Metoo said:

Civil disobedience has a big effect on the market perception of system coherence which is the foundation of fiscal stability. Countries can borrow money only against their perceived ability to tax. When states turn against feds and executive loses control of the federal infrastructure the bankers are beginning to scratch their heads. As with all perception based processes things then move quickly.

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Metoo said:

Yes, that is one way to look at things but my perspective is wider. Looking at the covid drama as a test applied to social systems in an evolutionary game there are winners and losers.

The countries which got on top of covid did it through isolation (Iceland, New Zealand, Taiwan, Fiji), draconian management (China) or both (North Korea). The US and a bunch of populous second world countries (Brazil, India, Mexico) are burning and most other countries are doing so so but will flare up again.

It is painful to watch but from a Darwinian perspective the system we cherished as a temple of personal freedoms and opportunities is struggling. One of the modes of failure is the opening of the social fractures. It is not that China is a land of unity but the likes of Tibetans, Uygurs or Falun Gong would never be allowed to turn city blocks into lawless wastelands. This difference in the style of governance may decide who is left standing when the dust has settled.

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qman said:

Or maybe it was so easy to predict that the US was going to massively fail with the virus on a relative basis because 1. We're a nation full of dumb-asses. 2. Have a highly dysfunction health care system. 3. Have no system in place to deal with economic turmoil. 4. Have no leadership from the top.

I knew the US was going to be the biggest loser on the block even before this whole thing started.  It's our culture, our economic system and moron at the top that made it inevitable.

I laugh when people try to compare our infection rates to Japan or Germany. They have a highly functional health care and economic system with people that work together in a time of crisis. That's the complete opposite of USA.

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koods said:

Lol a couple blocks of civil disobedience has very little tangible effect on the economy unless the leaders decide to make it so. The Portland situation is manufactured political theatre by a president who thinks making liberal states appear like they’ve decended into lawless anarchy is his key to winning re-election.

Think about how much energy, rhetoric and resources he’s investing into preventing property crimes. He’s also talking about sending tens of thousands of troops into cities to prevent a couple of extra murders. Even if his plan worked as advertised, and say he reduced homicides in chiacgo by half, that would amount to less than one life saved per day. Meanwhile we are losing 1,000 people a day to covid and his attitude about that is “it is what it is.” It’s perverse.

More people died yesterday from covid than were murdered in Chicago in the past three years. Covid deaths are almost entirely preventable and we know how to do it. Other western countries are seeing a couple deaths a day. We are on the verge of seeing covid kill more people in a week than are murdered in a year in the US. A spike in homicides sucks, but the lives being lost to covid are so much more consequential to the American people and the American economy. It’s not even close.

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Ovoidhunter said:

My argument is this: you can go out and claim to be fighting fascism and racism and all that in the midst of a global pandemic and not be required to wear a mask or even practice social distancing but people are dying in hospitals alone because they wont let their families visit them. How does that make sense?

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Ovoidhunter said:

My argument is this: you can go out and claim to be fighting fascism and racism and all that in the midst of a global pandemic and not be required to wear a mask or even practice social distancing but people are dying in hospitals alone because they wont let their families visit them. How does that make sense?

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Because if you protest what the establishment or media want you to protest you actually slow the spread of corona

Ovoidhunter said:

A young black man from new york city has a better chance of succeeding than a young white man from a trailer trash state like kentucky.

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Enlil said:

If it isn't systemic racism, how do you explain the fact that African Americans are overrepresented in prisons, underrepresented in corporate boardrooms, and statistically of a lower socioeconomic class?

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