Tophattingson
No bio...
User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Do I really need to beat my usual drum again. Is the elephant in the room going to be unaddressed. Okay then...
Remember when governments across the formerly liberal democratic west put their entire populations under home imprisonment? Shut schools, workplaces, international travel, recreation, and places of workship? Brutally attacked even the most mild-mannered of protests? Implemented sophisticated schemes to segregate the population by whether they have taken a series of injections assigned to them by the government? Whipped up hatred of those who disagreed with any of this? Conspired with big tech to censor voiced dissent online, when they didn't just go straight to arresting people for facebook posts instead?
The three things you've listed above are rounding errors compared to this.
Don't imprison the entire population was a principle so fundamental that, at least in the Anglosphere, it dates back to the middle ages with Habeas Corpus. The load-bearing walls for civilization have already been dismantled. Detente in the culture war is over. Liberal democracy has been replaced with "the government makes you wear a seatbelt, so it can do whatever the fuck it wants, and beat the shit out of anyone who disagrees". I don't see a path to putting the walls back up at present, because it's hardly like our current leaders are ever going to admit to committing crimes against humanity and rebuke their past policy as the unthinkable actions they were.
Tophattingson
11d ago
Via conversations with the people who are most affected by this, those who use sites like Pixiv commercially, they seem to believe that there's a cabal of anti-porn American Evangelicals behind payment processing restrictions. This seems to be approximately a consensus. When I tried to question them on alternative hypotheses involving a Visa/Mastercard Duopoly, even the "moderate" suggestion that excess chargebacks is the primary motive for not wanting to deal with adult content, there was a lot of pushback. Didn't even risk discussing right-wing hypotheses involving debanking or Operation Chokepoint. My impression was that they pattern match all politics they dislike to political groups they dislike regardless of whether there's actually a link.
Due to me largely being a single-issue anti-lockdown guy at this point, I guess in the US I'd fall in with the "dissident right" even if I disagree with them on the majority of social issues. To give an example, I back LGBT rights in about the way you'd expect from a progressive but I can't back progressives in their current form because the end result of lockdownism is everyone, including LGBT people, equally having no rights. You can't claim to support LGBT rights and simultaneously criminalize sex).
So Russia... Fuck Russia. They too are a lockdownist regime, and I equally want Putin's head displayed on the end of a pike as I do the average prog. The place I differ is that I also want most western leaders heads lined up alongside his. Hence my stance on the war is that I hope both sides lose. Both sides losing probably requires that Russia lose first, because I don't see a route where a Russian victory leads to uprisings against Putin but a Ukrainian victory probably has Zelensky get turfed out in a few years if recent Ukrainian history is anything to go by.
There is a hypothetical world in which Russia are indeed liberating Ukraine from it's vile regime. The problem, of course, is that this isn't the actual circumstance. Belarus would have a slightly better case to make, as one of the few countries that avoided lockdowns, I'd at least give Lukashenko the time of day if he invaded Ukraine in 2020 to liberate Ukrainians from their regime - it would at least be a coherent cause. Even if Russia invaded the UK, I might defect to them just for the opportunity to get justice for the crimes that the British regime has committed against me, but it would be no more than pure opportunism on my part. But what exactly can Putin claim to liberate Ukraine from? From one corrupt lockdownist oligarchy to another? How utterly pointless.
Of course they'll have prepared a long list of grievances with "elites" that are intended to persuade you that whatever happens in the US is much worse than repressions in Russia or China.
The most notable form of repressions over the last few years were lockdowns, affecting billions. When it comes to how brutal these are, there isn't some vast difference between Russia and the West. Even China has typically behaved more courteously towards those protesting lockdowns than Western regimes have done. And if democracy is meant to be the difference, I wonder what exactly is supposed to be the difference between Putin's machinations and media control to win his elections, and western "mainstream" parties winning via similar censorship and violent attacks on dissidents? We no longer need to speculate. The paper trail of censorship of opponents of lockdowns has been traced back to governments.
