This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now, ranging from inconvenient to life altering. The things I've been hearing about from my social circle include major tech layoffs, inflation, and increased serious illness due to diseases like RSV and flu hitting people in unexpectedly strong ways. My general response to this has been, "well maybe next time, we shouldn't shut down the entire world due to a relatively non-dangerous disease like coronavirus." Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take? To be honest, there's probably a lot of other factors at play as well that I'm not accounting for in that analysis, due to my unfamiliarity. These factors may include foreign issues, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, leading to increased energy prices, etc.
C19 - Catchall term to refer to all covid mitigating restrictions such as lockdowns, capacity limits, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, money printing, eviction freezes, etc. Not the disease itself, Which specific item should be contextually obvious.
America is relatively shielded from the C19 fallout relative to the world. So you are actually limiting the strength of your argument by limiting it to the US. There are certain very very bad things [1,2] happening in the third world that is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt is caused by C19.
Your list is far far from exhaustive. And all of it becomes really dizzying when they confound a few times over and you get into nth order effects.
Quite obviously very related to C19.
Tech companies got much more traffic as people spent their sTimMiEs and could only shop online; and as a result hired a whole load of excess staff that they now have to fire as the money printing can't go on forever and said money printing induced inflation mitigation measures are put on by the fed.
Obvious.
I'm not going to make an technical economic argument because there are many people who can do it much better than me.
But much like the The First Law of Thermodynamics and Newtons Third Law; There Ain't No Such a Thing as Free Lunch. Closing businesses, closing factories, closing ports, all of it has a price, a rather steep one. You can cushion the punch in the gut of doing that for a long time, but there is no escaping the punch in the gut. The longer you cushion it, the harder you get hit.
I am absolutely bamboozled at anyone who questions this notion at all. The Economy is the creation/exchange of goods and services, not abstract numbers on a monitor, you have less of those going around, it doesn't matter what the numbers say. Seriously anyone who doesn't understand that shouldn't be allowed to talk about economics ever.
Also ridiculous amounts of wealth transfer can make the aggregates look good. But the AUC will be less.
Will the left ever talk about C19 being class warfare? I'll not hold my breath.
This is the hardest one to find a causal link for but I wouldn't discount it at all. My priors are much aligned with this being true than not.
And the mechanism for that doesn't have to be rocket science.
Bad health -> Bad immune system
Ofcourse staying at home and watching movies all day or months on end, working from home, not getting any sunlight, only eating dogshit you ordered off delivery apps, drinking more, is not good for health.
And that is discounting physiopsychological effects!
I think the Ukraine war really was one of the best things that happened to The Establishment in a long time. It can act as a scapegoat for a plurality if not majority of the bad things caused by C19.
The fact that some of the bad things are a result of C19 is not even within the public consciousness.
It's always the supply chains or this things price going up or that things factory closing, when you dig into okay "why did that happen?"; It almost inevitably leads back to C19.
Immunity debt is a possibility but needs more studies.
We don't need to prove that public health interventions caused harm. Those who decided to implement them had to prove that they are safe and effective, just like we do with medicines.
A lot of inflation in Europe is not related to Ukraine. Maybe prices for energy could be explained by war in Ukraine but food is very questionable. Even if the price of grains is determined by global market prices, their impact on total food should not be that much.
The whole COVID debacle illustrated pretty profoundly how much public health academica is a circlejerk of people who called for lockdowns then marking their own homework. Honestly the way that the period has killed a lot of trust in science & politicans will be one of the bigger legacies.
My personal experience with my relatives and friends is that people who died from covid were already on the verge of death (very frail, in really bad health, in most cases bedridden) and their deaths didn't surprise anyone. Now that pandemic has ended I wonder if those with better access to global data have evaluated if my experience is true globally? Of course, there will always be exceptions but generally speaking I think that excluding this vulnerable population, not many people died or suffered severe consequences from covid.
I base my assumption from the fact that we know that risk from covid was greatly stratified by age. Statistics show that some younger people also died but we don't know very well what was their health status. Even listing of all comorbidities is not very helpful because the health of people can be different. People with diabetes can be very healthy and can be in very poor health, the same applies to people with different heart diseases. Hypertension may be nothing in one person, and it may be causing heart failure in another.
Anecdotal data is not very helpful. We really need to evaluate this aspect because there was so much fear and paranoia that a lot of purported data is not trustable. Probably, those with access to this level of granularity (like NHS in the UK) do not want to do this type of research because the outcomes can be politically unpalatable, i.e., it would show that it really was the case that most people who died from covid would have been dead a few months later in any case. It was sad for them to die but it was inevitable outcome that didn't deserve damaging the lives of children and all of us.
