Optimism is the first step to disappointment.
Voyager hit all the high points, but I want to point out that the evidence is indicating that the second wave of COVID-19 outbreaks is going to hit rural areas much harder, and these areas have less access to critical medical services and supplies. In addition, NIFC is anticipating above normal fire potential in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest while NOAA is predicting an active Atlantic hurricane season. This isn’t great news at the best of time but on top of a global pandemic, massive unemployment, and expected food production and distribution system disruptions, it is potentially ruinous. And this is addressing the United States which has large critical resource reserves, a (mostly functioning) national government, and a solid transportation and communication infrastructure. Developing nations no longer receiving the kind of aid they would normally get and collapsing nations like Venezuela and Brazil can anticipate famine and otherwise avoidable pandemic deaths potentially feeding wide scale civil unrest, especially if the current disruptions exacerbates all of the normal seasonal epidemics and shortages.
Things could not “go as badly as some fear” but that would take actual leadership on the world stage and a concerted effort to support vulnerable populations, something that is lacking in even a nominal situation. Now we have China vying for greater control over its nominally autonomous regions, saber-rattling in various places across the globe, a generally inchoate response to the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic, and Trump hiding away in the White House bunker and Twittering out hateful and violent rhetoric instead of doing anything to reassure the nation. So, I’m curious about the logical chain of events that results in a better outcome than many expect and fear, because right now the good news and competent leadership outside of New Zealand seems hard to come by.
Stranger
I’m also old enough to remember 1968.
And part of what I remember about 1968 is that for me, in my privileged bubble, most of that amounted to an essay I wrote for a high school class, and to my politics shifting away from my parents’. There were a whole lot of other people in that bubble, or similar ones, along with me.
Unless maybe you were in one of the specific places with the worst riots, nobody closed the schools, or the libraries, or two-thirds of the stores in town, or screwed up the supply chain for the stores that were still open. And for quite a lot of people, what they knew of the riots and the assassinations and even the Hong Kong Flu was what they saw on the TV for maybe an hour at night. There aren’t anywhere near as many people in that much of a bubble now.
We were, admittedly, still worrying about nuclear war in 1968. But then, I’m not at all sure why we’re not worrying about it now.
I agree with that one.
And though I don’t think it’s going to be the end of the USA, we probably won’t be quite the same country afterwards. We weren’t the same country in 1970 as we were in 1950, either; or in 1930 as we were in 1950; or in 1930 as we were in 1900; and so on. We’re not going to be the same country in, say, 2030 as we were in 2016. We might be drastically worse; we might be considerably better; my guess is that we’ll be better in some ways and worse in others. But that guess depends a whole lot on how we respond to this mess. There are no guarantees.
And that is certainly a factor. Watch out for the counsels of despair. The people who are actively trying to make things worse are the only ones who will benefit from them.
This is both true and I think a lot of the current problem. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Nobody who’s paying attention, of any political persuasion, knows what’s going to happen next. That is not a situation which makes a whole lot of people happy; and it makes some people likely to, themselves, do just about anything next.
Do your best to fix things, and to help what can’t be fixed. If things do go better than expected, that will have done no harm, and if enough people do it then that might cause things to go better than expected. But stay ready to duck. And also ready to keep trying to help even while ducking, if needed.
Those who follow the issue are increasingly worried about the potential for a nuclear exchange. This isn’t a new sentiment; since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent proliferation of nuclear weapon technology, students of game theory of nuclear strategy and international relations have warned that that the increase in instabilities combined with the lack of oversight over nuclear weapons has significantly increased the potential for a regional nuclear exchange that could potentially grow into a global conflict.
Stranger
Just for the USA: Trump does indeed have an election coming up that he simply cannot afford to lose. Whether intentionally or not, he has made the COVID thing worse by not providing leadership when it was sought of him. Trump is also failing to provide leadership in what, for America, should just be another run of the mill episode of the police murdering a helpless victim in broad daylight. Whether or not things are desperate, there are plenty of people ready and willing to pretend these are the darkest days we’ve seen and use that as an excuse to go forth and be terrible. Oh no, we’re not out of the woods yet by a longshot. The real fun will begin when Trump refuses (impotently, but loudly) to recognize election results from states that used mail in ballots. If I had to predict, I’d say the worst place on earth is going to be USA in November/December when COVID is back in full swing and MAGA patriots are executing domestic terror plots right and left.
Trump would have been fine (if still controversial) had it not been for COVID-19. Things would have just gone on business as usual and there would be an election in November. Maybe he’d be reelected. Maybe not.
But it’s easy to be in charge when you don’t have to do anything. It’s a lot harder when you actually have to deal with a real global crisis.
I don’t see how the year won’t get worse though I’m not projecting any new shocks to the system. I think that 0.1% of Americans will die from COVID-19 before the end of the year in a best case scenario. I think the riots will go away for a while but that before the end of summer another black man will be killed on video for apparently no reason so there will be at least one more round of massive protests is not riots. I think there will be a presidential election in the fall and no matter who wins 40% of the population will feel like they were robbed and there will be protests and some rioting. I think the economic downturn will keep getting worse until a viable vaccine is found which, best case scenario, won’t be distributed until Q1 of 2021 so this year will all be bad economically.
Looking forward I don’t see much room for national good news.
I don’t agree with this at all.
Thanks to this interesting article in the Times Magazine, I withdraw my prediction of a stock market collapse. It notes that the small businesses which are going to get ruined by the pandemic are not in the market, and so their fate is not reflected in the Dow. Many of the big companies in the Dow are doing okay, or will do okay. The number of publicly traded companies in the US has fallen in half since 1997, due to failures, mergers but mostly private equity. The companies taken private aren’t in the indices either. Maybe the impact of higher unemployment will be felt in the market, but I’m no longer betting on it.
