This is my key takeaway. A lot of the damage is in the end self-inflicted. People seem not to be able to act cohesively at an inter-national scale, not even within a country group that is supposedly designed for that.
Whether it's pandemics, global warming or nuclear weapons this lack of cooperation shows up again and again.
Edit: As an example: I would like one bottle of hand sanitiser. That should last quite a while (nobody needs boxes and boxes of the stuff) and it would be very useful. I cannot buy it anywhere either IRL or online. As a last resort I just checked eBay. I found a 500ml approx bottle of Purrell for £17. Insane but given it would be very useful to have I almost bought it. Then I noticed the postage price was £100. The crazy part is that this person has sold quite a few of these according to eBay. You can claim this is the free market and supply/demand etc.etc. all you want but that doesn't make it ok. It's still incredibly selfish behaviour.
Edit 2: Any explanation for the downvotes? I almost self-censored my comment on the free market as I thought it might lead to downvotes - decided to go ahead with it anyway. If you disagree with anything I've said starting a discussion is much more productive than hiding something you don't like.
It's a hive mind where dissenters are punished via down votes for hurt feelings.
Regarding people being selfish... There is nothing selfish about self preservation. The problem is we have a negative view on "price gouging" which is just economic triage.
There wouldn't be a run on toilet paper if it cost 10x the normal price. It costs you nothing to stock up, so people do.
No, but purchasing much more of an item that you are ever likely going to need (at the cost of everyone who isn't doing that) is selfish. Stock up on enough essentials to get you through a self-quarantine period (2-3 weeks). Don't buy enough to last the next 12 months because a) it's completely unnecessary and b) you're preventing other people stocking up enough to cover a self-quarantine period.
Two people at a grocery store, both with an entire shopping cart full of dried pasta. One has twelve mouths to feed at home, the other lives alone.
How do you police that or distinguish who is selfish?
I disagree… "before the virus has even taken hold" is the perfect time to do long-term shopping. Avoiding crowded areas (read: THE MALL and the public transports to get to the mall) is key to reducing infection.
Yes, hand sanitizer/face mask markets are ridiculous right now, but that's to be expected. It's not people being selfish, there's clearly genuine needs for it. When there's a fuckton of needs and not enough being produced… how is it people being selfish that you can't find hand sanitizer at a decent price? All those have been bought.
While I agree that being prepared is important people are stocking up for much longer than necessary + not considering other people. This all depends on your ethical/world view I suppose but we don't have enough of certain items yet. The options are to think of only yourself and buy as much as you can as quickly as you can (while leaving other people with no options at all) or buy what you need now so that everyone has what they need and hopefully production can increase of the in demand items so we can all stock up before (worst case scenario) production has to cease entirely for a period of time. It's interesting to see how quickly our progressive societies can become every person for their self (to an extent).
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/sars-cov-2-study-c...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/14/8116090...
The problem appears to combine habitual shopping for long term (not many have a 24/7 convenience store within 3 minutes of walking), panicked distrust in infrastructure reliability, and good old tragedy of the commons.
Some countries fare better on first two, but still have the last one (e.g., Hong Kong).
COVID-19 isn't going to be some world ending thing, it's just going to put some supply pressure in the short term until production and distribution can ramp back up, but people are treating it like it will be. It's really frustrating.
If nobody hoards, everyone is fine.
If a small number of people hoard, there are stock-outs, and everyone else has no access to the thing.
Ergo, the strictly dominant individual move is to hoard ASAP. As it provides coverage against all scenarios.
Limiting quantities is the obvious equitable response to this, so it's been good seeing retailers step up and do so.
Doig the kind of shopping right now is extremely disruptive if happening at scale. Which it does. Long-term availability of all kind necessities will suffer from it, for you, for everyone. It is the opposite of reasonable right now.
Then, follow the guidelines (washing hands, ....). Avoid big groups, keep a certain distance. Regarding shopping, buy normal volumes of stuff. That always works, the system is used to this. If there are things missing, buy small volumes. Spread shopping over multiple shops of multiple chains. Ideally over multiple days. This keeps peak small, reducing the risk of supply disruption.