But why do some on the dissident right actively support Putin rather than take my burn it all down including Russia approach? I don't think it's quite enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's more appeal to an outside power. Like cosmic intervention. Desperately hoping they'd swoop in to save the day. Just like far-left dissidents wanted the USSR to do during the cold war, or e.g. anti-Putin protesters in Russia sometimes want NATO to do. It's a cry for help because they do not see any way to depose their regime without external assistance. Which I reject, because I don't think Putin would replace their regime with what they want. Sweden, though? They can nuke me whenever they feel like it. Drone me harder Tegnell.
Fair enough. But then please don't take a high moral ground. You are just as evil as "elites".
The social contract to not act in maximally selfish ways is broken, and the dissident right have a good claim that they aren't responsible for breaking it.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Some more claims I did a double-take on, having never heard them before: [...] that masks are entirely ineffective in preventing the transmission of COVID-19?
By the best standards of evidence available, masks do nothing for covid-19. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6
Some people caveat this by saying the evidence against is weak. My response to this is that if you're going to force billions of people to do so, you should have strong evidence in favour, not weak evidence against it. The default position for medical interventions should be that they don't work until proven otherwise. Others argue against the findings on the basis that masks necessarily must work because physics, on the grounds you don't need to do a scientific study to determine if a parachute works. This is called unfalsifiability, and is the classic sign of pseudoscience. Regardless if we did do a study on parachutes and got a null result that would actually be very good evidence against parachutes.
Stuff like this means we need to caveat any claim that Kennedy has wacky beliefs / conspiracy theories with the fact that his political opponents hold the similarly wacky (but in practice far more destructive) belief / conspiracy theory that masks work for covid.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
The steelman case for a stolen election is to take the entire "electoral fraud" bit, pick it up, throw it in the bin, and instead look at censorship. Basically you'd need to argue that some of what's come up in Missouri v Biden predates Biden's presidency and was used to sway the election in a way that'd be recognised, if it occured in the third world, as leaving the election deeply flawed at best. The second argument you'd want to make was that self-coups committed by some State Governers and institutions damaged democratic procedures before the election even occured. Then the third argument would be threat of intimidation or violence coming from riots that occured shortly before the election.
I will not elaborate further on this, however, because I think the legitimacy of a government depends on more than just whether it was elected or not.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
An argument I've regularly encountered from more honest advocates on the pro-Palestinian side is they first acknowledge the concerns over Palestinian violence as legitimate, but then they claim that Israeli's intrusive security measures are ultimately counterproductive because they provoke further radicalization and thus further violence. This strikes me as a naive argument, but I admit I have no way of falsifying it except through hypotheticals.
I feel there's an ommitted piece of the puzzle in this discussion. Even Hanania's broader discussion of it has that ommission even though he gets very close to it. There's an idea common in leftist (for lack of a better word) political spaces that military action provokes a counter-response that results in the target being strengthened, not weakened:
When they say “Israel can’t win by military means alone” what they’re really saying is “we don’t want them to,” because they don’t think it is worth it. Yet they feel a need to appeal to the self-interest of Israelis and make arguments that are convincing to Westerners who support Israel and don’t care that much about the Palestinians.
What's missing? This idea isn't exclusively applied to Israeli military action against Hamas. It's applied in a very ad-hoc way to all "oppressed" targets of military action from the perspective of leftists. Punching fascists doesn't make them stronger, bombing Nazi Germany didn't make it stronger, bombing Japan didn't make it stronger. Killing Russian conscripts doesn't make Russia stronger. But bombing Hamas strengthens them. Bombing Iraqi Insurgents strenghen them. Even the Khmer Rouge, where the US is oft blamed for their rise to power because the US... Bombed them in a desperate attempt to stop Cambodia from falling to a bunch of omnicidal maniacs? In all likelihood this is just the 70s Cold War Left trying to defect from their vocal support for Southeast Asian Communism in the aftermath of it's atrocities, but it's part of the same pattern where some bombs are mysteriously disobeying Lanchester's laws.
Now maybe there's some advanced theoretical reason why certain targets get stronger when you smash their shit up, but I don't see this articulated, nor do those same leftists sincerely act upon those beliefs. Why would they simultaneously chant "Palestine Will Be Free" and "Ceasefire Now" if they believe that bombing Hamas will only strengthen them? "Bomb Me, Almighty Bomber!" would surely be a better slogan.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
COVID skepticism does not neatly map to "edge" for a few reasons.
