Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

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If a closed off mouth being symbolic of repression of dissent is too arcane and far fetched for rigorous intuition (just google image 'censorship' ffs) i guess the rainbow symbolism is definitely a bridge too far here anno domini 2020 and will probably earn me a stern reprimand for being unscientific, illogical and just allround nuts from someone or other!




Anyway, here's a song to lighten the mood and lessen everyone's anxiety:

[dada]

I can't speak for anyone else, but I certainly won't reprimand you. What a symbol means for you is just as valid as what it means for anybody.

I guess the question, or a question, is where symbolification ends. I don't think it does. Interpreting a symbol leads it back to a meaning. This meaning is in its turn another symbol, lead back to another meaning. Inerpretation is ongoing.

Which is a reflection of the state of things. A collective way of life, for example, is a static thing. But nothing is really that static.

[Sounder]

I think that your potentially unkind sentiment was expressed with as much kindness as can be reasonably mustered, given the circumstances.

alloneword wrote...

But yes, @dada... The mask as a 'symbol'. Were I being unkind, I might suggest that they represent a form of virtue-signalling or display of fealty, somewhat akin to a modern day 'Che Guevara' T-shirt.

In fact, the whole adherence to 'Lockdown' could perhaps be seen as the cheapest display of virtue-signalling ever devised, in that all that is required of it's participants is to literally do absolutely nothing, except sit, staring at the wallpaper, waiting for some free money to appear, occasionally opening the front door to clap like a performing seal - whilst saving lives, of course.

[thrulookingglass]

The ubiquitous irony is in this world we couldn't be more socially distant already.

[JackRiddler]

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Anything is interpretable as a symbol. Your belt and your shoes can be turned into symbols. Same goes with the mask, but for most people it's just a fucking mask. And obviously it's not a physical muzzle.

We should all accept that there is genuine belief among those who still see the virus as a potential killer of millions (or as an imminent deadly threat to themselves or their loved ones), and also genuine belief among those who think the lockdown is exaggerated, counterproductive to its stated aims, or utterly disastrous due to the sociopolitical and economic effects.

There is no virtue signaling or hypocrisy in merely following the lockdown rules. People just do it because they believe it (these are MANY and sincere, so accept that please), out of fear, or to conform.

That being said there definitely IS virtue signaling among those, especially those who are receiving an income during this time, who constantly announce "STAY THE FUCK HOME" as if they've been appointed World Hall Monitors. (Watch them heroize the coming Contact Tracing Squads, the planned Trumptime Jobs Guarantee.) Or who want to burn joggers and poor mask-fitters at the stake. (I don't seem to encounter any of those on my daily run, but here in the epicenter of the epicenter most people on the street wear the mask and keep the two-meter rule but really don't look like they give a crap.)

Or those who post the Darwin memes without having any clue how natural selection actually works.

But equally so (different sort of virtue) among those who talk the Liberty or Death bullshit while STORMING STATEHOUSES CARRYING THEIR FUCKING MASS-DEATH INSTRUMENTS. That display is just out-and-out fascism, astroturfed and minority though it also is. With or without swastikas or Confederate battle flags.

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Jack, to illustrate your #stayathome point: where i live there are posters allover that consist of a huge white space. Then in the middle in dramatic letters is written:

We miss grandpa

#stayhome

Now i don't know who even pays for these advertisements but it's fearmongering, irrational emotional blackmail at its absolute worst imo. And this in a country where during the flu-season of 2018 there were 8000 excess flu-deaths with hardly a peep in the media and no measures other than the usual cuts in care. Now with a lot of creativity we have around 5000 deaths with the coronavirus and the exact same government locks down the country, says things will never be normal again, there are huge waiting lines for cancelled cancer, heart disease, etc treatments - even the government itself introduced the measures as "draconian"!

draconian /drəˈkəʊnɪən/ adjective: (of laws or their application) excessively harsh and severe.

[PufPuf93]

It is easy for my mind to grasp the concept that masks, social distancing, and stay at home orders are common sense.

Concurrently, I realize that various parties including our political and financial elite use the pandemic for their objectives. Same as it ever was.

Here is a sobering experiment using black lights to follow contamination in a buffet restaurant.

https://youtu.be/OOvENoZMmK4

[dada]

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Anything is interpretable as a symbol. Your belt and your shoes can be turned into symbols. Same goes with the mask, but for most people it's just a fucking mask. And obviously it's not a physical muzzle.