And keep away from things medical professionals would need as well.
If push comes to shove, accept shortages of luxury stuff and certain products. But we are very far from that.
All that is a European perspective, so.
From an American perspective, that is not immediately clear to me.
>Avoid big groups, keep a certain distance.
...
> buy normal volumes of stuff ... Spread shopping over multiple shops of multiple chains
These two things are not compatible in my view.
>If push comes to shove, accept shortages of luxury stuff and certain products. But we are very far from that.
Maybe where you are. My grocery shopping trip this morning ended with me re-planning meals for the week in the supermarket based on what was available. A wide range of staple ingredients were completely out of stock.
We might see shortages for stuff coming from China, inventoires will slowely be depleted and the replenishment from China severly hampered by the situation in Europe and the US. Stuff sourced / produced on the same continent won't hit nearly as hard. As long the production doesn't break down there shouldn't be to hard impacts. And since quarantine measures only started a couple of days ago, we can rule out those impacts as causes for the shortages you saw. Leaves short term and mid term disruptions caused by, what I might call, panic shopping, which outpaced replenishment.
The US population is historically suspicious of the government and it's ability to get things done, so individuality is much more pronounced there.
Secondly, I think the government, media and experts just haven't thought their communication strategy through. They've told people "you might need to get isolated in your home for a few weeks, and remember to wash your hands a lot". What, besides stocking up on food, soap/sanitizer and toilet paper, would you expect them to do in response?
I would have hoped people would keep in mind that staying home for a few weeks doesn't necessitate buying all that much more than a lot of families do in a "big shop". Take toilet paper as an example. The amount of it that's being bought by most people will last them 6-12 months. I know there's a lot of factors pushing people to make these decisions but it's certainly altered my generally optimistic/positive view of people as a whole.
Also, from my personal experience, it's a distribution problem. There is enough toilet paper, but it's sold out at some stores while others have more than enough. Can't level that out though, because margins are thin and the companies would lose money.
Nobody is telling people to stay at home for long periods of time. If you think you have the disease you need to quarantine for a couple of weeks. That doesn't require a lot of stocking up. In Italy, where they are in 'lockdown', grocery stores remain open along with other essential services. So panic buying is unnecessary, causing shortages that are unnecessary and causing problems for people who aren't panic buying.
If you think you only need to budget supplies for two weeks, you’re just wrong. You need to budget for _months_, and likely need to budget many supplies you otherwise wouldn’t have needed, like increased food for daily breakfasts and lunches for a whole family who otherwise would have been at school / work drawing those supplies from elsewhere.
While I agree the panic buying is harmful & we could ration and space it out with less shock to supply chains, I also think the behavior of everyday people facing the sudden prospect of a large family consuming toilet paper, 3 full meals, soap, medicine, etc., for an indefinite number of weeks ahead, it’s totally understandable and not even remotely “selfish.”
Can you back this up at all? As I explained in my comment, Italy, one of the worst hit countries globally (and on 'lockdown') has grocery stores still functioning. The idea that people will be required to not leave their homes for months is fear mongering , impossible to enforce, and even in the worst case scenario people simply won't do it - they'll go stir crazy and give up a lot quicker than they think.
When you buy a stockpile of supplies, it is for contingency, not immediate threat. You are not accounting for this.
If the probability of being home quarantined is, say, 1%-5%, that’s huge and requires stockpiling at least some supplies. The grocery stores functioning today has literally nothing to do with it. That’s not fear mongering.
In the absence of hard data on the probability of home quarantine, then what do you recommend people do? Prepare for a worst case scenario? Act like nothing will happen? Somewhere in between (but where exactly, and why?)
I’ll reiterate, your responses so far are just glib rhetoric. Unless you can provide a reason why people shouldn’t prepare for a worst case scenario (knowing it’s unlikely to get that bad, but better to have the supplies if it does), it’s extremely disingenuous of you to brandish such moralistic grandstanding judgment towards people trying to prepare for an emergency.