If it comes to "conspiracy" or "forbidden knowledge" then it instantly runs into the problem of equal and opposite conspiracy theories. Take someone living in Sweden. That person is a trusting, humble person who believes everything their government says. They do not care for forbidden knowledge The exact opposite, therefore, of an archetypical covid skeptic. Except... Their government IS covid skeptic, and thus they are too. They think all the countries doing lockdowns and forcing masks on people's faces are somewhere between silly and tyrannical, because this is the consensus in Sweden. And, like the rest of the world, Sweden has it's "conspiracy theorists", except in Sweden that means supporters of the mainstream narrative on covid, or zero covid advocates, who accuse the Swedish government of, approximately, a conspiracy theory to kill Swedes.
Are Swedes edgelords? Quite the opposite, in my experience.
No matter what position you hold on Covid, you almost necessarily must believe at least some conspiracy theory. Either Sweden's government is engaged in a conspiracy to kill people with covid, or another pro-lockdown regime is engaged in a conspiracy to needlessly perform lockdowns. Either Fauci conspired to stop people wearing masks, or conspired to make people wear masks.
As for aesthetics, the policy of... doing nothing, lacks a distinct, sharp edge to it. Far less cool than throwing everyone into lockdown and making them wear apocalyptic symbols. If you wanted a world of edge, the aesthetics of lockdownism certainly have a sci-fi evil supervillain edge to them. The contrasting aesthetic is usually middle-aged casual wear and when covid skeptics want to go edgy they do so by adopting the aesthetics of their opponents.
If my goal was edgy, I'd know where I'd plant my flag.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
I object to being falsely imprisoned.
Do you really even have to ask? Seriously, I don't understand how this can be so mysterious? What next, will you ask why Uyghurs don't like reeducation camps?
While some of the games given as examples, like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress, are memed as being hard, they're really not that hard.
I played Dark Souls after dealing with the far harder Monster Hunter games (the newer games have eased the difficulty curve but get even harder towards the end) before, so it never really felt all that difficult. Nioh also scales up the hurt to far higher levels than Dark Souls, but also gives you the tools necessary to do those fights if you get gud, which is where Elden Ring's last few bosses fall apart. Most Fromsoft Soulsborne games tend to have several mechanics that allow you to trivialize most of the content even if the standard guy swinging big stick will struggle. Usually something involving magic, blocking or parrying.
Dwarf Fortress is not hard. It's just convoluted. You can stick 7 dwarfs in a hole with a tiny patch to grow food and they'll live in happy mediocrity forever. Any difficulty comes from the player trying to do a 'stupid dwarf trick' or RNG sometimes sending an indestructible syndrome-spreader your way.
Stephen's Sausage Roll is by far the hardest puzzle game I played. Nothing else warrants mention in that genre.
And to highlight something in a genre that interests me, the Codemasters F1 games are both the most "mainstream" sim racing titles, but also by far the hardest. Sure, you could whack on all the assists and drop the difficulty to 0 and cruise your way to victory, but the baseline car without assists is one of the the most difficult cars to drive in all of sim racing. So difficult, in fact, that actual F1 drivers criticized it as being unreasonably difficult to drive and unrealistically prone to spinning out of corners. The AI is also extremely aggressive relative to most older racing games. Driving the same car in any other series, even more "hardcore" simulators, is a far more relaxed experience. I believe the 2023 version of the game improved, however this. Similarly, their contemporary "Dirt Rally" games are so much harder than the old "Colin McRae" titles that they might as well be a separate genre. Sim Racing has long had a bit of a problem with a hard=realistic perception, and generally improved simulation has lead to easier driving, not harder.
Dark Souls is like a 6 or 7 on the hardness scale out of 10. It's sometimes challenging but doesn't scale up too far once you've figured out whatever particular gimmicks are useful in the exact title. Monster Hunter and Nioh are more like an 8 because they do in fact keep scaling up in difficulty. Dwarf fortress is maybe a 3 or 4 once you've gotten around the controls because, aside from deliberately challenging yourself, the core gameplay is easier than most city/colony builders. I'll give Stephen's Sausage Roll and the racing games I mentioned 9, because they hit hard and never stop hitting. And the hardest mainstream games tend to be rhythm games on their highest difficulties for the sheer level of mechanical execution they expect. You cannot fire up Through the Fire and Flames on expert and clear it without at least 100 hours of prior practice in either Guitar Hero or in very similar games.
