kerravonsen | Pestilence and Karma

I've just discovered that murder hornets are a thing. Didn't realise before probably because it's a US thing and not an Australian thing. But... really... I can't help thinking of the plagues of Egypt. The count is rising...

Fire
Plague (aka pandemic)
Insect pests (murder hornets, not locusts)

Ah, looks like I'm not the only one to make the connection. I like this take on it.

Thing is, a lot of the stuff going on now is a case of "what goes around, comes around".

The bushfires in Australia in January: global warming. Which is man-made.
Covid19: forget the ridiculous rumour that it was made in a lab; this is, like Ebola, like Swine Flu, like Bird Flu, like Mad Cow Disease... a disease that jumped from animals to humans. (See Americapox: the missing plague for a more in-depth discussion about what conditions are required to create plagues). The practice, in China, of having "wet markets" (public markets where live animals are sold and slaughtered at the market) makes the likelihood of animal-to-human disease-jumping higher. Which means it isn't terribly surprising that China has been the source of more than one dangerous disease in recent history.
What is happening in the USA now... there's a whole lot of karma coming home to roost. Lack of public health care; the attitude of shoot-first-and-don't-ask-anything (from the gun lobby AND from the government); the glorification of individual rights to the detriment of community safety; and the pernicious racism (which is leading to protest marches all over the world, which is going to pretty much guarantee a second wave of Covid19 spread).

The strangeness of a global pandemic is that it isn't the Apocalypse that the extremist preppers/survivalists signed up for; it isn't the Apocalypse that SciFi writers wrote about. Instead of rugged macho individualists murdering their neighbours with impunity (in the name of self-defence), we have people staying at home making sourdough bread. It is a feminine Apocalypse: solved by kindness, cooperation, and baking. We've had the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror(ism)", but trying to frame this as a "war" is doomed to failure. At least, framing it as a modern war is. World War II had the Blitz, and it is more that kind of spirit that we need; endurance, cooperation, holding fast, and making do. And, indeed, there are many who are showing that kind of spirit: let us not forget that.

Current Mood: pensive

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From:

tree_and_leaf

Sidenote: that's not what "Wet markets" actually means. A wet market is a market that sells perishable food, i.e. meat, vegetables, etc, as opposed to dry markets, which sell non-perishables. There are plenty of 'wet markets' in Western countries. The problem is live animal markets...

From:

kerravonsen

The wikipedia article I link to did say that the term is also used for live animal markets.

From:

thewayne

Arizona, where most of my friends live, is already massively spiking with over 500 new cases a day. Banner Health, the major hospital chain in Phoenix, went to 125% critical care beds and I think they're already at that capacity. No ventilators available. And this is from "Re-opening the State!" a month ago.

And they have had a couple of shootings during shutdown.

From:

kerravonsen

Reminds me of the heartbreaking stories from Italy earlier this year, where they were so swamped and had such limited resources that the doctors had to choose not to put the most vulnerable on ventilators, because they were the least likely to survive even with help. Tragic. So tragic. My sister-in-law pointed out that Italy was a wake-up call for us, because it was a First-World country, unlike China or Iran (who were the first two to be majorly hit).

As for George Floyd... can you explain to me why the US didn't learn from the previous THREE TIMES a black man was choked to death by a cop? (I was aware of Eric Garner, but not the others until I checked Wikipedia). I can hypothesise that they were all treated as "isolated incidents" rather than a systemic problem, since that's what has happened every time someone has gone on a gun-murder spree in the US (unlike here, where we actually did something about it after the Port Arthur massacre). But the gun-murder spree problem in the US is linked to your history with "the right to bear arms" so it has a lot of cultural baggage associated with it that would need to be cleared away first. But cops killing blacks has nothing to do with the gun lobby as far as I can see. Is it just pure racism, or what?

Yeah, racism is really hard to eradicate, I know. We have problems with it here too. But I get the impression that our black deaths have all been due to police negligence rather than police brutality, which makes it not such dire problem. Still a problem, true.

The only other factor I can think of in regard to police brutality in the US as opposed to here is that our police force is structured differently; I gather that you guys have your police organised by county/city while ours are organised by state, but I'm not sure why that would make a difference. Well, I suppose that would contribute to the tendency to consider it an isolated problem, since people could say "well, it's a problem in Minneapolis but not in Seattle, so we'll ignore it".

From:

thewayne

I worked for a police dept for nine years, as a civilian doing IT, back in the ‘90s. We had a chokehold death while I was there, cop accidentally hit the vagus nerve, triggered a heart attack and the black man died. Major retraining, dept-wide. But we were trying very hard to do community-based policing. We had bicycle cops, especially downtown, who couldn’t wear bullet-proof vests because of the heat, and they responded to shooting incidents same as regular patrols.

I just read an excellent article in The Atlantic about what foreign police depts could teach the USA about policing, I was especially impressed with Germany. It takes 2.5-4 YEARS to become a cop in Germany! Heck of a difference compared to 4-6 months or whatever is now the standard over here.

Yes, our police depts are completely independent, organized at the lowest level on up. Very limited oversight. In Arizona, they at least had statewide-standardized training for recruits, for whatever that’s worth.

From:

kerravonsen

That's interesting about Germany's police training! Sounds like it takes the same amount of time as a proper degree. Your comment about length of time training police in the USA made me check what Victoria Police do: it's a seven-month course, looks like a pretty intensive one, though. I guess the fact that it's uniform across the state is a positive thing, though. Because if, say, the police need re-training for some reason or other, it will be done statewide, not just in tiny isolated spots.

