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I think there's a good chance we will but noone will face any consequences because crisis and heat of the moment and making the best decisions they could with the information available at the time and blablabla. Noone important enough to get into a commission like that is going to conclude that actually thousands of deaths were preventable based on information that was readily available at the time if only people would've stopped navel-gazing.
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Jul 23, 2020 15:21
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JordanKai posted:This man is the head of the Dutch crisis council. He thinks people wearing masks will lead to them flouting the 1.5m social distancing mandate...which people already do anyway. Same argument is being used in Denmark. "Mask use will create a false sense of comfort". Other classics are: "Improper mask use is worse than no mask use" and "Non-medical grade masks are useless and/or harmful". I still think the passively dismissive attitude to mask use in Scandinavia (and maybe other similar countries) is primarily due to the fear of having to enforce mask mandates. If there are no consequences, lots of people will ignore the mandate. If that happens, or there is no actual mandate (but a recommendation), there will be an angry reaction from people who value human life and public health. So at some point, the government needs to pass a law with fines for not using masks when required. That will create a backlash of negative publicity as traditional and social media flood with stories of people "unfairly" punished for not wearing masks, violence due to disagreements of over compliance, examples of police selectively enforcing the rules, etc. Widespread public mask use turning out be an important aspect of handling this epidemic is a problem for the Danish government. The american mask-debate is a bit of a help here, as many see the resistance to masks in the US as a hint it might be a good idea after all. But even then, tons of people will just downright refuse to comply - and civil disobedience on such a scale will weaken the government regardless of what they do. Danes consider social convention more important than law - and low-intensity civil disobedience is the norm in many aspects of life. This is why I think politicians and health authorities are just staying quiet and hoping voluntary mask use is going to be enough - and downplaying the benefits of mask use, so people don't actually start demanding mandatory use.
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Jul 23, 2020 15:31
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Technocratic governments actually probably will look at it , maybe in a year's time in a parliamentary committee , it's what they do. The two page summary report will state that gosh, we did the best we could do with the information available, and that's the story sold in the media. Then in chapter 420 page 666, it will be mentioned that actually the government policy was ,due to an oversight in wording and confusing guidelines, killing all the olds and minorities, and if *very obvious measure* was enacted it would have stopped deaths by 69%. Without ever analysing why that happened or assigning responsibilities
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Jul 23, 2020 15:35
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Antifa Poltergeist posted:Technocratic governments actually probably will look at it , maybe in a year's time in a parliamentary committee , it's what they do. Absolutely this.
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Jul 23, 2020 15:43
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I don't know how effective masks are. I'm not a virologist. However, I'm still glad that there's some clarity now. Masks mandatory in stores, and on the street it's your own choice. Waffling and/or turning it into Culture War bullshit is just about the worst thing you could do, as that way it will inevitably hit the most vulnerable groups the hardest. Compliance issues are overblown, in my opinion. Belgium is notorious for its individualism and 'low-intensity civil disobedience', and sometimes high-intensity to the point of tax dodging, but I haven't seen a single person disobey the new rule in the past few weeks. You're not telling me that it can't be done in Scandinavia with its extremely high social pressure. e: as I was typing this post I happened to check De Standaard and they've decided to extend mandatory mask use to 'busy public spaces'. Up to mayors to decide what exactly constitutes a busy public space, so there's some arbitrariness involved, but I'm OK with it.
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Jul 23, 2020 15:43
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PederP posted:So at some point, the government needs to pass a law with fines for not using masks when required. After increasing the penalty for covering one's face in public at the beginning of the pandemic and fining niqabis for two years. 
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Jul 23, 2020 15:52
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SplitSoul posted:After increasing the penalty for covering one's face in public at the beginning of the pandemic and fining niqabis for two years. ah but that's about
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Jul 23, 2020 16:02
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Well, you know, at least they're being consistent. Most minority groups are far more likely to be affected by covid than native Europeans.
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Jul 23, 2020 16:04
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It's that germanic blood ofc
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Jul 23, 2020 16:09
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yikes! posted:It's that germanic blood ofc I've legitimately heard otherwise intelligent people put forth this "explanation".
