Today’s wet market special: bats! Yum-yum.
Let me introduce the Comment of the Day by once again acknowledging the consistently excellent contributions to Ethics Alarms made every day by the commentariat here. I know a lot of people who don’t read the comment sections of blogs and websites; heck, I usually don’t, and the reason I don’t is that they are almost uniformly horrible and depressing. Horrible, because even in the cases of some superb blogs, they are reliable pits of name-calling and hackneyed talking points I have read elsewhere, full of poor reasoning and biased, lazy opinions lacking support or genuine understanding. Depressing, because I know they are representative of the general public, perhaps even positively so, since the real mouth-breathers don’t read about substantive topics at all, and couldn’t write about them literately if they did.
I know I complain too much about the traffic here. Since what has been called “The Great Exodus,” when those slowly succumbing to Trump Derangement left in a huff because I insisted on refusing to join what is tagged here as the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, and Facebook arbitrarily and mysteriously knocked the pins out of a major source of circulation and growth by banning links to the blog, my hopes of reaching a sufficient audience to allow some income-producing activities here have been dashed. I don’t do this for profit (obviously), but some income would help–as you might expect, this is especially on my mind now. I was this close to topping the 5000 views a day level that is the minimum required to monetize a blog at the end of 2016, then our angry progressive friends left, and even 4000 a day is usually a faint hope. Still, I can’t complain about the quality of the comments, which, if anything, is stronger than ever, as is the variety of views and topics that arrives through them. I really should be grateful for that, and stop bitching. Together we have a superb product, getting better after a decade.
Humble Talent is one of the reliable stars here, with a unique outlook and a no-nonsense style. Before I started annually failing to deliver The Best and Worst of Ethics Awards (2019 was the third straight flop; maybe next year…), he had been a recipient of Commenter of the Year.
Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, : “Thank God This Miserable Week Is Over Ethics Review, 3/27/2020: Of Pangolins, Pandemics And Pronouns”:
We don’t have any conception under God how many people are actually affected. We don’t know the morbidity rates. We don’t even know the number of people who have died from the Wuhan Flu.
I used to say that we knew the numerator when it came to deaths, and that the percentages that we were hearing were worst case scenarios, because the denominator was always going to be much, much higher, so the rate was almost certainly artificially inflated. That remains true when talking about cases coming out of first world democracies… We know, roughly, how many people died from Flu related complications, but we don’t know how many people have had the Flu. For weeks now, Canadians have been told that if they’re experiencing symptoms, but those symptoms are not serious enough to warrant a visit to the emergency room, they need to stay home. Either they have it and we don’t want it walking around outside, or they don’t have it and we don’t want them bringing exciting new complications into our medical centers. The massaging in the states has been mixed, but there’s a lot of similar sentiment out there. The vast, vast majority of people who think they have the Flu won’t be tested, and there is a large slice of the pie that get the Flu but never develop symptoms.
And then you have third world, tin-pot communist dictatorships like China, Information Black Holes like Russia and places that don’t have sufficient medical facilities like most of Africa. Who knows what the numbers are out of places like this? I’ve seen chilling images and video coming out of China, pictures of of cremation packages stacked up outside of funeral parlors because they ran out of room inside. I don’t know if that’s representative, but I think it’s likely. 40 million cell phone users have been cut off from the rest of the world in the heart of China, and China has not reported a single Flu related death in a week.
It’s… uniquely frustrating. The rest of the world got this Chinese export in part because China lied about it. They threw doctors who tried to report on the disease into Gulags where they eventually died, and gave the virus the Voldemort treatment for months between November and February of this year, allowing it only to be referred to as a pneumonia. In the months between November and February 5 million people had been allowed to travel out of Wuhan Province, China, including 100,000 laborers who landed in Italy, which is why Italy remains the worlds third largest contagion center. In February, once the disease had basically gone global, and scientists outside of China named it the appropriately sterile “COVID-19”, China *still* tried to lie about it, calling it an American bioweapon. The useful idiots in the media are calling people racist for pointing out that China has been China for the last half year, carrying water for them in a combination of corporate greed, communist-worship, and misplaced wokeness. Now, China is saying because they haven’t had any new Flu deaths, they’re going to reopen Wuhan province, including the godforsaken Petri dishes that are their wet markets.
