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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?

I don't mean this in a cruel or offensive way, but the usual way things go is that people simply don't care about the thing that happened a year or two ago. We move on, we change focus, and we find new things to be offended or enraged (or perhaps happy) about.

I know a couple of people who would likely be avid users of r/MasksforAll, and a higher number of people who are perpetually incensed about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Oddly enough lockdowns are a huge thing here (I have never met a single person angry about lockdowns in real life, but here the number of people persistently furious about lockdowns is pretty large), but in my personal life there are still people utterly incensed that other people are no longer taking safety measures - I wear a mask on the train nowadays after A/B testing it in Excel for the better part of a year and finding I was drastically more likely to get a cold when not masking, but not anywhere else.

Ordinarily even the most politically vehement people I know really do shut up about politics, but two of my friends will no longer shut up about Covid. We catch up for a phone call (we live a few thousand kilometres apart each), and it invariably turns back to vaccines or Covid and so on. One of my aunts is frustrated that she can't get people to reliably mask when catching up with her (she's not immunocompromised or anything along those lines, and she's in her late 40s) without asking them beforehand.

I feel like being, well, a normie throughout this has inoculated me to these feelings. I never really got mad at people not wearing masks or taking vaccines (largely because by that point it was pretty clear Covid was far less dangerous than initially thought), except to note that the people who generally didn't mask back when mask mandates were a thing tended to be the sort of people who committed publically antisocial behaviour to begin with (playing loud music on the train, harrassing people for smokes, etc). Likewise, the more worried people seemed similar to me - I was happy to take a RAT test or whatever to see someone if it assuaged their anxiety.

It's not everyone, and the majority of people seem to have returned to normal. I guess this is a culture war issue in general which is why I'm posting here, but I can't help but feel a large number of people will be relitigating Covid for years, whether it's their anger at authoritarian monsters trying to destroy their lives and enforce the injection of experimental biological matter into their veins, or their fury at antisocial plague rats who were unwilling to take even the slightest measure to try and keep people safe.

I'm not trying to judge these people or look down on them, we all have our issues and our pain points. I'm not going to pretend I don't have mine. But it just strikes me as noticeable that there's a substantial chunk of the population now seemingly stuck on Covid issues.

Does this gel with anyone else?

It sure broke my trust in the people around me. I now know:

  • That people can turn to spying on their neighbors and snitching to the government in the space of a couple of weeks, convinced that they're the good ones.

  • That those high-minded statements about human rights to privacy, bodily integrity etc. are all bullshit.

  • That any official outlet talking about anything should be assumed to be lying until proven otherwise.

  • That not even "once-in-a-generation-pandemic" is a good enough reason to keep people's data private; contact tracing was used to expand the surveillance state all over the world.

There's a family in my neighborhood that goes on a walk together just about every day. Mom, dad, and three boys, ages roughly 4-8.

They're always masked. Outside on a walk, no one else within twenty feet of them.

There was a period of about a week, a month ago, where I saw dad and one of the kids maskless. But I saw them again today and it was all masks again.

I haven't forgotten how the normies openly wished me dead for daring to act on what they now recognize as truth, all because the words on tv told them.

I wouldn't say it broke my brain but it certainly broke my politics.

I now know that nobody but me and a few reflexive powerless boomers actually believe in the principles of liberalism when they are put to any real (or not even that real) test. And in consequence my position has moved from a care to safeguard what remained of our fragile institutions to a much more simple and ruthless idea. Destroy the current elites by any means available.

If our they had the wisdom to have some of them pay the price for their incompetence in this matter it would be something else, but as it stands the managers must be removed, not just because they're walking the path of totalitarian tyranny, but because they are constitutionally irresponsible.

I think there's zero chance humanity survives this century. Just think about AI, how diabolical and complex the challenge is, dealing with alignment issues AND the prospect of rogue actors in the tech or military/intelligence sectors.

Then consider that we knew COVID was an airborne virus. We knew that because of the Diamond Princess and other cruise ships, where they sprayed everything down but people got sick. It must've been coming in through the air-filtration systems. Yet people were still spraying down surfaces for about a year! A relative of mine, who intensely trusts the media, was spraying down groceries and her own shoes. Someone spread some totally pointless hysteria (hopefully it was Big Spray looking for customers rather than a genuine case of random error) and nobody managed to correct this. And then there's the whole 'masks don't work but actually we changed our minds and they're compulsory' thing, there's the gain-of-function research that continues up to this day, despite a very high chance that it was to blame for the virus.

