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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32447 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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They also legally suppressed the French language across the state. Cajun and Creole children were paddled for speaking it in their public schools well into the twentieth century.

This is technically true, but the dominant factor in Cajuns abandoning the French language was that their bosses were Texans who preferred English speaking workers, and Cajuns who had mostly been paddled for speaking French in school and then continued speaking it anyways stopped teaching their children French because they wanted them to make more money as adults rather than be stuck in the rice fields subsistence farming. The paddling mostly suppressed the Cajun language in a few holdouts.

The narrative that state pressure, rather than economic factors, was the main reason for the decline of the French language is mostly driven by Cajun academics trying to cast themselves as oppressed by a white anglo hegemony alongside blacks- my grandfather told me "my parents spoke French, but they never wanted to teach me". For the same reason you tend to see occasional books talking about how Cajuns were more likely to intermarry with blacks or whatever- being oppressed is fashionable, and LSU academics who got French department sinecures through nepotism and themselves speak standard, not Cajun French want in on the grift.

Actual working class(the vast majority) Cajuns are more likely to point to anti-Catholic or class biases as reasons for their poverty, and are often not shy about criticizing lazy or dysfunctional friends and relatives, with the implication that those prejudices are much reduced and so there's not a lot of excuse for not succeeding.

stopped teaching their children French because they wanted them to make more money as adults rather than be stuck in the rice fields subsistence farming.

I don't follow. Why would that make them stop teaching them French instead of starting to teach them English?

Because natal bilingualism was not understood to be completely possible in the 1940's.

I don't believe that. There were bilingual regions in the world way before that.

As a former ESL teacher, I can tell you that well into the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for schools to discourage ESL students from speaking their native language at home, and for immigrant parents to basically not teach their kids to speak it, because it was widely believed that this would inhibit becoming fluent in English.

Now we know that this is the opposite of true, but bilingual education really wasn't well understood, even in places where you could see kids growing up bilingual.

I think I heard this theory in the past, but I heard it exclusively from Americans. That fact makes the "we totally weren't trying to stamp out your culture, guys" theory look a bit suspicious, rather than argue in it's favor.

It was also the norm across a lot of Europe for a long time. My hometown in Europe switched from a local dialect of a minority language to the national language in about one generation, for this reason.

That doesn't mean Cajuns in the 40s knew that. I had an immigrant teacher from Latin America in HS who told me how his parents spoke only English at home to Americanize the children better, so that by the time he was an adult he couldn't speak Spanish.

If you are a peasant under Jim Crow in the rural southern US, you are unlikely to know about them. And to be clear, it was the mainstream narrative in the USA that simultaneous bilingualism was undesirable and barely possible.

And to be clear, it was the mainstream narrative in the USA that simultaneous bilingualism was undesirable and barely possible.

Yes, it's almost as if someone decided to stamp out all competing cultures on the territory, make it look voluntary, but wasn't shy about using the paddle if someone was being stubborn.

Well yeah, obviously there was top down assimilative pressure and obviously there were kids beaten for speaking French. But these weren’t Native American residential schools here- the English only assimilationism failed when it was all stick. Yes, a lot of the carrot was on the basis of false narratives being fed by educated people to subsistence farmers. But it’s important to note that this wasn’t a pack of lies being fed to the backwards peasants to get them to cooperate in their own cultural dissolution or whatever narrative some academics are pushing- aside from French, Cajun culture is doing fine, and the Cajuns themselves wanted their kids to speak English with a normal American accent rather than as a second language while the educated people they turned to for help happened to hold false beliefs about how to do that, but those false beliefs were the expert consensus of their day and applied literally everywhere.

Experts hold false beliefs for non-malicious reasons all the time, eg face masks stop Covid.

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but those false beliefs were the expert consensus of their day and applied literally everywhere.

I honestly doubt that. The idea that bilingualism is somehow bad could be seen in the wild until pretty recently, but in my experience was limited to the Anglos, and might even have been mostly an American thing. Maintaining it requires a huge amount of anti-curiosity, and blindness to other parts of the world.

Experts hold false beliefs for non-malicious reasons all the time, eg face masks stop Covid.

Sure, once an idea gets rolled out from the top, it tends to get repeated in good faith by the lower strata of society. It seems that this is how Anglos have always done it.

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Once everyone speaks English, what benefit is there to also speaking French? My maternal grandparents spoke cajun French at home growing up. Would my mother have gotten any significant utility out of being raised bilingual?

Coolness only carries so far; You need an active initiative and local culture to really support it. (Which is why cajun-french lasted as long as it did, really.)

A friend of mine can understand both Cajun-french and German(due to his older relatives), but that doesn't mean he can speak it.

Well, beyond the swear words.

Contrasting that, while my grandfather could understand the language of the home country, he couldn't speak it - because his father and mother made a point not to have him speak it, and there was little benefit to knowing a second language when you were supposed to be American.

