Pandemic Political Consequences
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Marty1 is both a delivery driver for Amazon & currently ill with a 'heavy cold'.
Yeah, last year in Jan I was off work for 3 weeks with the flu so I got the flu jab late last year and thought I’d beaten getting it again but to no avail. My son and my gf are also with the same heavy head cold.
I’m feeling a lot better now tho but still feeling tired/lethargic but never short of breath which is a symptom of Coronavirus.
I’m due to return to work on Tuesday.
I saw something earlier on the Graun live feed about 'gig economy' workers being especially fucked.
A union boss was saying he'd heard about a delivery person who went to drop some stuff off and the customer told him he had Corona. He called his boss and they said go home and self-isolate. Come back in 2 weeks.
That's it. No sick pay, not allowed to work, just fuck off, like.
edit: found a link
Coronavirus threat leaves gig economy workers 'abandoned and penniless'
In the face of a global health crisis bogus self-employment model is screwing over the disadvantagewww.gmb.org.uk
Amazon won’t help drivers out financially if the worst happens. If anything they’d just hand out Amazon branded orange face masks and say crack on.
Can you imagine the level of panic that would ensue if people were opening their doors to be met with a delivery driver wearing a face mask
?!
elbows
Well-Known Member
Shortness of breath is a symptom of a Covid-19 infection that is going beyond mild.
I know wide possible ranges of symptoms do peoples heads in, because that means we cant just make reasonable assumptions about what we've come down with, but thats just the way it is.
Other than getting tested for Coronavirus I guess there’s no real way to know I had anything other than a common cold.
I deliver in the Teeside area - no cases there but I think one school has closed temporarily as a precaution after a school trip returned from Italy.
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
And available for fruit picking.
Yossarian
⏭️
It's definitely showing how much the US right has been infected by Trump's narcissism - to them, even the epidemic, stock market crash, is all about Donald Trump and what people are saying about him and how his enemies want to use it against him, etc. etc.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Its a natural fit with the long term paranoid strain of US politics. A dangerous combo even in less eventful times, who knows what it will end up bringing now. And if Trumps bragging has already taken us to some very surreal places in recent years, my mind boggles to think where it will lead in a pandemic.
Silver linings and all that.Marty1 is both a delivery driver for Amazon & currently ill with a 'heavy cold'.
scifisam
feck! arse! girls! drink!
More blaming of immigrants followed by officially treating them even more shittily and unofficially letting people get away with attacks on them. Trump has already started blaming them.
Martial, not Marshal.
Martial, not Marshal.
Yossarian
⏭️
Even though he's been in the news nonstop for nearly five years now, Trump always manages to be even shittier than I was expecting him to be - at a rally in South Carolina Friday night, he called the outbreak a Democratic hoax. From his remarks, he apparently believes the coronavirus made it way into the US from Mexico because of the previous administration's border policies.
Trump rallies his base to treat coronavirus as a ‘hoax’
At a South Carolina rally on the eve of the Democratic primary, the president also sought to manage expectations about the White House’s response to the outbreak.
www.politico.com
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Here's a very interesting in-depth piece from the Chuang people, not sure it's 100% right for this thread, but probably not for the newsier one either. Some people might want to skip to the section starting Containment as an Exercise in Statecraft but i'd recommend reading the whole thing. (Btw issue two of their journal came out at the start of the year and has doubled in size, nearly 600 pages of this sort of stuff if that's what floats your boat - link on left of article)
Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China
The outbreak has been incorrectly blamed on everything from the conspiratorial and/or accidental release of a virus strain from the Wuhan Institute of Virology—a dubious claim spread by social media, particularly via paranoid Hong Kong and Taiwan Facebook posts, but now buoyed by conservative press outlets and military interests in the West—to the propensity of Chinese people to consume “dirty” or “strange” types of food, since the virus outbreak is linked to either bats or snakes sold in a semi-illegal ‘wet market’ specializing in wildlife and other rare animals (though this was not the ultimate source). Both major themes exhibit the obvious warmongering and orientalism common to reporting on China, and a number of articles have pointed out this basic fact. But even these responses tend to focus only on questions of how the virus is perceived in the cultural sphere, spending far less time digging into the much more brutal dynamics that lie obscured beneath the media frenzy.