We got outwitted by a virus, something that's not even technically alive, let alone sapient, let alone superintelligent! If we can't prevent or at least secure dangerous GoF research, how can we do anything for AI? AI is immensely more important, more profitable, more omni-present, it's a key area of competition between the US and China. We've failed the tutorial-tier technological crisis and we failed badly. There are going to be more technological crises, devious and lethal crises. We are clearly not capable of handling them.

Spraying things down is understandable, even after it was shown to have little effect. The cost of being wrong was much higher than the gains of being right.

Put another way: COVID was framed as a deadly disease from the outset. Most people (health ministers included) still believed this more than a year in. So a few minutes & a few milliliters of sanitizer meant little if it could reduce the likelihood of infection by even 1%.

If the health ministers believed in high death rates against all evidence, they blatantly and openly failed their duty. What could their excuse be - we just didn't bother reading the worldometer death statistics for a year? It's their responsibility to know what they're doing and distribute accurate, useful information.

I was told to spray and wipe down my table after I'd eaten a communal meal 3 times a day for about 3-4 months. If there was such a great danger, it would've been better to have us not eat together! It was an airborne virus! How could they not know whether it was an airborne virus or not? The most farcical part of it was that we were all grabbing the same handle of the spray can, touching the same thing. You don't usually touch the table with your hands that much at a meal, let alone other people's sections of table (naturally all segmented up with tape). The spraying itself was probably the number one source of surface contact between people. It doesn't even help under its own incorrect logic.

Why not get some kind of air processor/freshener/UV-devirus machine and plug it into an outlet in the corner? That might have done something. Ventilation actually helps but people treated it like an optional extra to the all-important security theater.

If we can't prevent or at least secure dangerous GoF research, how can we do anything for AI?

Expanding brain meme goes here

Microbrain: "Yay! We're safe because the smart people are in charge"

Brain: "The "smart people" can't even figure out how to avoid endangering civilization with fumbled virus research"

Megabrain: "So they definitely won't be able to figure out how to avoid endangering humanity with fumbled AI research"

Galaxy brain: "Yay! Wiping out civilization first with viruses will prevent us from wiping out humanity with AI"

My brain is broken as a result of the past few years, and I feel not the slightest inclination to fix it.

To surmise a very long story, I was an r9k tier NEET sadsack up until a few years ago when I began the uphill struggle to rebuild my life. By 2019 I had managed to get a job I would normally have required a degree for and normal friends I went to the pub with, both of which are things I thought I could never obtain. At the start of 2020 I was looking for a place of my own, which is exactly when the (UK) lockdowns hit.

I ended up losing the place I was going to move into, all of my hard earned friends moved away. I was able to hold onto my job, which for around seven months consisted of me travelling to and from an empty, freezing office and spoke to no one real and constitutes possibly the worst time of my entire life. Government actions rapidly deflated the value of my savings and put a fire under the already burning housing market. There are more parking spaces for rent than there are 1bed or studio flats in the city where I work. I cannot afford anything within 20 miles of where I live. It wasn't fucking like this pre-pandemic. Even if I engaged with the spook of "mental health", what would be the point? My life is materially worse in every conceivable way. My prospects are permanently damaged as a result of government action, cheered on by both strangers the system purports to be my "countrymen" and people close to me that I once respected, but now no longer.

Despite all of that, it is the cognitive dissonance that bothers me most. How can a person proclaim that a virus is deadly enough to ban recreational outdoor activity, but tolerate certain outdoor political protest? Why are tampons and clothes considered "inessential goods"? Why does going sledding outdoors in a country where snows once every 2 years make you a granny killer? I go back and read my old posts sometimes, and there was shit I got angry about then that I had apparently forgotten now. The most blackpilling thing about all of this is that indeed, just forgetting what was done to you and changing what you Care About in the way you change your clothes is most successful way to approach life. It amazes me that humanity has developed any capacity for individualist, introspective thought at all.

It probably does not help that I elected to read Nietzsche and Stirner at the same time during my aformentioned 7 months alone in that building. My "Good Morning, I hate _" could fill a book of its own.

Covid broke my brain, and a lot of it is responses to the traumas imposed by our Covid responses being more permanent than the traumas themselves. It’s a bit like Scott’s metaphor about the child of divorce who responded by getting into drugs- the trauma of divorce is temporary but the crackheadery is forever.