At some point enough is enough. China is lying, people are dying, and something needs to be done. China’s government is not responsible to its people, so that something might have to be foreign. Unless China’s government can dig deep and find in itself the ability to bury its pride, admit some culpability, stop its fucking propagandizing and actually contribute to at least honestly tackling the virus within its own damn borders… I think WWIII will be China against the world. That seems bombastic, but I think that as more and more of the truth comes out, people are going to get more and more angry about it.
Ethics Alarms 
Congratulations, Humble Talent. Well done!
The Chinese have a long and glorious history of lying, whether it’s disease in the people, famine, flood losses…you name it. African Swine Fever broke in their pig herds a couple years back…that probably won’t be eradicated in my lifetime. They lied about it for a long time, and they euthanized more sick pigs than the US has in its entire herd. They’re awful.
I know one person that does NOT have the virus. My wife has been very sick since the 25th of March and was finally tested on Tuesday. We found out yesterday she is negative. Her recovery is slow, but she’s a little better each day.
Joel I concur.
I am pleased that your wife tested negative and is getting better.
Whew. Good news.
I suggest the US place all P&I payments to China for holding our national debt in escrow until a full accounting of the origins can be determined.
If the US and other nations hold China’s feet to the fire by witholding payments on the debt they hold of these nations they will have little foreign exchange to acquire more leverage over its client states.
If it turns out that China willfully attempted to hide the virus from the globe then the US and other nations should demand compensatory damages in the form of debt forgiveness. That would offset this ridiculous 2.2 trillion dollar addition to our national debt.
Is their risk? Of course but if the world stands collectively against China the risks would be minimized.
I thought of this as a possibility, but it wouldn’t work.
America’s debts to China are in bond form, and there is nothing on a bond that would foster that kind of debt cancellation. If all of a sudden America said that it wouldn’t make any maintenance payments to China, China would sell the bonds to someone America would pay. Failure to do that would shock the entire market in ways that I don’t think the system would be prepared to deal with.
Line up the American corporate and governmental players who *created China* by contributing to its rise — and shoot them.
The enemy is not ‘there’ quite as much as it is ‘here’.
Aliza
It is not corporate greed it is perceived corporate survival.
If consumers buy the low cost import and not the higher priced domestic good then corporations will react. Corporations pursue profits and they produce where profits can be made.
So who is greedy? Is it the consumer who wants to buy the most satisfaction for the least cost, the American worker who wants the highest wage, the general public who wants heavy handed high cost regulation here but who could not care less about health and safety of Vietnamese and Thai children as they toil to make shoes and garments that are sold for 500 times their cost , or a combination of all of these. Greed works both ways.
Nice try, but she’ll never get it. She’s in her anti-America power conspiracy library too deep to accept the notion of billions of individual decisions organizing capital everyday. There must be large nefarious groups controlling these billions of decisions in order for her world to make sense. Of course the control is animated via the lying profession of marketing. Yet we’re you to point out an anti-American ideology motivating people like her erstwhile mentor Chomsky to undo places where billions of independent decisions can be made, you become a lackey; when it is she who better fits the term.
I have on my desk right here a book: ‘The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution’ by Bernard Bailyn (Belknap Press, 1967). One of its chapters, chapter lll, is titled “Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics”.
Bailyn writes:
The point I have been making is singular in a sense, but has manifold implication. I say that *real conservatism* must turn back to genuine and articulated ideas about what *liberty* is and what *freedom* is. And doing this it must, it simply must, confront the problem of Power, not as it was in the distant past of the Republic, but now, and within our modern context.
You make a very serious and a dangerous mistake when you assert, in rather violent semi-intellectual terms, that what I say and suggest is ‘anti-American’. What I do say is that Power has very certainly — I say *without question* — usurped proper bounds. And I also say that one of the mechanisms, one of the most powerful mechanisms, is the corporation and the legal structure of corporations as this was defined after the Civil War.
