Carroll Quigley from Tragedy and Hope.
Historian Carroll Quigley affirmed the existence of an Anglo-American deep state, his only objection was they’re not exactly communists, altho they’ll work with communists and anyone for that matter to achieve, whatever their ends are.
i agree with all that but it’s overly apologetic and a bit exaggerated. whatever kind of system exists in five hundred years, none of them will include a population of less than five or six billion people… however they are arranged economically. capitalism could expand forever, creating monopolies that are so extensive they look like socialism in a political form. corporatism, essentially, but on much larger scales. governments run like companies… or rather only a few companies that are so powerful they become part of government or all of government. to us this would look like a socialist revolution and in a sense would be. it would mean the superpowers became so powerful that they were able to democratize the means of production and create a socialist state without losing any power. that is to say an abundance of material wealth was able to be ‘re-distributed’ more evenly without it jeopardizing the wealth of the very few corporations responsible for organizing the economy. the system became so rich that it could afford to produce a socialist like government and still profit from it… a privatized socialist government, as oxymoronic as that sounds.
anyway my point is that however the future will be, there’s no real necessity to assume it would have to involve intentional mass exterminations. measures put into place to control populations, yes, but not any deliberate targeting of a population with germ warfare to quickly an succinctly dispose of them. that’s really not necessary… and the deepstatists know that. they prefer to not have to do that. they don’t wanna do that. they don’t have to do that.
you know what it comes down to? real estate. instead of depopulating your planet, you do the simpler thing and expand territory to disperse those populations throughout and make them productive in their respective place.
world government is like a sims game, dude. any kid with a computer could run a country. it’s that easy.
Corporatism and state capitalism is not socialism, they don’t benefit the proletariat.
Corporatist and state capitalist monopolies aren’t better than private monopolies, they’re worse, for you can’t monopolize the economy as effectively without government as you can with it.
It sounds like for you, all government is benign.
It’s not.
Just because government gets involved in business, doesn’t mean it’s looking out for our interests, or even that our interests will be taken care of as a by-product of it looking out for its own.
I’m in favor of a mixed economy.
I think big businesses should be partly or fully nationalized, and socialized, and/or syndicated and/or cooperativized and/or taxed to prop up small businesses and the poor.
But just because government gets involved in the economy, doesn’t mean that’s what’s occurring, instead it can get involved in the economy solely to further its own interests and/or the interests of private corporations.
For the most part we live in an oligopolic oligarchy, not a democracy.
Nothing’s being democratized.
Yup, an oligarchic government together with a handful of corporations will own most or all things.
We’ll be helpless, hapless and dependent on them.
But what’s the point of monopolizing the means of production if you’re just going to spread the goods around?
No they’re only going to give us just enough to pacify us, in exchange for our liberty.
They’ll continue replacing as many of us with Ai and machines as they possibly can.
They want a world populated by themselves and machines they have absolute control over, not with us.
Yup, easy peasy.
Just give government a complete monopoly, and uncle Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Kim Jong Un will take care of us.
Ummmm… saying ‘I assume’ in the post above was rhetorical. It’s like saying “One can expect…”. You’ve taken my quote out of context to make it appear as something it was not.
Of course, coronavirus tests have threshold and/or additional criteria specifically designed so they only pick up significant amounts of coronavirus DNA. That was my point. Other tests have ways of ignoring insignificant data so I ‘assumed’ (i.e.I expected) coronavirus tests must do the same and your link confirms it.
Rather than waste your time trying to find fault in unimportant minutia, why don’t you find a link that shows us how many deaths the CDC ‘presumed’ to have COVID-19 without even testing (see below). Is it 10% fake? 50% fake? 80% fake? This is not just important; this is fraud and the mockingbird media just parrot these made-up numbers without questioning.
Utah ICU Nurse of thirty years blows the whistle “COVID-19 is manufactured crisis”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGZ-DW5LVCs[/youtube]
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The biowarfare angle rather convincing and it is beginning to feel like a cover-up, .
The other angle is that a nuclear war would have been much less preferred for it would have totally destroyed all of humanity .
This hypothesis is more likely then any other, at this point.
The psycho-social angle of viral predominance may be part of the cover.
But why? Perhaps population-control became a necessity, at this critical phase of our evolution.
