Category: Internet

No, the United States is Not The Worst Place For #CoronaVirus

So, just recently the United States became the country with the most cases of coronavirus in the world.  And woke folks from the darkest, deepest morass of the Internet (also known as Twitter) began trashing the U.S. in a desperate attempt to out-virtue signal each other. 

Naturally, it’s wildly overblown. When scientists and doctors and assorted other intelligent people look at this data, they don’t look at total numbers.  They look at trends and rates. They don’t care so much about who has the largest number of cases or deaths.  They look at per capita numbers.

So I decided to take the few extra minutes it takes to do some real research, instead of unleashing verbal flatulence from my frontal lobe as the wokescolds do.  And a simple look at per capita numbers is all it takes to dismantle the madness of this particular crowd.

Sorting the numbers by per capita figures on the Worldmeters website shows totally different countries at the top of the list.  Now the ones at the very top are a little misleading. Many of these appear to have high rates mostly because they’re just countries with small populations concentrated in relatively small areas.  Even larger places in terms of geographical area, like Iceland, would have populations concentrated in relatively small areas like Reykjavik, where a third of the population lives. So these are likely special, unusual cases.

The top two in particular stand out.  San Marino is a tiny little province fully within the boundaries of Italy.  And the Vatican is obviously just a tiny little section of Rome. And when you consider that Italy is one of the highest large countries on the list, it’s not a huge surprise that these two places would have a lot of cases too.

So it makes more sense to just compare countries that have a high number of cases, are relatively high in population, relatively large economically, and with relatively sophisticated health care systems.  The ones Bernie Sanders somewhat vaguely refers to as “major countries”.

When you piece together a list of these countries, a peculiar pattern emerges.  The United States is lower than many, if not most, of the European countries. You know, the ones with ostensibly better healthcare systems.  Overall we’re about halfway down the list in terms of total cases per capita and total deaths per capita. These numbers are constantly changing, though, so things might not stay that way.

Another thing of note is that with the exception of South Korea, Japan, and China, the first detected case in the United States happened before these other countries.  So for us to have a relatively low number of cases, despite the fact that we had it days or weeks before these other countries, indicates that we’re doing fairly well. It’s not clear if this is due to luck, skill, or perhaps that there are many undiagnosed cases out there that we don’t know about.  But it does suggest that the presumption that we’re doing worse than other countries is misguided.

Now, more than a few people have noted that the number of Chinese cases is very low per capita, despite being the apparent source of the virus.  But that assumes that the Chinese government is telling the truth. The way they covered up the early stages and silenced the doctor who discovered the COVID-19 outbreak vaguely reminds me of the Soviets spreading disinformation about the Chernobyl disaster.

But even if it’s true, China can lock down easier than other countries.  They are a communist country, not a free country.  Although, technically not they’re not really communist anymore.  They have a degree of private ownership of property and business, but with heavy state control and influence, which would technically make them fascist.  Either way, authoritarian regimes can use force to lock down their populations, because they have no real interest in human rights.  The free world has to do things the hard way.

Despite any early appearances of incompetence or actual incompetence, the United States is doing fairly well, based on what we know now.  Of course, it could be that we haven’t peaked yet the way some European countries have. And the lack of testing might mean that the known numbers in the United States are lower than the actual, and as more of these undiagnosed cases are diagnosed, the numbers could go up rather dramatically.

But the takeaway here is that these Twitter goons are just being intellectually lazy.  In their haste to piss on the United States, they decided that logic, reason, and critical thinking were unnecessary.  And they completely missed the real story that the stats tell us.

Instead of bellyaching over the situation and blowing things out of proportion, maybe we should instead ask ourselves why Japan and Russia are so low.  What happened there that caused them to have such low infection rates, despite their relative proximity to the source in China? The United States is not the worst, but we’re not the best either, and we should be curious about whether those countries that are did something differently or just got lucky.

The United States is not the worst place for the virus.  Not yet, anyway. It’s entirely too early to get carried away with condemnations.  But I guess getting carried away is what Twitter is for, so we shouldn’t be surprised. 

Millennials and Gen Z Kids Need to Settle Down With This #OkBoomer Stuff

Kids these days.  I’m hearing a lot of griping about how their parents screwed up the world.  Global warming, wealth inequality, mass shootings, student debt and so forth.  This sort of stunning ingratitude is all too common amongst the younger generations.  They don’t appear to realize how the older generations made the world better, and spend all of their time on focusing entirely on the mistakes the older generations made.

When older people call them on this, the slightly snippy reply from from these young adults is “OK, Boomer.”  Which loosely translates as “shut up, person who screwed up the world.” This is applied broadly to any generation older than the Millennials, not just Boomers.  But is it truly fair to treat Boomers like they screwed up the world? Let’s think about the things Boomers and the Silent Generation did, with an occasional assist from Gen-Xers.