I went from being generally trusting of institutions to full on ‘they’re all lying unless proven otherwise, all the time’. I went from willing to get vaccines, even if I didn’t think all of the recommended ones were important, to being an antivaxxer generally skeptical of western medicine. And there’s the sense of betrayal, too- what and who I trusted changed permanently. A democrat winning an election now seems like an emergency and not an unfortunate occasional happening. Etc, etc.

It was definitely a couple of years of mass hysteria, but I'm actually impressed by how thoroughly it has blown over. The same friends who wore double N95s and a face shield when they had to fly on an airplane a year ago now don't even get tested when they have a cold.

The five-day in-office work week is dead as a default for white collar workers though. Maybe it'll come back if unemployment rates tick up, but so far no dice.

And some people still wear masks in public. It isn't just East Asian people anymore.

It seems like the 8-5 M-F was replaced by a new norm of salaried workers being on call 24/7 and their exact scheduling not being relevant as long as they did the actual jobs they're hired to do.

This has obvious benefits to employers; I doubt major white collar employers ever particularly cared if you did most of your work at 2 am on saturday as long as it got done, and 24/7 on call for all white collar employees is, from the employers perspective, a plus.

I do not work a salaried job, so this is just observations. But it seems like it's not necessarily a bad deal for companies, all told.

There was definitely a default expectation among white collar work pre-covid that you'd be in the office during working hours. Not a hard and fast rule, plenty of exceptions, no one batted an eye if you needed to take an afternoon off to run an errand, but generally expectation was to be in the office.

And it is somewhat harder to slack off if you're in the office. Your screen is visible and you don't have as many other temptations.

Honestly, I was probably more productive when I was in the office five days per week. Now it's much easier to spend a few hours on The Motte, or to go get groceries, or wander over to the living room and watch an episode of TV.

You're right that getting your work done is the ultimate check, but it's an elastic check... most of these jobs have some play in how much work a particular person has to do, and it isn't always easy to measure. So the old equilibrium was a combination of (loosely) measuring output and (loosely) enforcing butts in seats.

I mean, consider the number of people who still argue about Donald Trump even though he's no longer president, or how long people were obsessed with 9/11 after the fact. The world changes faster than people can update their interests.

COVID did have one positive lasting effect: masking on public transit. In many East Asian cities, it was normalized/acceptable preceding the pandemic for the purposes of limiting the risk of the flu and the common cold, and I'm glad wearing a mask on crowded subways won't be considered weirdo territory.

As far as broken people and their brains, though, the most significant social COVID risk is on education. Most immediately, students suffered severe learning loss, both for the material they were supposed to learn and the processes needed for learning. We'll see those effects for a lifetime. But the institutional and cultural changes driven by COVID are also significant. COVID laid bare the reality that the institutions responsible for education aren't really interested in education: learning and intellectual development may be good side effects, but they're not the primary goals. And institutions have learned this lesson. If some desired policy results in plummeting test scores, that's to the discredit of the test scores, not the damaging policy. This has been happening for awhile, but COVID tempered that principle. Schools, informed by the experience of COVID, will increasingly discard objective measures of learning and student well-being for the sake of alignment with the faddish ideas of the day. That's the long COVID we need to worry about.

Is there any data to support the belief that masking on public transit reduces one's chance (long term) of getting a cold. In the sense that it might reduce your chance of getting a cold right now but won't reduce your chances in general due to your weakened immune system. I've certainly never worn a mask voluntarily and I am almost never sick.

Talking out of my ass here as someone with only a GCSE education in biology, but does this 'weakened immune system' thing actually make any sense? The whole reason why you can keep getting colds is that they are new mutations each time you catch it, so you haven't been able to develop any immunity to that specific mutation. So it would seem sort of irrelevant how many colds you've caught before because that won't help with the next one.

I've certainly never worn a mask voluntarily and I am almost never sick.

I mean, n=1

I think we're all talking out of our ass here. Speaking of N=1, one of the posts above said they did an "A/B" test and determined that wearing a mask helped reduce their own incidence of getting sick. How many colds must they suffer to glean any useful information? Surely, hundreds or thousands at a minimum. How truly awful things must be for them.

