I lived through collapse. America is already there.

October 7, 2020 12:45 PM

If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down. I know people who were beaten, arrested, and went into exile. But that’s not what my photostream looks like. It was mostly food and parties and normal stuff for a dumb twentysomething. CW: wartime violence
posted by mecran01 (58 comments total)

Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.
posted by mecran01 at 1:23 PM on October 7, 2020 [36 favorites]

You can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around.
posted by clew at 1:23 PM on October 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

I just wrote statement/disclaimer when turning in an event plan, stating that I would not be present, I would not attach my name to it, and that I did not agree with it happening at all. It's probably going to get me fired, but these people acting like everything should go back to normal are NOT going to get me dead.
posted by lextex at 1:24 PM on October 7, 2020 [56 favorites]

Just like Rome
We fell asleep when we got spoiled
Ignore human rights in the rest of the world
Ya might just lose your own

-Jello Biafra/Lard

posted by BigHeartedGuy at 1:26 PM on October 7, 2020 [17 favorites]

It's probably going to get me fired, but these people acting like everything should go back to normal are NOT going to get me dead.

"I'd rather be a killjoy than kill people" has become my watchword.
posted by phunniemee at 1:28 PM on October 7, 2020 [104 favorites]

@phunniemee I'm borrowing that. Thank you. *curtsies
posted by lextex at 1:29 PM on October 7, 2020 [12 favorites]

I was looking through some old photos for this article and the mix is shocking to me now. Almost offensive. There’s a burnt body in front of my office. Then I’m playing Scrabble with friends. There’s bomb smoke rising in front of the mall. Then I’m at a concert. There’s a long line for gas. Then I’m at a nightclub. This is all within two weeks....We’d pop the trunk for a bomb check. Turn off our lights for the air raids. I’m not saying that we were untouched. My friend’s dad was killed, suddenly, by a landmine.

I get that there were some protests, some injuries and I've been to a few with some teargas and violence, but I've never seen a burnt body, bomb smoke, and gas lines all in two weeks. I don't know of anyone killed by a landmine or turned off lights for an air raid.

We are not there yet.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:29 PM on October 7, 2020 [17 favorites]

I think the point is that for some of us it will probably never feel like we are "there yet"; there are a couple tens of millions of people who know the collapse is here and it's been here for a while.
posted by windbox at 1:40 PM on October 7, 2020 [31 favorites]

It’s just not evenly distributed
posted by acb at 1:41 PM on October 7, 2020 [74 favorites]

It’s a fair point. For kids in cages, we are there. For black men and women and children murdered by cops, we are there. For folks downtown getting teargassed, hit with batons and rubber bullets, we are there.
posted by amanda at 1:43 PM on October 7, 2020 [63 favorites]

We are not there yet.

Not by the numbers either. Even if we take a relatiely high estimate of 150k war-related casualties from roughly the 30-year period up to 2009 in Sri Lanka, against a population (in 2012) of about 20m, that's approximately 0.75% of the population killed. The US has around 210k coronavirus deaths against approximately 330m population, which is about 0.06% of the population, an entire order of magnitude smaller.

Now, one could argue that America's norms are collapsing, as the population grows more polarized on a bunch axes (wealth, hyperpartisanship, race relations), and I might agree with you there. This is more of a cold collapse, and I don't think it's fair to compare it to a country experiencing an active civil war where there are dead bodies in the streets and bombings.
posted by axiom at 1:43 PM on October 7, 2020 [14 favorites]

We are not there yet.

If we're not there yet, what do we call refrigerator trucks to collect the dead in NYC? More than 210,000 people dead who shouldn't be within the space of seven months or so?

It's been seven months since my step-kids have been able to attend school in person. Just as long since I've been able to see my friends in person and actually hug someone outside my house.

I get that there were some protests, some injuries and I've been to a few with some teargas and violence

We've had people killed during protests, others have lost their eyes or had other permanent damage due to police brutality during protests - encouraged by the orange monster in the White House. We've had people randomly plucked into unmarked vehicles by possibly federal agents or possibly freelance agents. We don't even have answers. The list goes on and on and on.