From my reading of the literature:
Most comorbidities don't amount to much compared to just age + being male. There's no way to give a young person enough comorbidities to make them at high risk as an old person without also making them instantly die from their comorbidities. You'd need to be a quintuple amputee with stage 11 cancer and multiple organ failure. Governments incorrectly communicated the risk of comorbidities and never rescinded this communication (and also never properly communicated the sheer impact age has), resulting in plenty of 20 year olds with asthma thinking they're more likely to die than their grandparents.
Chance of dying from OG covid correlates pretty much 1:1 with your chance of dying in the next year once you are over 30. Below 30, this pattern doesn't hold, as teens and 20-somethings have a bump of risk of dying from suicide/violence/vehicles and under-5s have infant mortality effects despite being unaffected by covid.
The average age of covid deaths, and life expectancy tables, come together to yield a result that the average person who died from covid probably had 7 years left to live. Eyeball-tier adjustments for how the average person who dies of covid is frailer than the average person of the same age probably reduces this to ~4 years. This doesn't sound good for lockdowns as it means, in a circumstance where as much as 1% of the population die from covid, that's still only two weeks lost per person. Does not bode well for stealing multiple months away with lockdowns.
However, our counting system for covid deaths introduces all kinds of oddities, because the more ill you are, the greater the chance of you incidentally dying shortly after catching covid even if covid plays no role in it. There's a double whammy when you add in nosocomial infections. In the UK, there have been periods where it is likely that as many as 50% of recorded deaths are incidental, simply as a by-product of the number of positive tests * the chance of dying in any random 28 day period.
High level court officials were giving completely misleading data about how many kids have been hospitalized due to covid and how many of them died from covid. I cannot simply trust any officially published data now. I will need several confirmatory sources with good methodology and tested by rigorous review process.
I work at the pharmacy. Some children we dispense medicines to are wheelchair bound. In fact, they have severe disabilities, including mental disabilities. In vulgar language such a child is sometimes called “a vegetable”. People talk like that although I am conscious that some people will consider that it is very disrespectful to use such a word. In any case, one of them died from covid. It is sad but I am sure the parents saw his death from covid as mercy. He had no chance of fulfilling life and was only suffering every hour of his existence.
Elon Musk refused to reinstate Alex Jones on twitter because he was using child tragedies for personal gain. I agree with this decision. But I think that many people were using those rare child deaths from covid to spread fear and push their narratives. Their actions are abominable similar to Alex Jones'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Modern food productivity is largely a byproduct of natural gas derived nitrogen fertilizers (which were heavily exported by Russia and Ukraine and who both exported a significant proportion of the natural gas used by Europe to make their own fertilizers. Since the Ukrainian War started, natural gas prices meant that European fertilizer manufacturers shut down their plants which raised costs and prices even in places that didn't buy Russian wheat or fertilizer directly (their cheap fertilizer came from Russian gas).
As I mentioned above, the electricity prices has quadrupled in Latvian and yet the price for whole range of energy dependant services haven't increased significantly yet. I don't that gas price accounts for 50% of, let's say, of the price of milk. I have been offered such narratives bud do the calculations work out? By my rough, very approximate estimate, they don't. I am not an expert in this and might be wrong but I suspect that this narrative is not correct either.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Considering Ukraine and Russia are both massive food exporters I think the war could very easily explain surging food prices. A sharp drop in supply could send ripples through the global market.
No, most of the food in Latvia is not imported from Ukraine/Russia. Only very few products are actually imported from there.
Price shocks on a global market will still effect local consumer prices. If the supply of wheat goes down 10% you'll see prices rise across the board as countries and businesses globally bid up the price for a now scarcer resource. Latvian farmers can now sell their goods abroad for a premium to plug a RussoUkranian sized hole in the market, so Latvian locals still end feeling the pinch.
Very doubtful. The bus rides didn't increase when petrol prices increased considerably. Just because grain is more expensive now, doesn't mean that pizza prices should increase by 50% or so.
Some goods and services are more elastic price wise than others, but I think a fairly massive war between two countries that combined account for 25% of global wheat exports could explain most of the sticker shock in the food sector.
Yes, but it is not 25% of total global wheat production either. And in the EU agriculture is subsidised, and the prices farmers get hasn't changed much.
Ukraine played the role but I suspect that the usual reasons for inflation (like free money, supply chain disruptions etc.) played even greater role.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link