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Jul 23, 2020 16:55
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Osmosisch posted:Try since the 70s. Basically the brief progressive period is the anomaly, not the fygm liberalism. I understand what you are trying to say here, but I mean abortion was legalized in the Netherlands in 1984, euthanasia in 2002, and it was the first country to fully legalize same-sex marriage in 2001.
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Jul 23, 2020 17:07
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oliwan posted:I understand what you are trying to say here, but I mean abortion was legalized in the Netherlands in 1984, euthanasia in 2002, and it was the first country to fully legalize same-sex marriage in 2001. "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" -- a recipe for progressiveness 
Osmosisch fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 17:12
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Private Speech posted:I've legitimately heard otherwise intelligent people put forth this "explanation". I've heard that Europeans are more resistant against AIDS due to having been hit especially hard by the Black Plague. Never read that about covid, though. I don't see the need for a genetic cause when it is already easily explained by comparing demographic and cultural patterns.
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Jul 23, 2020 17:20
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oliwan posted:I understand what you are trying to say here, but I mean abortion was legalized in the Netherlands in 1984, euthanasia in 2002, and it was the first country to fully legalize same-sex marriage in 2001. roffle a lovely society trying to paper over its shittiness by making progress exclusively on issues that cost nothing to fix and only really anger people already looking for a reason to be angry about something.
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Jul 23, 2020 17:21
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Osmosisch posted:"socially liberal, fiscally conservative" -- a recipe for progressiveness The point is that up until the early 2000s the Netherlands were still signing progressive bills into power. After that this completely changed, and besides eroding social security, which was already heavily underway, it is now also eroding progressive measures from that time.
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Jul 23, 2020 17:26
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Phlegmish posted:I've heard that Europeans are more resistant against AIDS due to having been hit especially hard by the Black Plague. Professor Thomas Benfield has done some preliminary research into this and is asking for more attention to how covid is affecting immigrants, minorities and the chronically ill. Apparently immigrants tend to display epigenetic stress markers similar to those found with chronic illness. Here's an article for those who can read Danish or don't mind using a translation tool: https://ugeskriftet.dk/files/scientific_article_files/2020-04/v205022_web.pdf Of course, vitamin D genetics probably matter too (an area given far too little attention, I think) and socio-economic factors probably play some part, but the article highlights an important factor not easily solved by lifestyle changes.
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Jul 23, 2020 17:55
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I honestly believe vitamin d genetics play a far tinier role than the other two you mentioned. It's no wonder that higher levels of stress make you more likely to catch it and immigrants definitely experience a ton of stress. Pink skins' ability to absorb the vitamin D more readily is not a super power. The fact they are more likely to have better healthcare or a better safety net is probably a larger contribution to the disparity.
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Jul 23, 2020 18:04
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oliwan posted:The point is that up until the early 2000s the Netherlands were still signing progressive bills into power. After that this completely changed, and besides eroding social security, which was already heavily underway, it is now also eroding progressive measures from that time. what changed in the 90's that lead to that shift? Did the unions get smashed or sth? e: it's the euro and its baked-in austerity isn't it?
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Jul 23, 2020 18:09
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An insane mind posted:I honestly believe vitamin d genetics play a far tinier role than the other two you mentioned. It's no wonder that higher levels of stress make you more likely to catch it and immigrants definitely experience a ton of stress. And all of them put together probably play less of a role than attitude towards (extended) family, need for community, family size, etc.
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Jul 23, 2020 18:11
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Others can correct me if I'm wrong but I think it's about that time that a leftist party (PvdA) needed to share power with a centre right (d66) and right wing party (VVD) and it seemed alright economically but a lot of concessions to the right had to be made constantly and it eroded the left over the years.
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Jul 23, 2020 18:13
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Or, in other words, the they sold out to stay in power?
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Jul 23, 2020 18:16
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yikes! posted:Or, in other words, the they sold out to stay in power? Yeah. I think so at least, but then I'm super stupid and am probably getting all sorts of things about this wrong.
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Jul 23, 2020 18:20
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oliwan posted:The point is that up until the early 2000s the Netherlands were still signing progressive bills into power. After that this completely changed, and besides eroding social security, which was already heavily underway, it is now also eroding progressive measures from that time. All that's changed is that the mask has come back off. The erosion of things that actually gave people meaningful freedom, e.g. social security and housing, had already set in long before. The rest is just recognising the cultural winds and bending with them.
