It would be great if it were illegal to control the flows of inputs to and outputs from manufacturing, but I doubt national leaders hellbent on playing the blame game and prioritizing some lives/prosperity over others simply based on the accident of birthplace would ever give up that sort of control they now exercise.
It has to begin with everyone respecting broadly the same general ethics and views on rights. As it turns out, there are countries where women aren't allowed to drive, where religious autocracies rule, where whole populations of religious minorities are imprisoned and enslaved and the people of those countries support it happily. Do you want people with those values having a say in how you live? I don't.
Most countries have a pretty big chunk of people in them that would be fine with a religious autocracy that enslaves those who don’t conform to the majority, the US included. It’s the same in every country.
There are, for example, a whole bunch of people in the US who are fine with some fiercely racist and inhumane federal policies, such as running concentration camps wherein many children are raped and otherwise sexually abused.
Do you want people with those values having a say in how you live? I don't.
What? Of course it is. Even if you went one level down, states in the United States itself are excellent proxies for the mean values that are held in a particular region. If your point is that every geographic region has groups of people on the fringe, then yeah fine. That's true. But that doesn't mean anything with regard to the usefulness of what makes up a nation or its borders - which are of course proving quite useful during a pandemic.
I don't think those are any more practically useful, correlated, or appropriate than the assemblage, unless you go down to states where the population numbers are so low as to be less than a really meaningful statistical universe.
Populous states such as California and New York do not have anything remotely resembling universal buy-in on important values. Even within places like San Francisco, a single city/metro, you have a wide array of mutually exclusive value positions.
As soon as you get people together in large groups, you are going to have a large diversity in values and priorities. These civil perimeters have very little utility; I think people just like mentally personifying groups/nations so that they seem easier to reason about, regardless of the fact that it's wickedly inaccurate and not actually useful for that purpose at all. This is reflected in the widespread practice of synecdoche/metonymy.
China is a perfect example of this, as is California.
(TBH, I think it's a leftover from serfdom, where the lords/regional owners literally held physical dominion over the persons, labor, and travel rights of the people who lived within their borders. The Pythons' sketch on the matter from MPATHG accurately sums up my opinions on even thoroughly modern political assemblages.)
Personally, I reject the validity of all group identities that are based on sets containing more than a million or so humans. They're just not useful for reasoning about the group constituents, at all.
> But that doesn't mean anything with regard to the usefulness of what makes up a nation or its borders - which are of course proving quite useful during a pandemic.
Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
I bet you anything that if you polled Saudi Arabians and asked "Would you be willing to be ruled by a monarch?" and then do the same for Americans, you'll get wildly different results. If you are willing to make the bet large enough, I will go to relevant polling organizations to pay for one to be conducted.
To my point, you'd get the same results in both places: some people in each country would say yes, and some other people in each country would say no.
Assuming one's ideology based on their geography is entirely outmoded in the age of global information systems.
We can and are doing this at a much smaller scale. We have trade organizations that mediates disputes. And the US has been successfully pushing variants of the DMCA everywhere.
A sovereign country could decide that copyright is no more (within its borders), but no developed country has done it. Most countries probably pay more in copyright royalties to other countries than they get in return.
Isn't copyright also a prisoners dilemma?
"China" doesn't produce anything; human beings standing on the landmass called China produce medical supplies, just as human beings on other landmasses produce medical supplies. Recipients of medical supplies need more than can be supplied by Earth's manufacturers right now, as well as supply/demand scoped within specific regions or countries. That has nothing to do with countries or regions, any more than it has anything to do with which US state or city a factory is in.
I do agree that we should avoid excessive centralization of the manufacture of certain essential items, medications and medical supplies (and advanced/low power CPUs, and passenger aircraft) among them, but not for nationalistic reasons—simply because the Earth is big, transport is wasteful and resource-intensive (even if economically cheap), and resources are sometimes scarce/precious, such as in emergencies or supply interruptions (e.g. melt-blown fabric producing machines are time-consuming to produce).
It's nothing to do with the nationality of the people who produce the supplies, or the nationality of the people who need the supplies.
Perhaps the UN or another international body could coordinate ensuring that a certain amount of manufacturing capacity for various and specifically enumerated essential things could be carefully maintained on each continent, to guard against planet-scale civilizational collapse in rare events. I think in the old model this would be termed something like a "national security stockpile" or "strategic reserve" but ultimately it's more of a "civilization continuity capacity". Essential medicines and equipment are essential medicines and equipment, regardless of which humans need them, or where.
Trump might not be making the best decisions, but at least he's making decisions for the US! Noone is even trying to make decisions for Europe...
Of course people are. The EU commission works on it, countries talk to each other. Is there a fully coordinated EU response yet? No. Is there cooperation? Yes.
Trump 0 Europe 1
I think she is just half bad and predictable but I don't think it is the best argument for the condition of the commission.
This XY vs Trump shit isn't very convincing and I do believe that it is pretty though for people really caring about politics.
The cureVac thing is suspicious as there are conflicting reports.
> To make it clear again on coronavirus: CureVac has not received from the US government or related entities an offer before, during and since the Task Force meeting in the White House on March 2. CureVac rejects all allegations from press.
Oh sure, the original articles have been updated, but still the myth remains. Funny how that works.
0: https://mobile.twitter.com/CureVacAG/status/1239535638359281...
It's a circus.
I would like the EU to take more control over manufacturing protection gear and ventilators, and distribute them as needed over the EU.
If we wanted to turn EU into a federation, we would've done it. As it is now, member states cling to their sovereignty (IMO quite unfortunately).