The World Health Organization called it the new coronavirus “massive infodemics”. Social Media abundance of information as well as usual allowing amplifying of disinformation and misinformation to spread and flourish helping fueling anxiety and racism online and in real life against people of Asian origin. This is scary. There were physical attacks and verbal abuse of people of Asian origin not only in the US but also in Europe as well. Racism in the West often involved physical harm as well mental injury or worse. I think we should stop getting our information from social media and get it instead from reliable, trusted, highly factual and respected mainstream media sources and organizations like the World Health Organization (www.who.org) and Center for Disease Control and Prevention.(www.cdc.gov ) To gain accurate and factual information of the issue and situation. Information is key here against xenophobic and racist behavior.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/20/us/coronavirus-racist-attacks-against-asian-americans/index.html
New Coronavirus Disease Officially Named COVID-19 By The World Health Organization.
"The new coronavirus disease that was first identified in Wuhan has received an official name from the World Health Organization: “COVID-19.”
“As weeks went by, people began calling it “Wuhan virus.” But that’s a problematic label. World Health Organization guidelines for naming infectious diseases, issued in 2015, discourage names that refer to specific places, people and professions, aiming to avoid negative repercussions from stigmatizing a geographic area or a population group.”
What you need to know about coronavirus
“What began with a handful of mysterious illnesses in a vast central China city has traveled the world, jumping from animals to humans and from obscurity to international headlines. First detected on the last day of 2019, the novel coronavirus has infected tens of thousands of people — within China’s borders and beyond them — and has killed more than 2,500. It has triggered unprecedented quarantines, stock market upheaval and dangerous conspiracy theories.” Please visit www.cdc.gov (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) and www.who.org (World Health Organization) websites for authoritative information and updates. Information such as the sign and symptoms of COVID 19, transmission, prevention and treatment, what the public should do, what to do if you are sick with COVID 19, when and how to use mask, mythbusters, Q and A about COVID 19 etc.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/02/28/what-you-need-know-about-coronavirus/?arc404=true
White racism really is disgusting issue it shows in various forms, names.and ideology. This is happening over and over again with no end in sight. The perpetrators of individual and systemic racism should be asking of themselves what is wrong with our tribe? Why we keep on doing this? Why we keep on oppressing the “others”? Why we keep on killing people? They creatively always find ways and means to always blame the "“others”, This white “privilege” to do harm in many forms and means is nauseating. We read and see enough of the monstrous consequences of these to people they called the “others”. Open expression of racism, bigotry and intolerance are now more frequent and belligerent. Hate crimes and hate groups.are increasing. Those perpetrators of racism and those who benefit of racist policies should ask themselves what are your remedies or solutions that your tribe must do to decrease racism? To change your lives and especially the lives of the “others”.
Tribalism unfortunately isn’t a monopoly held by Europeans. How people treated gays during the AIDS crisis. How Chinese Han might treat Vietnamese, or how Burmese might treat Karen people (let along Rohingya), etc. Even Pinoys with Han Chinese in this COVID-19 crisis.
Yes, white racism is reprehensible and unacceptable, but it’s also misleading if we don’t take a step back for the bigger picture at play too.
Here’s a reflection on writings about the plague in 1630 Milan and the danger of foreigners, among other common human habits in a disease crisis:
When we begin to see how universal and how deeply human these reactions are, they give us a much better perspective of what we are really dealing with.
True, it’s more of a Homo Sapiens thing rather than just “white supremacy”, whoever of us is superior in a context seems to exhibit it. It has been quite universal, across times and cultures.
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one.
Us. Homo Sapiens.
– From Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Sapiens”.
He’s also followed it up with “Homo Deus”, our possible future. Homo Sapiens may become the oppressed as a few among us upgrade to a much superior hybrid cyborg species.
Lol! Probably headed by Elon Musk. (Neuralink, OpenAI, SpaceX…). Or, maybe not… things are dicey.
Yes I agree @greg and @learner2020 tribalism is not only the monopoly of white people but the degree and extent of white tribalism from colonization to nazism, neo nazis, white supremacist just some of the examples far exceeds that of other tribes.
Looking at history (mostly told by “white men”) from early scientific revolution (say, Galileo onwards), industrial revolution (steam engine), colonialism/imperialism, the Federal Reserve Act in the US in 1913, and the rest of the history since then, you can see how the early dominance of “white men” led to “them” (the greedier of the lot especially) ruling and ruining the world.
But like the ignorance and bias in the racist attacks this topic is about, blaming the debacles of modern times on a blanket group of “white men” would be like Hitler blaming the Jews. It’s simply the case that everywhere we look, there has been a dominance of “white men” at least since the times I mentioned above. It doesn’t mean there are no smart individuals or no innovations or no instances of tribalism in people belonging to other races. Some of us just got the early mover advantage, and the winner-take-all/long tail distributions of power followed - it has been particularly stark since the Internet because it accelerated the interactions happening across the globe. If another race had gotten that early mover advantage, we would be talking about the tyranny of the “asian men” or “arabic men” or “black men” etc.