Supply will be kept open, quarantine or not. Italy and China are the best examples, groccery stoes and pharmacies remained open. It is much harder to do that, so, if everybody goes panic shopping before. So please, don't do that.
And from earlier times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...
This dress rehearsal hasn’t gone well.
We've wasted all the time China gave us.
China did it to themselves in the first place. They silenced the early warnings about the epidemic, and did not acknowledge anything until it was already too late in Wuhan. It could have ended right there had they been more serious to begin with.
There's a huge difference between looking good with small numbers because you haven't done testing like in much of Europe or NA vs looking good because you've blanketed the country in tests and are seeing recoveries outstrip infections.
Even at an individual level we're so used to thinking in terms of 'our country vs. the rest' that our ability to empathize with people from 'far-away' is impeded.
All this will let the virus thrive.
Moreover such pan-national tackling will let the apparently most adequate response be adopted, therefore if it fails too badly we may be all wiped out because it will fail everywhere.
Such a major pandemic is only possible thanks to our current population densities, massive transportation of persons/goods. Our central administrations were, as usual, patently totally unable to cope and even in some cases their very actions amplify the threat (cops in Wuhan silencing the local doc who early understood the threat, grotesque CDC actions in the US...), and are always pushing towards more densely populated huge territories for them to 'administer'.
... and further transportation of persons/goods and centralization of control should be in order?
Even if it were necessary, mitigation measures are neither difficult nor expensive.
Perhaps we could just leave it to the markets. They've done such a good job of providing robust and affordable healthcare in the US, markets can surely handle an international viral outbreak simply by maximising efficiency and ROI.
Because of economies of scale and specialization? It's often cheaper for one place to produce a lot of a narrow list of goods and trade that for the goods they're lacking rather than every place making everything they use. This means that a lot of goods need to be moved around and a lot of people too.
>Even if it were necessary, mitigation measures are neither difficult nor expensive.
Like what? Shut down international travel? Test every person coming into a country for a new disease? Both of these are very expensive, especially the former.
Mirioron answered.
> Even if it were necessary, mitigation measures are neither difficult nor expensive
The very reason why the virus spreads like it does February is because it is difficult and expensive.
> Perhaps we could just leave it to the markets.
The current state of affairs in the US, as in most countries, is crony capitalism, which has nothing to do with 'leaving it to the markets'.
Isn't 'maximising efficiency' the very raison d'être of the 'pan-national effort' you proposed?
Isn't it also the reason why huge amounts of humans live in giant and dense cities, with strong central government powers? From an organizational standpoint those are the main causes of the present crisis: total failure at detecting it early (the Chinese doc was censored), then at devising and implementing adequate measures (the faulty CDC coronavirus test is a prominent case, there are many others), and now at managing a major crisis (in most European countries the reality is that nearly no new potential case can be tested). And just wait for such a Supa Dupa Central Mega Pan-National Gov decision, applied everywhere, which will prove to be an error...
Centralization and transport are sure ways to enforce the pandemics. We may be reckoning that high population density and centralized power not only aren't usefully efficient because the efficiency gain they induce is mainly used to produce nearly-useless (at best) products, and that they are extremely dangerous. We may, instead, appeal to moar of all this.
And quite frankly: if your leader's decisions are worse than throwing a dice, why even bother having him? Because it is more entertaining?
In times of a pandemic you want to have something in leadership who does the unpopular thing, that ultimately stops the spread and saves the lives. Not someone who only thinks about themselves and changes their stance on the topic with every turn of the wind. But feel free to argue otherwise, if you know how the poststructuralist ways of trumpian confusion somehow help in times of a pandemic.
The US is probably doing terribly because of the CDCs absolute fumble of the test kit debacle; but assessing Trump's response as good or bad will take a lot of time. His border closures, believe what you will, were totally in character and probably good ideas for this specific crisis.
"During a Feb. 28, 2020, campaign rally in South Carolina, President Donald Trump likened the Democrats' criticism of his administration's response to the new coronavirus outbreak to their efforts to impeach him, saying "this is their new hoax." "
So while he didn't exactly, it doesn't show a person who cares for reality. Snopes says "mixture" on it's veracity.
