Six on the Coronavirus: COVID-19 has blown away the myth about 'First' and 'Third' world competence; Return of the paranoid style Fake news is fooling more conservatives than liberals. Why?; Memento Mori; ‘Are you immune?’ The new class system that c
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"One of the planet’s – and Africa’s – deepest prejudices is being demolished by the way countries handle COVID-19.
For as long as any of us remember, everyone “knew” that “First World” countries – in effect, Western Europe and North America – were much better at providing their citizens with a good life than the poor and incapable states of the “Third World”. “First World” has become shorthand for competence, sophistication and the highest political and economic standards.
So deep-rooted is this that even critics of the “First World” usually accept it. They might argue that it became that way by exploiting the rest of the world or that it is not morally or culturally superior. But they never question that it knows how to offer (some) people a better material life. Africans and others in the “Third World” often aspire to become like the “First World” – and to live in it, because that means living better.
So we should have expected the state-of-the-art health systems of the “First World”, spurred on by their aware and empowered citizens, to handle COVID-19 with relative ease, leaving the rest of the planet to endure the horror of buckling health systems and mass graves.
We have seen precisely the opposite.
Fatal errors
“First World” is often code for countries run by Europeans or people of European descent; some of the worst health performers on the globe in recent weeks have been “First World”. For Anglophone Africans, it is doubly interesting that two of the greatest failures in handling COVID-19 are the former coloniser, Britain, and the English-speaking superpower, the United States of America.
Both countries’ national governments have made just about every possible mistake in tackling COVID-19.
They ignored the threat. When they were forced to act, they sent mixed signals to citizens which encouraged many to act in ways which spread the infection. Neither did anything like the testing needed to control the virus. Both failed to equip their hospitals and health workers with the equipment they needed, triggering many avoidable deaths.
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Western European countries such as Spain, Italy and Africa’s other wholesale coloniser, France, also battled to contain the virus.
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Effective responses
The most effective response was probably South Korea’s, followed by other East Asian states and territories. This is partly because they are used to dealing with coronavirus outbreaks. But it is also because they learned from experience: South Korea’s success is due to very effective testing and tracing of infected people. Whatever the reason, it is East Asia, not “the West”, which has done what the “First World” is expected to do.
Some would reply that East Asia is now “First World”. So, it is still superior; it has simply changed its address. This is debatable. But, even if it is accepted, some places have contained the virus in distinctly “Third World” conditions.
Kerala was the first Indian state to encounter the virus but has kept deaths down to three. It had largely curbed COVID-19 but is now dealing with nearly 200 cases, all people arriving from other parts of India. Judging by its record so far, it will contain this outbreak too.
Kerala, too, has learnt from handling previous epidemics. It also has a strong health system. But one of its key tools is citizen participation: it has worked with neighbourhood watches and citizen volunteers to track the contacts of infected people. Students were recruited to build kiosks at which citizens were tested. Kerala also had the capacity to ensure that all children entitled to school meals received them after schools were closed: non-governmental organisations were mostly responsible, emphasising the partnership between the government and citizens.
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Nor has Africa’s response to the virus confirmed prejudices. When COVID-19 began spreading, it became almost routine for reports, commentaries – and Melinda Gates, who, with her husband Bill, heads the couple’s development foundation – to predict that Africa would be engulfed in death as the virus ripped through its weak health systems. This is, after all, what is meant to happen in the “Third World” and particularly in Africa, which is always considered the least capable continent on the planet.
So far, it has not happened. It still might but, even if it does, some countries are coping better than the dire predictions claimed (and, perhaps, better than the “First World”). One stand-out is Senegal, which has devised a cheap test for the virus and has used 3-D printing to produce ventilators at a fraction of the going price. Africa, too, has experienced recent outbreaks, notably of Ebola, and seems to have learned valuable lessons from them."
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Broadcasters in many countries need a licence and must convince regulators that they try to report the news truthfully. Few such constraints apply to the internet. In April Britain’s broadcasting watchdog, Ofcom, censured a tiny tv station called London Live for airing part of an interview with David Icke, a conspiracy theorist who believes the pandemic is a hoax. The broadcast had been watched by only 80,000 people. Yet at the time of Ofcom’s ruling 6m had viewed the full interview on YouTube, which is outside Ofcom’s jurisdiction.