Even if I agreed with you that we're not "there yet," just how much farther do we have to go? It's not far.
posted by jzb at 1:44 PM on October 7, 2020 [39 favorites]

Agree with The_Vegetables. My dad did four tours in Viet Nam while in the US Navy. He was in-country, essentially doing the Swiftboat kind of stuff John Kerry was doing. He went through and saw all kinds of traumatic hell. I'm 90% certain he personally killed people, but never, ever talks about it. His longest tour of duty had him come back in 1968. He told me he just couldn't believe what the USA looked like upon his return. Remember—in 1960s Viet Nam, getting news from home was still very, very spotty. And he was in remote areas and had little access to what was going on in any way, shape, or form back home.

In 1968, he was a graduate of the Naval Academy and he was certain that the country was headed in a very short time to total collapse.

We've been through times like these before. It's apples and oranges to compare, but it's always apples and oranges— always.

(just want to add that my dad suffered largely undiagnosed PTSD his whole life, still does. And it affected our whole family. But he went from a 20-something Commie-hating war hawk to a pretty Liberal Progressive in his old age. He never voted for another republican after Nixon, and he detests Trump. So not all military men are the same. Love you, Dad!)
posted by SoberHighland at 1:45 PM on October 7, 2020 [44 favorites]

This comment by Dee Xtrovert from a 2009 MetaFilter thread about prepping has been linked to a bunch of times over the years to good purpose and has been on my mind a lot lately.
posted by Horkus at 1:50 PM on October 7, 2020 [48 favorites]

Adding that I'm in no way sanguine about what is going on these days. And I believe that collapse is possible. And could still happen. But this one article/opinion piece doesn't make me believe this is as close as some here are claiming.
posted by SoberHighland at 1:51 PM on October 7, 2020

YOU ARE HERE
posted by tclark at 1:56 PM on October 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Not quite but sort of double.
posted by PhineasGage at 1:57 PM on October 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

We are not there yet.

The "sudden" collapse of the Roman Empire took significantly longer than the entire lifetime of the United States of America, so a specific definition of "there" is pretty key.

Also, the point of the article is that a "collapse" isn't "Wine in Dolores Park on a lazy Fall day" one day, and "Death Squads with kill lists in Toyota Hilux Technicals up and down Market" the next.
posted by sideshow at 1:59 PM on October 7, 2020 [28 favorites]

There's this really clichéd idea of a frog in a saucepan of lukewarm water.
posted by chavenet at 2:00 PM on October 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

One wonders where the line is for the GOP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot was 11/22/00 and the Florida recount was halted 12/9 by the SCOTUS.

We were just entering the Dotcom recession in 12/00, with ~300,000 new claims vs. 3X that now (and 4X the unemployed).

Shit's on fire, yo.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:03 PM on October 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

I dunno, I have been all over the world working in war zones and "shitholes" and I think the word collapse is wrong. Not sure what else to say.
posted by tarvuz at 2:04 PM on October 7, 2020 [6 favorites]

The only element of collapse that is inevitable for the US is a reduced standing/influence in the world. Forget about collapsing, everything within your borders can be improved from where you are now to where you want to be. It isn't going to be easy to get there but you can do it and most of the rest of the world is rooting for you to do it.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:06 PM on October 7, 2020 [15 favorites]

In the board room it's"restructuring".
posted by clavdivs at 2:07 PM on October 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

When this article first came out, there was a lot of pushback about the privilege and position of the author. Their daily "collapse" may have looked like that, but the criticism was that a lot of the lower classes were absolutely unable to have any kind of life, that Sri Lanka had had something like 2-3 decades of civil war, etc -- a very different landscape to modern USA.

