The USA definitely does not. I'm starting to wonder if "not knowing what we want" will be the root cause for the end of American hegemony.
We entered 2 wars without clarity on what it would mean to win. This was the #1 post-mortem on Iraq and Afghanistan from basically every general involved over 15 years: they never had mission clarity.
On the back of that tough lesson, we immediately entered a trade war with zero clarity on what it would mean to win.
And before we could learn the lesson a third time we're now up against a pandemic and apparently can't decide what it means for us to win.
I'm starting to wonder if "not knowing what you want" is even worse than wanting something dumb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov
https://www.economist.com/europe/2013/05/11/an-ideologues-ex...
The long-term goal of the trade war with China is... QoL that costs low six figure salaries plus a pension and union protection for every high school grad in the midwest willing to work in a factory, even as the rest of the world surpasses us in labor productivty. In other words, a literal pipe dream.
We always have some pipe dream. We just never have an actual sober-minded mission with realistic expectations.
Maybe America needs a war on the drug of American exceptionalism. idk. I know war is always the answer, though. :-\
If we weren't drunk on exceptionalism, we would be containing the virus and we would have a Manhattan project-level investment in vaccine research. We don't. Calling a spade a spade literally sounds like trolling these days.
This has never been the goal of the United states
US Presidents typically have a lot of problems with democracies/democratic movements in Iran, Venezuela, Haiti, Egypt etc but very much liked the dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador.
I judge governments and people by their actions and not their words.
Maybe not the best way to phrase that these days.
Until the 20th century phrase had exclusively the meaning I always thought it had, and that meaning dates back to the 1500s (spade = gardening tool).
In the 1920s some people started using "spade" to mean "person with dark-toned skin" (because spades are black in a deck of cards, so spade the gardnening tool => spade the suit in a deck of cards => poc). I've never heard "spade" used like that before, and the article suggests that use of "spade" remains fairly esoteric, but it's apparently in wide enough use that dictionaries have picked up on this meaning.
The article doesn't ever establish that the phrase itself is used as a double entendre. In a quick saerch, I can't find any in-the-wild uses of "Call a spade a spade" that evoke the double meaning.
TBH I think the article's advice is sound but also extremely jaded ("Rather than taking the chance of unintentionally offending someone or of being misunderstood, it is best to relinquish the old innocuous proverbial expression all together"). I'll stop using the phrase, but doing so feels like assuming the worst of my interlocutors' intelligence and intent.
Does that really sound like a conspiracy theory now we know that the regime deliberately and knowingly lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction?
If you think that possible then perhaps the "long-term goal" wasn't really what the liars were lying at the time? There are those who believer endless war was the precise goal. There hasn't been a lot of anti-corruption impetus in washington since that distraction was launched - save for Trump pretending he was anti-corruption at the last minute before the lasrt election. That last minute inspiration might have won it for him too.
Anyway if you have an unclear goal you can just move the goalposts and declare success, which is the kind of the point, right? And why the goals are unclear because otherwise America might lose and you'd be the loser president.
Out of interest how do Americans feel about the Vietnam war? Did America lose that war?
Pretty sure of all of most of that for both, though not the same parts for Iraq and Afghanistan. The political imperative for Afghanistan after 9/11 is pretty unmistakable. The long-term neocon objective with Iraq also was unmistakable. There's also pretty solid indication that factions I. The Administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to execute the latter but were delayed by the political imperative for the former.
> Does that really sound like a conspiracy theory now we know that the regime deliberately and knowingly lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Yes, the ascriptions of the motives cited to both Afghanistan and Iraq still sounds like a conspiracy theory. And I’m not sure what you mean by “now that we know”; that the claims were being advanced were false and that the administration had the information which showed them to be false was widely reported in the major media at the time the claims were made.
> If you think that possible then perhaps the "long-term goal" wasn't really what the liars were lying at the time?
No, but in the case of Iraq, it's what the leading figures of the neocon movement were telling the truth about the desires for right up to the moment the whole gang became the defense and foreign policy apparatus (and hyper-empowered VP) of the Bush 43 administration.
> There are those who believer endless war was the precise goal.
“There are those who believe” is not an argument that makes your position sound less like a conspiracy theory.
> There hasn't been a lot of anti-corruption impetus in washington since that distraction was launched
There wasn't a lot in the two decades before that, either. So unless the distraction was as effective backwards in time as forwards, I don't think it was really a significant factor.
> Out of interest how do Americans feel about the Vietnam war? Did America lose that war?
Most recognize that we lost the war; there are those who cling to loudly propounding the fact that we militarily defeated the VC before the NVA took over the main fighting as if that somehow negates losing the war.
Without that, then we shouldn't be too worried about getting the disease as long as we keep transmission rates low enough so hospitals don't get overwhelmed. But if some people end up with long-term respiratory issues after contracting the disease, now there's a reason to keep people from getting it, period, regardless of hospital capacity.
But it would be nice to hear these goals actually articulated by public health officials. I'm not sure if my above paragraph is actually what any public health officials are thinking or are worried about (I'm just guessing), but it would be nice to know, because I agree with you that there seems to be a lack of "goal clarity" at this point.
