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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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It’s easy to see with hindsight what tactics worked. It’s not at all clear why different sets of tactical options were available in different countries. And it’s not clear what price was paid over preceding decades to make those options available.
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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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