I'm trying to find those counter-comments but, uh, this was two weeks ago, do you have any idea how much shit happens in two days -- I'll keep looking, as I felt they were a great "okay, yes, but don't have a collective freakout, America, you are so far from actually having anything in common here" counterpoint to the meltdown Twitter was having on first reading it.
posted by curious nu at 2:11 PM on October 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

From the outside the US is;

a gulag from 'sea to shining ', plenty of innocents incarcerated; has the form of a near-theocracy with all the corrupt trimmings (with at least one guy who looks like Sam Neil's Antichrist); a death toll from random shooting that looks like war; a surveillance state mindset; and some of the most divided people's on Earth outside of the Middle east.

When will you realise? What will it take?
posted by unearthed at 2:22 PM on October 7, 2020 [40 favorites]

So for a bit of historical context, since a couple people have mentioned the Roman Empire - the fall of the Roman Empire in the west isn’t something most people would have even noticed. One day the emperor was the guy in charge, the next it was a Germanic general (who may have even been in the emperor’s military at some point). It took centuries before major changes really set in, and those were affirming long, slow historical processes.

There were traumatic moments; the sack of Rome in 410 was the most visible. But most lives went on as they had been. The cities eroded away gradually, the trade networks and roads died out, the Roman world died, but not in a big conflagration. I find that very close to the article in the OP.
posted by graymouser at 2:29 PM on October 7, 2020 [17 favorites]

Oh, we do realize. The problem isn't that we don't know all of those things (to varying degrees, though from the perspective of many folks, not all of those things are bad -- "the people in prison are SUPPOSED to be there," forex). It's that our (individual) ability to change any of those things that is extremely hamstrung. Essentially, short of a general strike, voting is the only lever of power that the average person has, and 40% of the country thinks Trump is doing a good job, which means an awful big chunk of the other 60% has to vote. Democrats would win much, much more if voting were mandatary like in AU. It's not, though, and probably won't be any time soon because Republicans prefer it when there is less turnout for obvious reasons.
posted by axiom at 2:32 PM on October 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

curious nu: "When this article first came out, there was a lot of pushback about the privilege and position of the author."

Which the author addresses in TFA: Today I’m like, “Did we live like this?” But we did. I mean, I did. Was I a rich Colombo fuckboi while poorer people died, especially minorities? Well, yes. I wrote about it, but who cares.
posted by chavenet at 2:32 PM on October 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

> According to Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. Social complexity can be recognized by numerous differentiated and specialised social and economic roles and many mechanisms through which they are coordinated, and by reliance on symbolic and abstract communication, and the existence of a class of information producers and analysts who are not involved in primary resource production. Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).

> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge.

> while invasions, crop failures, disease or environmental degradation may be the apparent causes of societal collapse, the ultimate cause is an economic one, inherent in the structure of society rather than in external shocks which may batter them: diminishing returns on investments in social complexity.

> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
posted by are-coral-made at 2:33 PM on October 7, 2020 [17 favorites]

An anthropologist who was on my dissertation committee said that no matter what was going on - war, famine, pestilence, the dissolution of society - everyday life continued. It's not necessarily privilege, either. The poor, the rich, and everyone in between are still running errands, reading, chatting, getting together with family, and taking care of things. That's going to happen even if we know the sun is going to explode tomorrow.
posted by Peach at 2:38 PM on October 7, 2020 [24 favorites]

Thirty years ago I read a similar and equally powerful article/essay about the civil war in Lebanon, and I have never forgotten it. But I think the huge difference between those countries and the USA (and the Roman Empire) is scale.

In 1997 I went on a study trip to Texas, and took a wrong turn somewhere on the outskirts of Houston. I drove into a huge suburban area more similar to Brasilian favelas or poor suburbs in Mexico City (maybe some Houstonians can tell me where I was, I still don't know). I turned into a gas station to ask for directions, and the manager told me to get right back into the car and lock the doors and get away fast. As someone who is white, but from a mixed race family, this was a huge shock, and when I told about the experience back in NYC, no-one white had ever heard of anything like it, but my non-white friends just shrugged. I can see the way I tell this it becomes about crime, but what I saw was extreme poverty, lack of acces to basic infrastructure and isolation.
What I want to say is that you don't have to be very privileged in the US to not know anything at all about the places that are breaking down. I met people in Texas on that same trip who were very worried about riots in LA, but had no idea about the conditions in their own state.