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Yes, but when anything is interpreted as a symbol, we're no longer looking at the thing itself, but the frameworks of meaning in which different people place it. How far can a psychoanalytic approach to ontology take us? Uncovering drives and motivations only gets us so far.

I prefer a phenomenological approach. More open ended. With it we can continue to show what is revealed in the appearance of the uncovered drives.

I suppose in the end it's a matter of taste. Or says something about my own framework of meaning.

And sure, anyone can turn their belt and their shoes into symbols.But a true adept can turn symbols into their belt and their shoes!

[Grizzly]

Naomi Klein: How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic

As the coronavirus continues to kill thousands each day, tech companies are seizing the opportunity to extend their reach and power. By Naomi Klein

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic

Slow motion SHOCK Doctrine like 911 ... or Katrina redux

[stillrobertpaulsen]

One in five?! Guess the USA can flush the idea of herd immunity down the toilet!

Some evangelicals fear the 'mark of the beast' from a coronavirus vaccine

Caitlin Dickson Reporter,Yahoo News•May 14, 2020

Peggy Popham gets her flu shot every year, despite her daughter Laura’s opposition to vaccines.

“I’m 70 and I’ve gotten sick before,” said Popham. “I don’t have a great immune system.”

Popham, who spoke to Yahoo News by phone while quarantining at home in Asheville, N.C., acknowledges that the same factors put her at risk for the coronavirus. “Of course,” she said, she’s worried about contracting COVID-19.

But she’s more worried about a possible vaccine for it.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “I would not take the vaccine.”

That’s a view shared by nearly one in five Americans, according to a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, which found that an additional 26 percent weren’t sure if they’d take it. Some of them no doubt have been influenced by the anti-vaccine disinformation that has been spreading for more than a decade on social media — although that has been directed primarily at routine childhood immunizations and their hypothesized link to autism. Popham’s reasons aren’t medical: They are religious and political.

Popham believes that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert on the administration’s coronavirus task force, is part of the “deep state” along with Bill Gates, another prominent villain of coronavirus conspiracy theorists. She believes their interest in developing a coronavirus vaccine is “driven by money” as well as “a socialist agenda” designed to “get control of us.” Based on research she’s done online, Popham thinks it’s likely that the vaccine will include some sort of human tracking device.

“It will keep track of us,” she said. “Kind of like in the end days, as the Bible says, you’ll be numbered.”

Popham, who described herself as a lifelong Republican, said that while her beliefs about the coronavirus vaccine “have a lot to do with my political views,” they also “go along with my faith.”

And although she suspects the worst of Fauci, rattling off bits and pieces of several conspiracy theories and debunked claims that have proliferated across the internet in recent weeks, she considers her views well grounded, and rejects the extremist position that the entire pandemic is a gigantic hoax — although she believes the death count, now over 85,000 in the United States and more than 300,000 worldwide, is “exaggerated.”

“I might sound like a fanatic, but I’m really not,” she said. “I’m normal.”

She is, in fact, not out of the mainstream of the large segment of the American population whose views of current events are informed by the Bible, and who interpret every significant political and social development as a possible harbinger of the return of Jesus Christ. Though she is keeping an open mind on whether the coronavirus is the end-times plague, she sees “a lot of correlations” between the “agenda” driving the coronavirus vaccine and the “Revelation prophecies in the Bible.” The coronavirus pandemic created the perfect environment for apocalyptic Christianity to fuse with antigovernment libertarianism, New Age rejection of mainstream science and medicine, and internet-fueled gullibility toward baroque conspiracy theories about secret cabals ruling the world through viruses.

Prominent evangelical pastors, including one who has since died of COVID-19, have promoted baseless claims about Bill Gates, implantable microchips that could be used to control the population under the guise of tracking COVID-19 infections and immunity, and a link between coronavirus vaccination and the mark of the beast, a signifier, in biblical prophecy, of submission to the Antichrist. Such ideas have since spread beyond evangelical circles.

Some Christian scholars have recently sought to debunk attempts to link the coronavirus vaccine to the mark of the beast through detailed biblical analysis. But the general impulse among evangelicals is skepticism toward secular authority, including measures taken in the name of public health.

“I think that Christians, especially evangelicals, are very nervous about the government. They’ve always been nervous about the government,” said Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, who studies the intersection between religiosity and political behavior. Burge is also a pastor at First Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, Ill., which he described as a “main-line … moderate version of Baptist.” He told Yahoo News that “if you get really deep into evangelical theology, you can see that they have a martyr complex.”

