This includes some video from my time in Yakutia, taken by one of my companions while I was there.
This is the correct link for John Oliver on the call to build the wall.
Ironically, the problem discussed in the video is also a perfect description of the one involving all the misinformation everyone hears and believes about Russia, often perpetrated by "the Left" rather than "the Right" in this case. Here is a description of that for a recent scandal.
This one is on how the Inuit raise their children. I apparently didn't keep any others of this type.
A story of an American woman who finds herself in the past in Siberia. Picture book format, currently updating twice a month. View the story posts in chronological order with the archive tab.
20 July 2020
15 July 2020
Waiting for the Apocalypse
Update:
Because of my slow pace at writing, much of this content may seem out of date. I have updated stuff to a certain extent, but other things may seem a little off in how they were written.
As far as I can tell, I am basically in stasis, where I have been for the past couple years, waiting for life to be ready for me. The only thing which has worked to some degree for me is to go to Russia, but I need to wait for the risk of being sent to the US to be low.
When the reopenings were starting, before BLM began again, I needed to stop watching the news because most left-wing commentators were against the reopenings. I was always against the complete shutdowns, as I thought they were poorly thought out, poorly implemented, and would cause more harm than good. A couple weeks later, I was told by people I talk to regularly about the events in the US, specifically the protests.
I have been writing, slowly. I am editing the first chapter right now. I had been using a writer's group to help me edit, but the people there were of the type who had no attention span and were criticizing me for not following the typical erroneous and destructive tropes of action-adventure type stories common in fantasy. When one person goes into blatantly insulting me, you know there is a problem. I am sure that is not what she thought she was doing, but that doesn't mean its not a problem.
Work is not happening right now. I have been talking to my PhD supervisor, though, although mostly about Covid research. What he has been working on is here: https://nafshordi.com/welcome/covid/
I am also not working on my Russian, although I am watching Russian TV shows (without subtitles -- I don't know if this is a good idea, but I have weird tastes in TV).
The dog is being walked, although not as much as he should be. The food situation is not so great -- I am eating enough, but not necessarily well. I am not getting enough exercise or vegetables. I have been slowly managing to clean my apartment some, though.
I have been contacting people online. I also have a second DnD group right now as well as my Gloomhaven group.
About the Title:
The apocalypse is the unveiling, which means that I am referring less to a crisis situation as I am to the change in mentality which results. When the old world dies, the new world is born.
On that note, crises -- I have heard comparisons of Covid-19 to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, but these are both singular events, not ongoing crises. For crisis comparison, I tend to use the fall of the Soviet Union or the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, events still strong in the mind of Russians, which I understand to a certain extent.
What I would like to see:
At the very least, I would like there to be a reallocation of resources away from "defense" spending, to healthcare and other actual necessities. I am not going to go further into the details, like the question of "by how much?" What is relevant is the priority shift, where government officials realize that healthcare is a national security issue and the military, at least at the level of emphasis it has in certain countries, is actually a detriment to the safety and well being of citizens.
Here are a couple comments to that regard: Referencing a comment by the UN Secretary General, Gorbachev
One of the other big things is that I would like people to figure out how to slow down society and focus on long-term planning.
Overall Impression of the Current Situation:
Everything is frustrating. Life is like watching a movie -- I see what is coming, I see people headed to disaster, but I can't do anything to stop it. For stories, it is because I am in another reality, but in our reality this effect is caused by much more complex causes, and I am not unaffected.
It appears that every time there is a crisis, people insist on taking the worst possible solution, making it worse rather than better, because they are incapable of following cause and effect chains for more than one step.
I think my understanding of this issue comes back to my interest in non-trivial cause and effect. When I got interested in physics, it was because of my love of counterintuitive effects. This probably explains my interest in time travel, as the effect becomes the cause.
For me, the shutdown would be fine, at least intellectually, if
a) people remembered and emphasized that the shutdown was to prevent the system from being overwhelmed, not preventing illness, tuned the shutdown accordingly, acknowledged illness or death as a possibility, and didn't refuse to acknowledge herd immunity
b) people at least properly tried other solutions, like putting more resources and labor into critical infrastructure like medicine as an integral part of the strategy, recommended in addition to recommending the shutdowns, and people demanding to be involved rather than just hero worshiping doctors,
c) people actually acknowledged and tried to take care of the vulnerable populations like the poor and homeless (rather than ignoring them or using vulnerable populations as a justification for your favorite horrible solution),
d) people would be intelligent about shutting down travel, based on what made sense scientifically for mitigating damages of the pandemic, not on national borders or nationalism, or the practices of businesses, and let different cities and regions implement different policies based on what made sense in those regions, and
e) there was an acknowledgement that the crisis is partially caused by a systemic undervaluing of medicine in society and mismanagement within government and medicine.
In general, long-term strategies and acknowledging reality are vital to proper crisis management.