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Jul 23, 2020 18:22
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oliwan posted:I understand what you are trying to say here, but I mean abortion was legalized in the Netherlands in 1984, euthanasia in 2002, and it was the first country to fully legalize same-sex marriage in 2001. There are very rich people who want to prevent a troublesome illegitimate heir from happening, there are very rich people who want inheritance to happen sooner, and there are very rich people who are not heterosexual. If these measures can also somehow benefit the 99 percenters, well,
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Jul 23, 2020 18:24
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https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/the-conservative-embrace-of-progressive-values-on-the-intellectua This is a pretty good explanation of what happened in the Netherlands wrt the rightward shift. It's 300 pages of solid analysis in English.
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Jul 23, 2020 18:34
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I mean we could consider that the rightward drift is actually a regression to a long time average. Many European countries relied heavily on taxation and redistribution of wealth in order to uplift their population in the wake of World War 2. At some point those economic policies became old fashioned and we set in motion a regression to the pre-sale economy, with the great inequality and social immobility that state had. If things keep going the way they are, we will see more and more accomplishments of the labor movement erode, often under the cynical guise of progressivism and liberalization. Adding to that, with the supposed end of history, there wasn't a competing economic system around anymore. That removed any incentive restrict the looting of the working class.
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Jul 23, 2020 19:17
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What I'm wondering is how the right so perfectly wrestled the working class and weakest in society to not be angry with the exploitative rich but instead managed to point at immigrants and non-whites as an 'other' to direct most of the anger towards and see the left as an ineffectual, weak and outdated concept. Do people in this thread think that it was mostly luck or that it was actually a concerted effort to try and pull the wool over people's eyes and have them not care about the wealth disparity?
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Jul 23, 2020 19:31
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there is a psychological phenomenon that when people feel miserable, lashing out and humiliating/dominating someone else does make them feel better. easier to lash out at someone weaker than you or as weak as you than it is to lash out at the boss, who's surrounded himself with legalese and lawyerly or brawny bodyguards by giving them a few scraps of the profits. the game was rigged from the start.
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Jul 23, 2020 19:37
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An insane mind posted:What I'm wondering is how the right so perfectly wrestled the working class and weakest in society to not be angry with the exploitative rich but instead managed to point at immigrants and non-whites as an 'other' to direct most of the anger towards and see the left as an ineffectual, weak and outdated concept. Do people in this thread think that it was mostly luck or that it was actually a concerted effort to try and pull the wool over people's eyes and have them not care about the wealth disparity? I don't think that society is more bigoted than it was fifty years ago. Being a male nurse would have been a stigma back then. Catholics and Protestants were not allowed to mingle in large parts. Gays did not exist outside of prisons and the margins of society. Non white immigrant workers were not supposed to live together with the white native population, and God forbid a black man would have had a relationship with a white woman. I think what we are seeing is that the low hanging fruits of the booming post war economies have been picked. As a consequence, continued growth is restricted to an ever shrinking part of the population. Inequality will rise until there is some event, good or bad, that levels economic inequality somewhat again. I can't imagine the wealthy classing working towards solving this in a manner that benefits all, though. (I have a quite negative mindset at the moment, maybe I should open a bottle of wine and relax in the evening sun)
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Jul 23, 2020 20:06
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double nine posted:there is a psychological phenomenon that when people feel miserable, lashing out and humiliating/dominating someone else does make them feel better. Basically this. To focus the anger on the masses on the correct target instead of the nearest brown person requires a concerted effort of anti-indoctrination and education. A permanent revolution, if you will.