Still, recent changes in outlook has resulted in a rush to preserve the language, and Louisiana is one of the few places that has local governments having in-place bilingual laws and whatnot. But given how the older generation is slowly dying out... well. We'll see what happens.

(Though is is fun to see French tourists touring around the Acadian parishes.)

Learning Cajun French as an adult is moderately trendy, and there’s a decent enough live music scene and social activities in Cajun that it makes sense as a hobby in southwest Louisiana/southeast Texas. I’m given to understand that enough of the couples who meet this way (are trying to)raise their children bilingual that there’s probably a future of native speakers, even if the current native speakers make the ELCA look demographically healthy.

The misunderstandings between Cajun speakers and standard French speakers are hilarious, though.

The answer is, “It would be cool, and there are maybe some moderate cognitive benefits. We think. Mostly it would be cool.”

The cognitive benefits of knowing 2 languages is probably in the bottom 5% of reasons given to learn a language.

Hey, it's one of the reasons I'm doing it. (Of course, I'm getting old enough that cognitive benefits start becoming important again...)

I wonder if the benefits are greater if you learn languages far removed from each other, like simultaneously trying to learn Welsh, Magyar and Navajo.

TR giving a speech on the topic:

I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism. I do not speak of the hyphen when it is employed as a mere convenience, although personally, I like to avoid its use even in such manner. I speak and condemn its use whenever it represents an effort to form political parties along racial lines or to bring pressure to bear on parties and politicians, not for American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin, or of the country from which they or their fathers came.

Americanism is not a matter of creed, birthplace or national descent, but of the soul and of the spirit. If the American has the right stuff in him, I care not a snap of my fingers whether he is Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant. I care not a snap of my fingers whether his ancestors came over in the Mayflower, or whether he was born, or his parents were born, in Germany, Ireland, France, England, Scandinavia, Russia or Italy or any other country. All I ask of the immigrant is that he shall be physically and intellectually fit, of sound character, and eager in good faith to become an American citizen. If the immigrant is of the right kind I am for him, and if the native American* is of the wrong kind I am against him….

…Now for our own citizens. We represent many different race strains. Our ancestors came from many different Old World nationalities. It will spell ruin to this nation if these nationalities remain separated from one another instead of being assimilated to the new and larger American life.

The children and our children’s children of all of us have to live here in this land together. Our children’s children will intermarry, one another, your children’s children, friends, and mine. Even if they wished, they could not remain citizens of foreign countries….The effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself by the use of the hyphen and along the lines of national origin is certain to breed a spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens.

Long before Anti-immigration nativist sentiment was based primarily on conversations about the white race, it was based on questions of Christian denomination, on language, on a fear of factionalism within the country. Nativist Americans were hesitant to trust any immigrant who maintained cultural, linguistic, or ethnic distinctiveness.

This is fantastic! I lived in NOLA for 7 years (see my nick/handle), and most of this history is new to me. The names some facts are familiar but not the conceptual fabric tying everything together.

This is my favorite Mottepost all year. Can you recommend any good books on this history of NOLA and the Cajun triangle? I've got ties to the area and have always been enamored of its unique culture and history.

Some of your links are broken, the proper syntax is [text](URL).

Edit: Actually, the problem seems to be that some of them are using ”fancy” quotation marks instead of "normal" straight quotation marks.

Awesome post, would love to hear more of these deep dives

The United Kingdom is unique not because its longstanding ruling class have survived in some degree of power (the same is true in Western Germany, in most of Italy, in much of Spain, to some extent in the Low Countries and Scandinavia) but because the caste system that once defined British society persists.

That's exactly what's unique about the United Kingdom (and to a certain extent Scandinavia). You were just too polite to mention the war.

Famously, the United Kingdom has not been invaded for almost a thousand years.

Consider the great powers of Europe. Germany was defeated twice, bombed to rubble, and then occupied for half a century (in name in the West, in brutal fact in the East). It's one thing to lease your family's old fortress to the National Trust, and it's another to have it bombed by a thousand Flying Fortresses. The English nobility have enjoyed centuries of stability and wealth that allows them to pass great fortunes through the generations. The Uradel has had no such luck. In the 20th C alone, reparations, war taxes, the Soviets, and the Lancaster have reduced their great estates to merely an estate car for the monthly summer in Sylt.

The fate of the French aristocracy is obviously not a head scratcher. Even if we look only at the past century, while the French won both world wars, the experience was almost as ruinous as it was for the Germans.

We can continue. The Low Countries were churned to mud by trench and shell, and then occupied by the Germans. The Italians and the Spanish had poverty, Mussolini, and Franco.

The endurance of the British aristocracy is not due to a quirk of the British national character, but merely the result of a half century of war. In the rest of Europe, the PMC is all that's left.