I’m not sure how you can make this assessment. Even setting aside the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Trump has damaged international relations with strategic partners, engaged in a destructive “trade war” that has undermined large areas of the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, left many critical posts in agencies and federal courts understaffed, reduced or eliminated a number of science programs and advisory boards to further an anti-global climate change and pro-fossil fuel agenda, critically damaged the Department of Education in its mission to support states, engaged in the open corruption of dismissing officials who did their lawful and mandatory duty to investigate Trump and his cronies for irregular, illegal, and often highly damaging actions that compromised national security, neglected to do anything effective about the growing opioid epidemic, energized white nationalists to act out, and essentially set up the Supreme Court to undermine womens’ reproductive rights and protections for various groups, and has generally made a mockery of the United States on the international stage. His one vaunted pre-pandemic “accomplishment”—a growing economy with low inflation and unemployment—was really a legacy of the economic policies of his predecessor and a debt economy that was not serving the increasing lower middle class and the younger generation of new college graduates with historically large college debt and relatively few new entry level professional jobs. The pandemic has certainly amplified and exaggerated all that was going wrong with the system as it is, but when the president has historically low net approval ratings and so constantly lies and inflames discord things are very far from “fine”.
0.1% mortality is, at this point, beyond optimistic. The IHME model peaks at about 150k by the first of August but it assumes that daily deaths will continue to decrease even though most states have opened up with little or no controls or attempt at tracking. Deaths are probably understated in the official statistics by as much as 50k to begin with, and even if the opening up of states resulted in only a flat death rate we’d be adding a minimum of 60k deaths by the beginning of August.
And disasters will continue to occur because they always do; we can be statistically guaranteed of at least one major forest fire, and while it hopefully won’t be as lethal as the Camp Fire of 2018, neither the states nor the federal government really have excess resources to throw at it. A single major hurricane or flooding event could overwhelm critical services while they are what will likely be the middle of a second epidemic wave of COVID-19 outbreaks, and civil unrest on top of that could be devastating but with so many people out of work and no prospects for employment, it feels almost inevitable even outside of another inciting event.
Even if we have a safe and effective proven vaccine in hand today, it will take months to ramp up production; the earliest mass distribution of a vaccine could be distributed across the US population would be mid-2021. And despite optimism about the Moderna candidate they company has failed to produce critical performance data for any independent assessment or verification. So, I do not hold out great optimism for a vaccine ready for wide distribution by next year. And yet, few authorities seem to be making plans for long term coping with this pandemic and the attendant effects of it.
Stranger
Me either. Trump before the pandemic was an unmitigated disaster and had made it clear that there are two distinct America’s with diametrically opposed visions for the country.
I disagree about 0.1% mortality being beyond optimistic. That would 330,000 deaths in 2020. While I think it is likely that we will exceed that number 230K deaths in the next 6 months, I don’t think averaging 40K deaths a month as a low bound is unreasonable.
Natural disasters have nothing to do with my explicit COVID prediction. Of course you are correct and there will be fires and hurricanes this year. NOAA is predicting an above average hurricane season. I think it is unlikely you will see an intersection of race riots, Katrina 2, Sandy 2 or the Napa fires 2 and COVID but even if there were the 2,000 dead from another Katrina would barely move the needle against what COVID is doing and tripling it due to a destroyed infrastructure would only be a 15% increase in monthly deaths. The scale of COVID is wildly beyond our normal disasters.
Yeah, that’s kind of where I am right now, and why I asked what I did. This very thread has a lot of posts that just say to me, “lie down and die shrug” (although only one technically says that literally).
Still, what it comes down to is that I tend to be anxious, yet I’m not looking forward to the rest of the year with the kind of dread that some seem to. That says something to me. Whether it’s because of naïveté is probably up in the air, but that’s how things stand right now in the Leaper household.
(I also want to emphasize what I said in my original post: I’m not saying things can’t get worse. I’m saying that some of the absolute despair and fatalism I’m seeing is something I can’t really connect with. Then again, I’m also not exactly down with “joking” about dying and suicide and self destruction all the time as being a harmless fun way to express anxiety about the future.)
We have a divisive national election in five months where one of the candidates for the highest office on the ballot and the party that nominated him are determined to use whatever nefarious means they can find to win. With a national pandemic going on at the same time to complicate matters even more. It’s going to be a hot angry mess.
I can connect with it even though I’m not feeling it. It’s hard not to be in despair when everything we hear about our current state of affairs is scary and when so many people are stuck in truly shitty situations. And it is also hard to be pessimistic when the only people saying “It’s not so bad!” are people who are known for being liars.
A lot of folks who are full of despair are young adults itching to start off on their own. Older folks know that things eventually swing from bad to good, but young people have never experienced this. They just know that everything they know has been upturned and that no one can tell them when things will go back to “normal”. I think if I were 20 years younger, I would be hella depressed right now.
And if they lose, they will never, ever accept the results.
Amen!
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I’m amazed at what Americans accept: people regularly go into public places and shoot dozens of people and we treat it like it’s something that just happens like the weather, Americans go bankrupt trying to get healthcare for their loved ones, and the GOP openly talks about suppressing the black vote and no one blinks. When your baseline normal is that shitty, it can’t get a lot worse.
Fuck’em.
They didn’t accept the results of the 1992 or the 2008 elections either.
As long as we don’t end up with another election like 2000 or 2016, I can deal with their lack of acceptance.
Until they continue to commit acts of terrorism, push false narratives, refuse to take basic public healths precautions like wearing masks and insist we continue to pay them not to grow corn and pretend to be coal miners.