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Jul 23, 2020 20:41
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Lord Stimperor posted:Inequality will rise until there is some event, good or bad, that levels economic inequality somewhat again. I can't imagine the wealthy classing working towards solving this in a manner that benefits all, though. It's cynical, but I'd have to agree. What happened during the 1950's and especially 60's in the West was that you had massive, historically unprecedented social mobility. For the first time there was enough wealth to go around, and enough redistribution, that even the lower classes could live reasonably comfortable lives and send their children to university, and that was encouraged and expected in the post-war Third Way/corporatist ideological context. The most ambitious and successful of these children would later join the elite that started introducing neoliberal reforms in the 1980's. They had successful white-collar careers and they didn't much feel like paying for unemployed lay-abouts in a de-industrializing economy. From that point on, education and housing costs started rising again, the rich made sure that wealth was increasingly passed on generationally, and the new class system has gradually solidified again, with the help of globalization. The process will continue until there's another massive upheaval, which may or may not be caused by the incompetence of the increasingly less meritocratic and increasingly more (metaphorically) inbred elite. That's where I fundamentally disagree with Marx and why I think communism is a dead-end street, class conflict won't finally culminate in a classless society, I see it as more of a cyclical phenomenon. The processes that govern class formation are too deeply ingrained into the human social psyche to ever fully be neutralized. The best we can do is continue to point out that the current elite does not inherently 'deserve' its wealth and superiority, and that their privilege will only become less deserved as time goes on. Put the fear of God back into them. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 20:43
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I mean it wouldn't be the end of the world to me if we didn't get a classless society. But the loving cruelty of it all needs to go away. I'd be happy if I could see that. Let there be some rich fucks goofing around in Monaco I don't care, but don't loving deny people housing, safety, medicine, education and what not. Making disabled, ill, unemployed or marginalized people not feel like the scum of the earth would already be such an improvement that it almost feels utopian.
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Jul 23, 2020 20:50
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An insane mind posted:What I'm wondering is how the right so perfectly wrestled the working class and weakest in society to not be angry with the exploitative rich but instead managed to point at immigrants and non-whites as an 'other' to direct most of the anger towards and see the left as an ineffectual, weak and outdated concept. Do people in this thread think that it was mostly luck or that it was actually a concerted effort to try and pull the wool over people's eyes and have them not care about the wealth disparity? One of the main materialist mistakes in the West (and one of the reasons its intellectual left is so widely despised among the working class) is to think that culture and identity don't matter. They do, and they matter all the more if that's all you have. The poor are not enlightened, cosmopolitan citizens of the world, they can't go on holiday to Thailand every summer, they can't move their money to tax havens - they don't even have any. Joe Sixpack is not interested in hearing orthodox Marxist theory, presented in abstract terms by some suburban nerd who has never done manual labor in his life. It means nothing to him. He literally does not understand it in most cases. He does understand when that same person starts arguing for open borders and bringing in more of the brown people that beat up his kid in school, while in his view that's precisely why he lost his job at the factory. What he understands is that that person is the enemy, someone who fundamentally looks down on him and his identity. I think that attitude is best exemplified in the UK, since it's the country that is most obviously socially stratified in Europe. Listen to the lyrics of these 80's oi! songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JluZayrdWgY quote:You're the middle class kiddies from public schools https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZVtb_y9TwU quote:Everybody's talking about revolution
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Jul 23, 2020 20:59
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Phlegmish posted:One of the main materialist mistakes in the West (and one of the reasons its intellectual left is so widely despised among the working class) is to think that culture and identity don't matter. They do, and they matter all the more if that's all you have. The poor are not enlightened, cosmopolitan citizens of the world, they can't go on holiday to Thailand every summer, they can't move their money to tax havens - they don't even have any. This is absolutely true. Incoming extremely bad uncomradely rant: The thing is, as a suburban nerd who regularly travels and only sometimes does manual labour for the hell of it, part of me does viscerally hate the Joe Sixpacks. On an intellectual level and to some extent even from experience I understand that someone just scraping by (financially, in terms of health, etc.) has better things to do than reading politics and understanding the root causes of their problems instead of just joining the hate on whichever brown gay marxist unperson the Daily Mail calls out on its front page that day. Hell, how could we reasonably expect even comparatively well-off people living in comfort to develop good opinions given the appalling state of public education on these issues. However, whenever the glorious working class gets suckered into enabling a really loving dumb decision by voting for neoliberals and Brexits and nazis before going back to complaining about brown people stealing their god given right to a lovely job, my patience gets stretched to its limits. How dare these people think they're worth taking seriously if they vote for more of the poo poo they're complaining about and force everyone else to suffer for it along with themselves. gently caress them and if their lovely employer outsources their lovely job or they get the covid after putting some clown in charge who refuses to wear a mask to own the libs then I only hope to live long enough to see them loving die in what is essentially a suicide by vote. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 21:28
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Orange Devil posted:https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/the-conservative-embrace-of-progressive-values-on-the-intellectua  That's a hefty read. Gonna give this a look over the weekend!
