Wuhan Corona virus

[Unbeliever]

It seems the religious people want to go to church and sing God's praise. I say fine, let's see if God will protect them.

[Hydra009]

That first couple hinted at their real psychological reason to avoid the mask - it highlights how things are different now and they'd rather not be reminded of that.  They'd rather pretend that nothing has changed - out of sight, out of mind.

Imagine not wearing oven mitts because it makes you anxious that you're going to burn yourself.  Backwards thinking, isn't it?

[trdsf]

I've heard Pence is thought to be smarter than Trump.  I have no actually knowledge that this is true, but the above seems at least as dumb as Trump.

No doubt he believes that we can just pray the pandemic away.

Good luck with that, Mikey.

[Cassia]

When it is finally time to socialize again; there will only be a few friends left who I care to see. You do not know someone until they are tested or stressed a bit. The hate and selfish short term thinking consumes them. It is easy to be kind when times are good.

[Rosycheeked_rebel]

NULL

[Baruch]

Take care, folks going back to college ;-)  I thought about teaching non-credit classes to seniors, but probably won't do it now.

[Mike Cl]

So, I think I figured out why we're dead last when it comes to combating this virus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q3PSISAZL8

Too fucking stupid to live.  Once upon a time it was a pretty decent country--in many ways, anyway.

[GSOgymrat]

Too fucking stupid to live.  Once upon a time it was a pretty decent country--in many ways, anyway.

Do you ever get the feeling that civilization has reached it's apogee and it's downhill from here? The people of the world can't cooperate to contain a virus, which is a relatively simple problem that humans have dealt with their entire existence. The chance of people of the world cooperating on an unprecedented scale to address a problem as complex as climate change is zero. If people won't do something as simple as wear a mask in public for a few months when people they know are getting sick and dying, and it's the law, how can we expect people to make any significant change to their behavior for something as impersonal as climate change?

[Sal1981]

The ease at which misinformation is shared around and believed on the Internet is definitely a huge factor in the spread of Covid-19. What I found surprising and something I didn't expect is the fucking reality check people are given yet they still don't adjust their behavior accordingly. This is only able to happen in an environment with mass misinformation being spread around, in playing on people's fears and misconceptions.

With climate change this is already biting our collective asses, and has so for decades, yet a vast amount of people don't adjust their behavior to be able to alter our way of life to take climate change on. We're pretty much screwed if this level of neglect and this much misinformation is believed.

[SGOS]

What I found surprising and something I didn't expect is the fucking reality check people are given yet they still don't adjust their behavior accordingly.

The reality check so far is mostly in the forum of charts and math, and these things don't hit that close to home.  We had to learn arithmetic in grade school, and I remember being taught how to read charts and graphs.  We have to learn these things, because we don't know them naturally, and you don't learn them naturally as you get older.  People still react to the world from a base of spontaneous ignorance, even though they have been taught to read a chart and count.  Show me a chart, I can introduce you to people who will misinterpret it,and more that won't even read the x and y axis titles.

When reality comes to watching someone you know get sick and die, it will get closer to home and have a bigger impact, but the person who experiences that reality will still be one individual in a minority, because others will not have experienced it yet.  When the reality becomes fully known by the entire population, it is too late.  That is the apogee that gymrat refers too.  In past times when people were more isolated, they did not have the ability to understand the spread of a global virus.  Hell, they wouldn't even know about it.  It would simply infect a tribe, and pass either after everyone got sick or died.  Reality can be grim and we compensate by reshaping it into something more desirable, but no matter how much we reshape it through mysticism or other psychological filters, the real reality remains.

[SGOS]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q3PSISAZL8

My favorite snippet from this was:
"Why aren't you wearing a mask?"
"Because I live here."
"But aren't you... [muffled]..."
"I live here."

Granted the video was cherry picked for the dumbest replies, but there were a shitload of them, and 50% of the population has an IQ less than a 100.  You don't have to go far to find them.  And here we are in the forum struggling to understand why Trump gets so many votes.

[Mike Cl]

Do you ever get the feeling that civilization has reached it's apogee and it's downhill from here? The people of the world can't cooperate to contain a virus, which is a relatively simple problem that humans have dealt with their entire existence. The chance of people of the world cooperating on an unprecedented scale to address a problem as complex as climate change is zero. If people won't do something as simple as wear a mask in public for a few months when people they know are getting sick and dying, and it's the law, how can we expect people to make any significant change to their behavior for something as impersonal as climate change?

Yeah, I do think that.

[Unbeliever]

Too fucking stupid to live.  Once upon a time it was a pretty decent country--in many ways, anyway.

maybe all the most stupid people will be gone soon, and the rest of us can get on with saving the biosphere.

[SGOS]

maybe all the most stupid people will be gone soon, and the rest of us can get on with saving the biosphere.

Don't count on it.  Evolution doesn't seem to select for intelligence.  I'm not sure what it does select for, but it's not intelligence.  If it did, the stupid people should have been gone by now.

[Hydra009]

Do you ever get the feeling that civilization has reached it's apogee and it's downhill from here? The people of the world can't cooperate to contain a virus, which is a relatively simple problem that humans have dealt with their entire existence. The chance of people of the world cooperating on an unprecedented scale to address a problem as complex as climate change is zero. If people won't do something as simple as wear a mask in public for a few months when people they know are getting sick and dying, and it's the law, how can we expect people to make any significant change to their behavior for something as impersonal as climate change?

Some countries are tackling the virus better than others, just like some are addressing climate change better than others.  Imo, these sorts of crises expose who has their act together and who does not.  And over time, I expect countries that have their act together to amass much more power on the world stage than those who do not.  They rebound quicker from calamity, with less economic damage and human casualties, as we are seeing right now.  Hopefully, in the future the ones with their act together will be driving global policy and those not able or willing to comply will not appreciably affect the outcome.