In terms of the last point e, I have had two instances when I had someone apologizing to me during this crisis -- the first when I had asked for someone to call me regularly and she didn't notice the request, the second when I was almost run over by a car. Both times, I broke down because I still want the apology for e, and for the poor handling of the crisis.
Another big thing which has bothered me on the handling of the crisis is the emphasis on experts and expertise, and the crackdown on dissent. Personally, I feel that the attempted implication is that my experience with social isolation, ability to avoid herd mentality, and knowledge of modeling don't count in terms of being able to develop legitimate beliefs and hypotheses. I am not going to go further into this discussion, since it is not simple at all.
Black Lives Matter:
This year, I have been thinking a lot about the events surrounding 1917 and 1991, and the constant predictions (by historians and economists) of the impending collapse of the "American empire." Granted, the way these things work, you can make generalized predictions based on underlying patterns, but not specific ones.
What is going on in the US right now is kind of surreal. The way that middle class white people and the authorities have just turned from opposing such things (as previously people claimed that we can't be anti-police, and emphasized looting and rioting piggybacking on BLM) to supporting them all of a sudden is kind of bizarre to watch.
The two main thoughts I have regarding the resurgence of Black Lives Matter are: "What took you so long? We have known this for decades." and "Don't you know that revolutions often end badly."
I will summarize my response (to BLM) in three points: humans are emotional, the issues are real, and revolutions are messy.
-- Humans are emotional: I tend to think of the call to "defund the police" like the ones to "build the wall" or "shelter in place." No matter how much people try to convince themselves and others that this is just a shorthand for something rational, reasonable, well thought out, and scientific, the reality is that this is just an emotional reaction to crisis combined with the desire for a quick fix. I am not going to get into the analysis of these things, only saying that I don't believe all of them are equal in validity. [Here is John Oliver on the police and the wall. I may disagree with him and many "liberals" on a lot of things, but many of his analyses are very good. Just avoid anything involving Russia, and be careful about what he says regarding Trump or non-Anglophone countries. Careful research does not undo pre-existing biases.]
-- Revolutions are messy: The first point here is that we are in a revolutionary state. This one is much more difficult to see, but the US is blatantly polarized and divided, and calls to disband the police and take down statues are blatantly revolutionary. I don't want to say whether we should or shouldn't have a revolution, or whether or not it will be successful, only that this is what is going on.
The second is that they are often messy. Having one faction exploit a crisis to take control, or years of horribleness primarily affecting the most disadvantaged in society have been the characteristic factor of such political turmoil in the 20th century, and even into the 21st.
-- The issues are real: I am not going to go through all the details and statistics for black oppression. I will merely start with the most readily available -- The US has the highest per capita (and total) prison population.
As per riots and looting: I remember reports when there were protests and riots in Ferguson of the police purposefully refusing to stop the looting and destruction to make the situation worse as they attacked the protesters. It was actually the protesters who cleaned up after the mess and repaired the local shops, not the police.
I am not saying that such things are caused by agent provocateurs. Most of the looters and rioters, like Trumps "base", the nationalists or "neo-nazis," many of the Islamic terrorists, and often even Black Bloc protesters are poor, alienated people who just want to take out their anger on society, without paying attention to if their target is even legitimate, and all the police need to encourage this behavior is to cause violence, typically by attacking the protesters, and to not stop the inevitable wave of violence in response, if it is not targeted at them. When people are in survival mode, they are not very "socially responsible," something which is quite clear when you look at the past 30 years of Russian history.
I hope that people redirect resources from the police to social services -- conflict mediation, mental health, people who help find employment and other opportunities, etc., restorative justice, and even advocates which can help negotiate with employers. Many of these things exist, but they are not very "accessible," I guess would be the best term.
My Experience and Perspective:
Quarantine is very triggering for me (as are prison and slavery). However, some of the experiences which have caused this trauma have also allowed me to appreciate the usefulness of quarantine. Maybe it is just my ability to think things through, I don't know.
Basically, if I was struggling, if I was sick, or if I did something wrong, the response was the same -- isolation. My interpretation was that I was punished for struggling in life. The result is I often needed to work to exhaustion, after which I was forced to isolate.
The belief was that this would force efficiency, but it did the opposite for me. I learned not to wait until the last minute to do work, but I learned how to be inefficient -- to make or find breaks, to take advantage of gaps in events for leisure rather than work.
Being disabled, consensus decision making is basically survival for me. I first figured this out on my own based on issues I had with group therapy in 6th grade, but later, when studying socialism as an undergraduate, learned about the existence of such practices in other societies.
So, how does this relate to our current situation:
I like the fact that things have shut down. It feels like I have the opportunity to slow down, to recover and deal with putting my life together instead of pushing to keep going into work. And, yes, trying just to go into work had become exhausting for me.
Things are difficult, though, because I am not really an internet person. I don't like relying on the internet to make contacts, learn about things, and do everything. I rely on the local gaming circles to develop connections with others.