The whole reason why you can keep getting colds is that they are new mutations each time you catch it, so you haven't been able to develop any immunity to that specific mutation. So it would seem sort of irrelevant how many colds you've caught before because that won't help with the next one.

That makes sense, but think about the consequences of that statement. There are thousands if not millions of different cold variants. A subway station can have hundreds of people crowded into a small area, many who are contagious. You would be nearly assured of getting sick every time you rode public transit. As this doesn't happen, it stands to reason that your immune system does protect you against some novel pathogens.

The unanswered question becomes: does your immune system become generally weaker when not exposed to pathogens? My lay person answer is yet, but with low confidence.

On another note, it's rather sad that we have to resort to this level of lay person reasoning because, with Covid, our public health apparatus has completely abdicated their responsibility to provide accurate and unbiased information. Even if an expert were to come here and refute me, I would be skeptical of their information until I knew more about them.

I, for one, would like to see the data confounders added to such a study:

  1. Do participants pick their nose?

  2. If so, do they consume the fruits of their labor?

  3. Do they breathe in through their nose while showering, carrying humid air through their virus-infested nares into their lungs?

  4. Do they take any vitamin D or zinc, daily or weekly?

And so on.

I don't think I agree with your take as far as COVID normalizing masking on public transit. I think that in some places it may have had the opposite effect. Anecdotally, when I would in the past see a person on the train or walking along a city street with a mask on, I barely thought anything of it. To the extent that it stood out, I just assumed that person maybe had a cold and was a little extra conscientious than the average. It didn't seem particularly weird, and it communicated a completely negligible amount of information to me about that person.

But now, after everything, when I see a person in a mask it means something different. It's no longer an empty signal that tells me nothing about the person. Now it communicates to me that the person is weird. That they may be still gripped by fear, that they may be mentally ill, that they may be excessively credulous when it comes to authorities that I consider untrustworthy, or that they may be an extreme partisan of some kind. For some reason they are still not over COVID as a phenomenon.

It's hard to see a random masked individual any other way now, and I don't like that. I don't like that my initial read of someone who is wearing a mask is now "this person is a COVID weirdo that I should avoid", rather than "this is just a slightly more conscientious person than average." For one thing, now I don't even like putting on a mask at times when my own personal level of conscientiousness suggests would be appropriate, due to the perceived symbolic power of the mask. I don't want to look like a weirdo.

Yup, I still to this day spot people driving with masks on in their car…alone.

A few people have truly lost it. I’m allergic to discussion about Covid now I’m so sick of it. I’m triple vaxxed but I’m not taking any more jabs. I never got sick with it once, even mildly. People keep talking about getting their 4th doses and I just think their insane now, but I live and let live. It’s their health and they can do what they want

An acquaintance recently emailed a large group of people to say how sorry he was to have exposed them to Covid at a recent sporting event. He had recently been infected despite having received 5 shots, including the Omicron booster. He also said that he wears an N-95 mask any time he leaves the house.

For many people, actually getting Covid was the cure to their paranoia. I hope for him it will be the same.

COVID was the most disruptive event in my lifetime by a huge margin. Governments in concert exercised powers that I didn't even know they had, namely mass house arrest and mandatory medical procedures (i.e. vax). All of it was for nothing. Every government printed so much money that we are now headed towards a major economic crisis. And not only have they slowly and very quietly walked back every one of these insane rules without apology, there has been no serious investigation into the cause of all of this. Remember when you'd get banned off every social media platform for saying that it came from a lab and just recently a minor senate committee released a report saying exactly that? This is the type of stuff that makes me very upset.

On the other side of the fence, people that bought into the government and news narrative have also been left in the cold by the sudden and quiet reversals. If you believed everything they said, especially regarding antivaxxers deserving to die without medical care, the place we are in now is very strange. It is much easier on the ego to continue believing COVID is this big threat and that the government caved to pressure from those terrible anti vax people.

I already didn't have a very high opinion of government, but I am now convinced they hate their own people and want them dead. My opinion will not change unless we see mass incarceration of officials and pharma execs responsible for all of this nonsense, along with retaliation against whoever is responsible for releasing the virus in the first place. I am not holding my breath for this to happen.

On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?

Not in the slightest except for the rare few cranks which you'll find about any policy. The only places where I see any sort of "Covid-brokenness" are this forum and one local politician who seems to be mostly obsessed with her personal power trip (which has not succeeded in any meaningful sense).