> he's happy to have people on his task force who will publicly contradict him
You mean he doesn't care enough to put out the right information in the first place, and relies on being 'cleaned up afterwards' by his staff (who he keeps sacking)? He's made a mess of this primarily. The buck stops with him. The CDC does seemed to have fouled up badly but that doesn't exempt Trump's bizarre and dangerous response to a real crisis.
Trump banned travel from China in early February, and the hoax comment is late February. It is pretty obvious from his actions that he takes Coronavirus much more seriously than the flu whatever his public message.
> He's made a mess of this primarily. The buck stops with him.
Yeah, but we don't know how this plays out. There are a bunch of drugs against Coronavirus starting to complete clinical trials, so this may actually get nipped in the bud as far as the US is concerned. It is a real test of the Trump administration though, no argument there.
I've read patchy reports (eg, https://www.hngn.com/articles/228138/20200223/coronavirus-cu...) that the Chinese have started marking out specific drugs as effective for treatment. And of course Remdesivir is getting positive sounding press although I havn't seen any actual data.
It isn't really a question of whether we have something that works against COVID-19 because we surely do. The tricky part is figuring out what so it can be systematically delivered, and working out manufacturing. With a bit of luck (eg, chloroquine working out) the risk profile of the pandemic looks very different.
Often I feel that Europeans forget wet have state governments that have more local authority than the federal Gov.
Trump isn't some dictator. I'm perfectly happy with how my state officials are dealing with this virus.
Destroying that resource is squarely on turmp.
We've been watching the tearing down of the federal government since the Reagan years. We've witnessed the slow evisceration of everything outside of the department of defense.
The federal government could have and should have led a coordinated response to this. But now that the conservative dream of having a federal government big enough that it could be drowned in a bathtub is in reach, it's nearly impossible to.
This is the consequence of forty years of coordinated effort to hollow out the federal government from within.
States have very limited resources at their disposal. There's simply no way that they can coordinate the kind of response needed for an epidemic that knows no borders.
Where's the international cooperation? As the article mentions Bush and Obama were regularly on the phone with world leaders to coordinate their responses to the Avian Flu and Ebola outbreaks. This administration has done none of that and has effectively taken it's hand off the wheel.
Also, we have similar issues with testing and shortages of obviously critical supplies here in Canada, as do many other countries. Can one man do that much damage?
Yes, I believe most of the issues at cdc are due to trump - so far he has fired the experts who can best work with the CDC to implement policies needed, and has censored and classified their attempts to spread critical information. He rolled back Obama’s executive directives regarding pandemic response simply to spite democrats, and now is rushing to reimplement those same directives, with much less effectiveness. It’s literally a government agency under his sole control - by definition the failures of the cdc are his failures. That’s how accountability works.
I know that he specifically said that it’s not his fault and that he doesn’t stand for anything, regardless it’s still his fault. This crisis is the most current proof that he is utterly incapable of being an effective leader.
Did the US actually do widespread testing for H1N1? Or do anything at all?
My memory of the H1N1 outbreaks are that it was downplayed heavily in the media, and doing nothing was our response. It's pretty easy to do nothing. The way I remember it is that Asia did all of the heavy lifting by quarantining anyone with a fever.
Where is this number from? You aren't the only person that I've seen use it.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-pandemic-tim...
I see 1 million estimated in June 25, then by september we had done 1,000 test kits (which I assume have many samples).
> Your memory seems to be quite selective.
It was 11 years ago. Most of us don't remember what actually happened.
Edit to add: The biggest original difference in testing seems to be that the existing influenza tests worked for H1N1, then were easily modified for H1N1, while producing the corona virus test and running it appears to take far more time + we have shortages in sourcing chemicals because everyone is trying to get those chemicals atm. That 1 million number may be correct since existing tests that everyone can perform may have worked. That doesn't seem to have anything to do with who the president at the time was, or their actions though. I don't see any regulations being lifted/waived to make that happen. Do you remember that being a big deal at the time?
Straight to rhetoric. One can characterise this as a strawman argument I suppose, but is it true?