Part of it is that I can't really handle big crowds. It gets overwhelming for me. Online communities can get big fast, while our local gaming stores have only so many people who go their regularly. What was done with my parents' friends group, using unhangouts, seemed to work well for me, since we could split up the group.
The other big issue I have with online communication is that it is not forced, like it is in person. If I go find someone and can't talk, usually they will ask me what I want, forcing the conversation. Without this, initializing conversation is very difficult for me.
I am also at the point where I am sure that I need to go to Russia, which I can't do while travel is limited. But that will end, and hopefully they will make immigration easier.
Basic Principles:
-- "Avoid ideology." An alternative way to express this during the current pandemic would be "The next person to tell me 'flattening the curve,' I want to punch in the face."
Basically, people tend to repeat the same things over and over again. This is the first step in the construction of an ideology. Basically, people do this because it works -- if you repeat something enough, people will believe it. Except, the reality is not so simple. Because repeating the same things doesn't make it true. And many people are resistant to this trick. I typically get very annoyed, because I am usually far past this thought in my thought process (as in "I know that already!"). Others will purposefully misbehave or refuse to believe, or they will sacrifice themselves or their people for the cause, even when it is not actually helping people like they think it is.
"History is full of libertarian ideas which have been re-purposed into authoritarian ideologies used for societal control." The most obvious case would be the various forms of Christianity, but also Islam, communism, democracy, etc. I am not going to get into the details. You can look at the history and philosophy if you want. But, basically, when the things you are saying are aimed at trying to turn people's brains off instead of trying to get them to think, it becomes a problem. People end up doing things which cause more harm than good, whether by compliance or defiance, because the ideology becomes the cause, not helping people. Furthermore, it becomes very easy for a group of authorities to use this to solidify their power, pretending to be doing this for the greater good (and perhaps even lying to themselves about this).
-- "If someone is violating the rules, misbehaving, etc., don't attack them, instead find an alternative way for them to satisfy their needs."
This one feels like I can give you a lot of links, as it is certainly not a novel concept, and should be well known.
-- "Good leadership requires listening to the needs of those for whom you are responsible, not blindly following the orders of those on top."
I think I have brought this up before, so I will not go into detail with this.
What about my beliefs, concerns and questions about what is needed and what is happening?
-- Don't make this a choice between the two worst options.
The two options in this case are "do nothing" and "quarantine everything." Granted, most places are somewhere between these two options in their policies, but this is still how things are presented. The dialog is framed as one between lives and the economy, and is exemplified by protests against quarantine and the demands for lockdowns. However, there are far more options than these two presented, and the basic dialog defining them is incorrect.
First, social distancing was proposed in order to prevent the hospitals from overloading, (and possibly even the supply chains from shutting down,) not to cause disease extinction. So the shutdown option was designed to protect the economy and reduce the death rate of the disease, but still relies on herd immunity to end the pandemic. Since there were issues with hospitals and even meat packing plants in the US, the danger this was trying to prevent was there.
The danger from quarantine is due to the increase in depression, domestic violence, unemployment, etc, all of which cause suffering, increase health risks, and can lead to death, just like the disease. Comparing the death rates is tricky (and probably impossible), but that doesn't mean that you can just ignore one side or the other.
Basically, both options cause excessive death, suffering, and economic collapse, and thus more intelligent solutions need to be presented, not just the basic reactions. We are still guaranteed to get death, suffering, and economic collapse, but at least we can try to mitigate it, rather than trying to dismiss certain concerns as irrelevant, as people seem to be fond of doing.
"Accept the inevitable and work on mitigation of damage. Don't try to prevent the inevitable, thus making your situation worse." This is not a giving up hope option, it is an actually doing what you can to deal with an issue option.
A brief word on masks: As I have experienced when young, as Muslim women have been arguing for the past several years, if the choice is between covering your face or being uncomfortable going into public at all, covering one's face is the more social option.
Wearing masks to help stop the spread of the disease is something which has a big impact with very little cost. If a single layer of cloth worn while inside is enough to prevent the need of confining people in their homes, something which does actually kill people, then it seems wrong to object to this.
-- Plan for this to last for years, not weeks.
One of these things I remember watching as the shutdowns got put in place was that the policies implemented were not sustainable, and not intended to be long-term. I kind of was laughing at the two week school closings and even the couple of months of unemployment payments offered. At this point, you can start to see that shift from amusement to dread -- from "delayed" medical treatment, to the shutting down of parks, to police enforcement of arbitrary social distancing rules, etc. -- to frustration -- seeing the blatant inability to talk about the possibility of retraining people (like they conscript people in times of war). The lack of planning becomes even more obvious when you see the lack of correlation between policies and the current disease situation, issues with compliance (many of which come from the narrow walkways not designed for distancing, others from everyone choosing the same places and times for travel), relaxing of the lockdowns, and various types of protests.