Everyone else has moved on with regular life now that people are vaccinated and most have gotten infected with Omicron strain once anyway.

Then again, I live in a country where the available policy options were not only "full lockdown" or "do nothing at all".

Yeah, there's maybe 5 % (if I'm feeling generous) that I see using masks in public transport of shopping centers, but even then it's a blink-and-miss affair if you're really not looking for them. Apart from that pretty much nobody cares. Even many of the cranks moved on to various forms of Ukraine crankery in February (ie. Covid conspiracists often became Putinists and a number of zero-covidists seem to have become "Western intervention in Ukraine NOW" types.)

We recently had a subthread on topics that broke people's brains, or more precisely on topics that were fighting culture war terrain for them: https://www.themotte.org/post/146/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/22723?context=8#context. Several people, myself included, named covid-related issues as the most salient item.

So, yes, the age of covid broke everyone's brains. Mine included. I won't go into it again for now; there's hardly a point in repeating myself. Check the link to read about people being angry.

That was part of what triggered it. It wasn't just my personal life, but a bunch of people here (largely around lockdowns, though, which I haven't really heard concerns about in my personal circles) as well! But I figured the 'what broke your brain personally' question was worth following up with 'have you noticed this in your friend circles', especially because this is not exactly a normal place. Mottizens being angry about an issue doesn't necessary translate to much salience in the public at large.

Have you considered this lack of anger about lockdowns in your personal circle might be an artifact of your bubble? I know lots of people IRL who are still throwing fits about the pandemic response. And mostly normies, too.

Possibly. I grew up as poor white trash and my high school friends largely reflect that, worked in a factory and my blue-collar friends (the two I keep in touch with) reflect that as well, and then uni to a bog-standard office career - so plenty of white-collar colleagues and a couple of friends as well. All that means I think my bubble is hopefully a little more diverse in opinion than that of most people. It could be in part that I'm Australian - the response was largely bipartisan because for quite a long time lockdowns meant 'no Covid' instead of 'we still have Covid but you also can't go out to eat'.

There are plenty of people I know who are still mad about the pandemic response, but it all seems to be vaccine-centered. Though the 'Australian' bubble is very difficult to pop, it's not as if I can go out and meet new Americans in real life on a regular basis.

It's also why I'm asking, though! Maybe my friends weren't representative and most everyone was fine and had moved on. Maybe everyone was mad about lockdowns and didn't care about vaccines. I certainly didn't know, so I thought it was worth raising.

Australia seems like a pretty big confounding factor, here, and I'll grant that popping that bubble is not particularly reasonable. In America it's quite common to run into people IRL who are extremely bitter about covid measures for one reason or other; particularly younger working class men, or skilled blue collar labor(for whom lockdowns meant, in practice, that they were required to go to work as before but could not leave the house for any other reason), or devoutly religious people(who interpreted church closings as persecution, especially post-Floyd). And that's without getting into the rural-urban divide.

The people who are like "everything is totally back to normal" probably just don't live in the truly-insane areas of the West Coast where this stuff is still, still!, very much an issue. Last month I was on a trip with a large group of people. One of the people in my group was wearing a mask inside the restaurant, pulling it down to take a bite, and pulling it back up to chew. In Seattle, masking in grocery stores is still at maybe 10-20% and there are plenty of buildings that still have "masks required" signs.

Let me give you a slightly different example.

In higher education, the gossip right now is revolving around perceptions that students are cheating more, less inclined to come to class, more fragile with feedback and being challenged, less prepared for university-level work, etc. I'm not aware of any specific, careful empirical data here, and there is certainly a tendency among professors to complain about their worst cases. But certainly my own experience has aligned with that of the gossip.

I grew up hearing all kinds of stories about how those who grew up during the Great Depression had a tendency toward hoarding, "upcycling," and so forth. "Post traumatic stress disorder" has come to encompass a lot more than shell-shock these days. What's weird, to me, about post-COVID sociological changes is how just wildly unnecessary the whole mess appears to have been. My students aren't skipping class and sloughing assignments because they lost their families to the plague; they're skipping class and sloughing assignments because most of them spent a year or two living under government lockdowns, being assured all the while that this would not impact their life progression. But it already has.

Did you know that six U.S. states just waived the bar exam for law graduates to become lawyers. The bar exam, which is supposed to be the line between "competent" and "incompetent" representation, and state governments just said--eh, just wave everyone through.

