Good vid, I like the part where he’s talking about how western governments keep vacillating back and forth between two contradictory goals: for a few weeks it’ll be health, then it’ll be the economy, then back to health, then back to the economy… just a total shitshow of a reaction to a crisis that needs a strong government response. He’s right that this will probably be the year that people look back on, when the tide really turned and showed the failure of the western style governments.
The problem is obviously that in our capitalist worldview, the economy is a vacuous entity that exists in detachment from the lives and well-being of the people. Media harps on about the economy failing but as is tradition with our discourse there is no concrete definition of these underlying assumptions (like what exactly the economy is) and it’s just passed on as truisms. By economy we mean the flow of value to the capitalist class which is antagonistic with saving lives at the moment because the economy is structured in a hyper-specialiased manner where stringent measures for preventing the spread of the virus will lead to the obstruction in the accumulation of wealth for this class and as a collateral many people in the middle of the chain will lose their livelihood.
The only moment this virus could have been contained by the West was right when it was discovered. It’s too late now to do it without causing a major overhaul in the systems of governance and economy so I don’t know how this will proceed.
If I were the anchor I wouldn’t be able to hold back a smug grin.