In terms of short-term vs long-term planing, another obvious such issues is how medicine was defunded before the crisis, even though we knew this was a potential issue after SARS. If people are struggling to get health care treatment when there isn't a pandemic, than this is an issue. But policy makers still think of security and preparing for the worst in terms of policing, building better weapons and war games.
-- Isolate by urban area, not province or country.
One thing I remember people talking about was this debate about whether or not to close borders. One of the things I thought was bizarre about this was the emphasis on closing national borders. While travel did spread the disease, this had more to do with travel from an area that was more heavily infected to one which was less infected, which has less to do with national borders than people seem to think. As such, logically, it makes sense to propose policy and close borders and limit travel based on where people live, i.e. cities, not on political borders. This prevents migration of the disease from the main cities to the smaller ones, allows less infected regions to avoid shutting down their economy, allows for a better understanding of what is or is not necessary travel, and prevents racism. The only issue is in terms of governance.
However, any such closing of borders needs to be based on an awareness of how exponential growth works, something which triggered my original frustration with the news. Bringing the disease from a more infected region to a less infected region does nothing to impact the curve. Mass migration, though, can seed an infection in an uninfected area without herd immunity or push an infection rate up for a region in the (slow) exponential decline side of an epidemic. The first is inevitable, but can be put off, the second is to be avoided.
-- I think people who are used to making decisions for themselves will fare better.
This is where I disagree with basically everyone. When people don't know what to do, they turn to those in charge. However, those people act just as emotionally and also don't know what to do. As I said in the previous, point, I don't believe that we need a uniform policy. Rather, as far as I can tell, we need an adaptable policy, one which can make full use of the known data of the situation at hand and is able to accommodate regional differences in the situation as well as the needs of individuals. As such, we need individuals to be able to make rational, informed decisions, and not decisions based on compliance to or defiance of arbitrary policies given by those on top, or on emotion and habit.
-- Also, don't rely on our leaders, and don't blame our leaders when things go badly. They are not gods; they are only human, just like the rest of us.
Morality and Ethics:
-- "Everything in moderation."
Aristotle's version of ethics may be difficult to call ethics, but is very good advice in life.
Life is a complicated mess of many, many factors, many of which have contradictory requirements to deal with properly. To deal with this, instead of making a priority list, it is often much better to balance these needs properly based on the situation at hand. When that is not a possibility, you can just guess by falling back on the principle, "Everything in moderation."
-- Kantian ethics is more focused on sustainability. His basic principle is "That which can be taken to be a universal principle is moral." Since I don't believe in universal principles, I can rephrase this as logical analyses, something requiring more context.
-- Utilitarianism, "The greatest good for the greatest number of people," is a more traditional ethical principle. I am not going to get into the utilitarian monster (mis)calculation argument.
-- The Veil of Ignorance is a concept, that when designing a system, you don't know which person you are, so you need to make things comfortable for all. This is true to a certain extent in reality, especially when you consider things such as ageism (as people start young and slowly get older) and ableism (as people can get sick or hurt). Both of these effectively reduce people's life expectancy, as well as interrupting the flow of knowledge from the older generations to the younger generations, facilitating the push of society to a faster pace, which is detrimental to all. Wealth inequality is another thing which does affect everyone, as it is possible to fall out of the higher classes, into poverty. Yes, there are myths of people pushing themselves into higher classes, but this is actually extremely rare, and mostly serves as a myth used to keep the lower classes subservient.
-- For people not managing whole systems, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," or "Do what you want, as long as you harm none," are more typical moral principles. They also have their flaws and also require some degree of calculation.
Other Lessons:
"Trust your instincts; don't trust others."
This is something I have been learning for the past year and a half. It is difficult, as undoing childhood training often is. Basically as a child we are taught, "If you can't get your work done, you are lazy. If you want something for yourself, you are selfish." I even remember being yelled at and punished for not doing something when I hadn't even realized that I needed to be doing something. If I ask to be treated fairly, or rather with respect, I am just told, "Life isn't fair." Assignments are made based on seniority, not ability. You quickly learn that your needs are unimportant, your instincts of right and wrong therefore incorrect, and only those in charge know what is right.
For me, my instincts and needs are different from those of others. I don't pick up societal cultural norms. That trick, were people get trained as to what is expected, what is right and wrong, never really happened. Therefore, I never left this state as I describe above.
At 14, I was called selfish by my parents. At 10, I volunteered in the library during recess time and was trying to be inclusive of the other individual in my class who was bullied by the students. Yes, people change over time. Yes, people grow up and learn how to deal with others. But sometimes, the adults are just wrong. And sometimes those in a position of authority are wrong.