[u]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Republic[/u]
Gee, where’ve I heard that before?
Kind of like how a tiny % of powerful families and corporations monopolized our main politicians?
Everything relevant we need to know about all that was already written by your boy Engels. If political participation is determined by your level of wealth, law making in general is going to trend toward the preservation of the wealth in the wealthy families… who are coincidentally the only ones who have a vote. Once private property laws are passed, the next thing to be privatized is industry. Now the wealthy become even more wealthy by buying labor power, and they have an interest in keeping things that way so they can continue to do so.
Yeah oligarchy is as old as the hills and one of the first political systems to have ever existed for groups of people larger than fifteen. It’s a quite natural kind of order, though. What makes it obscene nowdays is it’s scale. when dudes like bezos are legally amassing all that money while others are struggling with three jobs… that’s market oligarchy. It is glaring in a way it never before has. This kind of wealth disparity was unheard of until the medieval era, and even then probably not comparable still.
But oligarchy isn’t unnatural or ‘wrong’ and I’ve seen strong arguments in its favor. It’s just one of the many ways systems can be governed. It’s got its own checks and balances like any other.
Right, I was thinking something along those lines.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZSV92g6Hb8[/youtube]
Things are looking grim for Italy.
How much longer will they be made to hold on, and how much longer will they be able and willing to?
Carleas
Really?
For the most part, Covid can only affect vulnerable populations (old people with one or more morbidities), but vehicular accidents can affect us all.
If you want to avoid contracting Covid, either stay home alone, or wear a mask, hell wear a gas mask and gloves when venturing out in public.
It may not be socially acceptable, but so what?
Only shop for essentials and sanitize anything you take home with you.
That way you have next to no chance of contracting it until a vaccine becomes available, if you believe in vaccines.
But there’s nothing you can equip your vehicle with or wear that’ll fully protect you from an accident, not even close.
It’s funny how libs seem more likely to believe in authoritarian and mainstream science than conservatives, but was it always like that?
Back in the day, a lot of hippies and new agers were into whole foods, supplements, herbalism, crystals and so on.
It seems like conservatives have become more libertarian and antiestablishment in general these days than libs.
How does “authoritarian and mainstream” map to “correct/incorrect” or “true/false”?
This is very hard for me to judge, but I think it depends on the issue to some degree. IOW the Left as a whole, I think, is much more comfortable seeing conspiracies and abuse in the private sector. The Right with government. I can’t remember what the issue was…something to do with government restricting alternative health products, herbal, etc. And this wonderful collaboration developed between people from both sides and some from extremely distant positions on the political spectrum. I noticed a bit of this around Trump/Sanders followers, where there was some grudging respect for what were being treated as the other teams out of the box candidate.
I still see rebellious and critical factions on both sides, but it seems like the possibilities for odd bedfellow coalitions is disappearing. Everything is so binary these days.
I don’t think the Left wants to notice just how influencable he products of research are, because then, for them, everything becomes religion and we can’t count on experts.
Well, that’s where we are. Just because it is science doesnt’ mean that the technology is a good one. Just because the data seems to indicate X, this doesn’t mean that there wasn’t undue influence by power brokers.
I’ve come from the left into a place where I can’t really tell anyone what I believe, the range of beliefs, or I’ll be seen as evil/mad by everyone,
OH, as an aside, a lot of the new agers were de facto right wing and still are.
I have some nits here, but I basically concede this point. I thought fever was more harmful than it is. In my defense, it does seem to be more harmful in children, and that’s the context of every fever I’ve seen in the last 4 years, and I let that influence my thoughts about fever more generally. Thanks for letting me know.
Nits:
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I think you are right that I overestimate the harmfulness of fever, but I still think the cost of fever is not zero. If we’re using an evolutionary approach, we should expect fever to be sub-optimal, otherwise why not always run hotter? Why not vary temperatures more frequently, as other organisms do? Partly I’m sure it’s that warmer temperatures are more expensive metabolically, but varying temperatures would be an efficient way to do that if a higher temperature had no other costs, and in some cases it might be metabolically cheaper to run hot, e.g. less need to sweat. Maintaining a narrow band of temperature as we do is itself fairly metabolically expensive, from which I conclude that leaving the normal temperature range is costly in some way that it’s been disfavored by evolution.