This type of ignorance happens in Denmark, where I am now, too. But more in the sense that people worry excessively about imagined problem areas and the politicians send in hoards of professionals to remedy the perceived problems in wrong ways. We have sort of an opposite but equal problem to the American one.
posted by mumimor at 3:06 PM on October 7, 2020 [16 favorites]

Brazoria county in Texas has been dealing with a deadly brain-eating amoeba in the drinking water supply. Philip Alston's reports on US poverty from a few years ago found levels of impoverishment not seen in developed countries; including no access to clean drinking water, sewage backing up into water supplies, no water infrastructure beyond wells and water sources contaminated with hookworm. Large chunks of the country are currently dealing with fires at unprecedented scales that produce clouds of smoke still billowing across the entire country. Hurricanes have been coming one after another. The federal government resembles a tinpot dictatorship. The real economy is in freefall and there has been civil unrest across the country with armed white supremacist militias on the rise. There are concentration camps where at least one facility seems likely to have been practicing genocide (note that this is not confirmed, but the investigation found corroborating reports from facility staff and multiple women who reported forced hysterectomies, so more investigations need to happen but it does not look good). The US is the world's biggest failure of the Covid-19 pandemic.

There's more. There's always more. That's just what comes immediately to mind. I have a few nits to pick with the article as well, but the US is collapsing. This is what that feels like, however it feels.
posted by Lonnrot at 3:13 PM on October 7, 2020 [25 favorites]

As an outside observer of American society, the cultural acceptance of death dealing is why I would never live in the US and why I think that it will be hard for any significant change of direction.

Once a society decides that the death of children by rogue gunmen is an event for which the children need to be trained and is incorporated into the school curriculum - that is a level of cultural acceptance that leaves me aghast.

As a conversation go-to with someone from the US, I ask if they know someone who has been shot. I can usually just listen for the next five to ten minutes with minimal input on my part. Once you get adjusted to bullets, the protocols are established for the next killing mechanism.

It's like the NRA has given you the template - "freedom", "tough", etc. Rinse, repeat.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 3:14 PM on October 7, 2020 [38 favorites]

Who trusts the federal government? Depending on the state, who trusts the state government?

Not just for COVID but for real unemployment numbers, real eviction numbers, the number of homeless (counting couch surfers and the like), the actual crime rate as called in on a nightly basis (this is maybe a DC specific bugbear), the number of suicides per month, the rate of police violence, whether the people being sent to jail are actually guilty, whether the officers allowed to keep their jobs are safe to be around, how disparate the tax evasion investigations are by wealth, how many Environmental Assessments and Impact Statements are purely fraudulent and will never be looked into, how bad the corporate looting really is, how vulnerable savings and 401(k)s are, how much tax money is being lost to various corporate frauds, how trustworthy prosecutors are in a courtroom, how trustworthy judges are in a courtroom, and on and on and on and on.

For a couple years I’ve been calling this as our mirror to the collapse of the Soviet Union and it just keeps feeling that way. Maybe we’re in 1979 or maybe this is 1989.
posted by Slackermagee at 3:22 PM on October 7, 2020 [10 favorites]

I think in the early days of the Trump Administration, in 2017, someone tried to compile all the ridiculous things happening in the federal government every single day, because there was so much of it all the time, and normal media outlets could just not report on all the insanity going on. Because most of it didn't have a direct effect on people's lives, it eventually became normal and even expected.

This "normalization of deviance" is cited as one of the causes of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. A singular moment that puts into stark relief all the small little errors that piled up over time. I'm not sure that it's happened yet for most people in 2020.