I don't want to mark this as a general principle, as there are people on the opposite side of this. But, basically, people have an understanding of themselves which no other person can replicate, and they can't really explain to others, i.e. "You know more than you think you do," and "You know your needs better than anyone else." This is complicated slightly by the fact that people often lie to themselves to protect themselves, so sometimes you need the people close to you to tell the truth of who you are. But people often misinterpret the intentions of others as well, including those close to them. A lot of this has to do with how we compare people to others or to societal expectations, which is often not a great guide for proper behavior.
Because of my slow pace at writing, much of this content may seem out of date. I have updated stuff to a certain extent, but other things may seem a little off in how they were written.
As far as I can tell, I am basically in stasis, where I have been for the past couple years, waiting for life to be ready for me. The only thing which has worked to some degree for me is to go to Russia, but I need to wait for the risk of being sent to the US to be low.
When the reopenings were starting, before BLM began again, I needed to stop watching the news because most left-wing commentators were against the reopenings. I was always against the complete shutdowns, as I thought they were poorly thought out, poorly implemented, and would cause more harm than good. A couple weeks later, I was told by people I talk to regularly about the events in the US, specifically the protests.
I have been writing, slowly. I am editing the first chapter right now. I had been using a writer's group to help me edit, but the people there were of the type who had no attention span and were criticizing me for not following the typical erroneous and destructive tropes of action-adventure type stories common in fantasy. When one person goes into blatantly insulting me, you know there is a problem. I am sure that is not what she thought she was doing, but that doesn't mean its not a problem.
Work is not happening right now. I have been talking to my PhD supervisor, though, although mostly about Covid research. What he has been working on is here: https://nafshordi.com/welcome/covid/
I am also not working on my Russian, although I am watching Russian TV shows (without subtitles -- I don't know if this is a good idea, but I have weird tastes in TV).
The dog is being walked, although not as much as he should be. The food situation is not so great -- I am eating enough, but not necessarily well. I am not getting enough exercise or vegetables. I have been slowly managing to clean my apartment some, though.
I have been contacting people online. I also have a second DnD group right now as well as my Gloomhaven group.
About the Title:
The apocalypse is the unveiling, which means that I am referring less to a crisis situation as I am to the change in mentality which results. When the old world dies, the new world is born.
On that note, crises -- I have heard comparisons of Covid-19 to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, but these are both singular events, not ongoing crises. For crisis comparison, I tend to use the fall of the Soviet Union or the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, events still strong in the mind of Russians, which I understand to a certain extent.
What I would like to see:
At the very least, I would like there to be a reallocation of resources away from "defense" spending, to healthcare and other actual necessities. I am not going to go further into the details, like the question of "by how much?" What is relevant is the priority shift, where government officials realize that healthcare is a national security issue and the military, at least at the level of emphasis it has in certain countries, is actually a detriment to the safety and well being of citizens.
Here are a couple comments to that regard: Referencing a comment by the UN Secretary General, Gorbachev
One of the other big things is that I would like people to figure out how to slow down society and focus on long-term planning.
Overall Impression of the Current Situation:
Everything is frustrating. Life is like watching a movie -- I see what is coming, I see people headed to disaster, but I can't do anything to stop it. For stories, it is because I am in another reality, but in our reality this effect is caused by much more complex causes, and I am not unaffected.
It appears that every time there is a crisis, people insist on taking the worst possible solution, making it worse rather than better, because they are incapable of following cause and effect chains for more than one step.
I think my understanding of this issue comes back to my interest in non-trivial cause and effect. When I got interested in physics, it was because of my love of counterintuitive effects. This probably explains my interest in time travel, as the effect becomes the cause.
For me, the shutdown would be fine, at least intellectually, if
a) people remembered and emphasized that the shutdown was to prevent the system from being overwhelmed, not preventing illness, tuned the shutdown accordingly, acknowledged illness or death as a possibility, and didn't refuse to acknowledge herd immunity
b) people at least properly tried other solutions, like putting more resources and labor into critical infrastructure like medicine as an integral part of the strategy, recommended in addition to recommending the shutdowns, and people demanding to be involved rather than just hero worshiping doctors,
c) people actually acknowledged and tried to take care of the vulnerable populations like the poor and homeless (rather than ignoring them or using vulnerable populations as a justification for your favorite horrible solution),
d) people would be intelligent about shutting down travel, based on what made sense scientifically for mitigating damages of the pandemic, not on national borders or nationalism, or the practices of businesses, and let different cities and regions implement different policies based on what made sense in those regions, and
e) there was an acknowledgement that the crisis is partially caused by a systemic undervaluing of medicine in society and mismanagement within government and medicine.
In general, long-term strategies and acknowledging reality are vital to proper crisis management.
In terms of the last point e, I have had two instances when I had someone apologizing to me during this crisis -- the first when I had asked for someone to call me regularly and she didn't notice the request, the second when I was almost run over by a car. Both times, I broke down because I still want the apology for e, and for the poor handling of the crisis.