Old games are rarely hard. Contemporary gaming is harder at a baseline for at least some of these reasons:
- The controls are better and thus the difficulty has gradually shifted from wrestling with controls to actually making the game hard.
- There's more competitive multiplayer. It is impossible for the average competitive multiplayer game to give the average player a win rate greater than 50% in the long run, making it inherently difficult compared to single-player games.
- Developers are free to add more difficulty because they know players have access to better online resources on how to overcome said difficulty.
- There are more layers of conventions that developers expect you to understand. Even relatively handholdy games often have broad swaths of unexplained mechanics due to being more complicated.
- You were just younger. Go back, play them, smash them over your knee.
Whenever I have played an older game that I thought at the time was difficult, I soon learned it was not. I was just younger. To give an example of something I recently replayed, Pikmin's 30 day time limit sounds like a challenge, and my memory of the game was that it was a serious threat. When I replayed it, I beat the game in 11 days, and the time limit was totally irrelevant. Roller Coaster Tycoon is another old game I recently played, and is utterly trivialized by using high ride prices (often 10x the default) and advertising, something the game doesn't clearly explain the impact of but once you know about them it's GG. There are exceptions, like Battletoads and Ghosts 'n' Goblins still being difficult, but these were the exception then just as very hard games remain the exception now.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Reducing the false home imprisonment of the entire population to a mere disagreement over policy preferences is like calling the subject of the film a mere policy disagreement. Maybe you do think such actions are just policy disagreements, but if so the entire point of the banality of evil as a concept starts to fall apart. They're not evil, not even banally evil, perpetrators and those who aquiesqued to the holocaust just had a civil, rational difference of opinion that by chance happens to involve imprisoning and then killing lots of Jews, with as much moral weight as preferring rye bread to bagels.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
Biden has already announced he's going to work around the student loan decision AND smack "defect" as hard as he can on the deal which ended the payment moratorium. But this one doesn't provide easy outs and lower courts do accept the First Amendment as something to consider.
Is there even any mechanism to punish the president or any relevant legislatures if they keep repeatedly enacting something already shown to be unconstitutional?
I think only in China were lockdowns severe enough to qualify as “home imprisonment”, as far I know in Western countries you were allowed to leave your house to go buy groceries, walk your dog, exercise (albeit sometimes in a reduced area), etc.
Home imprisonment often comes with reasons you are allowed to leave your home. Even prisoners placed in prisons get home leave from prisons, for instance, and nobody would deny that they're not imprisoned. The reason the definition of imprisonment needs to be so broad is because otherwise it allows situations where pseudo-imprisonments can't be challenged by their victims.
To put it another way, I know a relative who was sectioned (is it called that in the US) for two weeks and then recovered and was released. During their sectioning, they actually had more liberties than they did under lockdowns, as they were permitted to go anywhere for two hours a day for any reason, every day. Not to mention access to legal protections if there was reason to believe that the sectioning was done fraudulently.
Lockdowns were a case of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency, which does not have the same quasi-universal moral consensus as committing genocide.
Nazi Germany justified genocide on the grounds of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency. (Edit: This is not the actual reason but it's the steelman they could make. Nazi Germany didn't recognise personal liberties as a thing at all. Similarly, lockdownist regimes don't actually believe they're "curtailing personal liberties in an emergency" because they don't recognise personal liberties as a thing either. You don't see relevant leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied. Further, those who criticize lockdowns for being breaches of human rights do not get the response that they are a regretful breach of human rights but something something utilitarian priorities. Rather, they get called far-right extremists or conspiracy theorists, suggesting lockdownist leaders at least publicly deny that any loss of personal liberties happened at all)
Prior to 2020 there was a quasi-universal moral consensus against false imprisonment. That's why it's in the universal declaration of human rights. It's why there's objections to concentration camps. Or at least there were, until places like Australia started opening them up. Countries have been condemned, sanctioned, isolated etc for far, far less than what many places did in 2020.