If one is interested in tracing *causal chains* by which Power has used legal mechanism to take for itself tremendous power, and to use that usurped power to subvert government in processes known to be corrupt so that these entities gain ever-more power: I say that this is an area of concern that can be intellectually defended only be reference to the ideas of the Founders and the Founding Generation.
Nice try, but she’ll never get it. She’s in her anti-America power conspiracy library too deep to accept the notion of billions of individual decisions organizing capital everyday. There must be large nefarious groups controlling these billions of decisions in order for her world to make sense. Of course the control is animated via the lying profession of marketing. Yet we’re you to point out an anti-American ideology motivating people like her erstwhile mentor Chomsky to undo places where billions of independent decisions can be made, you become a lackey; when it is she who better fits the term.
What you do here, in my opinion, is to employ *Chomsky* as a rhetorical device. The mention of that name invites prejudice. Your effort here is to absolutely undermine a critical outlook, in this case in respect to Power (which most certainly requires the analysis of a responsible citizen, if anything at all does!) and your whole effort is, in truth, to shut down conversation and consideration. Yet you state — not imply but state directly — that my efforts are ‘anti-American’.
I make the suggestion to you that you reconsider your position. I am not sure you can fairly and genuinely see yourself and call yourself a friend of the Constitution, and the spirit behind it, if you take this knee-jerk stance. You stand against dialogue and against a critical analysis of corruption. You therefore act as an apologist for that corruption.
Now, the more interesting question is How have you *come to be*? What are the *causal chains* that have produced the tens of millions who act as you do? Who have no real qualification to spout off, who show your self as a damper to critical analysis, and who do everything in your power to keep yourself, first, and then others from looking more poignantly into these important questions?
That is why I say: You are part-and-parcel of a dumbed-down generation. You are not part of a solution, you are part of the problem.
Nice try, but she’ll never get it.
When pushed, you will resort to base name-calling and insult. And you are free to do that if it serves you.
If the issue here is what can and should be *gotten*, then that conversation can and should be broached. Let it be put out on the table for consideration and conversation.
You say there is something that I don’t *get*. Fair enough. But it is never explained in any depth and with any clarity.
On the other hand, I could definitely say that you do not *get* what I say and allude to because you impose, immediately, and reflexively, a ‘block’ (your use of the emblem ‘Chomsky’). So, right there you block yourself from understanding what I say and why I say it.
So let me be as clear as possible: I get you and your position completely. I have no problems understanding it. You do not, and have set your will not to understand what I am saying. Why? I think the answer is that it will involve you in analysis of power, and an analysis of our present, in ways that make you very uncomfortable.
That *project* places demands on you that are beyond your capacities.
One of the themes that runs through everything I think and write is the notion of *causal chains*. Causation. If you want to understand why things are as they are now in this country then you have to trace back the causal chains. It is not a complex idea but it is definitely far-reaching. Primarily, the idea’s relevance became important to me reading Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences:
The ‘final and efficient cause’? Who thinks in these terms?
True, his particular point has to do with a radical shift in (literally) how Reality and Existence are understood (if you subtract transcendentals from your terms of though your thinking will indeed be radically transformed), but the same notion applies to a range of different *outcomes* as I call them.
We live now within *outcomes* but those who can only see the external contour of things, the exterior surface — and you are a classic example — are so limited in perception that you are unreliable if I require a holistic understanding. Let me go further: nearly every contributor to this blog only describes *surfaces* and only *complainingly*. A complaint is a release of tension — in respect to Steve Witherspoon I used the image of a steam-whistle: a loud, insistent shriek which alleviates pressure but is empty of interpretation. I cannot rely on anyone writing here for such interpretation. This is entirely frustrating. And yet I overcome my frustration and push into the only territory that you-plural allow: an often thoughtful, but sometimes reckless jump into wide-ranging interpretation. The reason I stick around — like a parasitical worm! — is because the *blindness* of most who write here, their non-glorious focus on surface externals, has been a fabulous and articulate teacher. My rule has become:
Everything that you-plural dismiss and deride, or simply cannot understand, indicates precisely where more intellectual study is required.