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That fevers helped in the evolutionary context might not mean much to their usefulness against modern diseases. For example, SARS-CoV-19 appears to have come from bats, who regularly have 100-105 degree body temperatures. A virus evolved to survive in that organism might actually prefer a feverish human to a non-feverish human. That’s speculation, but the point is this: an immune response evolved in an African ape might not be well-suited to a disease evolved in Asian bats.
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It doesn’t appear that fever reducers have a significant negative effect on health or recovery either, which may support the second point above (if modern diseases aren’t affected by fever), or may support the first (if there are costs that sometimes outweigh the benefits).
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Fevers do get dangerous around 104+, and COVID fevers can be in that range. If you have COVID, you may still be well-served to take fever reducers.
I do think this is what I’ve been calling “an inflection point in history”, and I think the world will be permanently changed by this. But I think it’s easy to overestimate the extent of that change. I can’t endorse a picture of total breakdown when I can have almost anything delivered to my house in a few days. That takes a huge supply chain that is still functioning, relying on laws and labor and institutions that all roughly equate to ‘society’.
There are definitely many areas where things aren’t functioning so well, but I still think those are marginal. Restaurants and local shops have very high turnover in good times, those industries will rebound once lockdown ends, even if none of the current businesses survive.
Definitely, but government has been changing so fast the past few years I have trouble separating some of the darker trends into COVID-related and right-nationalism-related.
But I think the biggest thing that COVID will do for government is increase uncertainty. The probability of an authoritarian turn as a result of the crisis has increased, but so has the probability of a significant safety-net socialist turn. Even in the Trump era, prior to the pandemic the space of future possibility was pretty tightly contained. Now it is much less so. Social inertia matters a lot, and lockdown will break a lot of inertia and free/force a lot of people to pick a new direction.
I think uncertainty explains this too. Decision-makers often have less uncertainty than the general public (although increasingly less so as information proliferates), but even where they do, there is still substantial uncertainty. We don’t know what will work. If COVID regularly produces a 105+ degree fever, then acetaminophen is a good recommendation; if the risk of mask shortages is greater than the risk posed by people not wearing masks, then telling people not to buy and wear masks is a good call; if 3 million people will die otherwise, then a lockdown that causes a depression might be a good idea. But all of those are based on future projections that can’t be certain, and as facts are revealed previous decisions can look stunningly foolish.
Citation needed. What death rate are you talking about, CFR or estimated fatality per infection? And when you say it’s very low, is that relative to seasonal flu, or to ebola?
It has been suggested that those diseases can be partly explained by the evolutionary bottleneck of slave ships: the arduous journey tended to select for people who retain salt, which in their descendants looks like hypertension. I think we could tell a similar story about diabetes, which from my limited understanding involves a decrease in sugar metabolization, which might help ration energy during starvation.
So your “assume” is about expectation, while CDC’s “presume” is just fake? It sounds like maybe you’ve taken [their] quote out of context to make it appear as something it was not.
First, note that you’re giving up 2/3s of your objection here. You implicitly acknowledge that alcoholism and suicide are bad comparisons.
Again, this isn’t true. COVID presents serious symptoms in all age groups and has a mortality rate as high or higher than flu for the least affected demographics, and orders of magnitude for those in mid-life on. Mid-life, not moribund.
The word “fully” is doing all the work here. You can pick a safer car, you can drive slower, you can wear your seatbelt, you can buy a white car or other high-visibility color, etc. All those individual choices will decrease individual risks.
But it’s true that there is a large residue of risk that can only be addressed through collective action. We could restrict driving to those who can prove that they are capable of driving safely, require registration of every car on the road, and have police patrol the roads to make sure that cars are registered and drivers are driving safely. We can forbid driving in lots of places, and limit it to certain speeds or directions in others. We can and do take a lot of steps that significantly reduce the danger posed by driving. Indeed, we’ve continuously improved vehicle safety and regulations to reduce the death rate, and the rate has fallen dramatically in terms of population and miles traveled. The current death total is about 40k/year, lower than expected deaths from COVID. (Also, speculative, but I still think driving is going to be functionally illegal in a generation once automated alternatives mature)
On the other side, eliminating all driving would be much worse for the economy than the current lockdown is.
To sum up, driving an example of an activity that produces fewer deaths, would cost more to ban, and that we’re already taking significant collective action to make safer. What is your point?