Another big thing which has bothered me on the handling of the crisis is the emphasis on experts and expertise, and the crackdown on dissent. Personally, I feel that the attempted implication is that my experience with social isolation, ability to avoid herd mentality, and knowledge of modeling don't count in terms of being able to develop legitimate beliefs and hypotheses. I am not going to go further into this discussion, since it is not simple at all.
Black Lives Matter:
This year, I have been thinking a lot about the events surrounding 1917 and 1991, and the constant predictions (by historians and economists) of the impending collapse of the "American empire." Granted, the way these things work, you can make generalized predictions based on underlying patterns, but not specific ones.
What is going on in the US right now is kind of surreal. The way that middle class white people and the authorities have just turned from opposing such things (as previously people claimed that we can't be anti-police, and emphasized looting and rioting piggybacking on BLM) to supporting them all of a sudden is kind of bizarre to watch.
The two main thoughts I have regarding the resurgence of Black Lives Matter are: "What took you so long? We have known this for decades." and "Don't you know that revolutions often end badly."
I will summarize my response (to BLM) in three points: humans are emotional, the issues are real, and revolutions are messy.
-- Humans are emotional: I tend to think of the call to "defund the police" like the ones to "build the wall" or "shelter in place." No matter how much people try to convince themselves and others that this is just a shorthand for something rational, reasonable, well thought out, and scientific, the reality is that this is just an emotional reaction to crisis combined with the desire for a quick fix. I am not going to get into the analysis of these things, only saying that I don't believe all of them are equal in validity. [Here is John Oliver on the police and the wall. I may disagree with him and many "liberals" on a lot of things, but many of his analyses are very good. Just avoid anything involving Russia, and be careful about what he says regarding Trump or non-Anglophone countries. Careful research does not undo pre-existing biases.]
-- Revolutions are messy: The first point here is that we are in a revolutionary state. This one is much more difficult to see, but the US is blatantly polarized and divided, and calls to disband the police and take down statues are blatantly revolutionary. I don't want to say whether we should or shouldn't have a revolution, or whether or not it will be successful, only that this is what is going on.
The second is that they are often messy. Having one faction exploit a crisis to take control, or years of horribleness primarily affecting the most disadvantaged in society have been the characteristic factor of such political turmoil in the 20th century, and even into the 21st.
-- The issues are real: I am not going to go through all the details and statistics for black oppression. I will merely start with the most readily available -- The US has the highest per capita (and total) prison population.
As per riots and looting: I remember reports when there were protests and riots in Ferguson of the police purposefully refusing to stop the looting and destruction to make the situation worse as they attacked the protesters. It was actually the protesters who cleaned up after the mess and repaired the local shops, not the police.
I am not saying that such things are caused by agent provocateurs. Most of the looters and rioters, like Trumps "base", the nationalists or "neo-nazis," many of the Islamic terrorists, and often even Black Bloc protesters are poor, alienated people who just want to take out their anger on society, without paying attention to if their target is even legitimate, and all the police need to encourage this behavior is to cause violence, typically by attacking the protesters, and to not stop the inevitable wave of violence in response, if it is not targeted at them. When people are in survival mode, they are not very "socially responsible," something which is quite clear when you look at the past 30 years of Russian history.
I hope that people redirect resources from the police to social services -- conflict mediation, mental health, people who help find employment and other opportunities, etc., restorative justice, and even advocates which can help negotiate with employers. Many of these things exist, but they are not very "accessible," I guess would be the best term.
My Experience and Perspective:
Quarantine is very triggering for me (as are prison and slavery). However, some of the experiences which have caused this trauma have also allowed me to appreciate the usefulness of quarantine. Maybe it is just my ability to think things through, I don't know.
Basically, if I was struggling, if I was sick, or if I did something wrong, the response was the same -- isolation. My interpretation was that I was punished for struggling in life. The result is I often needed to work to exhaustion, after which I was forced to isolate.
The belief was that this would force efficiency, but it did the opposite for me. I learned not to wait until the last minute to do work, but I learned how to be inefficient -- to make or find breaks, to take advantage of gaps in events for leisure rather than work.
Being disabled, consensus decision making is basically survival for me. I first figured this out on my own based on issues I had with group therapy in 6th grade, but later, when studying socialism as an undergraduate, learned about the existence of such practices in other societies.
So, how does this relate to our current situation:
I like the fact that things have shut down. It feels like I have the opportunity to slow down, to recover and deal with putting my life together instead of pushing to keep going into work. And, yes, trying just to go into work had become exhausting for me.
Things are difficult, though, because I am not really an internet person. I don't like relying on the internet to make contacts, learn about things, and do everything. I rely on the local gaming circles to develop connections with others.
Part of it is that I can't really handle big crowds. It gets overwhelming for me. Online communities can get big fast, while our local gaming stores have only so many people who go their regularly. What was done with my parents' friends group, using unhangouts, seemed to work well for me, since we could split up the group.