Now, why is this? Why is it that you-plural have no capacity to interpret? Why is *seeing* so numbingly limited? Or when you attempt something that looks like interpretation it is, as in your case, the repetition of quasi-ideas that were given to you by those who frame ideas? In your case (here) the business-interests themselves. This is classic ‘propaganda’ (your childish, reductionist assessment) and it depends on a dumbed-down group and population to receive the pre-masticated pablum. But I can assure you, and I assure you now, that in a community and culture of free-thinking individuals if they devoted themselves to thorough, unfettered thinking on this question (How did China get empowered? would be one of the questions) that the answers would be, necessarily, far more complex and *realistic* than what you allow.
I can, if you want, direct you to some sources for further study about the very nature of *corporations* and how inimical to the foundational Constitutional ideas is the idea, and the fact, of ‘private business tyrannies’ that are radically cut-off from proper, intellectual, ethical and moral planning and which stand outside of the domain of control, and which advocate for restraint from most or all controls. But wouldn’t this be a case of ‘bringing the horse to water that the horse has a fixed will not to drink’? There is a whole, wide conversation to be had here and no one is home to have it!
I always think of Gloucester:
I have no way, and therefore want no eyes.
It is so sad to me that adult, responsible men show themselves blind and without a way at every turn. You are your culture’s leaders?
God help us.
You’re doing it, again.
Yes, we’re too stupid. Got it.
I guess you must be right. If you do not understand, and refuse to consider, the most important political and philosophical concern of the Founders (power and its abuse essentially), enunciated in everything they thought & wrote, and if you refuse to bring this forward in what you perceive and think about our present, then I suppose, with regret and sadness, that I will have to agree with you.
You especially then: a dull bulb in a dim hallway.
How does that work for you? 🙂
Yes, we’re too stupid. Got it.
This is one of the unique and salient features. Here I speak of a class: the educated class of America. Professionals, those with above-average capacity to understand (or who should have that capacity). Those who are literate enough to express views that seem coherent. What I notice is that you-plural assume that you have the proper and necessary perspective. You believe — axiomatically — that you *reside in truth* and that your perspectives and ideas are the right ones.
You assume the role of telling ‘the democrats’ [this is a glyph-word and is very complex] and the various ideological under-classes — these are the ‘idiots’ to which Jack refers, and it is used as a valid term of discourse, indeed as a sociological term, and thus all of you are free to designate who is and who is not an *ideot*) — that what they think and believe is *wrong*. You give yourself the rôle of correcting a Grand Them . . .
. . . but this critical lens is NEVER turned on your own self. You are incapable of self-critical analysis. Mostly what is done on this blog is to 1) share complaining and 2) share your *agreements* about the justification of your complaints. But there is little trenchant historical analysis, and absolutely ZERO causal considerations.
An *idiot* (in the Greek sense) is someone who goes his or her own way. In a sense it means ‘real individualist’. But what I notice is a form of *idiocy* that needs to self-correct. I write about this all the time. It is one of the bases of my idea-set.
And it is this that is utterly intolerable to you, and sometimes I think to a you-plurality. You lecture; you refuse to be lectured. You instruct; you refuse to be instructed.
You show what *closed-mindedness* is and how it functions destructively. Saying this — obviously! — is intolerable. Yet I say it. And I can present my arguments calmly and rationally. You cannot.
You represent *an American problem*. You are a part of the problem that clamors for cure.
From this base, you see, I can extend a critical posture in a way that you simply cannot. You screw yourself out of that possibility through an egoic arrogance. This needs to be challenged. I am merely an external messenger about this.
Excellent comment, Chris. Thank you.
I read only a few places for news and opinion, and this is the only one I check more than daily. I even follow one where the host is…. disappointing. However, their commentariat is much more adept and clever. At times twenty plus will come down hard on the blogger for idiot comments in one column, and none agreeing.