A slightly more complex variant at least understands the economic consequences, even while it exaggerates the potential political repercussions for rhetorical effect. Here we find the usual suspects, ranging from standard warhawk dragon-slaying politicos to the spilled-latte pearl clutching of haute-liberalism: press agencies from the National Review to the New York Times have already implied that the outbreak may bring a “crisis of legitimacy” to the CCP, despite the fact that there is barely a whiff of an uprising in the air. But the kernel of truth to these predictions lies in their grasp of the economic dimensions of the quarantine—something that could hardly be lost on journalists with stock portfolios thicker than their skulls. Because the fact is that, despite the government’s call to isolate oneself, people may soon be forced to “gather together” to tend to the needs of production. According to the latest initial estimates, the epidemic will already cause China’s GDP slow to 5 percent in this year, below its already flagging growth rate of 6 percent last year, the lowest in three decades. Some analysts have said Q1 growth could sink 4 percent or lower, and that this may risk triggering a global recession of some sort. A previously unthinkable question has been posed: what actually happens to the global economy when the Chinese furnace begins to grow cold?
...
In this sense, the outbreak presents two opportunities for reflection: First, it is an instructive opening in which we might review substantial questions about how capitalist production relates to the non-human world at a more fundamental level—how, in short, the “natural world,” including its microbiological substrata, cannot be understood without reference to how society organizes production (because the two are not, in fact, separate). At the same time, this is a reminder that the only communism worth the name is one that includes the potential of a fully politicized naturalism. Second, we can also use this moment of isolation for our own sort of reflection on the present state of Chinese society. Some things only become clear when everything grinds to an unexpected halt, and a slowdown of this sort cannot help but make previously obscured tensions visible. Below, then, we’ll explore both these questions, showing not only how capitalist accumulation produces such plagues, but also how the moment of pandemic is itself a contradictory instance of political crisis, making visible to people the unseen potentials and dependencies of the world around them, while also offering yet another excuse for the extension of systems of control even further into everyday life.
Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China
The outbreak has been incorrectly blamed on everything from the conspiratorial and/or accidental release of a virus strain from the Wuhan Institute of Virology—a dubious claim spread by social media, particularly via paranoid Hong Kong and Taiwan Facebook posts, but now buoyed by conservative press outlets and military interests in the West—to the propensity of Chinese people to consume “dirty” or “strange” types of food, since the virus outbreak is linked to either bats or snakes sold in a semi-illegal ‘wet market’ specializing in wildlife and other rare animals (though this was not the ultimate source). Both major themes exhibit the obvious warmongering and orientalism common to reporting on China, and a number of articles have pointed out this basic fact. But even these responses tend to focus only on questions of how the virus is perceived in the cultural sphere, spending far less time digging into the much more brutal dynamics that lie obscured beneath the media frenzy.
A slightly more complex variant at least understands the economic consequences, even while it exaggerates the potential political repercussions for rhetorical effect. Here we find the usual suspects, ranging from standard warhawk dragon-slaying politicos to the spilled-latte pearl clutching of haute-liberalism: press agencies from the National Review to the New York Times have already implied that the outbreak may bring a “crisis of legitimacy” to the CCP, despite the fact that there is barely a whiff of an uprising in the air. But the kernel of truth to these predictions lies in their grasp of the economic dimensions of the quarantine—something that could hardly be lost on journalists with stock portfolios thicker than their skulls. Because the fact is that, despite the government’s call to isolate oneself, people may soon be forced to “gather together” to tend to the needs of production. According to the latest initial estimates, the epidemic will already cause China’s GDP slow to 5 percent in this year, below its already flagging growth rate of 6 percent last year, the lowest in three decades. Some analysts have said Q1 growth could sink 4 percent or lower, and that this may risk triggering a global recession of some sort. A previously unthinkable question has been posed: what actually happens to the global economy when the Chinese furnace begins to grow cold?
...
In this sense, the outbreak presents two opportunities for reflection: First, it is an instructive opening in which we might review substantial questions about how capitalist production relates to the non-human world at a more fundamental level—how, in short, the “natural world,” including its microbiological substrata, cannot be understood without reference to how society organizes production (because the two are not, in fact, separate). At the same time, this is a reminder that the only communism worth the name is one that includes the potential of a fully politicized naturalism. Second, we can also use this moment of isolation for our own sort of reflection on the present state of Chinese society. Some things only become clear when everything grinds to an unexpected halt, and a slowdown of this sort cannot help but make previously obscured tensions visible. Below, then, we’ll explore both these questions, showing not only how capitalist accumulation produces such plagues, but also how the moment of pandemic is itself a contradictory instance of political crisis, making visible to people the unseen potentials and dependencies of the world around them, while also offering yet another excuse for the extension of systems of control even further into everyday life.
AnnO'Neemus
Is so vanilla
If/when the country goes to shit, it'll allow Johnson to blame COVID-19 instead of Brexit.
marty21
One on one? You're crazy.
But, if all us Housing workers have to work from home , how do we let these homes?
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
It will be God's doing until a big evangelical congregation is affected, at which point it will be spread by "illegals".
Rawnsley in The Observer spells out the dilemma:
"Should we take every measure available to try to counter the virus and at whatever economic and social cost? Or are we better advised to take less stringent steps to minimise the impact on society, at the price of increasing the risk of infection and, for those most vulnerable to the virus, elevating the risk of death?"
