Progressives (Liberals)

Surging anti-Asian hate crimes being tracked during coronavirus pandemic: "Things are getting very physical"

USA! USA!! USA!!!

Somebody needs to "get physical" with them, sho nuff.

To fight a pandemic, governments are erecting barriers to the movement of people and goods unlike anything seen since the end of World War II. In some ways, the new barriers are even tighter. America’s borders with Canada and Mexico remained open during the war, but they are closed now.

These interventions have been introduced as temporary measures. Globalization is suspended only for the duration, governments insist. But if we are not very careful now, during the crisis, the duration will extend itself indefinitely.

In the crisis, even the ideal of global cooperation is dying. The Trump administration did not consult with European allies—if allies remains the right word—before effectively suspending transatlantic air travel. The German government accused the Trump administration of trying to gain exclusive rights to Germany’s vaccine research, again without consultation. France and Germany forbade the export of protective medical gear to Italy. Hungary and Poland unilaterally closed their borders.

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A fenced-off world will be a poorer world. But the economic costs are the least of the dangers ahead. A fenced-off world will also be a more mutually suspicious world, a world more prone to conflict. Perversely, it will also be a world more exposed to pandemic disease, because a fenced-off world will also be a world of diminished cooperation and censored information. If China had been a freer country, the ruling regime would not have been able to suppress the news of the outbreak as long as it did. Free and independent media are among the most important tools of disease prevention. Yet in the direction we are moving, authoritarian governments are trying to use the pandemic to assert greater control over the media. Trump obviously would like to do so, if he could.

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But of course, there was no multilateral response. The Trump administration has poisoned American relationships with almost every historical U.S. ally, to the point where it’s a question whether these relationships can still meaningfully be described as alliances at all. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo conceives of leadership as barking orders at other countries, and then complaining on Fox News when his orders are disregarded. The American approach to the coronavirus has been nearly as dishonest and selfish as China’s own. Trump-led America is not even trying to cooperate with former partners; by now, it’s doubtful that the former partners would trust an offer of cooperation if it were extended. [What happened to his offer to help North Korea? Haven't heard much more about that, have we.]

Trump and his media partners at Fox News have recently pivoted from denying the crisis to blaming it on China. They want Americans to call the coronavirus the “Chinese virus.” Their motive is obvious: to shift blame from a negligent president onto sinister foreigners. (Trump and Fox’s preference for “Chinese virus” over “China virus” subtly shifts the blame from the state of China to Chinese people, including people of Chinese descent living in the United States.)

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Amid the devastation of the Second World War, Secretary of State Cordell Hull looked backward at the path to ruin. “Nationalism,” he said, “run riot between the last war and this war, defeated all attempts to carry out indispensable measures of international economic and political action, encouraged and facilitated the rise of dictators, and drove the world straight toward the present war."

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Quote:

The Coronavirus Is Demonstrating the Value of Globalization

To fight a pandemic, governments are erecting barriers to the movement of people and goods unlike anything seen since the end of World War II. In some ways, the new barriers are even tighter. America’s borders with Canada and Mexico remained open during the war, but they are closed now.

These interventions have been introduced as temporary measures. Globalization is suspended only for the duration, governments insist. But if we are not very careful now, during the crisis, the duration will extend itself indefinitely.

David Frum, heh.

Coronavirus: The European Union Unravels

Faced with an existential threat, EU member states, far from joining together to confront the pandemic as a unified bloc, instinctively are returning to pursuing the national interest. After years of criticizing U.S. President Donald J. Trump for pushing an "America First" policy, European leaders are reverting to the very nationalism they have publicly claimed to despise.

Ever since the threat posed by coronavirus came into focus, Europeans have displayed precious little of the high-minded multilateral solidarity that for decades has been sold to the rest of the world as a bedrock of European unity. The EU's unique brand of soft power, said to be a model for a post-national world order, has been shown to be an empty fiction.

In recent weeks, EU member states have closed their borders, banned exports of critical supplies and withheld humanitarian aid. The European Central Bank, the guarantor of the European single currency, has treated with unparalleled disdain the eurozone's third-largest economy, Italy, in its singular hour of need. The member states worst affected by the pandemic — Italy and Spain — have been left by the other member states to fend for themselves

The European Union, seven decades in the making, is now unravelling in real time — in weeks. After the dust of the coronavirus pandemic settles, the EU's institutions will almost certainly continue to operate as before. Too much political and economic capital has been invested in the European project for European elites to do otherwise. However, the EU's attraction as a post-national model for its own citizens, much less for the rest of the world, will have passed.

France. On March 3, France confiscated all protective masks made in the country. "We will distribute them to healthcare professionals and to French people affected by the coronavirus," French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter. On March 6, the French government forced Valmy SAS, a face mask manufacturer near Lyon, to cancel an order for millions of masks placed by the UK's National Health Service.

Germany, March 4. Germany banned the export of medical protective equipment such as safety glasses, respiratory masks, protective coats, protective suits and gloves. On March 7, the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that German customs authorities were preventing a Swiss truck carrying 240,000 protective masks from returning to Switzerland, which is not a member of the EU.

Centers for Disease and Health Control Director Robert Redfield said Friday that China originally claimed the coronavirus was not contagious between humans before the virus caused a global pandemic.

“That led to the situation we’re in today. No one could have predicted how transmissive, how infectious this virus really is.”

"Obviously that became corrected as they saw in the first three,four weeks of January that human-to-human spread was not only occurring, it’s actually as I said more infectious,” Redfield said.

A whole 300, Walt!? I guess those 300 sneaked into Germany before they could be diagnosed, eh?

Besides that: EU-citizens can't "sneak" into another EU-country.

I question those poll results. Progressives LIKE it when Americans are killed. That's why the progressive response immediately after 9/11 was to say that America deserved it.

How is that working for you? It allows terrorists to move around, known or unknown terrorists.