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I don’t know how to feel about this 🤔
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A note from abroad: Realizing now that I've been 5 days out of US that many folks back home don't realize how other countries might be living with the 'Rona. Here is what it was like to come to Taiwan. I think we could maybe learn a coupla things... /1 #COVID
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To be clear, I mean that literally. I have no positive or negative reaction or mixed feelings. This thread is like reading a weather report from another place. Ok they have different weather there.
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In a way weather is a good analogy. Governance systems are like natural phenomena. Perhaps some are just more dangerous than others. Maybe living in a western liberal democracy is like living in an earthquake or hurricane zone. You get some nice views but you pay with risk.
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I’m wary of all monocausal simple answers like prompt government action, SARS/MERS experience, etc. Backtrack a couple of degrees from proximal causes and those simple answers turn into politics-complete (as in NP-complete) questions.
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Don’t want to let Western leaders off the hook, especially not Trump or BoJo, but it really is a full civilization stack A/B test here. It’s not path-dependent.
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I’ve had a couple of people die in my friends/family circle and that did get to me, but I’m not going to pretend I viscerally feel numbers at the 300k scale like some bodhisattva tuned in to mass suffering. At that level lines like “even one death is too many” is just posturing.
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A lot of people have gotten a lot more certain about what they already believed. I’ve only gotten systematically more doubtful. This is too complex to be simple validation for anything. It might confirm/disconfirm isolated specific beliefs but not entire world views.
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If you’ve had an entire worldview get stronger, you’re probably not paying enough attention to things. The world did not get simpler in the last year. It got more complex.
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With love, I think a lot of this is clearer than you suggest it is. There are really parsimonious explanations for a LOT of nat'l responses, assuming everyone's telling the truth, which China probably isn't, e.g. Vietnam/India probably can't (with the best will in the world).