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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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1.2 million people died? You mean the lockdowns didn’t prevent large numbers of deaths?

We should have let the Kung flu burn itself out faster. Lockdown advocates should be stripped of their professional credentials(and if that means ‘no doctors for a few years’ then so be it) and forbidden to work, address the public, or collect social security, and the head honchos executed. The lockdown itself needs to be the subject of a sustained ‘never again’ campaign similar to the Holocaust, and future generations should be guilt tripped endlessly about what their ancestors did.

Sound harsh? ‘Covid was really bad’ apologia is just an attempt to rehabilitate the lockdowns to do it again. I’ll have an objective discussion about it when dr Fauci is executed after a public show trial.

We should have let the Kung flu burn itself out faster.

Did anyplace on Earth achieve herd immunity? What makes you think this was possible? What was to prevent more dangerous mutations from spreading, before herd immunity was reached?

(Also, if you want to annoy the CCP, call it "Sars-Cov-2," not "Kung Flu.")

It really should have been Wuhan Flu.

Except it wasn't a flu, so that would just be incorrect.

Flu is almost always symptomatically indistinguishable from COVID. Not very many people need to know or care about the exact taxonomy of a moderate respiratory infection, and frankly speaking, most doctors don't either. To the minor extent that treatment might differ, we'd mentally just keep that bit in mind. It would hardly be the worst name in the world.

I'm not sure why there are so many people insisting that we should have used a more inexact name for this disease just because it fits a certain naming scheme (or geopolitical interest).

Remember when we all pretended it was a rule not to name diseases after places? That was fun.

Again, I'm not sure why people are insisting on this. Is there something particular gained, apart from - again - the geopolitical interest?

If by "this" you mean "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID", SJers tend to subscribe to the Whorf hypothesis that language affects culture and keep trying to exploit this.

If you mean "Wuhan Flu", because anti-SJers are very angry at the SJers who play Whorfian language games and want to spite them, possibly in the hopes of not having more Whorfian language games. Also, because naming diseases after places has been quite common until recently.