Lockdowns do not reduce freedom in the name of safety because they both don't increase safety from covid and also massively increase danger from the government. I am against false imprisonment in particular. The response was empirically ineffective given that countries that declined to do lockdowns saw no ill effect from doing so. I am against all covid-related travel restrictions because governments clearly cannot be trusted with an inch lest they take a mile.
would you be against them even if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they worked?
Does this hypothetical serve a purpose? It's like asking if you'd be against the holocaust if Nazi ideology was proven to work. A world in which Nazi ideology was correct does not resemble our own in any way. For a start, there's no hypothetical way for a lockdown to pass a cost-benefit analysis because the maximum benefit is so small compared to the minimum cost. Even if our lockdowns as actually carried out worked and prevented, say... 0.6% of the population dying, the amount of time people were placed under lockdown itself undoes that through QALY losses.
This seems like overly dramatic macho posturing. Obviously you are still alive and didn’t do anything of the sort.
If someone is charged by a needle-wielding thug with the intent to stab them with it, I believe they are entitled to defend themselves, up to and including using lethal force against the assailant. Even if said thug is an agent of the state. Of course, this would be analogous to compulsory vaccination, which is not the form most vaccine mandates took in 2021. Rather, they are more akin to a mugging, and that's a slightly greyer area when it comes to whether lethal force is appropriate for self defence.
Regardless, medical coercion is a gross violation of ethics. Even in the absence of vaccine mandates themselves, lockdownist regimes violated medical ethics in how they offered the vaccines. They advertised that restrictions would go away without vaccines, hence created the implicit threat of more restrictions in the case of refusal.
My judgement on this comes from the UKDH reference guide to consent for examination or treatment, which says:
To be valid, consent must be given voluntarily and freely, without pressure or undue influence being exerted on the person either to accept or refuse treatment. Such pressure can come from partners or family members, as well as health or care practitioners. Practitioners should be alert to this possibility and where appropriate should arrange to see the person on their own in order to establish that the decision is truly their own.
[...]
When people are seen and treated in environments where involuntary detention may be an issue, such as prisons and mental hospitals, there is a potential for treatment offers to be perceived coercively, whether or not this is the case. Coercion invalidates consent, and care must be taken to ensure that the person makes decisions freely. Coercion should be distinguished from providing the person with appropriate reassurance concerning their treatment, or pointing out the potential benefits of treatment for the person’s health. However, threats such as withdrawal of any privileges, loss of remission of sentence for refusing consent or using such matters to induce consent may well invalidate the consent given, and are not acceptable.
On this basis, the existence of vaccine mandates clearly poses a risk for violating informed consent, as it introduces duress in several ways. Firstly, it means pressure or undue influence being exerted on the person to accept treatment from government, employers, retail services etc. Secondly, it also means threats of the withdrawal of privileges in an environment with involuntary detention. See how specific the language here is, how closely and specifically it applies to the circumstances of vaccine mandates in countries that carried out lockdowns, despite the age of the document long predating covid. That should hint that these recommendations are not simply some backporting or recency bias for the sake of winning an argument, but instead represent best practice as it was already understood.
Even political leaders broadcasting claims that vaccines are a route out of lockdowns, or that unless X% of the population are vaccinated that restrictions will continue, introduces duress. However, this is more of a footnote, as regimes that carried out the false imprisonment of the entire population are already instantly rendered illegitimate by doing so.
Personally, I found the whole process so fucking disgusting that I refused to take the vaccines purely on the basis of that. I don't care if they're the best or the worst vaccines in the world. The rubicon is crossed, and the relevant institution is no longer trustworthy. For the state to insist that people are born subhuman, and only acquire rights after jumping through regime-approved hoops and injecting regime-approved substances on a regime-approved schedule... The very thought sickens me. The fact that a large proportion of my fellow countrymen, as if somehow I can regard them in such friendly terms any more, agreed with these mandates sickens me even more.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
The Canadian government's actions against political dissidents over the last two years leave it a non-democracy regardless of election procedures. You can't have free, fair elections if huge swaths of political opinion are the target of state violence. After the use of the emergencies act against people protesting vaccine mandates, how certain can we be that Trudeau won't engage in similar attacks on his other political opponents when expedient?