I asked very specific questions, that can be answered. If you accuse me of framing, well...guilty as charged. In fact, I'm the one bringing this up.
> I never blamed him for lack of masks, so we can summarily move past that.
I never said you did, so we can summarily move past any insuation that I in any way made that assertion.
Please, argue against my words, not a distortion of them. And especially not while accusing me of using a strawman argument.
> Acknowledging that he is the cause of many actual issues is not fantasy.
I am not disputing that. Again, please argue against my words.
> In reality, the United States has the worst testing capacity and infrastructure of any developed nation - this fact has to be specifically trumps fault.
For you to know that is true would require some specific evidence, much of it quantitative. I've seen absolutely nothing even remotely resembling this, have you? Please note: the current lack of this data in no way proves anything one way or the other, and me asking such questions in no way requires that I believe it is false, or am making a suggestion - had I not written this disclaimer, that would have been a common rhetorical escape route. It is now closed.
> Obama was not caught unprepared during H1N1
Can you define "not caught unprepared" in more explicit detail? Specifically, can you provide a reference to inventory levels of critical care supplies over the last 20 years?
I have seen no such data, therefore I will continue to classify this as ~"Inconclusive - significant non-evidence based news that is highly narrative-based; numerous stories across independent media outlets all point back to the same 2 or 3 "fundamental" media stories (also narrative based). Biased reporting highly likely, even though their hearts are probably in the right place."
And again, none of this is to say I'm suggesting Trump has handled this well. He's handled it atrociously. I have zero doubt Obama would have handled it way better. But I suspect what really has gone on, is no one was prepared, not really. Beyond doing the standard "fund this 2500th "obviously a good idea" bill", I doubt anyone did too terribly good of a job.
If they did, but then this finely tuned, incredibly robust system fell apart in the span of 3 years under one rogue leader, with hardly anyone noticing....may it not be fruitful to investigate and discuss the actual events that occurred here? Is looking at reality, to the best of our ability to discern it, a bad idea?
I would support a full investigation into this. I welcome the full exposure of Trump's sins with open arms. Do you feel similarly unattached about Obama, or other parts of "the system" as it is? Are you willing at all times to reconsider everything you hold to be true?
And as for investigations, I think random members of the public need to start being on these investigations, like a variation of jury duty. I can pick out obviously misleading stories in the media as easily as finding cigarette butts on the ground. There is ample evidence that many fishy things are going on (think: reefer madness, racism, sexism, war propaganda & rationing), and the public's trust of media, government, and experts is unsurprisingly low as a result.
It doesn't have to be this way.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/face-masks-in-...
Does skeleton in closet beat imaginary strawman?
The fact that the richest nation on earth permits about 10% of its population no access to decent healthcare is morally repugnant. But even if one is not persuaded by the moral argument, perhaps the economic impacts can change views.
With no national sick leave policy, potentially infected uninsured citizens will have the incentive to go to work, raising the risk for all. Children of uninsured whose parents are unable to take sick or medical care leave may be shunted to older care givers who are most at risk. Uninsured families are acting rationally for their own economic circumstances, but creating a larger risk profile for all.
Let's hope Americans are sobered by this experience and consider a more sensible healthcare policy.
This is a very different story in the US of course — but is it really only a leadership problem? Isn't it more of a systemic issue in the sense that now the weaknesses of e.g. certain centralized testing structures, not having universal healthcare etc come to light.
Trump might be the worst president the US could have at that point in time, because he acts actively destructive on top of a system that hasn't that much ressilience anyways.
This is simply not true. The response of the Merkel administration is one of the slowest and inconsequential in whole Europe. Very probably accompanied by deliberately playing down death cases and infection numbers in general if anectotical information and comparison with the numbers of surrounding countries has any value.
Tbh. the most important thing for me is that you listen to experts and don't overreact.
Otherwise okish response I would say. Also no indication for dow playing. Maybe a bit reluctant with shut downs of Carnevale, clubs and ski vacationing
https://www.tichyseinblick.de/daili-es-sentials/wie-die-coro...