“They love the idea that they’re being oppressed, and that they’re being persecuted,” he said, adding that evangelicals are “always on the lookout for times when the government sort of oversteps its bounds and starts to infringe upon religion.”

Jared Yates Sexton, an associate professor of writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern University, described his religious upbringing as “a split between Baptist and Pentecostals.” He also emphasized the role persecution and martyrdom continue to play in the evangelical identity, “even though they have a large power base in America, and they’ve determined large swaths of American political history.”

In fact, Sexton suggested that “one of the reasons why they have the dedicated political base that they do and … why they support [Trump] the way they do is because they truly believe they’re engaged in an end-times war, and everything from ‘happy holidays’ to vaccinations extends from that.”

Evangelical support for Trump, and Popham’s enthusiasm for the president, is undiminished — even though he has been an advocate for rapid development and deployment of a coronavirus vaccine, which he has speculated could be ready by the end of the year, much sooner than many medical experts believe.

“The idea is that the Christian faith is being persecuted or being oppressed, particularly by state, or by outsiders and conspiracies,” said Sexton, suggesting that the coronavirus, and the suspicions it has raised, particularly within the evangelical community, is the latest iteration of the ongoing “culture war.”

Sexton said that since the start of the pandemic, he’s observed what he described as the “quick radicalization” of several family members and childhood friends taking place within his own Facebook feed.

“I’m seeing a lot of people who, in the past, I would’ve characterized as mildly conservative, who are now embracing extreme views,” he said. “I think that the pandemic has not only brought up the narrative of the end times and conspiracies against Christians, but it’s also led to people looking for something to give them an answer, because obviously the government hasn’t done it.”

Popham, who listed QAnon, a fringe internet conspiracy theory, and the far-right One America News Network (as well as the BBC) among her go-to sources for information online, said her views on the coronavirus pandemic are rooted in long-held concerns about the “deep state,” which she said is basically the “one world order.” Though she said she’s been spending more time online during the current lockdown, she said social media hasn’t so much influenced her views as it has “confirmed them,” indicating she’s observed that many more friends, members of her church and her Republican women’s group have started posting things that align with her beliefs.

Though Popham said she personally believes state lockdown orders are simply meant to keep people safe, such orders have been a source of outrage for many others, including several evangelical pastors, who claim that social distancing measures that prohibit in-person church services amount to an unconstitutional infringement of religious freedom. In fact, some of the earliest protests against lockdown measures were led by pastors like Rodney Howard-Browne, who was arrested in March for holding services at his Tampa megachurch in violation of Florida restrictions against public gatherings.

“We’ve seen the extremist community really latch onto this,” said Howard Graves, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Graves and his colleagues, who track antigovernment movements and far-right militias, say they’ve observed how these extremist groups have sought to exploit concerns about religious freedom to gain broader support for their antigovernment agendas.

Among “more right-leaning segments” of the evangelical community, in particular, Graves said, “there is a certain resonance with this idea that Christians are being persecuted, and the entire debate around congregations staying open during quarantine has been effectively used by shrewd and cynical individuals to play on that fear.”

Graves pointed to a recent Facebook post by the South Carolina Light Foot Militia Special Response Team, urging its supporters to raise money for the congregants of a Mississippi church who were ticketed for participating in a drive-in service.

He also noted that Ammon Bundy, who last gained national attention in 2016 with the armed occupation of a wildlife refuge in Oregon, held an Easter service in Idaho in defiance of the state’s coronavirus restrictions. And Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase, a Republican who has previously aligned with far-right causes and has recently been a vocal advocate of reopening the state, shared a post on Facebook in late April condemning Virginia for keeping churches closed while allowing other essential businesses to remain open.

They “want to undermine trust in the federal government as a way of normalizing [their extreme] views,” said Graves. “It’s no coincidence that you’re seeing a really strong correlation between folks advancing religious liberty arguments [and those] also sharing baseless conspiracy theories.”

Recently, Facebook groups dedicated to opposing lockdown measures have become a virtual swap meet of conspiracy theories, where memes tying coronavirus immunizations to the mark of the beast can be found alongside calls for people of faith to “rise up” against a government that is “pushing us to be silent and compliant.”