The other big issue I have with online communication is that it is not forced, like it is in person. If I go find someone and can't talk, usually they will ask me what I want, forcing the conversation. Without this, initializing conversation is very difficult for me.
I am also at the point where I am sure that I need to go to Russia, which I can't do while travel is limited. But that will end, and hopefully they will make immigration easier.
Basic Principles:
-- "Avoid ideology." An alternative way to express this during the current pandemic would be "The next person to tell me 'flattening the curve,' I want to punch in the face."
Basically, people tend to repeat the same things over and over again. This is the first step in the construction of an ideology. Basically, people do this because it works -- if you repeat something enough, people will believe it. Except, the reality is not so simple. Because repeating the same things doesn't make it true. And many people are resistant to this trick. I typically get very annoyed, because I am usually far past this thought in my thought process (as in "I know that already!"). Others will purposefully misbehave or refuse to believe, or they will sacrifice themselves or their people for the cause, even when it is not actually helping people like they think it is.
"History is full of libertarian ideas which have been re-purposed into authoritarian ideologies used for societal control." The most obvious case would be the various forms of Christianity, but also Islam, communism, democracy, etc. I am not going to get into the details. You can look at the history and philosophy if you want. But, basically, when the things you are saying are aimed at trying to turn people's brains off instead of trying to get them to think, it becomes a problem. People end up doing things which cause more harm than good, whether by compliance or defiance, because the ideology becomes the cause, not helping people. Furthermore, it becomes very easy for a group of authorities to use this to solidify their power, pretending to be doing this for the greater good (and perhaps even lying to themselves about this).
-- "If someone is violating the rules, misbehaving, etc., don't attack them, instead find an alternative way for them to satisfy their needs."
This one feels like I can give you a lot of links, as it is certainly not a novel concept, and should be well known.
-- "Good leadership requires listening to the needs of those for whom you are responsible, not blindly following the orders of those on top."
I think I have brought this up before, so I will not go into detail with this.
What about my beliefs, concerns and questions about what is needed and what is happening?
-- Don't make this a choice between the two worst options.
The two options in this case are "do nothing" and "quarantine everything." Granted, most places are somewhere between these two options in their policies, but this is still how things are presented. The dialog is framed as one between lives and the economy, and is exemplified by protests against quarantine and the demands for lockdowns. However, there are far more options than these two presented, and the basic dialog defining them is incorrect.
First, social distancing was proposed in order to prevent the hospitals from overloading, (and possibly even the supply chains from shutting down,) not to cause disease extinction. So the shutdown option was designed to protect the economy and reduce the death rate of the disease, but still relies on herd immunity to end the pandemic. Since there were issues with hospitals and even meat packing plants in the US, the danger this was trying to prevent was there.
The danger from quarantine is due to the increase in depression, domestic violence, unemployment, etc, all of which cause suffering, increase health risks, and can lead to death, just like the disease. Comparing the death rates is tricky (and probably impossible), but that doesn't mean that you can just ignore one side or the other.
Basically, both options cause excessive death, suffering, and economic collapse, and thus more intelligent solutions need to be presented, not just the basic reactions. We are still guaranteed to get death, suffering, and economic collapse, but at least we can try to mitigate it, rather than trying to dismiss certain concerns as irrelevant, as people seem to be fond of doing.
"Accept the inevitable and work on mitigation of damage. Don't try to prevent the inevitable, thus making your situation worse." This is not a giving up hope option, it is an actually doing what you can to deal with an issue option.
A brief word on masks: As I have experienced when young, as Muslim women have been arguing for the past several years, if the choice is between covering your face or being uncomfortable going into public at all, covering one's face is the more social option.
Wearing masks to help stop the spread of the disease is something which has a big impact with very little cost. If a single layer of cloth worn while inside is enough to prevent the need of confining people in their homes, something which does actually kill people, then it seems wrong to object to this.
-- Plan for this to last for years, not weeks.
One of these things I remember watching as the shutdowns got put in place was that the policies implemented were not sustainable, and not intended to be long-term. I kind of was laughing at the two week school closings and even the couple of months of unemployment payments offered. At this point, you can start to see that shift from amusement to dread -- from "delayed" medical treatment, to the shutting down of parks, to police enforcement of arbitrary social distancing rules, etc. -- to frustration -- seeing the blatant inability to talk about the possibility of retraining people (like they conscript people in times of war). The lack of planning becomes even more obvious when you see the lack of correlation between policies and the current disease situation, issues with compliance (many of which come from the narrow walkways not designed for distancing, others from everyone choosing the same places and times for travel), relaxing of the lockdowns, and various types of protests.
In terms of short-term vs long-term planing, another obvious such issues is how medicine was defunded before the crisis, even though we knew this was a potential issue after SARS. If people are struggling to get health care treatment when there isn't a pandemic, than this is an issue. But policy makers still think of security and preparing for the worst in terms of policing, building better weapons and war games.