Bad stuff (good stuff too!) doesn't usually happen all of a sudden. Change is slow and gradual, to the point that people start building their lives with those negative effects in mind, and often will be the first defenders of those negative effects.
posted by meowzilla at 3:58 PM on October 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

Once a society decides that the death of children by rogue gunmen is an event for which the children need to be trained and is incorporated into the school curriculum

Collapse doesn't happen all at once. A gun massacre like Sandy Hook was just one fork among many along a long road of normalized violence we chose. It took all of us to allow nothing of consequence to be done, so that gun companies and other vested interests could continue to make money from gun massacres. It takes all of us to normalize it by way of making the same excuses ("founding fathers", "Second Amendment", etc.), so that the next massacre will proceed unhindered. It's an endless falling.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:02 PM on October 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

According to Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. Social complexity can be recognized by numerous differentiated and specialised social and economic roles and many mechanisms through which they are coordinated, and by reliance on symbolic and abstract communication

I was thinking about this recently and suddenly the biblical tower of Babel story made a lot of metaphorical sense. At a certain level of complexity and specialization people can no longer actually talk to each other in everyday plain terms about the problems they're working on and it takes considerable effort itself to communicate the basic essentials in relevant digestible bites and you're running on a significant amount of trust in your trading partners and fellow citizens and the various institutions you're participating in.

Trust is vulnerable. It's vulnerable to exploitation by bad actors who con people, but it's further vulnerable to people who decide an organized and cooperative society capable with values that might challenging whatever security/status/power they've achieved.

I don't think what we're experiencing in the US today is merely us reaching the limits of our society-wide capacity for handling complexity. It's true our society does things involving expertise and specialization that present challenges to communication or even legibility, but I'd bet we could do emore. What I see is that there is a subset of the wealthy and powerful who have decided it is in their interest to actively wage war on an organized society, damage trust in science, in academia, in government, anywhere they can to sow distrust across disciplines and communities except their partisan tribe, and otherwise hamstring collective institutions that could potentially keep them from moving beyond insanely privileged and into essentially unaccountable.

So, less collapse than sabotage, though at some level the impacts of either kind of failure is difficult to distinguish.
posted by weston at 4:21 PM on October 7, 2020 [13 favorites]

@meowzilla, maybe you're thinking of https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/
posted by morspin at 5:05 PM on October 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

We are not there yet.

I live in Louisville, KY and at the height of the BLM protests I had tanks outside my apartment and tear gas seeping into my apartment, and this is in an upperclass neighborhood. I had far-right radicals walking my streets untouched with guns while minorities were being killed by the cops for simply existing. I saw people rattled with rubber bullets and tear gas to the face.

It may not be the scale of bombs going off everyday and corpses lining the street, but that constant hum of violence, authoritarian tyranny, and societal collapse is definitely there. I 100% believe it will continue to scale.
posted by Young Kullervo at 6:27 PM on October 7, 2020 [19 favorites]

We had no market for one of our products this spring so one or two of us are always out at night doing rideshare. We talk to lots of people and they have lots to say when you get them going.

A couple weeks into the shutdown I picked up a late twenties couple who commented that the town was really dead. They were on their way to Disneyland for their honeymoon. No tip.

Then I picked someone I kinda know at the cheapest motel in town. She had bruises. Boyfriend had her car. She had a spare key. I would've liked to see the title but did it anyway. She was in that motel until her unemployment ran out. Women's shelters been full since the beginning.

We are not supposed to pick up minors. Sometimes a kid uses someone's phone to escape. They put on lots of makeup or deepen their voice and we play along. Sometimes the account holder cancels the ride midtrip and then we have a big problem. The account holder is awake and angry and knows where the kid was going and the driver is not going to get paid for anything after that. Sometimes kid has plan b. Sometimes not.

We've been doing this off and on for 8 years and never seen so much pain. We had 22 narcans at the beginning. Three left. Three. We used three in all of 2019. People are breaking and I think they won't fight if that is what needs to happen.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 6:33 PM on October 7, 2020 [44 favorites]

This sort of chicken little-ism is very susceptible to recency bias.