Someone will undoubtedly say--well what were they supposed to do? I get it, really. People spent two years or more improvising at every turn. Mistakes were bound to be made. But it is depressing to me that so much of that improvising involved total abandonment of anything approaching ordinary common sense in favor of absolutely maximum panicking. That sort of thing is bound to have long term impacts.

Did you know that six U.S. states just waived the bar exam for law graduates to become lawyers. The bar exam, which is supposed to be the line between "competent" and "incompetent" representation, and state governments just said--eh, just wave everyone through.

I think in many ways Covid accelerated preexisting trends. One was toward remote work; we would probably have gotten there eventually anyway, the incentives were strong as cost of living and commute lengths skyrocketed in high-income employment hubs, but Covid probably moved us ten years into the future in terms of forcing adoption. Another is probably a secular trend away from meritocracy. IMO the fundamental driver there was the end of the Cold War and generally increasing wealth (slackness is more pleasant, and can be viewed as a luxury good that we are consuming more of now that we have more wealth), but Covid again moved us probably ten years forward in terms of abandoning standardized tests, having sympathy for mental disorders (or laziness that uses the language of mental disorders) and adopting racial and gender quotas in employment and higher education.

Did you know that six U.S. states just waived the bar exam for law graduates to become lawyers. The bar exam, which is supposed to be the line between "competent" and "incompetent" representation, and state governments just said--eh, just wave everyone through.

Man, that is wild. I genuinely have a hard time believing that anyone would do something as stupid as that. Do they not stop to think for one second about the consequences of such an action?

And isn’t it normal to have to take multiple times anyways?

Do they not stop to think for one second about the consequences of such an action?

I think what gets me is--maybe there won't be any noticeable consequences. Most, maybe all of these states implemented an "hours of supervised practice" prerequisite. If supervised practice really is enough to accomplish the goals of the bar exam, why in God's name would we continue administering bar exams? That's an expensive, deeply unpleasant process to subject people to for literally no reason at all (queue Meditations on Moloch electroshock discussion).

Conversely, if the exam really does protect consumers in ways that can't be accomplished by supervised practice, what possible justification could there be to shrug your shoulders and say, "well, this year we're just not going to bother?" "Yes, hundreds of lawyers whose legal education was interrupted by COVID, also never had to prove that they learned anything to the state, so... just watch out for lawyers who graduated in 2021 I guess? One in ten should probably not be practicing law?"

But no--we get total doublethink on the matter. The bar exam is absolutely crucial to protecting consumers from incompetent representation, and also a completely optional exercise with no serious relevance to professional competence, somehow.

literally no reason at all

No, there are reasons for it. Maybe not good reasons for it, but definitely reasons. Just off the top of my head, we have:

(1) the bar filters for people who are either capable of ingesting and processing lots of information, or working like cast-iron bastards for six months to simulate the brainpower. These skills are extremely useful in the legal field.

(2) the bar filters for people who are able to write well (for a certain definition of "well") and with clarity (for a certain definition of "clarity") under high stress, significant time pressure, and over an extended sequence of continuous tasks. This is also a very valuable skill for many lawyers (though not all).

(3) the bar does at least require a certain amount of basic legal knowledge about a number of different legal sub-fields. Most of these fields are quite complex in their own right, and can take whole careers to become an expert in, but the bar means that no attorney is going to be completely clueless when it comes to, e.g., family law, or the remedies available in different kinds of litigation, or the steps necessary to form a contract. As long as we're going to be pretending that all lawyers are members of a sacrosanct professional guild, some degree of basic generality is required so the number of lawyers providing affirmatively wrong information and advice is cut down somewhat.

(4) the bar functions as a literal bar-to-entry to the lawyering guild, increasing compensation in the industry.

In higher education, the gossip right now is revolving around perceptions that students are cheating more, less inclined to come to class, more fragile with feedback and being challenged, less prepared for university-level work, etc. I'm not aware of any specific, careful empirical data here

Not really a sophisticated and careful analysis, but Bloomberg had a recent op-ed about SAT/ACT scores. They've plummeted during COVID. If anything, it probably understates the loss, as universities have increasingly dropped test requirements and would-be weak scorers have decided not to take the tests and submit scores.

Obviously scores don't tell everything. But they speak to the trend. And there's a reason for the dearth of other empirical data: American educational researchers are very disinclined to look into this question, and schools don't want to surface self-condemning metrics.