Tophattingson
1yr ago
and I don't find it unreasonable to impose a cost on individuals to the extent it can potentially mitigate negative externalities.
I find the idea of being unvaccinated creating an externality, and therefore receptive to externality-targeting policy, to be a very weak. Not specifically for covid, but in general for vaccines.
When calculating externalities, you need to set a reference point - externality relative to what. Generally, this reference point is set relative to doing nothing. For instance, when it comes to climate, we choose the reference point of no pollution, and therefore class polluters as inflicting a negative externality. If we instead, erroneously, set the reference point of yes pollution, we'd instead find that non-polluters are inflicting a positive externality. Opposite of consensus on how this is calculated. Since the default state of humans is to not be vaccinated, externalities need to be set relative to this. Because of this, the demand for someone else to be vaccinated creates the externality. I'm yet to see a rigorous explanation of why being unvaccinated is the negative externality, rather than demanding that others be vaccinated creating the negative externality.
To give an example this applied to a hypothetical situation of whether unvaccinated and vaccinated people should meet at a venue.
Nobody wants to be there: No externality.
Only one person wants to be there: No externality.
Both people want to be there: No externality.
Both people want to be there but one of the two insists the other be vaccinated: Externality, as they impose a cost of being vaccinated on someone, while reaping all the (hypothetical) reward of supposedly lower chance of being infected.
Besides, vaccine mandates are not vaccinations. As in, the policy of a vaccine mandate doesn't vaccinate people. It merely punishes them for being unvaccinated. The standard justification for externality-targeting policies is that they can resolve market failures where people impose costs on others for their own benefit, by redistributing both the costs and benefits. However, vaccine mandates don't have benefits to redistribute, they just have the costs of the loss of utility from harming unvaccinated people. Well, I guess you could get really nebulous and claim that e.g firing unvaccinated people redistributes wages to vaccinated people, or suggest that vaccinated people emotionally benefit from seeing unvaccinated people be needlessly harmed, but that's not what any advocate of vaccine mandates claims to want.
Further, if we're doing a full accounting of covid-related externalities, we should do it evenly. Advocates of lockdowns and other restrictions reaped all the rewards (emotional, health risk etc) while imposing costs on me (emotional, health risk etc). This is unfair. I've seen people crunch the numbers on how much being unvaccinated "costs" to healthcare. It's about $1k for the average person, which is way way lower than a lot of other voluntary activities that are considered sacrosanct to restrict, but whatever. Great. I'll gladly pay that amount, provided I am compensated for all the other externalities. I expect to massively benefit from this arrangement overall. The chance of me being hospitalized with covid is negligible. The financial damage of restrictions, once you sum up years of lost income, QALY losses, increased taxes, increased cost of living due to inflation, the loss of government services etc, will come in at well over $100k.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Remember that time they gassed the antivaxxers?
No. However, in the US, as a consequence of regime propaganda, a large proportion of the population eventually claimed to support the idea of putting unvaccinated people in concentration camps. Are these people evil? Banally evil?
The idea that nothing should ever be compared to the Holocaust contradicts the concept of "never again", because for it to never happen again, similar events must be stopped before they progress to being as bad as the holocaust.
Austria came close to criminalizing being unvaccinated, aborting plans to do so at the last minute.
Nowhere in the Western world did vaccine requirements come anywhere near the level of the unhinged rhetoric you keep repeating.
Some countries implemented lockdowns on the basis of vaccine status. Again Austria comes to mind as an example. Austria's regime did decide that people who did not jump through regime-approved hoops and take regime-approved medication on a regime-approved schedule are so unworthy that they do not deserve the right to leave their homes. I don't know what to call that beyond treating them as subhuman. Many more places decided that they couldn't be allowed to attend events, restaurants and bars, shops etc. Even the US, to this day, continues to regard unvaccinated people as lesser by making it illegal for them to enter the country.
And I've seen enough rhetoric from governments and supporters of mandatory vaccinations to know that, without pushback, they'd have gone further. Because of this, I'm not particularly interested in merited impossibility, nor lockdown denial.