For some of it, too, I think the internet and ubiquitous cameras magnify the idea that there is SO MUCH NEWS HAPPENING and ALL OF IT IS NEW, by both making it easy to document events instantly, and because we can also now transmit such documentation around the globe in nary a heartbeat. Police were always terribly racist, there'd be 100 Emmett Tills if the camera phone had been invented in 1945. We've been boxing undesirables into neighborhoods over there so all their bad crime is over there for so long; people are, I think, naturally inclined to ignore the problems over there (because almost all of the world falls into that over there category, and nobody has enough seconds in the day to keep track of the sum total of misery and suffering happening to the rest of the world, so we have to ignore much of it just to stay sane). There was hope that the internet would foster an era where over there was just as instantly available as right here but if anything it's done so in the worst way, because now the dazzling array of the world's assholes are just a comment section or tweet away.

Present company excluded, naturally.
posted by axiom at 9:54 PM on October 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

-Jello Biafra/Lard

Close. Jello and D.O.A.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:23 AM on October 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is Trump corruption stunning? Sure, but so was Teapot Dome. Kids in cages? Awful, but so was the internment of Japanese Americans.

Compared to the scale and breadth of corruption under Trump, Teapot Dome seems quaint.

Pick a metric that sucks about the US now, it's trivial to go back in history and find a time when it was worse.

Sure, I guess? I mean, a clear-eyed look at U.S. history shows us that as a country we've done some really terrible shit. The thing is we're supposed to get better and stay better.

It's true that the internet + phone cameras mean we see a lot of things that have always gone on, but statistically those things are on the rise since 2016. It's true that racists aren't as bold, for example, as they were during Emmett Till days. Yet. But they're a lot bolder than they were four years ago.

The Japanese internment camps were supposed to be a "never again" moment in U.S. history, not a "whoops, we did it again" moment. (And while I'd never excuse the internment camps, we seem to be dialing the cruelty up a few notches for people caged at the border this time around.)

Also also - this is not a single thing, it's a combination of several scandals bigger than Teapot Dome or Watergate, plus widespread and flagrant police brutality, plus widespread and flagrant voter suppression efforts by Trump and his cronies, plus infrastructure failures, plus a pandemic that's been horribly mishandled, plus an emptying of the coffers to pay for tax cuts for the rich and letting Trumpies siphon off money supposedly earmarked for COVID relief, plus attempts to roll back gay rights, trans rights, Title IX protections, student debt relief, attempts to re-write history to be more palatable to conservatives... the list goes on and on and on.

Also also also - our checks and balances in government are hanging by the thinnest thread. Another year of this, much less four years, likely means doom for the republic. GOP operatives and congresscritters are openly saying the quiet parts out loud about how they need to suppress the vote or they can't win -- and damn little is happening to counter that.

And let's not forget about the abrupt about-face the government has done on Trump's watch about climate change and complete refusal to help Puerto Rico, California during the forest fires, etc. Any one of these things should be cause to hit the panic button and make changes. But they're all happening at the same time and ... damn little is being done. But you can try to reassure yourself by saying "well, it's been bad before." I don't accept that.

This isn't Chicken Little'ing things, this is a "holy fuck things are getting worse than they were five years ago really fucking fast and with no end in sight if we don't change right now."
posted by jzb at 6:56 AM on October 8, 2020 [24 favorites]

comfort yourself in the notion that things have been just as bad or even worse before.

Considering the US is a country founded on genocide and built through slavery, this maybe isn't as comforting as you mean it to be. The bar is very low.

Pick a metric that sucks about the US now, it's trivial to go back in history and find a time when it was worse.

Ok I'll play here, what about incarceration rates? Or how about the number of people laboring to keep our homes and towns clean, grow our food, and cook our meals who are literally considered 'illegal', dehumanized by the state because they lack the proper paperwork? Obviously one could point back to the mid-1800s as a time when things were much worse for many people; but then we have to acknowledge what it took to 'end' slavery in this country.

It isn't 'Chicken Little' to point out that the USA continues to be structured around violent white-supremacist logic and is actively preparing for/perpetrating genocide.