While “it’s not the first time [these kinds of groups] have used religious liberty as a shield to deflect criticism … and to make their messaging look more appealing to people who are a lot less versed in all these issues,” Graves continued, “the stakes are a lot higher this time.”

[JackRiddler]

Non-hostile Report on Sweden
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=42015&p=687370#p687370

[Nordic]

Has this been shared here yet?

[Joe Hillshoist]

To me, it sets a ridiculously bad precedent to criminalize coming within six feet of other people or failing to wear a mask.

Not really a precedent. Look up Typhoid Mary.

Too many people, even many here, do not seem to appreciate the very basic idea that almost everyone will be exposed to this virus one way or another before this is over. All we can possibly do by steering clear of others is to flatten the curve. Are you really in favor of jailing someone who may or may not actually have a certain virus for potentially transmitting to someone something with the potential to perhaps harm this person at a time that is potentially not optimal in terms of available medical resources for this person to be exposed to something that he or she will soon almost certainly be exposed to anyway?

If you're supposed to be in quarantine because you've had close contact with someone who tested positive then yes, you should get slapped if you ignore it. Jail is probably too harsh unless you're being exceptionally stupid, like repeatedly breaking quarantine or coughing on people on purpose.

Why not criminalize sex? Sex has the potential to lead to all sorts of ill health effects. Aren't you willfully risking the health of your partners in the same sort of manner every time you have sex?

If you intentionally infect someone else with an STD then that's already a criminal offense.

That's a bizarre reply. I mean, if you put COVID-19 in someone's drink in order to infect them, sure you should go to jail. But how does going outside without a mask or coming within 4 feet of someone have anything to do with intentionally infecting someone else with a STD?

And I don't think you would bat an eye if any heathen who committed the high crime of refusing vaccination or not wearing a required mask were intentionally infected with disease as punishment. I mean, look up Typhoid Mary.

There is criminal negligence. I typed about this but it disappeared as I'm using an old device that doesn't save dialogue box contents for some reason...

The guy who was jailed was charged after breaking quarantine twice on two consecutive days. The first time he was required to isolate at home, the second he was put in a hotel being used for quarantine.

There is video footage of him wiping his mouth and nose with his hand immediately before he used the lifts. We've had till that point a month of non stop hand washing propaganda, as well as similar stuff warning of the dangers of contaminating surfaces. It's not like he wouldn't have known that he was potentially infectious and exposing others with his behaviour. He just didn't care.

That is almost as low an act as having unprotected sex if you know or suspect you have an std.

There is very little difference.

BTW. The second day he broke quarantine to have sex with his girlfriend. I dunno if she was infected or not but if not she'd probably have been alllowed in with him anyway. If she wasn't he did deliberately pass on an std. Unless he was a completely dud root. Cos that's about the only way you could fuck and not pass on this virus.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I wish the option "no action" was a lot more popular in general, sadly people who are interested in "no action" typically don't get heard in a society that's all about action action action.

This is a very profound comment. Across everything in life, not just wrt this virus situation.

Often doing nothing is the sensible option.

Often but not always. And even tho you disagree.

Today I saw a headline from the Australian, a Murdoch publication that helps control Australian politics. It stated that the suicide toll right now, here, was higher than the COVID toll.

I'm not linking to it.

On the face of it this seems like it justifies a lot of what has been said, but is this an accurate, rigorous even, interpretation of things?

Our death toll is under 100 if figures are to be believed.

We're beginning to return to normal life here, slowly and cautiously. This last week was the date we picked to review based on modelling and it seems about right. We have reinfection rate under 1. We have most cases tracked and a small community spread atm.

We'll see what happens with our so called second wave soon.

We have a positive test return rate of under 10 every 10 or 20 thousand.

As of yet few people are taking up the governments track and trace app. It's a bit of a joke. Most people think that's more government interference than they are prepared to put up with.

And it is a bit shit.

We don't need it anyway. They've had the power and ability to do this with phones for ages. It's just a matter of how quickly they can pull up the data and these days that is quickly.

Less than 100 people dead so far.

Obviously in a country of 24 million there will probably be more suicides than that over a month. Unfortunately. In Australia the normal suicide rate is over 200 per month. Our death rate is so low it's nearly a statistical blip on the suicide rate.

At the moment it seems this is a case where doing nothing would not have been appropriate. Tho to be honest we won't really be able to say for at least a year.

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Has this been shared here yet?

Yes i posted it twice. Anyway, it bears repeating!