You'd kinda like someone to stand up and say which it's going to be. Or where policy lies on a line between one extreme and the other. Can't see Boris or any of his gang of incompetents giving any clarity on this.
"Should we take every measure available to try to counter the virus and at whatever economic and social cost? Or are we better advised to take less stringent steps to minimise the impact on society, at the price of increasing the risk of infection and, for those most vulnerable to the virus, elevating the risk of death?"
You'd kinda like someone to stand up and say which it's going to be. Or where policy lies on a line between one extreme and the other. Can't see Boris or any of his gang of incompetents giving any clarity on this.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Its not a great piece because its mostly politics as usual, and this stuff is not a binary choice, and such choices are not just about economy vs the needs of 'those most vulnerable to the virus' (eg its also about health system collapse).
Faced with the coronavirus, Boris Johnson must stop playing the invisible man | Andrew Rawnsley
People want reliable information and reassurance that their government has got a grip: the prime minister must be seen to lead
I predict that the default 'business as usual' position is one the UK government is unlikely to take with this, its just not an option at all, not unless there is an extremely surprising development with the way this outbreak evolves.
They are not going to tell us exactly what will they will do at this stage, due to the uncertainties. But they are very much preparing us to think the unthinkable, talking about what a worst case scenario would mean, and I expect that privately they are assuming that worst case is what will happen. I think plans will be published this week, but the scene is already being set, eg:
Coronavirus: 'Nothing ruled out' in government's virus battle tactics
Big events could be banned and schools closed in the "worst-case scenario", the health secretary says.
www.bbc.co.uk
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
Shame, could have been a bit of good news for once.
elbows
Well-Known Member
An obvious potential consequence in South Korea:
Coronavirus: South Korea sect leader to face probe over deaths
Lee Man-hee, 88, is accused of hampering efforts to contain the virus.
www.bbc.co.uk
Shechemite
Be the sun and all will see you
Its not a great piece because its mostly politics as usual, and this stuff is not a binary choice, and such choices are not just about economy vs the needs of 'those most vulnerable to the virus' (eg its also about health system collapse).
Faced with the coronavirus, Boris Johnson must stop playing the invisible man | Andrew Rawnsley
People want reliable information and reassurance that their government has got a grip: the prime minister must be seen to leadwww.theguardian.com
I predict that the default 'business as usual' position is one the UK government is unlikely to take with this, its just not an option at all, not unless there is an extremely surprising development with the way this outbreak evolves.
They are not going to tell us exactly what will they will do at this stage, due to the uncertainties. But they are very much preparing us to think the unthinkable, talking about what a worst case scenario would mean, and I expect that privately they are assuming that worst case is what will happen. I think plans will be published this week, but the scene is already being set, eg:
Coronavirus: 'Nothing ruled out' in government's virus battle tactics
Big events could be banned and schools closed in the "worst-case scenario", the health secretary says.www.bbc.co.uk
there’s going to be an epidemic (sorry) of wankers telling folk to be resilient
Jeremiah18.17
Well-Known Member
Have seen some tweets from Iranian expats saying things are getting really serious there, even predicting things may spiral out of control by the end of the coming week - due to govt attempts at covering up and downplaying the severity of the outbreak there.... predicting imminent fall of Iranian regime has always been popular in some quarters, but nevertheless, worth watching.
Shechemite
Be the sun and all will see you
is there any assessment/analysis of how the Coronavirus situation is affecting the healthcare system there? And what (if any) steps the IRoI is taking to safeguard those vulnerable to dying from it
Jeremiah18.17
Well-Known Member
The official figures and death rate indicate that either the regime has not been being completely honest or some other factor like their healthcare system is affecting things to be out of line with what has been observed in other countries.....
globalnews.ca
COVID-19: Iran raises death toll to 54 as new cases spike | Globalnews.ca
Iran's health ministry raised on Sunday the nationwide death toll from the new coronavirus to 54 as the number of infected cases jumped overnight to 978 people.
globalnews.ca
Jeremiah18.17
Well-Known Member
This piece indicates potential or actual disagreement between state and religious authorities in Iran affecting virus spread:
uk.reuters.com
Reuters | Breaking International News & Views
Find latest news from every corner of the globe at Reuters.com, your online source for breaking international news coverage.
uk.reuters.com
ruffneck23
front left
so , message through from work :
Travel for anything barring your current projects has just been banned indefinitely.
Which is nice.
Travel for anything barring your current projects has just been banned indefinitely.
Which is nice.
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
They'll certainly find some kind of conspiracy theory to explain it rather than blame their own lack of knowledge and an inability to listen to people who do understand the problem.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
What line of work?
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