YouTube has since taken the video down, along with many others. Section 230 of America’s Communications Decency Act absolves tech firms of responsibility in that country for fact-checking uploaded content. But President Donald Trump wants to change this (see article). Even if he is blocked by the courts, public opinion favours more intervention. In America 84% say social networks should delete posts that they suspect contain inaccurate information about covid-19. Half that number say they should do so without confirming the posts are false. Tech firms have thus begun to add warnings to false information and signposts to reliable sources."
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Covid-19 may seem a relatively straightforward subject on which to play censor. Compared with, say, politics, “it’s easier to set policies that are a little more black and white and take a much harder line,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, told the New York Times in March. Yet it is proving tricky. The science is changing rapidly. In February America’s surgeon-general tweeted that facemasks were “NOT effective in preventing general public from catching coronavirus”. Now he says they are."
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"More than 12,000 Veterans Administration patients have contracted the COVID-19 virus since early March. As of May 22, COVID deaths among VA patients have topped 1,000.
Robert Edwards was formerly an infantry and intelligence officer in the US Army and a captain in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq during the first Gulf War.
This post first appeared on The Kings Necktie
When I was growing up, my father, an Army infantry officer, used to tell me that if at all possible, I should always take some time on this holiday and visit the local military cemetery to honor the fallen and pay tribute to what they gave for their fellow countrymen.
In that spirit, this time of year I frequently post about the sacrifices of American veterans. I never expected that I would be writing about the needless deaths of almost 100,000 of our countrymen and still climbing, rapidly approaching the number who died in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. ...
America is in the midst of a crisis that is testing our soul, or what’s left of it. So far we’ve seen incredible bravery, fortitude, and sacrifice—from first responders, health care workers, delivery people, mail carriers, store clerks, and others in all walks of life. We’ve also seen some of the most appalling greed, selfishness, dishonesty, criminal suppression of the facts, refusal to take responsibility, and even active efforts to make this crisis worse.
There is no need for us to pass judgment: God will take care of that…..and so will history, which traditionally is far harsher than the Lord."
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"He also believes it will become necessary for travel – even after a vaccine – to prove immunity and as a means to skip quarantine. “Showing that you’ve been infected and are immune and can’t transmit the virus is a really powerful mechanism.”
The concept is already being adopted by the private sector. The hotel booking app Sidehide and verification company Onfido are developing an immunity passport for hotels – set to launch in Miami this month.
Such are the perceived benefits of immunity that some people are intentionally trying to get the potentially deadly virus.
Dr Jerome Williams Jr, cardiologist and senior vice-president of consumer engagement at Novant Health, says they have had multiple people test positive in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, after attending “coronavirus parties” – gathering unprotected with positive people – in the hope of getting infected.
Without knowing exactly how immunity works, the parties are, he says, “a bad idea all round”.
Despite the perceived advantages of immunity, creating a system that publicly identifies people with antibodies opens safety and privacy issues.
The ACLU has warned against immunity passports, which it fears could incentivise poor people to risk their lives to intentionally get sick so they can work, exacerbate racial and economic disparities, encourage health surveillance and endanger privacy rights."
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"The coronavirus epidemic will have a lasting worldwide impact, to be sure, but it will have a unique native social impact as well, one equal to those brought about by the upheavals of the 1960s and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Already it’s changed the way we see ourselves, and our nationhood.
As we renounce a climate accord, allow medical bills to push us into bankruptcy, cage children and seal our borders, America First-ism has ceded our international leadership and prestige. And that was before greed, incompetence, bigotry and self-dealing reduced the federal apparatus to tin-cup beggary. While the president spins dangerous cure-all fantasies, we wheedle for face masks!
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“If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the U.S. would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives,” Fintan O’Toole writes, in a scathing Irish Times column. “In the process, the idea of the U.S. as the world’s leading nation — an idea that has shaped the past century — has all but evaporated.”
