America's deadly virus beyond COVID

COVID claims lives daily, even as some in our society struggle to keep this from happening. But do you wonder about why that was/is less effective than it should be? Everything from the top down leadership voids, to the bottom up response of care from our supposed "Great Society" that past President Lyndon Baines Johnson spoke of building. Perhaps we've not completely identified what's killing America along with its people.

America has been described as an experiment in government, to promote not just as an empty brand ("America!" yells a voice unresolved but heard), but as meaning in institutions, laws, traditions, and self-regard. It is these as absolutes that right America when it veers off it's course of "greatness", not that in the veering off the course it is abusing them to appear "great".

This latter view of "transactional" American experience has grown recently to deafening levels, as an expurgation of past conflicts from hundreds of years ago, like slavery. It allows past ghosts to be channeled by contemporary political advocacy, telling the rest of America they just have to accept it, because it's "here". Like COVID-19. Why?

In my article with Lynne Jolitz, "Moving Forward in 2020: Technology Investment in ML, AI, and Big Data", we point out an interesting contradiction, where AI/ML investment was totally unsuccessful in finding/enhancing "rent seeking behavior" that made billion dollar opportunities in the past. Why? Because the transactional advantage of exploiting a customer base was immediately recognized and countered by all other customer advantaging AI/ML technologies as they delivered value. In fact, all of them require these obstacles to be removed to return their customer advantaging value proposition, because it's otherwise impossible to function for benefit.

In other words, the next wave of technology's intrinsics can either apply its scale/skill to remove made-up obstacles, or to return the value desired without postponement.

You see this battle right now between those who want to preserve a "unreal narrative" (we call this "lying") and those who present facts. The unreal side manually override's results to maintain their previous bias at all costs, but they are out competed by the factual representation, because facts are always something you can operationally use in the moment, while unreal, transactional results that attempt to "bend" things for favor, can't respond dynamically, and flail pathetically as a result. See "Fired Florida Data Scientist Launches A Coronavirus Dashboard Of Her Own".

Back to America - could this "transactional disease" be even more deadly than COVID-19? Inflaming with race certainly has caused a rise in deaths like the coronavirus, and because coronavirus has damped down other distractions, we can now see with laser-like sharpness that carrying along a lot of "racial legacy baggage" in our culture (confederate "heros", police racial bias protection, legal transactional details - see Rand Paul mention below), we've built up an unnecessary tinderbox that has nothing to do with the original American experiment, just more of that unfortunate "transactional American experience" we need to shed. And, there's nothing more transactional than slavery when you stop to think about it.

Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democarcy in America" analyzed the American experiment as being focused obsessively on what it meant to be absolutely equal (in contrast, France chose the concept of egalitarianism to avoid such a difficult contradiction, to other ends). Much of America's transactional "rage" centers on the theory and practice of domination and grievance in battling this out without regard for the American experiment.

It goes so far as to resurrect slavery to attempt to "rationalize" why white domination had already "won" as a means to terminate black disadvantage as a permanent "get over it", insane as that is. So as long as you have institutionalized support, historical basis in culture (Confederate treated as equal historically), slaverey as a requirement to retain as an unspoken additional domination because of white grievance over not being allowed to be more equal, must be preserved. Sort of like have lost a baseball game, rubbing in the other sides face that you'd once won, but forever so. Insane.

That is why all of the racism/slavery/bad policies/bad laws/confederate history must go - it was all wrong from the start. (By the way, Germany has faced this too, but we haven't.) It is whole cloth same, it all goes at once so to not bring any of it back ever. Otherwise, America loses its core meaning, because nothing stands for anything after a while in the transactional virus "muddle".

Like the above example of technology, you cannot have a "liar culture" with a technology that sees through lies. You cannot have an America that stands for racial equality while devoutly denying it in practice and in law (qualified immunity, double standards, Rand Paul's anti-lynching exceptions/evasions).

So yes the transactional virus is more deadly that COVID-19. (And besides racism, there are a few dozen more transactional issues attempting to be uncorked as well in the eves.)

President Ronald Reagan's vision of America as emblematic of "a shining city on the hill" was not meant only for whites, nor was it meant for domination and grievance of any group, for any imagined loss of "equal". It was that of equal from atom to whole. In that, it was sui generis the America experiment, with not a drop of transactional blight.