telling us that the Coronavirus is a mere ‘panic’ – it is nothing serious. Indeed the implication, of the framing, seems to be that all pandemics are nothing serious.
There is some truth in what Carlin says. It is probably a good idea not to use germicides everywhere, in everyday life. This is because some exposure to normal disease is helpful for immune protection, and also because Germicides are poisons – they kill life forms after all.
However, this idea, that pandemics and death by disease do not occur in tough traditional societies, or old time cities, because people develop strong immune systems through bad hygiene, or living with dirt, ‘germs’ and infection, is just silly.
There are, and have been, plenty of places were people have been exposed to ‘germs’ as a matter of daily life, and they still get wiped by pandemics. Badly. Especially when the pandemic is new and people have not adapted to it. Think of the black death, and cholera. Diseases, like small pox, have even used as a weapon, and we rightly fear bio-warfare.
Building immunity is not all that this needed. Being ‘tough’ won’t help you completely. If Carlin really thought that exposure to random ‘germs’ and pollutants, such as found in the Hudson River when he was a kid, is a complete protection against pandemics, then he simply does not know what he is talking about, and is suffering the benefit of historical ignorance.
It is more than probable the reason the US, and Europe have had few pandemics recently, is because of public health measures, like clean water no sewage in the street, and a relative lack of malnourished people living in the street. Vaccinations, or other treatments might have helped, but public health is likely the main breakthrough. If Carlin’s statements were true you would have expected heaps of pandemics over the last 40 or 50 years as hygiene improved and people got ‘soft’.
The US has only been seriously threatened by one pandemic in the last 50 years and that was AIDs, and it turned out to be relatively easy to deal with. Carlin had no experience of a really hard pandemic.
We didn’t stop HIV-AIDS by vaccination, because it was impossible to vaccinate against. We did eventually manage to extend people’s lives. We further found that physical distancing, or not intaking other people’s sexual fluids and blood, largely solved the spread issue, so it became something we can live with.
That was pretty easy. It had nothing to do with swimming in raw sewage or ‘vaccinating’ through ingestion of random hazards.
Now people might say Carlin is engaged in humorous exaggeration and not to be taken seriously. However, whatever Carlin’s intent, I think it is being used quite seriously.
The issue is whether what he says tells us anything about the ‘corona panic’? About whether it tells us anything about a new supervirus that turns our vital organs to liquid shit – or in this case into solid shit.
In terms of exaggeration, the Hudson River would probably not have been 100% sewage, no river would be, it would not flow very well. However, it probably would have had a lot of chemical effluent in it as well, including heavy metals. If you object to vaccination, you probably should object to swimming in polluted excrement as well.
We only have his anecdote to show there is any evidence that people in his neighborhood never got polio. It would be interesting to see if that was true, unusual, or just another ‘humorous exaggeration’.
His statement: “if you die you deserve it because you are fucking weak and you have a fucking weak immune system” is a great way of wiping away any sense that you might have responsibility towards others in your ‘freedom’.
So I guess the message of the video for Covid, is ignore medical advice, eat sewage, and don’t worry you might pass the disease on to other people.
If you really want people to die by the millions or billions, but not feel guilty or sad about it, then following the advice in this video will probably help.
Time for the roughly monthly comparison between Australia and the US on the coronavirus pandemic….
The population of the US is about 13 times greater than that of Australia. So if all things are equal, US figures should be 13 times greater than Australian figures.
Today’s figures 27 June 2020:
Australia, confirmed cases: 7593
USA confirmed cases, 2.51m (despite official reluctance to test)
The pattern over time is as follows:
10 April 77 times as many cases as Aus
29 April 130 times as many cases as Aus
29 May 246 times as many cases as Aus
27 June 330 times as many cases as Aus
The confirmed cases are increasing more rapidly than in Australia.
The US had 127,000 deaths and Australia 104.
The pattern is as follows
10 April 309 times as many deaths as Aus
29 April 673 times as many deaths as Aus
29 May 1000 times as many deaths as Aus
27 June 1221 times as many deaths as in Aus
The Death rate is continuing to increase more rapidly than in Aus – although the rate of increase is perhaps slowing down.
There are no figures for those left incapacitated by the virus….
The third comparison between the US and Australia. This is being made at random intervals…
It is a response to those who think that Australia should be more like the US economically and politically.
The first case of coronavirus in the US was announced on the 20th Jan. The first case in Australia was announced on the 25th Jan. This is pretty comparable.
The US population is about 334,000,000 and the Australian population is about 26,000,000. So the population of the US is about 13 times greater than that of Australia. So if all things are equal, US figures should be 13 times greater than Australian figures.
Current confirmed cases in US: 1,760,000 (precise figures not available to me) Current confirmed cases in Australia: 7,155
The US has 246 times as many confirmed cases as Australia. This is up from 130 times as many on 29 April 2020, which is up from 77 times as many on 10 April 2020.
Current deaths in the US: 103,000 (exact figures not available to me). Current deaths in Australia: 103.
The US now has 1,000 times as many deaths as Australia. This is up from 673 times as many deaths on 29 April 2020, which is up from 309 times as many on 10 April 2020.
The trend is clear: the US is getting significantly worse than Australia.
I think the Trump example is probably not one we need to follow.
Yet there are signs the Australian government does not want to be thought of badly by the US and it might become a bare chest grunting match, rather than a considered phase out, as they start returning to the hard-line neoliberalism they are renown for….
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