What were they supposed to do?

Listen to all of the smart people who were screaming at the top of their lungs that this sort of thing was exactly what was going to happen, and work to avoid it.

On a personal level I can definitely admit that covid has broken me. I can't seem to let it go and I'm still hooked on lockdown and vaccine BS that a normal person would've long moved on from. I recognise that this is a problem and have actively been trying to spend less time and energy pursuing such material.

It's hard to move on though because the public response in general, and particularly that of my friends and family, to covid restrictions, was really shocking to me. How easily they rolled over and accepted the boot of tyranny in the name of safety. How quickly my friends turned on me for questioning the narrative and how even my own family turned against me and didn't want me around anymore. That stings and the trauma from that betrayal is at the root of my continued obsession.

And although they've moved on there's been no apology or acceptance that they were wrong. They still believe that they did the right thing. My friends ignore covid restrictions like everybody else now and my family invites me around again but the fact that they haven't acknowledged how easily they were manipulated and misled into evil, into pointless ostracisation, into supporting highly unethical and immoral policies, means that I can't trust them or wider society in the same way I did pre-covid.

So yes, covid has broken me. It broke my trust in my country, in my people and in my closest loved ones. Is it any wonder I can't let it go.

It really is depressing how many people can be proved so utterly wrong and yet never acknowledge it isn’t it? People are so prideful and arrogant. It’s our greatest downfall as a species

I've learned at work that if a boss never admits he is wrong, or that the team is in complete shambles, then that leaves just enough doubt that many people will not ever truly realize or conclude this. If you live in a domain where there is not complete knowledge sharing amongst people, there's always just a little bit of doubt. "Are my thoughts accurate? Maybe I'm the one who's crazy. Everyone else seems to have so much trust in this institution/team, I guess it's all just fine, and maybe the boss isn't wrong after all. Maybe the team really is going strong, and is a great place to work after all."

I’m sure this kind of denial is adaptive in the business or employment sphere but there should be a limit when it comes to personal intimate relationships. If you have a close relationship with someone who refuses to admit their wrong doing even when it’s negatively afffected you, you might want to consider whether this person is abusing you in some way

COVID measures were a tax on conscientiousness and I think corrosive to our society’s health in ways we are only beginning to understand. I think most westerners are so a-historical and complacent that they don’t think real oppression can happen to them. Most peoples response was “I support lockdowns” because that was the pro-social thing to say, while at the same time flouting all the rules personally. They lived as if there would not be personal consequences to their actions in defiance of the rules. And they were right, of course too bad about all the businesses that failed, but we needed to do it to save the marginal old person.

This is dangerous and the worst of both worlds. People don’t care about the loss of their de jure liberty and just assume the justice system won’t come for them. We eroded faith in law and order at the same time as we sent a strong signal to the state that we will accept state overreach. And the people who protested? In Canada we froze their bank accounts and declared martial law.

Say what you want about lax US gun laws, but they do deter the type of protest that we saw in Canada. Nobody would do that here, because homeowners would be outside brandishing forearms firearms.

Nobody would do that here

Sure they would- California has lots of guns, but that didn't stop the early 90s race riots; $major_US_city metropolis has lots of guns, but that didn't stop the peaceful but fiery protests from consuming them. Rittenhouse was the end of it, but they certainly gave him hell for it and his friend was convicted anyway.

The problem is that you actually need a legal leg to stand on, and the Canadian right gave no reason beyond what is typical for protests for the citizens of Ottawa to start sniping from their expensive apartment balconies. Not that they even had any guns, given they're the ones begging the government to act aggressively against the people that do, but still.

Didn't help in the US either. Instead of rioters being deterred, defenders of own homes got prosecuted for merely brandishing.

brandishing forearms.

Sun's out, guns out?

I was already immunized to government propaganda before the Covid psy-op.

After the Russia election hack psy-op, the Hunter Biden psy-op, the white supremacy psy-op, the Charlottesville psy-op... Gamergate...

Nothing bad really happened to me, ties were further strained with family, for example my mom hoping I'd lose my job to the OSHA federal mandate that was shot down.

This was a practice run for the next big thing, and hopefully we survive that one too.

I don't know how many people actually changed their view over that, but if they still have faith in their government, 'Science', 'the experts' etc, it seems that there is not much that can be done for them.

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