One that even the most hardcore woke Millennial would have to acknowledge are the advances in Civil Rights and Women’s rights produced by the Boomers.  They were in the streets for the rights of minorities. They pushed back against Jim Crow and redlining. They demanded equal rights for women. And they succeeded.  There were a few things they didn’t get, like free abortions on demand or slave reparations. But perhaps that’s because those would have been a bridge too far. Regardless, the generation of the Millennial’s parents and grandparents advanced the cause of liberty in a manner more extraordinary than perhaps any generation before it.

Nerdier members of those generations advanced mass communications.  This may not seem super sexy, but think for a second. In previous generations and centuries, things could happen halfway around the world and you might never hear about it.  Or at least not hear about it for months. But when reporters could file stories that hit print or nightly news within days or hours, the response became more rapid. When Boomers heard about atrocities in Vietnam or starvation in Ethiopia, they could take timely action.

Speaking of timely news, the world was sort of blown away when they watched a couple of guys land on the moon in 1969.  The older generations did that. And the entire world witnessed it. And the guys who did it did so in peace and on behalf of all mankind and left a memorial to all astronauts and cosmonauts who died getting into space.

And let’s not forget what may be the greatest achievement of the second half of the 20th century: the defeat of communism.  After the fall of the Berlin wall in the late eighties and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, millions of people across the world were uplifted from poverty and oppression.  Some of those countries are truly free countries now. Others are at least more free than they were. This was one of the pivotal moments in the 20th century and probably all of human history. Your parents and grandparents did this, young people.

This may be why there was Crazy, Ridiculous Economic Growth.  It started before the end of the Cold War, but most of it happened after that.  75% of the wealth of the United States has been produced in the past fifty years.  Years where our own record on freedom and equality was better than it had ever been.  Years where the oppression of older, oppressive ideologies (such as fascism, communism, and colonialism) were on the decline.  Freedom and equal rights appears to have finally produced results. Lots of old white men theorized about it in the late 18th century, and the older generations appear to have realized it better than anyone else.

Some of their advances occurred in mundane but important ways.  Like food and medicine. The Boomers made advances in medicine and food production that ended disease and hunger not just in America, but in distant places around the world.  One early boomer meme before the Internet was even a thing was “there are hungry kids in China”. My parents told me that when I refused to clean my plate. But that’s not a thing anymore, because of the actions of their generation.

And there’s one other little thing.  Computers and the Internet. The Boomers made your computers and video games and consoles and websites possible, although some of that was done by my own GenX generation.  You couldn’t even throw down your little #OkBoomer memes if they hadn’t made that possible.

Despite all of this, there are a number of things that  young people endlessly scream about. We hear endless complaints about mass shootings, despite a long term decline in mass shootings and violence in general.  We hear endless screams for socialism and communism, even though the literal opposite of that is what made the world great.

One of the most confusing complaints is in regards to global warming.  Yes, the world is warming. Yes, the cause is primarily human made. But have you given any thought as to why?  The global population has roughly doubled over the past forty years. In 1972, it was 3.85 billion, half of what it is today.  When the population was half of that, it was sometime in the early 20th century. It was half of that shortly before the end of the 18th century.  And it was half of that roughly 150 years earlier and half of that about 700 years earlier and half of that 1800 years earlier.   It used to take centuries to double the population, now it takes decades.  And this is not a simple geometric increase, it’s a sudden, meteoric rise.

This is because the Boomers made food and medicine available.  The consequence is that the human population expanded suddenly, requiring more energy.  The energy sources required to support this population produced emissions, warming the earth.  The Boomers dropped the ball on this. They could have done better. But this happened primarily because they wanted food and medicine (especially vaccines, the most important of all medical advances) spread around the world.  Hardly evidence of ill intent. This problem was caused by them solving other problems. Unintended consequences are a thing for every generation.

Here’s something you need to know if you don’t already: Your parents were right about just about everything.  After years of fighting with my parents as a teenager, it slowly dawned on me in my mid-twenties (after I’d moved out, finished college, and started paying my own way for a few years) that they had been right in almost every one of those arguments.  There are a few things my parents might have been wrong about (LGBT rights, global warming, whether or not superhero movies are good), but for the most part, they got it right. Because they learned the lessons from their parents, which were passed down from their parents, and so on.  The lessons of our ancestors are not irrelevant.  Some truths are timeless.

Truth is your parents and grandparents (with an assist from your older cousins, brothers, and sisters, the Gen Xers) made the world better than it has ever been.  They solved millions of problems. They also caused thousands of new ones. So it goes for every generation. They did way more good than bad. So acknowledge that, and don’t waste your time griping about the things they missed.  Instead, spend your time fixing the things they missed. And remember this when you have this same conversation with your children and grandchildren.