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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Covid global health emergency is over, WHO says

Yes, I know, Covid "has been over" for well over a year, pretty much no-one cares about this topic anyway, but I wonder if we'll now start more getting full appraisals of the entire Covid period. It is bewildering to consider how little people (apart from the two formed and ongoing "Covid tribes" - lockdown/vaccine skeptics on one hand, zero-covidists still wearing masks on the other hand) care about Covid now, considering how large it loomed for two years. For instance, I watched some Finnish election debates a few months ago, and the dire financial/general status of the health care system was frequently discussed with almost no mentions and indications that the Covid crisis and the decisions done during this period might have had anything to do with it.

What are all the ways people here would say the pandemic era changed the world? I don't think that all the effects will be visible or evident for years to come - there will yet be a lot of stuff where people in ten years might say "of course the Covid era changed that" but isn't properly yet considered to be a Covid effect.

There will be no appraisals. It behooves nobody in the journalist/politician alliance to examine whatever the fuck it was that they had a hand in making. We will be seeing countless knock on effects for years. The only silver lining is that in our (UK) official inquiry there will be some investigation into the effects the pandemic has had on the young. I feel desperately sad for them - their early years are so vitally important and the government did everything it possibly could to disrupt them.

Which is interesting. When you make the political apparatus and the media apparatus two parts of the same machinery there will never be at least public review of poor choices.

While public rebuke is a nice thing, more importantly is that the right lessons are learned. One concern is that absent a public rebuke the right lessons are never learned.

Maybe you mean that there will be no "official" appraisals? There have already been papers written on the effects of official COVID measures in higher education--for my small part I have been part of the writing of at least two of them. These were bith qualitative interview studies with university students in the first two years of the COVID period, and I and my co-researchers, at least, tried to be careful to not frame the study as about "the effects of COVID" but the effects--on them specifically, as it was a qualitative study--of how the governmental, educational, and social systems (which the students had no recourse but to flow with) moved in reaction to COVID.

I am just speaking for my own experience. Certainly many others in education have written with agendas far removed from my own perspective.

There will be no common knowledge generated, no social consensus formed. People, collectively, will learn nothing.

People, collectively, will learn nothing.

Well, yeah. The Allies absolutely beat it into the Germans that being a Nazi was wrong and the polite opinion there is that it's still wrong today; unfortunately, there are no Allies to beat into the Western public that their Nazi-like response (forced vaccinations under legal penalty, concentration camps, rejection of science in favor of the regime's approach, internal border checkpoints, etc.) to Covid was wrong.

Society has qualified sovereign immunity, just like its corporate arm (government) does.

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