EDIT1: Perhaps this discussion points to the utter importance of correcting the bias in AI
In America white privilege and racism shaped this country so profoundly. Today open expressions of bigotry, racism and intolerance are more regular and hostile. This situation is made far less safe by people who refuse to call out racial hostility and it is rapidly growing. Minorities live them out daily. But the mainstream large part of the population of white people cannot be separated from the extreme quite so cleanly. Indeed the election of current political leaders played a crucial role in inspiring current wave of virulence racial hostility and increasing hate groups. But the central to the story was a historical sense that among white racist that white people control over america is slipping which is bonker and not true. Today their goal is to sow tension in nonwhite communities and radicalize white to lay for a groundwork for a more racist political regime and perpetuate white dominance through violent means. Its not very refreshing to think that this same people as well as their allies abroad with same goal in mind were committing mass shooting as well as other violent acts wold wide in furtherance of their goal. This is plain terrorism. Terrorist in the league of ISIS.
The coronavirus and the long history of using diseases to justify xenophobia
“Although the epicenter of the illness is in China, where tens of thousands have been affected, there have been only 15 cases in the United States as of Thursday. Still, Asians in America have been subjected to suspicion and ridicule, and not for the first time in this country’s history.”
“Outbreaks often have been attributed to marginalized groups in society, or the “other,” experts say. Asian Americans are still seen as “forever foreigners,” no matter how long they’ve lived in this country. Time and again, they have been blamed for importing diseases.”
Yes, it is strange how the “terrorist” label is only used when convenient. All acts of violence and oppression is “terrorism” - guerilla or organized, state or non-state, “us” or “them”, whatever race, religion, nationality etc
Hatred = War = Terrorism
But fear and unrest needs to be defeated with trust and peace, otherwise it only escalates into further chaos and destruction. More open dialog is urgently needed between people from all “groups”, about what our priorities need to be.
UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Capra’s comments about systems thinking and ethics can be one place to form the right kind of attitude in approaching our complex problems: https://vimeo.com/382503651
More videos: https://vimeo.com/capracourse
“The rule of the game is: never give up.” 9 March 2020.
“We are not at the mercy of this virus”, said the WHO Director-General at the 9 March media briefing.
All countries must aim to stop transmission and prevent the spread of COVID-19, whether they face no cases, sporadic cases, clusters or community transmission.
" Let hope be the antidote to fear.
Let solidarity be the antidote to blame.
Let our shared humanity be the antidote to our shared threat."
Dr.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
WHO Director-General
Coronavirus Has Become a Pandemic, W.H.O. Says
The spread of the coronavirus is now a pandemic, officials at the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.
“We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director-general.
Dr. Tedros called for countries to learn from one another’s successes, act in unison and help protect one another against a common threat.
“Find, isolate, test and treat every case, and trace every contact,” Dr. Tedros said. “Ready your hospitals. Protect and train your health care workers.”
“Let’s all look out for each other, because we’re in this together to do the right things with calm and to protect the citizens of the world.”
Although this is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus, “we also believe that this is the first pandemic that is able to be controlled,” Dr. Tedros added.
Hi all. Please keep this thread on-topic of humane technology. There are many places on the web where racism and the corona pandemic are being discussed.
I don’t think the discussion here were off topic. We cannot barricade ourselves from this consequential global event. Helping to dessiminate accurate information is important in this kind of situation. Misinformation about the COVID-19 are everywhere. The spread of false and malicious information and so much inaccurate information about the corona virus in the internet were affecting or harming peoples’ lives online and offline. I’m not really a great fan of misinformation as well as racism, racism is not really stupidity, racism is hate. Racist constantly found excuses to expound their hatred and in this backdrop of the corona virus they’ve found yet another excuses. Despite aggressive effort by twitter, google, youtube and facebook misinformation is still an uphill battle. And social media has even making efforts to point people back to reliable sources of medical information like the World Health Organization and Center for Disease Control and Prevention. People are looking for sources of good information. Why not give it to them? Facebook was even offering the World Health Organization free ad space to try and point people to accurate and useful information on the corona virus.
Yup… it’s an ongoing challenge that can have solutions in humane technology.
While awareness of Covid19 is being provided on social platforms, say by using prompts linking to WHO on twitter when one searches “coronavirus”, the fear about the virus can be a bigger risk than the direct harms of the virus, resulting in acts of misplaced hatred, posing a greater risk to our social fabric. This certainly calls for a discussion that can grow empathy and reduce fear.
