After the WWII Western elites more or less started promoting the idea that all society problems came from "authoritarianism" which became associated with both extreme left and right. Supposedly we moved beyond it to a neoliberal society where everybody has equal rights, including minorities, and the government rules only by consensus.
Well, corona virus has finally put this fairy tale to rest and various governments demonstrated that they are perfectly capable and willing of wielding hard power when soft power fails. All this for a relatively mild virus with a mortality rate only slightly higher than that of a bad flu season. You can be sure that if smallpox made a comeback, they'd patrol the streets with machine guns and forcibly vaccinate everyone.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. That's why libertarian ideology doesn't really make sense. The state always used coercion when necessary and it always will. That's not the real problem, the problem is in whose interests it's used, we the people or the financial elites.
Here in the Midwest USA, in my city, the major hospital, and it is a huge one is filled to capacity, and adults with the virus are now also being cared for at the huge children's hospital next to it. An acquaintance of mine did not go to the hospital but is in his fourth week of illness and high fever, and yet it continues.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter is an RN at that major hospital that I wrote about. She has seen what is happening with her own eyes and this is not a hoax or an exaggeration, people are terribly sick, and suffering, and some are dying. People are mistaken if they think this is just like the flu that normally comes around every year. The Covid 19 that we have here in the United States is causing suffering and death. My daughter is not a liar. Please, everyone take care.
I don't believe it's a hoax, I'm just wondering how dangerous it really is. Everybody who got it in my circle of acquaintances got better, even older people, nearly all of them stayed home and didn't go to hospital, either. I heard about 2 deaths, one was an elderly man in his 80s with other health problems who refused treatment, the other was admittedly a young man in his 30s but he was morbidly obese and had asthma.
ReplyDeleteIt probably depends on how healthy and young an average person is in any given country. As someone pointed out, in Italy nearly 25% of the population is above 65 (high risk) while in Nigeria it's only 3% of the population. Obesity/being overweight appears a big factor, too, plus the fact that here in the West we have lots of people who are on several different medications just to keep functioning.