Very balanced and thoughtful interview with Corbett. Unfortunately no transcript yet available but some very sensible weighing of possibilities (including its too early to say!) Well worth the watch.
Coronavirus Pandemic: Apocalypse Now! Or exaggerated scare story?
- Thread starter wanderingthomas
- Start date
That's certainly possible, though one wonders if perhaps it was "introduced" to so many high profile people precisely for the media coverage that it would (and has) produce, ie. "Look honey, even Tom Hanks and his wife got it! And Trudeau's wife too! We can get it too - OMG!"
AzarHyun
Jedi
Plagues follow bad leadership in ancient Greek tales
Greek epics remind audiences that leaders need to be able to plan for the future based on what has happened in the past. They need to understand cause and effect.
theconversation.com
Plagues follow bad leadership in ancient Greek tales
In the fifth century B.C., the playwright Sophocles begins “Oedipus Tyrannos” with the title character struggling to identify the cause of a plague striking his city, Thebes. (Spoiler alert: It’s his own bad leadership.)
As someone who writes about early Greek poetry, I spend a lot of time thinking about why its performance was so crucial to ancient life. One answer is that epic and tragedy helped ancient storytellers and audiences try to make sense of human suffering.
From this perspective, plagues functioned as a setup for an even more crucial theme in ancient myth: a leader’s intelligence. At the beginning of the “Iliad,” for instance, the prophet Calchas – who knows the cause of a nine-day plague – is praised as someone “who knows what is, what will be and what happened before.”
This language anticipates a chief criticism of Homer’s legendary King Agamemnon: He does not know “the before and the after.”
The epics remind their audiences that leaders need to be able to plan for the future based on what has happened in the past. They need to understand cause and effect. What caused the plague? Could it have been prevented?
Zeus, the head Greek god, who lamented humans’ tendency to bring suffering upon themselves. Carole Raddato/Flickr, CC BY-SA
People’s recklessness
Myths help their audiences understand the causes of things. As narrative theorists like Mark Turner and specialists in memory like Charles Fernyhough emphasize, people learn how to behave from stories and concepts of cause and effect in childhood. The linear sequence of before, now and after communicates the relationships between things and how we, as human beings, understand our own responsibility in the world.
Plague stories provide settings where fate pushes human organization to the limit. Human leaders are almost always crucial to the causal sequence, as Zeus observes in Homer’s “Odyssey,” saying, as I’ve translated it, “Humans are always blaming the gods for their suffering / but they experience pain beyond their fate because of their own recklessness.”
The problems humans create go beyond just plagues: The poet Hesiod writes that the top Greek god, Zeus, showed his disapproval for bad leaders by burdening them with military failures as well as pandemics. The consequences of human failings are a refrain in the ancient critique of leaders, with or without plagues: The “Iliad,” for instance, describes rulers who “ruin their people through recklessness.” The “Odyssey” phrases it as “bad shepherds ruin their flocks.”
A plague in Athens. J. Fittler after M. Sweerts/Wellcome Images/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Devastating illness
Plagues were common in the ancient world, but not all of them were blamed on leaders. Like other natural disasters, they were frequently blamed on the gods.
But historians, like Polybius in the second century B.C. and Livy in the first century B.C., also frequently recount epidemics striking armies and people in swamps or cities with poor sanitation. Philosophers and physicians also searched for rational approaches – blaming the climate, or pollution.
When the historian Thucydides recounts how a plague with alleged origins in Ethiopia hit Athens in 430 B.C., he vividly describes patients suffering a sudden high fever, shortness of breath and an array of sickly discharges. Those who survived the sickness had endured such delirious fevers that they might have no memory of it all.
Athens as a state was unprepared to meet the challenge of that plague. Thucydides describes the futility of any human response: Appeals to the gods and the work of doctors – who died in droves – were equally useless. The disease wreaked havoc because the Athenians were massed within the city walls to wait out the Spartan armies during the Peloponnesian War.
Yet despite the plague’s terrible nature, Thucydides insists that the worst part was the despair people felt from fear and the “horror of human beings dying like sheep.”
Sick people died of neglect, of the lack of proper shelter and of disease spreading from improper burials in an unprepared and overcrowded city, followed by looting and lawlessness.
Athens, set up as a fortress against its enemies, brought ruin upon itself.
The Spartan general Lysander orders the walls of Athens be destroyed, as part of the Athenian capitulation to Sparta. The Illustrated History of the World/Wikimedia Commons
Making sense out of human flaws
Left out of plague accounts are the names of the multitudes who died in them. Homer, Sophocles and Thucydides tell us that masses died. But plagues in ancient narratives are usually the beginning, not the end of the story. A plague didn’t stop the Trojan War, prevent Oedipus’ sons from waging civil war or give the Athenians enough reasons to make peace.
For years after the ravages of the plague, Athens still suffered from in-fighting, toxic politics and selfish leaders. Popular politics led to the disastrous Sicilian Expedition of 415 B.C., killing thousands of Athenians – but still Athens survived.
A decade later, the Athenians again broke into civil factions and eventually prosecuted their own generals after a naval victory in 406 B.C. at Arginusae. In 404 B.C., after a siege, Sparta defeated Athens. But, as we learn from Greek myth, it was – again – really Athens’ leaders and people who defeated themselves.
