rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
No bio...
User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
26d ago
That quote doesn't seem so bad if true? It is much easier to hit missiles on the pad than to knock them out of the air.
I am personally much more interested in the consequences of the Iran war for nuclear proliferation. For potential dictators, the lesson of Libya, Ukraine, and North Korea was that your leadership cadres will be secured in power if they can get nuclear weapons, but that giving up a nuclear program is asking to be harrassed by your neighbors. The winning move for Iran was thought to be the nuclear progam, delaying Israeli intervention until enough weapons-grade fissile material could be covertly manufactured.
This war in Iran flips the apparent incentives. The bombing of capital ships and leadership greatly increases the costs (both military and personal) to leadership discreetly pursuing nuclearization. The new rule effectively seems to be "running a nuclear program is not enough to secure your power: you'd better complete nuclearization before you are detected." This seems like it will be a successful means of deterrence against nuclear proliferation, which benefits everyone. I strongly approve.
It is also especially interesting that this is now the third time that the US is has committed surgical strikes against leadership cadres instead of full-scale ground conflict. In the short term this provides strong motivation for leaders of other states to capitulate to US demands, and reduces casualties for everyone who is not in leadership cadres. In the long term, localizing the effects of wars close to the people who start them seems like it will be great for the achievement of world peace. I wonder if the strategy here is asymmetric in favor of the US (Iran having a higher population of Israeli informants than camels), or if the defensive game is hard enough that this opens up US leadership to threats (Iran does have a large military drone sector, but Trump is just old enough that he doesn't care).
One must also wonder what would have happened in Iraq if Saddam Hussein was droned and his replacement was told "behave, or you get droned, too." Talk about aligning incentives.
That's an interesting perspective. I'm angry not because of the lockdowns, but because of the ignorance, politically-motivated thinking, and the incompetence.
As some choice examples of incompetence, I remember when the CDC and FDA blocked independent PCR tests, requiring that all coronavirus samples be shipped to Atlanta for testing. Then the "public health professionals" and the "medical ethicists" decried individual screening, as people cannot be trusted to interpret test results for themselves.
The CDC argued against testing symptomatic individuals in the general population for "wuhan flu", then declared that there was "no evidence of domestic transmission". The NPR listeners in my circles twisted themselves into knots explaining why private testing for novel diseases of pandemic concern is bad, actually, and also argued that the CDC was being intentionally hobbled by Trump.
Then the CDC required that private tests be validated against their in-house test suite - which contained faulty reagents.
Then the CDC rescued a bunch of Americans from Wuhan, put them together in group quarantine for 2 weeks, and didn't test them for a disease which spreads very well in confined spaces and has a 1-2 week incubation period. If a single person had been infected, they would have infected the whole group, then promptly been discharged into the population. We don't know whether this happened, because they were never tested.
USCIS started implementing epidemiological questionaires for people on planes, but there was no enforcement of quarantines, and the illicit means to walk across the borders were still available. I think the combination of pro-"open borders" with pro-"epidemiological controls" is a type of doublethink, but I'm the outgroup.
Then CDC and "public health experts" insisted that the disease wasn't airborne, despite strong epidemiological studies from other countries demonstrating airborne-only transmission: spread between members of a choir who had been religious about handwashing, examples of people infecting each other by walking past each other on the underground, a Daegu call center and a Daegu restaurant where probability of being infected was highly correllated with air handling direction rather than surfaces touched. Despite this, masks were not recommended.
Probably because the Chinese diaspora had already raided all the available mask supply in the continental U.S. and "public health officials" were afraid of inciting racism. I was friends with a member of the Chinese diaspora working for an American subsidiary of a Chinese manufacturing conglomerate. They spent most of late January to early Feb 2020 procuring masks from U.S. retail and hospital supply chains and shipping them back to China.
Then seemingly in April 2020, NYC hospitals were overflowing with positive cases, so they shifted positive cases into nursing homes. I may remind you that even then we knew that "CoViD-19" primarily killed the elderly.
And of course in May we learned that protesting was a public health risk, unless it was protesting for BLM. And in California restaurants and hair stylists were forced to close, unless you were friends with Gavin Newsom.
A lot of these closures would have been unjustifiable were it possible to track and trace efficiently, but there was a "shortage of qualified nurses" and "lack of budget" to do contact tracing as late as August 2020.
At risk of doxxing myself, I was in Korea at the time. In lieu of lockdowns, the Moon administration implemented effective procedures for figuring out who had been exposed, and effective tests to detect illness. (TBF, there was one short lockdown in Daegu before tests were available.) Instead of taking nurses out of patient care and being short on contact tracers, local government administrators were retasked into disease tracking. (Admittedly, this is a lot easier when there is a universal civil service exam: Local government administrators in Korea all pass some threshold of competence.)
Exposed people were identified by credit card purchase databases and CCTV (which were examined by the above administrators), and those individuals got texts asking them to quarantine at home if they were suspected to have been exposed. Breaking a quarantine order was a crime, but also the local government would leave two weeks of food and supplies outside your door so you didn't go hungry or run out of toilet paper.
Instead of banning private testing, the Korean government encouraged private companies and labs to develop tests. We had effective testing by late February, and by late March PCR testing was widely available enough to be required (for free) if you were showing symptoms. Exposed individuals were tested at the beginning and end of their quarantine period.
All people entering the country from abroad were required to test and quarantine, and this was remarkably effective at delaying the entry of new variants until they had evolved lower lethality, and until old people could be immunized.
The highly effective tracking and tracing revealed events with high chances of superspreading: raves and dance clubs, church choirs, "coin-room" (phone booth) karaoke, drunken gatherings. Events with a history of superspreading were banned, but if you weren't a fan of large or drunken gatherings, life mostly went on as normal. (A friend of mine got married in 2020. There was no reception and the audience was limited to 100 people, but the wedding happened in real life and the happy couple has a bunch of unmasked photos.)
In lieu of allowing the Chinese diaspora to buy and export all the available medical masks, the government requisitioned Samsung to quietly buy a few thousand tons of meltblown fiber, and banned export when it was becoming a problem. Starting in March/April, everyone in the country could visit a pharmacy with their national ID to receive two N95 masks per week. This was actually effective at minimizing transmission on the subway, and hospital staff were able to get their allocation, too.
In late 2020 there was a presidential election, and it was held in well-ventilated outdoor tents with free gloves and masks provided instead of by legalizing mail-in voting and the resultant loss of trust in voting systems.
It wasn't perfect: masks were required in parks / when outside, which is not a time of high transmission. Kids still did school on zoom. Workplaces installed infrared cameras at the entrance, which wasn't very effective. Daily epidemiological questionnaires were required to pass newly installed turnstiles at my workplace, and those access controls have persisted and made visiting old coworkers impossible. The rest of the testing and tracing Orwellian panopticon was only easy to dismantle because it was expensive and time consuming, and I think people were justified in their concerns that it might not be dismantled.
But I guess my point is that the US (and the UK) completely fudged it up when it came to lockdowns. There were demonstrated means available to achieve both disease control and functional life, but the US government is too incompetent, ignorant, and (likely) corrupt.
More options
Context Copy link