I am baffled as to why you would think this?
You can use the number of deaths to reason about the true infection rate, independent of the testing strategy. (Until something happens that changes the death rate, like the health system getting overwhelmed.)
For example, Germany and France started seeing cases at about the same time and have found about the same number of cases. But France has 10x the deaths. This suggests that Germany has found a larger proportion of their cases, i.e. they've got better test coverage.
And with all of that Merkel still said that 60% to 70% of the population will end up infected with the virus. It doesn't sound like Germany's going to be much better off than most other European countries.
In my country (Romania), our normally horribly inefficient government has closed schools the moment our 25th confirmed case was announced, it has banned events of more than 100 people, has encouraged people to work from home, and encouraged those who can't to change their work schedule so that people come in at different times to avoid mass transit overcrowding (and enforced this in public institutions). Many large shops have started limiting the number of people allowed in at once, preferring to firm queues outside. Flights to several countries have been canceled. And all of this in addition to screening travelers, putting everyone coming in from Italy/China/France/Germany/Spain in isolation for 14 days, as well as anyone who came into contact with a confirmed case, and of course tracking everyone who came into contact recently with an identified patient.
And all this is before we saw our 100th confirmed case, with 0 deaths so far. How can you say that the German response was efficient?
Really? The US was the first country to stop flights from China, as far as I recall. Were there other leaders anywhere who did the same?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/business/china-travel-cor...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
After a month from 1st infection, less than 2000 tests was conducted in the US. Right now, it's 12,000+ tests which is the lowest tests per million in the world.
Schools, theaters, theme parks are closed. Sports events are suspended.
What other evidence do you need that there is lack of leadership?
We surely need to invest more into health policies and reaction to pandemics. We need to be more conservative about spending resources. We should communicate and coordinate better.
Right now I feel like a lot of actions just prevent the spread (good), but not so many measures for the long-term play are being instantiated. Let's hope I am wrong.
Personally, I think the current situation could be the beginning of a new and better era. It could strengthen remote work, less travel, less global dependencies, digitalization, local economies, and the environment. The next virus could be a lot more harmful ...
I’m sure epidemiologists and other scientists will learn a lot about the spread of pandemics and coronavirus. As a society though...
For an institution to learn there have to be consequences for failure. The US is so hyper-polarized that these won’t materialize for anyone involved. You can already see the circling of wagons and history being re-written in real time (on this site even). Investment in healthcare (including pandemics) will continue to follow party lines.
Because it's everybody for themselves. What do you want, a world government? Of course there is no coordinated answer.
Well, if it were reasonably run, why not? Imagine a world where the trillions going into the military were spent in other ways? Where people weren’t arbitraged across artificial boundaries? Would that be so horrible? So much more terrible than what we have now?
Of course, it will never happen. See earlier poster’s point about people not being able to cooperate.
These trillions would be spent oppressing you for a change. A "world government" cannot be anything but a complete bloody dictatorship.
One world government doesn't look like some utopian committee of experts making perfect decisions each time. It looks like Trump and Xi but multiplied by a million.
The boundaries aren’t arbitrary; they reflect ethnic differences between groups.
Homogenizing people is an abhorrent suggestion — and without that, large governments don’t really work.
> Well, if it were reasonably run, why not?
This is extremely unlikely, because history has shown us that remote, centralized governments are generally both arbitrary towards citizens and ineffective at addressing regional needs.
Big, centralized government has killed 100M people in the past century.
> Imagine a world where the trillions going into the military were spent in other ways?
There’s basically zero chance that would happen, as a central world government would need a lot of force to keep regions following their edicts.
That you even suggest it shows that this isn’t a serious proposal.
> Would that be so horrible? So much more terrible than what we have now?
Yes, absolutely.
You seem to have a fantasy, not a serious view of how that would operate or the consequences to human well-being based on historic precedent.
It’s not that people don’t cooperate, it’s that what you’re proposing is dangerous and harmful, so people cooperate to oppose it.
> Homogenizing people is an abhorrent suggestion
Ok, just for the sake of throwing gasoline onto the fire, why do you think that boundaries are a natural thing, and why do you find the mixing of ethnic groups abhorrent?