Copyright © 2010–2020
The Conversation Trust (UK) Limited
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United Gnosis
Jedi Council Member
I don't see why that would be necessary. Politicians and other such public figures have a near daily regimen of hundreds of handshakes. You don't need millions of cases for them to end up with it - and they're also bound to be among the first tested.
"Pattern recognition run amok" seems to be a very cogent warning right now.
The advice to do intermittent fasting because it normalize the body, and to give this advice to people at risk was interesting.
Israel extends closure of West Bank, Gaza Strip amid coronavirus outbreak
How useful for them at this time... whats the betting these restrictions wont be lifted once the virus passes over...?
How useful for them at this time... whats the betting these restrictions wont be lifted once the virus passes over...?
None of that is required. You only need hysteria and ignorance - mostly hysteria.
When I was still a student I studied for 5 months in Estonia, in Tartu. And since then I remained on their mailing list. They didn't remove me for some reason. So today I saw that they sent the following to their students:
On one hand it is a logical precaution, because I do remember how students joked how every new semester began with a runny nose and sneezing, because students were exchanging bacteria and viruses they brought from home.
Coupled with the stress of the new semester, and many did get a mild cold. But then, this is something that happens all the time, and without dire consequences.
But obviously this time there is much more hysteria, and every normal cold will be seen as coronavirus.
On one hand it is a logical precaution, because I do remember how students joked how every new semester began with a runny nose and sneezing, because students were exchanging bacteria and viruses they brought from home.
Coupled with the stress of the new semester, and many did get a mild cold. But then, this is something that happens all the time, and without dire consequences.But obviously this time there is much more hysteria, and every normal cold will be seen as coronavirus.
AzarHyun
Jedi
Montenegro – the only tracked country in the Western Balkans with no reported cases of coronavirus
By
EWB
-
09.03.2020
BALTIMORE – According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering’s Worldometer, among the 93 countries that reported no cases of COVID-19 virus, Montenegro is the only tracked country in the Western Balkans region with no reported cases by March 9 at 1 p.m. As for other countries in the region, one case has been registered in Serbia, 2 in Albania, 3 in North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina respectively. Globally, so far there have been 111,489 registered cases in affected areas, with 3,883 deaths and 62,671 patients recovered. Worldometer coverage provides data for Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.
It is interesting that there are no infected corona viruses in Montenegro, despite the daily protests of thousands on the streets - for weeks now.
www.nytimes.com
By
EWB
-
09.03.2020
BALTIMORE – According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering’s Worldometer, among the 93 countries that reported no cases of COVID-19 virus, Montenegro is the only tracked country in the Western Balkans region with no reported cases by March 9 at 1 p.m. As for other countries in the region, one case has been registered in Serbia, 2 in Albania, 3 in North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina respectively. Globally, so far there have been 111,489 registered cases in affected areas, with 3,883 deaths and 62,671 patients recovered. Worldometer coverage provides data for Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.
It is interesting that there are no infected corona viruses in Montenegro, despite the daily protests of thousands on the streets - for weeks now.
Thousands in Montenegro March Against Religion Law
Thousands of people, led by Serbian Orthodox Church clerics, marched peacefully through the Montenegrin capital Podgorica on Saturday in protest against a law they fear will be used to target the church's assets and status.
I thought it may be because they jet around the world way more often and probably come into contact with others who jet around the world, therefore more chance of exposure. Or as Niall said, there are just many more people infected/ exposed than initially thought
I can now confirm that the toilet role crisis has come to my little town, it is just ridiculous.
Maybe with some celebrities, narcissism also plays a role. What better way to get attention than having a disease that everyone is terrified of, but which doesn't do any harm? Absolute no-brainer!
Which reminds me of probably the best solution at the moment:
artofdream
Jedi
Lock down measures see DRONES patrol streets in Italian town
and people were complaining about the measures taken in China...
source: https://www.rt.com/news/483058-italy-drone-lock-down-video
and no complains ... once we have worse back home...
and people were complaining about the measures taken in China...
source: https://www.rt.com/news/483058-italy-drone-lock-down-video
and no complains ... once we have worse back home...
Agron
Jedi Council Member
I have seen some signs that panic has come to Zagreb yesterday. First day that my local supermarket had empty shelves. Flour, eggs, water, TP etc... But you could go to a next store and find all you need.
I have caught this tho. I didnt see that this meeting was going on in Zagreb.
We will now probably start to see the roll out of all sorts of crap this fake pandemic was staged for.
I have caught this tho. I didnt see that this meeting was going on in Zagreb.
We will now probably start to see the roll out of all sorts of crap this fake pandemic was staged for.
It seems to me that at this point even if the virus was natural or released accidentally, there is now a global semi-coordinated response to it. My son's University in Texas is closing for 2 weeks (1 week added to spring break) and and then going to online instruction the week after for a yet undefined period of time. Same happening to one of my nieces that goes to a different University.
Even in Honduras, where I have family, there are closing all schools for 2 weeks. And they just had the first corona case 3 or 4 days ago
Even in Honduras, where I have family, there are closing all schools for 2 weeks. And they just had the first corona case 3 or 4 days ago