"Mass Formation Psychosis" just seems like a buzzword.
There's definitely something self-sustaining to lockdownism that makes it uniquely powerful as a variant of totalitarianism. Most ideologies have some sort of engine that, whether by design or by accident, sustains them, by bringing in new people and stopping them from leaving. Dawkins would have described it as a meme by his original intent: a self-replicating bit of culture, some of which are far better at self-replicating than others and of which lockdownism might just be the best ever at spreading.
But I don't think there's anything spooky like "Psychosis" explaining this. I think it's rather simple, actually. The core tenants of lockdownism are self-sustaining. That is to say, if you actually believe in these restrictions and carry them out, then the process of doing this will sustain your own belief in lockdowns:
They control behaviour by robbing people of everyday life. They destroy bonds of friends, family and work, and replace these bonds with bonds to distant figures like Fauci. They make people financially reliant on leadership (i.e the government) for survival. They isolate people from dissenting information by keeping people locked up in their houses, unable to hear or even see those who disagree - all outside sources are dismissed as not merely wrong, but actively dangerous. Any contact with people who don't agree with lockdowns is frowned upon above and beyond that of contact in general - they disagree, therefore they are more likely to be infected, and are more likely to kill you. Through masking, your empathy towards others is decreased. At a broader scale, political pluralism and serious disagreement are de facto outlawed via a combination of bans on public meetings and censorship of alternatives to public meetings...
The weakness is in the long-term. Once everyone is entrenched in this system, the economic wellbeing of society inevitably tanks to the point where it becomes unsustainable. These systems of control don't function once you have rolling blackouts knocking out information control infrastructure, seized up supply networks blocking deliveries, and people emerge from their isolation in desperate search fulfilling basic needs. They also don't function once people notice that the prophesies are failing, and the sinners aren't all dead - Bill down the road is one of those disgusting anti-vaxxers, and you've not spoken to him in months, but somehow his car keeps coming and going. In this regard, vaccine mandates could be seen as a way to resolve this discomfort - a way to make manifest in the real world the sufferings that are meant to befall the prophesized enemies, after they fail to emerge as a result of their sins.
It really shares quite a lot in common with the strategies that cults use to manipulate members. It's just that in this case, the policy prescription of lockdowns is inherently manipulative, rather than (or alongside) being intentionally so. Unlike a cult, it never replaces comradery with the outside world with comradery with the cult itself, instead just leaving a miserable void. Perhaps it's long-term instability is similar to Nazism and Communism, rather than religious cults - it feels good while you're killing Jews/Kulaks/whatever, but inevitably the reality that you can't sustain a society based on killing imaginary enemies sets in.
I don't know if this is a steelman of Mass Formation Psychosis, however. Maybe this is what those people are really getting at, beneath the layers of buzzwords.
Tophattingson
8d ago
A few years under Starmer might have people realise Labour have no policy for fixing housing.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
I don't think that consensus actually exists. The Vaccine mandates of 2021/22 is the refutation.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
2020 switched me from being ambivalently pro-euthanasia to vehemently anti-euthanasia. The attitudes of government, and in particular medical authorities over the last few years mean that I think they should never, ever acquire the power to assist in suicides. Not because I object to the actual action itself on moral grounds, but because I believe they are strongly incentivised to misuse this power. There is a serious risk that legalizing euthanasia will lead to governments ignoring suffering of their own creation by, approximately, responding "don't like it, KYS then" - a pressure valve to relieve political issues in a way that they shouldn't be. At it's most extreme, governments might actively encourage suicides among the recalcitrant as a means of further cementing their unchecked power over the population. Canada has already seen someone undergo euthanasia in response to covid lockdowns, after all.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't. But evidence in support of a lab leak was deliberately denigrated by nearly all authority figures. There was no need to maintain a secret channel of communication. Once consensus was established, peopled picked up the signals to stay on side, and ones who didn't were punished. The best evidence in favor of a lab leak (that the pandemic started near a lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses) was never secret. It was just not spoken of.