A week after the September 11th attacks in 2001, Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter declared, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” Carter’s comment was widely derided, yet it spoke to an undeniably compelling truth of the moment. The indelible images — of smoke rising and bodies falling in lower Manhattan, blackened concrete in Washington D.C., a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania desecrated with body parts, baby toys and laptops — shattered American complacency about the global toll of terrorism and disarmed humor, satirical or otherwise. (At least it did until Chris Rock wondered on Saturday Night Live in 2014 about the Freedom Tower that replaced the World Trade Center: “Who’s the corporate sponsor — Target?”)
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So, perhaps it wasn’t the end of irony, but it was certainly a shock to the system, one that transcended even the death toll of 2,996.
Such seismic waves of social upheaval were not foreign to a generation — mine — that came of age in the furnace blast of the anti-war and civil rights movements. One consequence of those years might be called the end of the age of belief. The revelations of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and the flood of documentation exposing FBI surveillance of American citizens, on the one hand, and the abdication of government oversight allowing rampant corporate malfeasance, on the other, inexorably obliterated the idea that our government was run in the interest of the public good.
Until then, Americans took comfort in the idea that, whatever our daily grievances, Washington basically operated in good faith. It functioned. By the end of the 1970s, that notion was dead.
The heroes of the new era were masters of the universe, corporate raiders, leveraged buyout specialists and other federally sanctioned swindlers bent on dismantling the liberal order. Government was of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%. Pervasive cynicism bloomed in such acidic soil — and continues to flourish today. That certainly is one way of understanding the triumph of Trumpism.
What has died since the coronavirus began cutting its global swath is the notion — central to our collective identity — of American exceptionalism. As George Packer writes in The Atlantic, “Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.” The epidemic, he said, has reduced us to “a beggar nation in utter chaos.”
This phenomenon is more than the natural extension of our earlier sense that the federal government no longer functions on behalf of us all. The virus as metaphor couldn’t be more apt (sorry Susan Sontag), for it undermined the dearly held notion that the United States occupies a special, deity-endowed place in the world as a beacon to all others.
That idea of specialness, historically appropriated by religious, not political, entities, was first applied to the United States with intentional irony by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century. (It was inevitably tied, as I learned in grade school, to the concept of Manifest Destiny, which to a sixth-grader explained God’s plan that white Europeans “discover” a “New World,” usurp the land, perpetrate genocide on its inhabitants, enslave peoples from an entirely different continent and lay waste its natural riches to provide goods and commodities for the Motherland.)
American exceptionalism would be further elaborated, dismissively, by Joseph Stalin in the 20th century before being proudly rehabilitated by Ronald Reagan (appropriating Jesus’s image of a “shining city upon a hill”) and, in the 21st century, Barack Obama.
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Credit the internet with leading us to finally understand how fragile the concept of citizenship really is, and how even leaders with good intentions are threatened by a consumerist conspiracy to turn the world into one big Amazon shopping basket. We have borne out what so impressed Tocqueville more than a century ago: Not American idealism; on the contrary, what struck him was our obsession with accumulation of wealth as the sole factor giving meaning to life."
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"By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.
He is not governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.
How has Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?
Trump called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.
On Saturday, he gloated about “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons” awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through Secret Service lines.
In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything
Trump’s response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a “Democratic hoax” and muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus to the states.
Governors have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against each other. They have had to decide how, when and where to reopen their economies.
Trump has claimed “no responsibility at all” for testing and contact-tracing – the keys to containing the virus. His new “plan” places responsibility on states to do their own testing and contact-tracing.
Trump is also awol in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.
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What about other pressing issues a real president would be addressing? The House has passed nearly 400 bills this term, including measures to reduce climate change, enhance election security, require background checks on gun sales, reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and reform campaign finance. All are languishing in McConnell’s inbox. Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of any of them.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with golfing, watching television and tweeting. But if that’s pretty much all that a president does when the nation is engulfed in crises, he is not a president."
Trump’s tweets are no substitute for governing. They are mostly about getting even.
When he’s not fomenting violence against black protesters, he’s accusing a media personality of committing murder, retweeting slurs about a black female politician’s weight and the House speaker’s looks, conjuring up conspiracies against himself supposedly organized by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and encouraging his followers to “liberate” their states from lockdown restrictions.
He tweets bogus threats that he has no power to carry out – withholding funds from states that expand absentee voting, “overruling” governors who don’t allow places of worship to reopen “right away”, and punishing Twitter for factchecking him.
And he lies incessantly."
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