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I agree with you about this. My point was more about the negative attitude towards Elon Musk where he proposes "solutions" to end the war in Ukraine. I don't believe that calling names etc. is productive. I hear many people now saying that they no longer like Musk and his cars etc. as if he had joined the dark side now. I simply see a person who is a little bit too trustful to the narrative that the Ukraine merely needed to stay away from NATO and Russia wouldn't have attacked. I see in him someone who is obstinate but open to the truth and maybe an idealist who thinks that he has found a solution. We just need to explain why this view is wrong. It is difficult because the idea of Russian supremacy is harder to understand, it doesn't have that logical dimension that ”Ukraine neutrality” proposers have. But by becoming antagonistic we only make this task much harder.
This twitter sneering culture seems so wrong. I prefer dispassionate evaluations, something like this: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1577120229942910978
Something similar happened with covid. Interesting fact that most vaccine mandates were introduced after it was definitely proven that current covid vaccines do not stop the spread of infection. I thought that it was slowness and failure of institutions to percolate this information to policy makers. But maybe it was more about unwillingness to recognise the defeat. It was the refusal to believe that covid was never going to disappear and desperately trying to maintain the illusion of control.
Most of the vaccine mandates were actually framed (and, I believe, sincerely intended by most) to be a tool for returning to normalcy. Ie. allow access to previously denied services to the most and boost vaccine compliance in hopes that there would be less hospitalizations. Of course, it then became a culture war and thus also quickly led to a discourse where it became essentially a means to punish wrongdoers - antivaxxers - and implicitly also lead to "Covid hawks" assigning individual blame to antivaxxers for the disease still spreading instead of governments, a popular target for many hardline zero-covidists.
Vaccines were hoped to be a tool for normalcy, not vaccine mandates. And vaccines had quite an effect, they were the best, I would even say, the only real intervention that worked and were cheap and least restricting. Before the introduction of the mandates, most elderly people were already vaccinated, mortality from covid among vaccinated elderly people were about 8 times less than for unvaccinated and that was the maximum what we could achieve. Omicron reduced the risks even further but it was unrelated to the measures we took.
The problem was that the vaccines didn't stop the spread and as the most common metric was case counts which still remained quite high, and some residual covid mortality remained many people were not satisfied and considered it to be a failure. Chasing the illusion of achieving nearly zero covid, different governments started vaccine mandates, reintroduced masking, in some cases even light lockdowns. In the UK Christmas 2021 events were really discouraged but other countries had even more restrictions. It was all in vain.
Interesting that the voices demanding surrender and neutrality of Ukraine are only becoming louder when Ukraine is starting to show some serious gains on battlefield. It is still not an ideal situation because fighting leaves many people dead and injured, the final resolution is no-where in sight and probably will happen only when Putin is gone which is hard to predict when it will happen. Instead of accepting the potential Ukrainian victory over Russia with NATO weapons and giving due lesson to the aggressor, they want perfect solution where people don't get killed anymore and where Putin is appeased. They don't want to accept that such a solution is impossible in real life.
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