Speaking of genocide:

Even if we take a relatively high estimate of 150k war-related casualties from roughly the 30-year period up to 2009 in Sri Lanka, against a population (in 2012) of about 20m, that's approximately 0.75% of the population killed.

In just a few months, about .2% of NYC's population was killed by Covid. It has been reported that the Trump team felt it politically expedient to deny aid and blame Democratic governors for the crisis.
posted by soy bean at 7:28 AM on October 8, 2020 [15 favorites]

This sort of chicken little-ism is very susceptible to recency bias.

It's not chicken little-ism, and it's obscene to pretend it is. Please stop wasting everyone's time by making them rebut this.
posted by ambrosen at 8:05 AM on October 8, 2020 [8 favorites]

I'm normally someone who is always decrying recency bias (people marrying in their mid-late 20s? Welcome to the 1680s! Unaffordable urban housing? yeah, that market failure has been around since at least c3500 BCE), but this isn't true in this case. People are looking at patterns over a longer time - from about 1945 to now - and they are seeing that the pattern is that things in the United States were getting better from c1945-1970 (increased real wages, increased civil rights, increased minority rights), but starting in about 1970-1980, there was a turn (economic and political) and things started getting worse, and it has accelerated since 2016.

Some of these trends - particularly the increase in inequality and gutting of social welfare - are shared by other developed countries. But the breakdown in democracy - increased voter suppression, corrupt elections, probably tampering with voting machines, and an administration threatening the peaceful transition of power - these freak the hell out of this long-term oriented person. I'm not saying things are perfect elsewhere, but at least I feel confident in the ability, for example, of Elections Canada to run a clean election.
posted by jb at 8:48 AM on October 8, 2020 [16 favorites]

And the Liberal party is corrupt to all hell (I mean, not as corrupt as the Conservatives, of course), but I know that if Trudeau is voted out, I won't have to worry about him fighting that - and of other powers-that-be supporting him.
posted by jb at 8:49 AM on October 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

Being able to confidently say, "we aren't there yet" doesn't mean you'll be able to recognize when we are.

I took this more as a warning that when we arrive we won't recognize it, rather than the assertion that these things are precisely the same (which would give an easy out to the skeptics -- of course they're not exactly the same. That's not the point).
posted by klanawa at 9:24 AM on October 8, 2020 [8 favorites]

Pick a metric that sucks about the US now, it's trivial to go back in history and find a time when it was worse.

The US has always been a deeply flawed society and we need to stop pretending otherwise if we ever hope to truly be that “shining city on the hill” that we supposedly aspire to be.
posted by TedW at 10:59 AM on October 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

axiom: Even if we take a relatiely high estimate of 150k war-related casualties from roughly the 30-year period up to 2009 in Sri Lanka, against a population (in 2012) of about 20m, that's approximately 0.75% of the population killed. The US has around 210k coronavirus deaths against approximately 330m population, which is about 0.06% of the population, an entire order of magnitude smaller.

The problem with such a comparison is that it assumes the pandemic is finished and 210k is the final death toll, which is not the case at all. The overwhelming majority of people have yet to be exposed. The WHO has estimated an infection fatality rate between 0.5% and 1.0%. Presumably the total number of covid deaths will never reach the IFR due to herd immunity kicking in at some point, especially if it's achieved with a vaccine rather than infection, but expecting the covid death count to stay anywhere near where it is now is completely unrealistic.

I've seen other comments around the internet of the "let's have some perspective here" type assuming that the current state of the pandemic is the final one. It seems to be a common error. Watch out for it.
posted by swr at 3:01 PM on October 8, 2020 [5 favorites]

Regarding the pandemic - it is not just the infection that is a concern - the post-infection issues are massive

The Monthly, Oct 2020, p.27 "Peter Doherty was awarded the Nobel prize for medicine in 1996, for his research on how the immune system detects virus-infected cells. But at the start of 202, in his 80th year, he was thinking about retirement. ... 'I've never seen a respiratory infection that's also a vascular disease. We've never seen that before. It's going to leave a lot of people who aren't necessarily that sick with long-term health consequences. When you just look at death rates, you get the wrong impression.'"
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 3:33 PM on October 8, 2020 [9 favorites]

Regarding the pandemic - it is not just the infection that is a concern - the post-infection issues are massive

Without downplaying the very real costs and grief from COVID deaths, I would go further and say that it is the long-term sequelae for survivors, especially for the younger two-thirds of the population, that is going to be the big cost to society of this pandemic.

