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 -
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.
When I was quite young, I adopted the stereotypical pretentious reddit fedora mentality - other people are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd, I'm smarter than them, I'm an independent thinker, etc. As I got a little older I softened on that. I thought, well that's not really fair, people generally do try their best and everyone has a reason for acting the way they do, I shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that I'm all that different from them.
But Covid kinda tanked my assessment of humanity in general and I'm back to thinking that most people really are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd. Covid was empirical proof of that. The media really can just turn mass sentiment on or off, like flipping a switch, and people will go along with it because it's "the right thing to do". Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat. Turn the switch off and it's all forgotten. Like it never even happened. They don't even think about it anymore. How can I trust that they have any deeply held convictions or principles at all, if the sentiment comes and goes that easily?
Granted, people have always believed dumb things throughout history. Mass psychosis has existed for as long as we've had mass society. So, taking a broad enough view, Covid didn't really teach us anything new. But I do think it was possibly the first example that showed how spectacularly easy it is to manipulate mass sentiment in the social media age. At least communism required a commitment on your part; it demanded that you have skin in the game for the long haul. Now the political flow of society can be turned on or off like a faucet, they can direct people over here one day and over there the next, running everyone ragged because they're deathly afraid of not getting enough likes on their TikToks from The Right People or whatever the hell it is that kids worry about these days.
With each passing year, reality does more and more to chip away at my faith in the inherent nobility of the human spirit. I'm bitter about it.
I empathize with your sentiment but I think it's a little bit uncharitable, I mean people had a valid right to be afraid of the virus as well. My father was high risk and ended up dying from it, so to paint everyone who freaked out about the virus as a sheeple is slightly insulting, though I realize that for the majority of people they didn't have nearly as much reason to worry. I also wonder if you're living in a blue tribe setting or somewhere outside the US as the response from where I was in a more rural area wasn't nearly as sheeple-y as your post seems to indicate, plenty of people were rolling their eyes the entire time in the small town I was living in
I acknowledge that Covid was an actual disease that actually killed people. But for most of the people who got swept up in Covid safetyism, what they were really responding to was the media campaign, not the underlying empirical facts about the disease itself. That was the core of my complaint.
Covid is still killing people - why aren't we still in lockdown? If reducing deaths from communicable airborne illnesses is a terminal value, why don't we have lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine mandates every flu season? The major difference between the Covid lockdown era, and the time periods before and after it, is the force of the public propaganda campaign. That was the real operative factor. I didn't think that so many people would be so responsive to that campaign, but they were.
Yes, deep blue. It was inescapable here, impossible not to notice anytime you set foot outside.
Why did we have that strong a media reaction to it? Real question, I honestly have no idea why this became what it was still.
I’m not sure that is actually true. NY was ventilating people left and right. We learned that was probably counter productive. That is, I’m not sure the virus killed 4x the normal rate but the virus + Iatrogenesis.
Not to mention the murderous blunder of sending recovered-yet-contagious patients back to old-age homes full of vulnerable targets so as not to "stress the health care system".
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