I didn’t say boundaries should be completely non-porous (as your comment implies), but rather that we don’t want to eliminate human ethnic/cultural diversity and that requires boundaries which enforce rate limited exchange. To borrow an analogy, there’s a reason cells have membranes.
Intermingling at a rate which allows each tribe to maintain its integrity is natural, and has evidence going back longer than writing. As does outbreaks of violence at exceeding that rate.
For example, Brexit was an act of political violence because the UK immigration exceeded the rate at which the society could naturalize immigrants leading to horrific events like “grooming gangs” of immigrants raping native children. Typically at the point gangs of migrants are raping natives, we drop the word “immigration” and talk about “invasion” or “colonization”.
Similarly, other lurches towards nationalism in Europe and the US.
Homogenizing everyone into a single global culture, which would be required to have a single government without boundaries that rate limit migration, would be verging on genocide.
Your comment assumes a very negative interpretation of what I said.
Not sure that it does :D
I'll address your points one by one:
> Boundaries are an expression of each tribe exerting an area of influence.
Modern boundaries, like modern nation-states, don't really work like tribes did. Prehistoric tribes tended to move around, didn't build fences or patrol them with armed guards and usually had a relatively vague concept of ownership.
In many places around the world boundaries were drawn by colonial powers according to their own interests and not by natives themselves. For that reason borders very often actually split cultures and lead to ethnic tensions (e.g. in the Middle East).
> we don’t want to eliminate human ethnic/cultural diversity ...
Fully agree.
> ... and that requires boundaries which enforce rate limited exchange
I really don't understand why you think this is the case. It seems to me you're operating with a mechanistic/thermodynamic model about how cultures work. It's simply not true that you need borders to allow diversity to survive.
Take for example the concept of linguistic continuum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum. This actually ante-dates modern borders and shows how you can have cultural diversity and cultural mixture at the same time.
> Intermingling at a natural rate which allows each tribe to maintain its integrity is natural, and has evidence going back longer than writing.
Again, tribes and cultures used to mix all the time and modern states are not like tribes (or ancient kingdoms or empires for that matter).
> Brexit was an act of political violence because the UK immigration exceeded the rate at which the society could naturalize immigrants.
While I agree that Brexit was caused by a perceived flood of immigrants, the act of violence is mostly self-harm. The public's belief that immigration is excessive and harmful was encouraged by certain political and economic interests and is not an objective fact.
> Homogenizing everyone into a single global culture, which would be required to have a single government without boundaries that rate limit migration
I wasn't arguing for a global government to begin with. However, again, I don't see why you think administrative unity requires cultural uniformity. We can, and do, have institutions that oversee multiple diverse cultures, both across nation-states (e.g. UN, EU, NATO etc.) as well as inside them (many countries are federations that oversee ethnically diverse populations).
I didn't notice this sentence before. Did you edit your comment to add in this part? If so you should mention it.
In any case, given the tone of this particular statement as well as that of your previous comments I really don't think we can have a productive conversation, so I'm gonna stop replying.
Would it be by the term “immigration”?
I’m genuinely curious.
no they don’t. they’re the result of a lot of wars and invasions. just look at a map of the middle east or Africa. or of china for example. low correlation between border and ethnies.
That definitely shouldn't be the case. Epidemics/pandemics are a situation of "we either make it together or we don't make it at all".
In a sense you're merely arguing for a collapse of civilization.
We're just not designed to be able to take third and fourth order effects into consideration in our day to day decisions at scale.
Just look at the current pandemic and this toilet paper stuff. We smoke, we drink alcohol, we don't count externalities in our consumption etc... The best thing we can do is build systems that nudge us to making better decisions in the longer term.
Prisoners Dilemma
Game of Chicken
However lack of cooperation has been solved in the past. We are not killing each other anymore (a backstab/backstab outcome of prisoner's dilemma). We coordinated cooperation here for shared values. It's time for better values. A good, simple set of values that everyone recognizes could spread very quickly in today's era of global light-speed communication networks.