Regarding Facebook:
Your business is being damaged by Facebook suppressing your speech.,
Obviously this harms you, and I think it harms the public too, since your business mission of promoting ethics among the legal profession is clearly of public benefit. It is a reasonable assumption that this suppression is being done on political grounds, based on your criticism of Democratic Party politicians when they behave unethically. You are very far from being the biggest Facebook threat to Democratic Party politicians, which raises another reasonable assumption: that the speech of thousands of others, more important than you politically, is also being suppressed on political grounds.
The conclusion is that Facebook is right now seeking to influence the next election in favour of Democratic party politicians, by suppressing speech opposing them. It would be hard to think a worse threat to democracy, if it wasn’t for the similar political speech suppression of Twitter and Youtube, the political slanting of Google searches, the partisanship shown by the top ranks of the FBI and DoJ over the last three years, and the IRS / Tea Party scandal. Accordingly, I believe the ethical thing to do is to fight tooth and nail. Time to drum up a class action? RICO suit?
Notes:
1. I would love to see a convincing rebuttal, but I don’t expect to see one.
2. It seems clear to me that you lean Democratic, but your aversion to unethical behaviour is stronger than any party loyalty you might have. You don’t hesitate to criticise Republican Party politicians when they behave unethically. It is significant that your own political evenhandedness counts for nothing with Facebook, but it is irrelevant since partisans too should be allowed to speak.
3. It is generally accepted in politics that it is legitimate to influence elections by promoting speech that you agree with, for example through advertising, but the active suppression of speech you disagree with is a very different thing, and is not generally accepted. Here the 1st amendment sets the standard.
4. As a private company Facebook is not subject to the 1st amendment as a matter of law, but as a monopolist in terms of the public political conversation it has an ethical obligation not to take sides in that conversation.
5. It makes no difference whether the suppression of your speech is the result of an explicit decision by Facebook, or the way Facebook’s content rules and complaint system have been exploited by political activists. Facebook is responsible for the consequences of tits rules and the way it applies them.
Well done HUmble.
For Jack: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – if you setup a paypal, subscribe star, or patreon I, and no doubt many others, would subscribe. It might not pay the bills for you but it’d be pretty cool to buy you a six pack every couple weeks.
This is where language is important. The Wuhan virus is not a “flu”. During H1N1, reporting was a mess because it was a bad flu season with a rampent rare H1N1 flu on top of it. Today we have a pandemic new virus and a bad flu season. People are dying of the flu (though rarely reported), and the new coronavirus.
Influenzas are a related set of viruses with known properties that have been studied for decades. Whenever a new strain emerges, there is a standardized process to “seed” the virus and create a vaccine rapidly. Residual immuty from prior illness or vaccinations help blunt novel flu viruses.
Coronaviruses are a different class of viruses. There are no human vaccines because they are two numerous, and the vast majority only cause mild cold symptoms. Only three cause serious illness: SARS, MERS, and SARS-II (Covid19/Wuhan). These all entered in the past two decades, and research is extremely limited.
Like antibiotics against novel bacteria, antivirals against flu or malaria can attack SARS-II, potentially shortening the duration of Covid19/Wuhan illness. However, the diseases and underlying are different enough that there is no scientifically validated course of treatment to shorten the duration of illness. Most treatment is general medical support, keeping a patient stable and breathing while his immune system fights it off.
The stakes involved in the effort to fight SARS-II/Covid19/Wuhan is the prevention of the annual cold/flu season from becoming cold/flu/corona season. I am as skeptical as anyone of government overreact and apparent glee in implementing social restrictions. Given all the hype and self-serving coverage, it is critical to accurately describes the illness and underlying virus. Calling it a “flu” just because it rhymes with “Wuhan” just muddies the waters.
For someone waxing poetic about the lack of cohesion in referring to the malady in question, it might behoove you to pick a single name for it. Instead of referring to as “The Wuhan Virus”, “SARS II”, “Covid19”, “Wuhan”, or the “Wuhan Illness” as fancy strikes.
