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I have a very smart friend who is also a talented decoupler, who could easily be a very quality contributer here if dealing with Culture War issues didn't make him bleed from the eyes. He is literally the only person I know whose Facebook posts about politics did not make me lose respect for him. Over the years, we have had a number of conversations about contentious CW topics that flirted with the border of Adversarial Collaboration, long detailed discussions handled with fairness, civility, and mutual respect.
Until the topic of student loan forgiveness came up. That discussion was unusually heated. He seemed almost frantic, heated about PPP loan forgiveness hypocrites and just not giving the expected degree of decoupled consideration for arguments about how the loan forgiveness was an overall terrible policy. He seemed personally invested, felt personally attacked, in a way he hadn't in conversations about abortion or gun control.
The thing is, my friend is a teacher. Education is a big factor in his identity. He has taught maybe a thousand students who might benefit from the forgiveness plan. Attacks on that plan are an attack on his class identity. Politics is the mind-killer, and it is a sad fact that a rationalist's Art is most likely to abandon him when he needs it most (or, rather, he will fail the Art). And so my arguments sparked an uncontrolled emotional response that was missing from other, less identity-laden topics.
The second thing is, I've been on the other side of that coin, back when we had our multi-day deep dive into the gun control literature. Gun control hits me emotionally as an attack on my class identity. When I hear a gun control proposal, before I hear a single specific detail or spend a second considering merits, some lizard part of my brain interprets it as "Fuck you, your father, your father's father, and your father's father's father". (Does the word "father" still mean anything to you?) I've begged off having spontaneous discussions about it in person, even with close family, because I don't want to spike myself into rage and other unpleasant feelings. During that deep dive, my excellent friend was so calm, fair and rational that he overrode that concern, and I ended up learning a lot and having a great time.
And I'm thinking about this now, because I notice a similar reaction to the trans discussion downthread. The idea that my children might be brainwashed into taking evolutionarily self-destructive choices, and I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State, kindles a pre-rational, animal panic/fury response. I find myself getting heated to an unusual degree just thinking about it. I don't think I'm particularly "anti-trans". I was willing to be accepting two decades ago, when I first learned it was even a thing. But something about the thought that the phenomenon might hit my kids triggers an atavistic survival instinct. That reaction doesn't trigger when I consider my son dressing like David Bowie, or my daughter playing sports. It doesn't happen when a peer goes trans. It triggers at the thought of one of the two corporeal incarnations of my DNA and memes getting sucked into a fraught psychological memeplex, and particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting. That's roughly the level of emotional hit - some part of me considers this an existential threat.
But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.
So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?
For the practical minded; As you said the probability of this happening is very low, as low as other things that should spark a lot of worry of their own. Even with the increased probability due to social contagion of the times, it's still not that high.
However, even if that is too much for you. Consider raising your kids outside the Anglosphere, ik ik easier said than done. But woke culture is very much the behemot that it is only in the US,Canada and UK. It's not that far left identitarian rhetoric doesn't exist elsewhere but to a much lesser degree.
Anything to do with covid.
Untold amounts of suffering caused by literally shutting down the world for what exactly? To make sure 85 year olds can live to 86?
The magnitude of the irrationality behind border closures, mask mandates and vaccine passes is too much for me to process.
Obviously worrying but doesn't actually prove anything until you can parse out what the effects would have been if strict measures weren't introduced, which is to say what part is actually attributable to Covid measures and what to just Covid itself.
Just about the same as what already happened. Minus the economic and social ruin.
A cursory google search seems like this working paper (which is not peer reviewed) seems pretty controversial, and lots of the criticisms seem pretty reasonable. They are reviewing a tiny slice of the entire literature, and for apparently no good reason. They say they're looking only at studies using a diff-in-diff approach, but some of them aren't even doing that, which raises the alarm of cherry-picking, especially when a lot of the studies that receive the most weight are from ultra-obscure journals. One of the studies, which it looks like received the most weight of all is from a journal, called 'Sustainability', so rubbish that in Norway it was the among the first 13 journals to be rated as predatory, and is now not even recognised as an academic journal there, having been removed from the national register because it was just a 'gun-for-hire' journal that would publish anything if you paid them for it.
Valids points, and in no way am I saying this paper is perfect or irrefutable.
But I will say;
Control for mainstream/publication bias. The (scientific/)establishment consensus was that NPI's were effective. This was enforced with strong Big-Tech state colluded censorship.
Most if not all the papers that speak positively about lockdowns have similar shortcomings. The only difference is they don't get much if any scrutiny at all. You won't find 50 links "debunking" a popular just as flawed meta analysis as the one I linked.
I think mechanistically even bereft of any empirical analysis, the costs of lockdowns are far too much relative to their benefit. This can be easily argued for. see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051?journalCode=cijb20
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