-- Isolate by urban area, not province or country.
One thing I remember people talking about was this debate about whether or not to close borders. One of the things I thought was bizarre about this was the emphasis on closing national borders. While travel did spread the disease, this had more to do with travel from an area that was more heavily infected to one which was less infected, which has less to do with national borders than people seem to think. As such, logically, it makes sense to propose policy and close borders and limit travel based on where people live, i.e. cities, not on political borders. This prevents migration of the disease from the main cities to the smaller ones, allows less infected regions to avoid shutting down their economy, allows for a better understanding of what is or is not necessary travel, and prevents racism. The only issue is in terms of governance.
However, any such closing of borders needs to be based on an awareness of how exponential growth works, something which triggered my original frustration with the news. Bringing the disease from a more infected region to a less infected region does nothing to impact the curve. Mass migration, though, can seed an infection in an uninfected area without herd immunity or push an infection rate up for a region in the (slow) exponential decline side of an epidemic. The first is inevitable, but can be put off, the second is to be avoided.
-- I think people who are used to making decisions for themselves will fare better.
This is where I disagree with basically everyone. When people don't know what to do, they turn to those in charge. However, those people act just as emotionally and also don't know what to do. As I said in the previous, point, I don't believe that we need a uniform policy. Rather, as far as I can tell, we need an adaptable policy, one which can make full use of the known data of the situation at hand and is able to accommodate regional differences in the situation as well as the needs of individuals. As such, we need individuals to be able to make rational, informed decisions, and not decisions based on compliance to or defiance of arbitrary policies given by those on top, or on emotion and habit.
-- Also, don't rely on our leaders, and don't blame our leaders when things go badly. They are not gods; they are only human, just like the rest of us.
Morality and Ethics:
-- "Everything in moderation."
Aristotle's version of ethics may be difficult to call ethics, but is very good advice in life.
Life is a complicated mess of many, many factors, many of which have contradictory requirements to deal with properly. To deal with this, instead of making a priority list, it is often much better to balance these needs properly based on the situation at hand. When that is not a possibility, you can just guess by falling back on the principle, "Everything in moderation."
-- Kantian ethics is more focused on sustainability. His basic principle is "That which can be taken to be a universal principle is moral." Since I don't believe in universal principles, I can rephrase this as logical analyses, something requiring more context.
-- Utilitarianism, "The greatest good for the greatest number of people," is a more traditional ethical principle. I am not going to get into the utilitarian monster (mis)calculation argument.
-- The Veil of Ignorance is a concept, that when designing a system, you don't know which person you are, so you need to make things comfortable for all. This is true to a certain extent in reality, especially when you consider things such as ageism (as people start young and slowly get older) and ableism (as people can get sick or hurt). Both of these effectively reduce people's life expectancy, as well as interrupting the flow of knowledge from the older generations to the younger generations, facilitating the push of society to a faster pace, which is detrimental to all. Wealth inequality is another thing which does affect everyone, as it is possible to fall out of the higher classes, into poverty. Yes, there are myths of people pushing themselves into higher classes, but this is actually extremely rare, and mostly serves as a myth used to keep the lower classes subservient.
-- For people not managing whole systems, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," or "Do what you want, as long as you harm none," are more typical moral principles. They also have their flaws and also require some degree of calculation.
Other Lessons:
"Trust your instincts; don't trust others."
This is something I have been learning for the past year and a half. It is difficult, as undoing childhood training often is. Basically as a child we are taught, "If you can't get your work done, you are lazy. If you want something for yourself, you are selfish." I even remember being yelled at and punished for not doing something when I hadn't even realized that I needed to be doing something. If I ask to be treated fairly, or rather with respect, I am just told, "Life isn't fair." Assignments are made based on seniority, not ability. You quickly learn that your needs are unimportant, your instincts of right and wrong therefore incorrect, and only those in charge know what is right.
For me, my instincts and needs are different from those of others. I don't pick up societal cultural norms. That trick, were people get trained as to what is expected, what is right and wrong, never really happened. Therefore, I never left this state as I describe above.
At 14, I was called selfish by my parents. At 10, I volunteered in the library during recess time and was trying to be inclusive of the other individual in my class who was bullied by the students. Yes, people change over time. Yes, people grow up and learn how to deal with others. But sometimes, the adults are just wrong. And sometimes those in a position of authority are wrong.
I don't want to mark this as a general principle, as there are people on the opposite side of this. But, basically, people have an understanding of themselves which no other person can replicate, and they can't really explain to others, i.e. "You know more than you think you do," and "You know your needs better than anyone else." This is complicated slightly by the fact that people often lie to themselves to protect themselves, so sometimes you need the people close to you to tell the truth of who you are. But people often misinterpret the intentions of others as well, including those close to them. A lot of this has to do with how we compare people to others or to societal expectations, which is often not a great guide for proper behavior.
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