What's the role of the National Guard? I don't think we have anything similar.

From:

thewayne

If I ever go back to Germany, I'd really like to spend some time with a police unit talking about how they do things. Yes, it strikes me as more of a 'degree program' profession, which I completely respect. I think police departments could improve things if they adopted barracks and kept the recruits in a completely controlled environment during a longer training program, but what do I know.

The National Guard is an interesting thing. So, we have our military, whch has multiple branches: Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Air Force, and now, Space Force. The Air Force didn't exist until after World War II, it was the Army Air Corps at that time. The Marines are sort of part of the Navy, and the Navy has its own air wing. After you serve in the military, I think unless you're on a psych/medical/disabled discharge, you're subject to recall. There's something called The Reserves, and I'm not sure exactly how that fits into the National Guard thing, so maybe we should just ignore it. But people who served a hitch in the military are subject to recall in a time of need, i.e. war. National Guard is state-run military units. They have the organizational mapping, ranks, and equipment - though maybe not quite as new - as full military. Each state may not have the full range of service branches, for example, Arizona doesn't have a NG Navy unit as it's a land-locked state, but it might have a Coast Guard unit as it does have rivers and lakes, I don't know. The most common is Army because everyone has land and roads that you can drive big trucks on and that you can play soldier on. When you sign up, you're signing a binding contract, just like enlisting in the military. You get a medical exam, you go through training for whatever specialty you're trying to get in to. Lots of testing. Eventually you're assigned in to units. I don't think the duration of training is the multiple months of army boot camp, for example, but it's still pretty rigorous. And you're required to show up one weekend a month for service, and I think it's one or two weeks a year for longer, more intensive activation drills. And you're subject to call-out when problems happen, usually tornadoes, flooding, earthquakes, disasters like that. And it is a job, you get paid for your activations. And your employer is required by law to give you time off for your weekends, weeks, and activations. You keep uniforms and such at home, but no weapons - those are all locked up at the armory that you report to. It's also quite possible that your specialty doesn't require a weapon: at the police department, we had at least 2:1 civilians to sworn officers, I believe the army is a higher ratio than that. And in the Air Force, it's only the officers that fly the planes and fight, they're completely dependent on the enlisted guys!

True story: my wife had a guy working on her telescope back in the early days, big trouble. Problem was, he made it past probation, so he was hard to fire. And he was former military who joined the nat'l guard. So he was constantly screwing with the work schedule. The schedule is done on a quarterly basis, and people either schedule travel and vacations around it, or submit requests in advance of the schedule being done. Not this guy. He'd wait until the schedule was final and published and "I can't work that weekend, that's a Guard weekend", and the schedule would have to be redone to accommodate him. Then one day a Colonel from the NM State Guard called the observatory. "WHY AREN'T YOU LETTING SO-AND-SO OFF WORK TO REPORT TO GUARD EVENTS! YOU'RE REQUIRED BY LAW TO LET HIM OFF WORK!" "Oh, dear Colonel. Come up to the observatory and let's have a nice, long, friendly meeting." My wife doesn't delete emails. She had the perfect email trail of her soliciting staff for when they needed time off before making the next quarterly schedule, the schedule being posted, and then this jerk saying he needed X weekend off for Guard. And then he wasn't showing up for Guard events. The Colonel was very happy with the meeting and the pile of papers he left with, because it gave him all the power he needed to write up the jerk for not attending Guard events, and much worse, lying to a superior officer by saying that his employer was not giving him time off work. Thereafter he was very specific, in advance, about what weekends and weeks he needed off for Guard events. Not that he lasted much longer at the observatory.

$kerravonsen: (fractal2)$

From:

kerravonsen

Hmmm, your National Guard sounds a bit like our Army Reserves -- though it isn't state-based, it's national. Reserves sign up, get trained, and periodically do weekends and such, and are subject to be called up as required. So it does sound very similar. But they aren't a separate force, they're part of the national military as far as I can tell. Whereas we hear on the news from the US that "the National Guard has been called in" when there's various emergencies, and it wasn't really clear whether they were police-like or military-like.

From:

thewayne

The Guard is state-based because we have this strong "state's rights" thing over here. There's also a concept of the states being "the incubator of democracy" and sometimes the states would experiment with laws and concepts that sometimes would become a national item. And a governor could call them out in the event of an emergency before the Feds could get their thumb out of their butt (excuse the imagery). :-) We also have Police Reserves and Sheriff Reserves in some places, similar ideas: civilians who sometimes work as regular law enforcement and can be called in when needed. Police are strictly city/town, sheriffs are county. We also have state police which are more like highway patrol. Sheriffs are usually tasked with law enforcement outside of city limits and in unincorporated areas (small towns) that don't have their own law enforcement. For example, the town that I'm in is legally identified as a village, town of 800, does not have 24/7 police. The county sheriffs do regular traffic enforcement and our 911 emergency calls go to the sheriff's dispatch because they know if our police are working or if they need to radio one of their guys.

From:

kerravonsen

No wonder I see in many US police dramas, people squabbling about jurisdiction... that's very fragmented.
There isn't much of a thing about states rights here (there is a teeny bit, but not much). And with six states and two territories, it wouldn't be as fragmented anyway.