Kids are still ok up to 103, 104. F. IOW immediately reducing fevers and muscle discomfort in children is still bad treatment. It comes from kindness, but it is actually wrong.
Which is why we lie around. I am not suggesting that fevers are a good strategy in general. And if we had a higher body temperature than viruses and bacteria would have likely evolved to thrive at slightly higher temperatures. We are tired, usually when sick, and even more often when there is a fever, because our bodies are engaged in an activity. Fighting an intruder. It’s not good to fill your stomach with stomach acids all the time, but it is good to do it when you have food there. This no doubt creates energetic and nutritional costs, but it’s what we do when we have food in there. I suppose what I am saying is that while I don’t think I have denied there is a cost, we spend that ‘money’ for a reason. And inhibiting that reason needs good justification. And while eating and stomach acids are everyday, and diseases are more exceptional, the immune system is running all the time and it has a cost, all the time. We’d probably need less nutrition and could use energy for other things if we had no immune system running at all. So, there’s always cost and benefits. I can’t think of a reason not to spend or consider something is negive if you are fighting a virus and it fights the virus. If it gets too high, fine. Though I would recommend lowering fevers in other ways. A doctor actually made a house call when I had a fever over 106 as a kid. He rubbed me with alcohol. My fever dropped and I felt better. And while this may have made me a safer environment for the virus, it did not, like those medicines inhibit other parts of my immune response.
Having a big brain has a cost. Having children that have less built in knowledge, more plastic brains and greater dependence than other animal babies also has a cost.
In this case we have a cost that has survived natural selection culling.
Of course in individual cases and reactions we may be quite right to override what is a generalized benefit of evolution. But as a rule, no. And it looked lke the public had a rule. There was no general warning the corona was killing people with fevers. Those people were ready to make themselves feel better.
Bats get higher body temperatures when they fly, and when they fly the body temperature goes up into our fever range. I don’t know what that would mean in terms of what an effective virus would be. Me, I wouldn’t wanna fly if I had the flu. I certainly don’t want to run.
livescience.com/44870-bats- … light.html
So, we’d have to know a lot more. While it is possible that a disease is not helped by a fever or even the fever helps the disease, this is generally not the case. And again, better ways to lower body temperature exist. You can start just with how you dress, the temperature of the liquids you drink, to luke warm washes, to cool washes and more. And then there’s things like Yarrow tea which is antiviral and lowers fevers. But that’s getting into a whole nother ball of wax.
If it’s true that recent viruses have origins in bats and we do better without fevers, it is weird that NO one has said this to us. And while the only study I read during the Covid period said that young men did worse if they took these over the counter drugs, older viruses, given the amount of people taking them, should have produced enough data to at least mention this. I feel like this is stretching.
I am not sure how you know this. I also can’t see how something that inhibits immune response, such as in the creation of antibodies, would be a good idea. And the WHO seems to share this concern.
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Carelas, come on. They could have told us: take a fever reducer when your fever hits ________. I did not get a fever that high. I was around 102. There would be no good reason for me to take a fever reducer. People will take them for muscle aches. Covid has caused pretty much every level of fever from nearly nothing to danger levels. I never said no one should break their fevers. I am pretty sure from the beginning I have been saying do it when the fever is dangerous.
The current policy was primarily, by governments, to be silent on the issue, despite all sorts of evidence that these pills were not helpful in cases of non-dangerous fevers, and likely negatively affecting the immune system. Alternative treatments, including ones that have no negative side effects, like garlic pills, they did take a moment to criticize. Even though there is evidence that the latter might help and there is absolutely no evidence despite decades of widespread use that the former fight viruses.
google.com/search?rlz=1C1CH … ent=psy-ab
19,602 US deaths as of April 11th.
That’s nothing, a drop in the bucket. Go ahead and compare it to seasonal flu, car accidents, alcoholism, lung cancer.
Now, this is the point that you should admit you’re wrong, and admit to the hoax, scam, lie, that has and is destroying 4 years of economic growth. THAT is the real damage and crime here. THAT is what we should be “panicking” about. We should also be “panicking” about how this fakeness and hysteria, has cost people their jobs, cost the credibility of Mass Media Mob (liars), and will further handicap the next generation of US citizens.