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Jul 23, 2020 21:34
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PederP posted:Same argument is being used in Denmark. "Mask use will create a false sense of comfort". Other classics are: "Improper mask use is worse than no mask use" and "Non-medical grade masks are useless and/or harmful".
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Jul 23, 2020 21:53
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Phlegmish posted:One of the main materialist mistakes in the West (and one of the reasons its intellectual left is so widely despised among the working class) is to think that culture and identity don't matter. They do, and they matter all the more if that's all you have. The poor are not enlightened, cosmopolitan citizens of the world, they can't go on holiday to Thailand every summer, they can't move their money to tax havens - they don't even have any. I've been going through the Punk Music thread, and your posts there as here have been really enlightening. I'm not a fan of hardcore, but I do like early punk and the Oi! stuff sonically suits me perfectly. I've wanted to teach a sequence in my English class on punk for a while, but it's a large genre and not something that's easily just done, but covering Oi! culture may be the perfect lead-in to also tie in with the necessary and inevitable Brexit sequence I'll have to do if/when school starts up again. Mind if I PM you, if I ever were to make these ideas a reality?
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Jul 23, 2020 21:55
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suck my woke dick posted:This is absolutely true. I'm sorry my dudes, I get what your saying here but... im mildly sure some obscure German philosopher has described this false consciousness or why people vote against their interests. There is no easy answer to this.or rather, there is: you have to fight and do poo poo that materially help these people before they'll even listen to you, and more for them to take you seriously.it is what it is.youre fighting all of Capital and centuries of indoctrination. We loose. A lot. Until the one time when we don't.
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Jul 23, 2020 22:08
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suck my woke dick posted:This is absolutely true. Sure. That's also absolutely true. The point is that the working class were never bamboozled by the right into voting 'against their own interests', as if they're children and not themselves the best judges of what their interests are. They broadly still think the same things they thought back in 1965. It's the left that's gradually changed, for the better although I guess it depends on your view, starting especially with the New Left that emerged from the student movements of the late sixties. Even though many of them were avowed Marxists, that's when the focus on ethics, anti-racism, spiritualism, Third-Worldism, etc. came to the forefront, and improving the material conditions of the lower classes became just one of many issues, all of it coinciding nicely with the onset of de-industrialization. Interestingly, many of these students were the socially mobile boomer children of blue-collar workers that I mentioned in my earlier post. And to their credit, they've been enormously successful in pushing society left in ethical, cultural, and symbolical terms, no matter what anyone says. Western Europe in 2020 is completely different to the Western Europe of 1960. My boomer dad saw churches go from packed to almost empty in the span of a decade. It was a huge seismic shift in cultural terms. However, to get back to the working class and making a very broad sociological generalization, in 2020 they agree with 'the left' on precisely one issue (left-wing economic policies), which the left itself has been de-emphasizing for decades now. Given that materialism has turned into a bullet point for the mainstream left, and even disappeared from view completely in the US (not counting Sanders), and given that their opinions on other matters are usually at odds with the party line (including those far left parties that actually do still pay attention to material/economic causes), what exactly is supposed to bind them to left-wing parties? In my view, it all makes logical sense. Left-wing parties simply have a different voter base now, one that is highly educated and usually financially stable. Under current conditions, it is not possible for them to regain the traditional working class unless they turn into something they don't want to be and that they themselves wouldn't even consider 'left-wing'. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 22:21
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Or they could do like the increasingly successful Danish Social Democrats, continue to gut welfare and sell infrastructure to the likes of loving Goldman Sachs while also deftly out-racisting the single-issue racist parties. Sure I take solace in the impending climate apocalypse these days, why do you ask?
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Jul 23, 2020 23:04
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