That is, we want to minimize infections, just not at all costs (to society/economy/...). And similarly, we want to minimize impact on society/economy/..., just not at all cost (to health).
Keep in mind that every infection bears a risk for long time health impact or short term (death), no matter if a hospital bed is available or not.
Finding this compromise is a matter of opinion and therefore a political question. It's not as easy and black-and-white to formulate as it would be to say whether we do 1 or 2.
Eradication in the US seems unreasonable, and just keeping hospitals less than overflowing not enough.
Keeping it under control but not eradicated means averaging exactly 1 over time, which seems like a much harder balancing act.
Focusing on the rate as the metric of attention seems very much like the right thing to be at the center of public policy.
Just put the control rods - I mean open restaurants - on a control loop driven by number of number of hospitalizations.
Helps if you have prompt and delayed transmission modes, so you can regulate at the slower speed.
I'm not saying it's not achievable. Just that you need to evaluate if it is achievable before you focus on it and it certainly doesn't seem like its "obvious" that it is to me.
Not surprising after COVID burned through their population (quarantine or not) the case numbers have subsided. If anything NYC demonstrates that quarantine was entirely ineffective, and that the biggest mistake was not focusing on protecting the people actually at risk.
The most interesting takeaway from COVID is that “both sides” were right. It is much more deadly than an average flu (for the elderly) and also much less deadly than the average flu (for those under 50).
Are you serious? How do you even come up with misinformation like this and not even bother to back anything up with any sources? How do you seriously look at the case charts and pretend like going from 10k cases/day to 500 cases/day was an inevitable outcome resulting from burning through nursing homes? It would be funny if it weren't completely insulting to their herculean efforts in containing everything when so much of the rest of the country is going in the opposite direction. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronav...
1) NY has the highest cases per capita and death rate per capita in the country. [1] [2] This is what I mean by burned through their population. Serology estimates about 20% of NYC population was infected. [3]
2) NY’s policy blunder in shipping COVID positive patients into nursing homes is well documented. [4]
#2 did not lead to #1, nor did I claim it did.
Their “herculean efforts” to contain COVID notwithstanding, NY is in the process of phased reopening, just like pretty much everyone else.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109004/coronavirus-covi...
[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109004/coronavirus-covi...
[3] - https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/amid-ongoing-covid-19-pande...
[4] - https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/ap-count-4300-virus-...
Most places just aren't being transparent. Wearing a mask has turned into a political or moral statement without being driven by a goal. Leaders aren't really selling any goals, though CDC / various health departments probably have goals, the technical details are not being communicated. Instead all you see is vague information and seemingly arbitrary action from leaders and virtue signaling from the population.
In Trump-led America, I think the goal is pretty obviously positive political outcomes for Trump. CDC and others might have goals but I haven't seen them.
Part of the problem is people are generally so stupid about failure that any goal setting sets you up to be a target for people angry about not meeting your goal or not setting an aggressive enough goal so being vague is seen as the best strategy, even though I think it leads to the sort of "fake news" vs "moral crusade" problem.
Eradication seems possible when there's a small number of cases, and effective border control (being an island nation helps a lot). In the US it's going to be difficult to eradicate, because people can move about the country easily and the case load is high.
I haven't looked at other states, but Washington state has fairly clear metrics for opening restrictions at a county level. We'll see how well that works, I guess. Other states will be doing their own thing, as well as other countries, and maybe we can figure out which methods are more or less effective and either switch or know for next time.
They probably expected to see light at the end of the tunnel last month, like other countries. Now, maybe next year?
We are not being treated by robots and the longer the pandemic lasts the more healthcare professionals suffering (physically and mentally) we will see, the more churn we will get and less care capacity we will have...
I think rather than it being "unclear" to policy makers, it's rather that there's a short-term economic imperative to go for 3), or if not, then 2), while 1) upfronts economic cost. This means that while the general desire might be to go for 1) from an ethical/expert/academic-advice perspective, policy makers are doing their best to hedge (while not wanting to appear as if they are).
What other country do you think of that doesn't have clarity?
I agree, and with the recent outbreak, I don't think it's possible, at least not for China. New Zealand has a shot at it.
If vaccines will also be available in ‘waves’ as they are produced, then that must mean testing is some kind of a prerequisite to know who to give the vaccine to that needs it most - and who also may already be immune from exposure?
It seems like the total cases —> 0 option is virtually unattainable in the near term (probably into 2021). Maybe with more cases being reported, we are aiming for 2) but actually going through 3).
1) we want to eradicate the virus from our population => total cases matter and should be 0 sometime soon, I think that was and is China’s goal
2) we don’t try to eradicate the virus, but we want to keep the stress on the health system manageable => total cases don’t matter that much, bed capacity is the relevant indicator. This seems to be the goal of the “flatten the curve” thinking
3) we don’t care that much, let the virus spread like wildfire so we will have herd immunity asap => I am not sure, but from outside it seems like Brazil is trying to do this
I think the reason you and I are confused is because it’s seems to be unclear if we are trying to achieve 1) or 2). It’s not communicated. Maybe it’s unclear to policy makers, too.