Daszak et al's conspiracy to minimize belief in a lab leak was incredibly unsuccessful at preventing the spread of the lab leak hypothesis despite never being exposed in polite society. Americans overwhelmingly believe covid leaked from a lab. On the other hand, this hasn't turned into even a moderate policy response to this (such as restrictions on biolabs), let alone specifically going after the perpetrators of the conspiracy, so perhaps it was a success as far as virologists who's paychecks depend on the steady flow of grant money are concerned.
I think you're right to be deeply skeptical of any "support" groups, but I think the problem is worse than any specific support group but would instead be inherent to them.
The average dangerous criminal knows that the crime they committed is morally wrong, but rationalise their crime to themselves due to some circumstance or exception that 'permits' them to commit that crime. The fancy term for this is Techniques of Neutralization. For instance, the average murderer is not a cold-blooded killer. They know murder is wrong. They'll repeatedly reiterate that they know murder is wrong. But there will be this one guy, this one exception, who absolutely deserved what he got, for whatever rationale they either had beforehand or constructed in the aftermath. So the average murderer commits only one murder, and usually do so in a fairly reckless way with minimal effort to avoid being caught.
Child predators do not behave like this. The typical profile of a child predator is someone who knows that the law regards their actions as wrong, that almost all of society regards their actions as wrong, but personally does not regard their own actions as wrong. This makes them an unusual combination of extremely opportunistic, far more apt at preparing and covering up their crimes than any equivalent, and also far more likely to be a serial criminal.
How to tell if you're not at risk of predating on children? The same way everyone else manages to not commit violent crime. The average human is attracted to adult men or women in some combination, yet can easily go their entire life without committing rape primarily because they believe rape to be wrong. A pedophile who seriously believes that molesting children harms them is unlikely to act on that impulse and unlikely to need or care about support, and hypothetically this is the majority in much the same way that the majority of people don't commit rape and don't need support groups to tell them not to rape. The real dangerous individuals are those who do not genuinely believe that their potential crime would harm children, though they may certainly make a good act of claiming to hold that belief. Nyberg's statements fit that profile.
I don’t recall any of them being focused on the potential harm actually molesting a child would cause, or any type of moral repugnance against molestation by people who claimed this condition.
And that's exactly the dangerous circumstance.
For this reason I don't think any self-created "support" group could ever be useful. If you join a such a group, then you believe yourself to be sufficiently at risk of committing such an act, which in the first place requires you don't think it to be morally repugnant. So these support groups end up self-selecting for people who don't think it's morally repugnant and will soon start constructing elaborate justifications of it for each other to use. Any actually productive support would need to be imposed externally and in a fairly hostile way, with the express intent of distilling the same sense of moral repugnance anyone else gets in such a circumstance.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
Experts being wrong isn't just about bias. It's about the limits of what expertise can even apply to. Expertise relies on repeatable events that give prompt, clear, indisputable feedback. Performing music is something you can acquire expertise in because you can practice repeatedly and get immediete feedback for whether you played correctly. Mathematics, same. Programming? Definitely. Physics, engineering, the feedback can be slower but still comes. But as you get further away from having repeatable events and from recieving feedback as to whether you made the correct or wrong decision, the possibility of acquiring expertise becomes weaker.
All the way down at the bottom of this tier list of plausible expertise, you can indeed find "Epidemiologist" or "Middle East Correspondant", where there are few repeatable events and when feedback is given it is ignored or epicycled away. Expert epidemiologists do not exist, or at least, they don't exist like they would for engineering, because you can't acquire expertise in epidemiology as it's currently practiced. There is no reason to put more weight on their arguments than you would the same argument from a random individual. They may well be right sometimes, they may well have a good argument to give, but they don't have expertise and can't get it either.
Sometimes I wonder if "banality of evil" is just a way to downplay regular evil. In other circumstances, if someone commits or aquiesques to evil deeds for the sake of personal success, that just gets called evil. If an armed robber murders a clerk, they don't get the privilege of having their evil called "banal" even if it was done seeking personal gain. Perhaps confronting the alternative, that some 90% of Germans simply were evil with no qualifiers during the height of Nazi rule, is too politically awkward?
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns. Then again, maybe banality is still the wrong word for it, given that at every turn they wanted the government to go even further, lockdown harder and for longer, and be even more aggressive towards dissenters.
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