#yes it's true other conflicts have undercounted

[booasaur]

Can you imagine the violence and indiscriminate brutality that would do this? The intention? In a tiny strip of land where the people are trapped and even the survivors are left traumatized, wounded, and starved in such a comprehensive way they'll carry this for the rest of their lives?

I remember when the number was more than one year of worldwide conflict. Can you imagine not doing everything in your power to stop it then, and instead helping it continue?

[sinrau]

There’s a strange and grim thing happening in America. Well, another one. Call it the Red States of Coronavirus.

Red states are seeing rises in Coronavirus so explosive they rival — or are greater than — the world’s poorest, devastated countries.

Yes, really. Florida had 4000 new cases yesterday. Just Florida alone!

Pakistan — the entire country — had 5000 cases. Florida’s population is 21 million. Pakistan’s population is…212 million. On a per capita basis, that means that Florida alone has about ten times as many new cases as Pakistan.

Pakistan is one of the world’s poorest, most devastated, dysfunctional countries.

And yet Florida alone is outdoing it in terms of acceleration in Coronavirus.

My God. Are you seeing the surreal, absurd, bizarre, shocking scale of this yet — what I mean by the Red States of Coronavirus?

Florida’s just one Red State. What about the others? Arizona, another 2500 cases. Texas, another 4400 cases. Utah, another 600 cases. Tennessee, 1200 or so. These might sound like tiny numbers, but this is just on one day. Now, I’m just grabbing the numbers from Google, so nitpick if you must, but don’t miss the point.

When we add those up, the total number’s probably north of 10K new cases, across all the Red States, per day. Again, that might not sound like much, either, until you realize.

That’s more than many of the world’s poorest, most deprived countries…in absolute terms. Bangladesh, for example has about 4000 new cases per day right about now. Bangladesh’s population is about 161 million, which is about that of Red States. So Red States have twice the per capita new Coronavirus cases of…Bangladesh. What the?

Think about the meaning of this for a moment. Bangladesh and Pakistan are two of the world’s poorest countries. They are failing states, and have been for most of their short, terrible history. They have no — no — functioning healthcare, in modern terms. They barely have decent sanitation and water for people. They don’t have working governments (but at this point — neither does America), but teeter on the brink of perpetual upheaval, and they certainly don’t have anything like the resources of a rich, developed country. And yet Red States are even outpacing them.

Now, you can go right ahead and assume that nations like Pakistan and Bangladesh are undercounting Coronavirus cases. That’s probably fair. But even if they’re undercounting them by a full 100%, that only puts Red States on par with them.

Let’s do one more example to drive the point home. India had about 15,000 new Coronavirus cases yesterday. That’s more than Red States, for once. But India’s population is about 1.4 billion — which is ten times that of Red States. Again, in per capita terms, Red States are doing much, much worse. How much so? About eight to ten times worse, if we believe India’s official numbers. And if we don’t, the best we can say is that they’re doing about as well as India, in a very very generous interpretation.

But India is also one of the world’s poorest and deprived societies.

What on earth?

Here is my point. There are three of them, actually.

America’s failure on Coronavirus has had shattering consequences. Red States are now some of the worst performing places on earth, when it comes to Coronavirus. Yes, really. We probably have to look at completely devastated countries like the Congo or Somalia to see worse outcomes.

That’s a result of three things.

The first is the failure to have a national strategy or approach whatsoever. Trump denied, then he dithered, then he told people to drink bleach, then he…cut funding for the WHO. To this very day, there is no national strategy whatsoever for Coronavirus. America is almost alone across the globe in this respect. How many other countries have no national strategy whatsoever for dealing with the greatest catastrophe in a generation?

That is what it means to be a failed state. And in that vacuum, with no national agenda, approach, vision, plan, American states were left to do…more or less whatever they wanted.

That brings us back to Red States. Red States are the empire of the American Idiot. They’re places where people carry guns to Starbucks, because who knows, the Indians might show up to raid your carriage. No, not everyone in Red States is an American Idiot — but there are certainly enough of them to make America’s Red States some of the most backwards places on earth.

Hence, Red States did things so bizarre, when I tell my European friends, their jaws drop. Like Texas’s Governor blocking mayors from making masks required. “Lol…what? It’s illegal to make people wear them…not not wear them?!”, my European friends splutter. “But how can he?” I shrug, and say, “I don’t know.”

But it’s not an outlier: Arizona’s governor blocked city and town mayors from mandating mask-wearing, too, among others. What the?

If the political leadership of a state is making it illegal for people to wear masks, then of course it’s probably going to be the case that it has zero plan for dealing with a pandemic in a sensible, thoughtful, even scientific way. And that’s precisely what we do see in Red States. No plan — to this very day.

What the rest of the rich world — and much of the poor world — now takes for granted as a plan: track and trace, lock down, isolate, quarantine, test: that’s entirely missing in Red States.

To be fair, most of that’s still missing even in Blue States.

Astonishing — because none of that, by now, is rocket science. Even poor countries, like Vietnam, and less rich ones, like Taiwan, have gotten all that precisely right.

America’s Red States are about at the point of political development of a Pakistan or an India. Sure, they might have a little bit more money. But they sure as hell don’t know what to do with it. The outcomes for people’s lives are now becoming every bit as catastrophic. That is how much of a failing state America now is — or at least the parts of it the American Idiot now controls and manages.

So if Red States didn’t follow the by-now proven and tested plan for controlling Coronavirus — track, trace, quarantine, isolate, lock down, test — what did they do?

Well, they reopened. Far too soon. That is what produced all the new spikes above.

They reopened not just because they are run by lunatics — but because they are poor states. People in them “need to work” to put bread on the table, or, by and large, their families go hungry. Red States are America’s underdeveloped and deprived regions — and since America is led by a set of hyperconservative old men, Americans received barely any support during the pandemic. Just $1200, or one week’s worth of income.

Red States needed support most, precisely because they are the poorest. But because they are the poorest, they are the most heavily conservative, too — and so they didn’t want support: they wanted to go back to work.

That’s another eerie parallel to failing states like India and Pakistan, too, by the way. Why are Corona cases spiking there? One, because people have to go on working, to put bread on the table: these are not rich societies. Two, because governments can’t support people through the pandemic, because again, these are not rich societies. Three, because there is no real national plan that follows the international template for best practices, because these countries have backwards political leadership.

But all that’s true of Red States, too.

I pointed out about a decade ago that America was about to become a failing state. I don’t take any particular satisfaction in being right.

But it’s beyond debate at this point.

Who has some of the worst Coronavirus trends and outcomes in the world today? It’s not just the world’s poorest, most shattered societies.

America’s Red States are outdoing them.

That’s how badly they’ve failed at governing themselves. That’s how badly their ideas and values — individualism, selfishness, indifference, cruelty, brutality, ignorance as a way of life, those old slavers’ values — have failed. America’s Red States are self-destructing. We are watching a bizarre and gruesome historic event, the suicide of a swathe of a society.

There’s a lesson in there, too. Self-destruction is what happens to societies that follow their model — putting I before Us, self-preservation over cooperation, power over prosperity, conflict over peace, ignorance over knowledge, old tribal and racial hatreds over dignity, worth, and value of and for all.

Bang! This is what hate and stupidity do. They destroy you from within, making you burn down your own house, and grin in glee — just because no one else will ever live in it. Well done, well done. But where will you go now, dummy?

I’m sorry if that sounds harsh to some of you. But isn’t it true?

Umair June 2020