Having the productivity of the working age population substantially reduced for a generation or two, and their health & welfare costs increased by similar factor, is going to hit very hard across the board, and our societies and economies are nowhere near being able to handle that cost.

This is why we desperately need an effective and safe vaccine. Until then, all bets are off on economic recovery and (what's left of) political stability and social cohesion.
posted by Pouteria at 6:20 PM on October 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

That's a fair point swr, but I don't have a crystal ball so the only comparison I can comfortably make is by what's known.
posted by axiom at 9:49 PM on October 8, 2020

The WHO has estimated an infection fatality rate between 0.5% and 1.0%.

The US reportedly had around 7.6M cases with around 216K deaths. That's not at all consistent with the WHO estimate. That implies a death rate of around 3%, assuming the number of infections isn't under-reported. The only way I can imagine reconciling them would be by saying that the WHO has very stringent criteria for determining which deaths are actually due to COVID-19, and the US is over-reporting.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:38 PM on October 8, 2020

assuming the number of infections isn't under-reported

Kind of a derail but yes, it very much is underreported. Testing and contact tracing were completely inadequate to provide an accurate picture of what was happening in the US during March, April, and May. In June a CDC study indicated cases were between 6 and 24 times higher in number than confirmed test results. It’s gotten a little better since then as testing has increased, but it’s still quite safe to assume the actual number of total infections as of a month ago (to account for lag time between infection and current mortality) are at least 5 times higher than reported, so definitely within the WHO fatality rate. We might even be seeing a lower fatality rate right now , possibly because of which populations are currently being infected.

But it’s important to remember, as jb points out above, that current realities like Trump and Covid are symptoms of the USA’s systemic failure, not causes. They are accelerants, but didn’t set the fires of bigotry and oppression and greed that have been raging for decades.
posted by soy bean at 5:58 AM on October 9, 2020 [5 favorites]

Secret federal police abducting/kidnapping citizens, and extra-judicial murder (of a US citizen, on US soil) ordered by the President (which he claimed to have done during his debate with Biden), are two very specific lines that have been crossed.

If there is precedent for either of those in US history, I'm not aware. There are some very specific gaps in my knowledge of US history, which was very carefully orchestrated by racist history book writers, so I'm all ears if either of those two specific things has happened before.
posted by fragmede at 6:13 PM on October 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

Although sadly the only part that would be new is the "on US soil" part. Extra-judicial killings of US citizens have happened under previous Presidents, including Obama. And the Obama DOJ said it was legal to do so even on US soil.

[If anything, to me this is an indication of one of the many ongoing problems with American democracy, so I certainly don't mean this as "therefore it's OK!" but kind of the opposite.]
posted by thefoxgod at 6:58 PM on October 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

This is why we desperately need an effective and safe vaccine. Until then, all bets are off on economic recovery and (what's left of) political stability and social cohesion.

A facebook friend was musing on the possibility that a C)VOD-19 vaccine might be on the horizon. Someone replied to that (all [sic]"), "Watch out its experimental. So ask them what's in it. If they don't know or lie tell them to take it first and see what happens."

This is where defunding education for decades has got us. The results of clinical trials for vaccines are overruled by the ending of a Scooby-Doo cartoon.

At the guy's insistence that "they" reveal the ingredients, I thought, "Cool. And if 'they' tell you it contains, for example, diphenhydramine hydrochloride and dextromethorphan hydrobromide, what will be your response? I trust it will be to point out to these charlatans that these are the active ingredients in a popular brand of cough syrup."
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:04 PM on October 15, 2020