Meanwhile. I don’t care. I’m going to quote Mike Lee who spoke in opposition to the senators who were trying to argue that attaching the word “milk” to almond milk confused consumers who had really meant to buy some sweet, sweet cow juice and were hoodwinked by marketing trickery;
“No one buys almond milk under the false illusion that it came from a cow, They buy almond milk specifically because it didn’t come from a cow.”
No one who isn’t prepared to guzzle fish tank cleaner is going to be fooled into thinking this disease is more or less serious than it is by calling it a flu, similar to how no one was confused by the interchangeability of SARS and “The Swine Flu”.
My best friend’s wife has been sick for 5 days. Yesterday, she went to an emergency room here in Brooklyn. The workers there weren’t testing for Covid 19. They told all of the patients to assume that if they feel sick, they have the virus. She said that, to her surprise, the ER wasn’t particularly crowded, they saw her quickly and they did run other tests on her — oxygen levels and chest x-rays for pneumonia — so I assume the problem is a shortage of Covid 19 tests. New York City reported about 5,000 new cases of Covid 19 yesterday but the real numerator is obviously much higher.
I hope the credibility of the phrase “listen to the experts,” or the even stupider, “follow the science” takes a worldwide beating because of this.
“The experts” and “the science” have been fantastically wrong over and over again.
-The Chinese scientists and “experts” lied and said that the virus couldn’t transmit from person to person,
-Then the WHO experts lied by repeating China’s lies,
-then OUR experts, without skepticism, “listened to the experts” at WHO and underestimated the danger.
-Then the media “listened to the experts” and told us that the flu was worse and that concern about the coronavirus was racist.
-Then they told us to “listen to the science” as they quoted “experts” who claimed that travel bans don’t work, just because Trump instituted a travel ban and Orange Man Bad (and ignored the more plentiful and credible experts who would have pointed out that travel bans DO work,)
-Then our political “experts” in New York told you to go eat in Chinatown and stand in parades to prove you’re not a racist.
-Then our health experts and scientists lied to you about the effectiveness of masks (but it was for your own protection!)
-Then a parade of experts lied through the media, claiming the “trump pills” were unsafe or wouldn’t work, just to stick it to Trump, at a time when good news about a legitimate potential treatment would have been nice for the country,
-Now they’re all pointing fingers and lying about how whoever they want you to hate COULD’VE ACTED SOONER BUT DIDN’T, and please ignore all of our previous statements in which we are guilty of that very thing.
For the last time, SCIENCE IS NOT TRUTH. SCIENCE IS NOT A SET OF FACTS. It’s a process, which, if done correctly, helps us find truth. And for it to even work, each individual involved in the process has to be honest, unbiased, and careful. And even then, the results might not hold up.
Our media is supposed to help us sort through all of this and get up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive information, including being honest and telling us if there is simply no scientific or “expert” consensus yet. Instead they’re just sniffing like pigs for truffles to catch and amplify anything said by any EXPERT or a SCIENTIST that might make their biases look good at that particular moment, making every story about themselves and their stunning bravery and continual rightness. Then they sit back and enjoy the thousands of clicks, likes, and shares, and learn absolutely nothing when most of it turns out to have been wrong and harmful two weeks later.
I missed out bashing the WHO, who have effectively acted as an arm of the Chinese propaganda machine for the last four months. America, especially, but the rest of the world too, will have to re-evaluate their relationship the the WHO over the coming years. This organization took every opportunity to zig where it should have zagged, and every instance of moving in the wrong direction was to the benefit of the Chinese bullshit machine. Their job was to be a non-partisan, human welfare oriented, medical organization, but they spent most of their time carrying water for one of the most brazenly inhumane administrations on planet Earth.
As an aside, China is still saying that there hasn’t been a Wuhan Flu death in the country for weeks, but there are all kinds of deaths being reported out of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Is that China admitting that HK and Taiwan aren’t part of China?