There is no fellow feeling between castes in Britain. There is, to some extent, shared allegiance to some cultural or political institutions - the monarchy, the military, the flag. There is a shared mythos, shared legend, aspects of common identity - like the pastoral fantasy, an obsession with gossip, a fondness for queueing, firm politeness, a strange and unique sense of 'fairness' that I've written about here before.

In the very recent past there was. Even in the 60s, the commoners would address a lord with deference. Whenever the royal anthem was played, people would stop and stand. People would say "I know my place" without irony.

The recent decoupling of the British aristocracy from the rest of Britain is also not a quirk of the British national character. The rest of Britain was culturally colonized by American individualism and self-creation. We carpet bombed their airwaves.

The Atlee government (and the wartime taxation that preceded it) grabbed a lot of the aristocracy's wealth, but the power of a functioning aristocracy doesn't stem from the cash (as long as there is enough to pay for the education of the next generation). It stems from the social networks (formed by shared upbringing, extended family ties, marriage alliances, and a tradition of regular large parties) and the family traditions that prepare the next generation for careers which will maintain the family's social position, including but not limited to military officering. The aristocracy didn't lose those things, so they were able to adapt. The playing fields of Eton still function as they did in Wellington's time.

To defeat an aristocracy, you either need to kill enough of them to break the network, or make the network irrelevant by building a better one. The last time there was a proper clearing out of the English aristocracy was the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). There is also a fairly serious theory that what actually did the aristocracy in was the slaughter of young officers in WW1 - the major public schools all lost about three graduating classes worth - and screwed up a lot of the rest.

My impression was quite the opposite. The British aristocracy suffered ruinous estate taxes that peaked at 80%, many lost a great deal and even the great estates were often halved (or more) in size.

And yet I still see quite a lot of dukes and earls in the list of top 50 landowners in the UK: https://abcfinance.co.uk/blog/who-owns-the-uk/

German aristocrats don’t even have to report their land holdings

Doesn't Germany have the Torrens system, meaning that each parcel of land is assigned a unique indentifier, and that there exists a public, state database in which its owner is listed?

In Germany, not only did Adenauer's chancellorship prevent the worst excesses of postwar socialism, but a tax code littered with exemptions for family businesses and agricultural land (in many cases drafted by aristocrats involved with the CDU) allowed West German aristocrats to keep the overwhelming majority of their land.

I definitely agree that British rich didn't uniformly have it better than their German counterparts. From Atlee up until Thatcher, Britain was the land of one for you and nineteen for me, and Germany seems to have more billionaires. A large fraction of their wealth does seem to post-date the war though.

On second thought, I think I would weight more heavily the economic leveling effect of the Avro Lancaster. The German rich seem to have done much better than the British rich since the war.

The Weimar government's failure to deal with the status of the aristocracy (even the Fürstenenteignung never happened, so the West German princely houses were among the only only deposed monarchs in history to be able to keep much of their crown property) further bolstered the aristocrats.

Famously, it cause problems for Hitler too.

Wasn't England invaded in 1688?

I suppose you can say that it was an invasion 'only' targeting the ruling dynasty and not the nation as a whole.

What do you think stops upper-middle class people from imitating upper class people, and by faking being high status become high status? Shouldn't they be able to imitate that upper class accent and thereby convince people they're upper class and worthy of deference?

I would've thought upper+upper middle would be more than 5% of the population, more like 10-20%. But my question still applies, what stops the closest to upper middle class portion of the population from imitating elite class markers and thereby devaluing them?

UK usage of class terms reflects the way we see the class structure as a pyramid - so there are more working class people than middle class people, and more middle class people than upper class people. "Middle class" as a stereotype implies someone around the 80th percentile of the SES distribution and "Upper middle class" implies someone close to but not in the top 1% - although in both cases the words actually refer to culture and behaviour and not percentile rankings.

According to the definition of class used by the market research industry, 4% of the UK is upper-middle class and the upper class is too small to be included in conventional market research. This feels about right, although the NRS social grades don't quite identify the right people because they rely on what jobs people do.

In my experience (and this probably doesn't address your question directly) apart from, say, actors putting on whatever accent, people from the UK cling to their respective accents and would be loathe to put on another. This is not to say that living abroad doesn't flatten out accents (as it does to most people, as it certainly did to me) but typically people seem to have some sort of loyalty to their native brogue or whatever.

The cultural distance between a 21st century British aristocrat and a Pakistani cab driver in Lahore, is less than the cultural distance between a 21st century British aristocrat and a 19th century British aristocrat. For starters, 19th century British aristocrats didn't go to Wimbledon. Also, they believed in a religion that no longer exists in the 21st century.

I don't think that religion has ceased to exist to the extent you are suggesting - my experience is that actual aristocrats in England are disproportionately either trad-Catholic (like Jacob Rees Mogg, but less unhinged) or old-time Anglicans whose faith would have been perfectly comprehensible to the high-Church Victorians. The late Queen was mildly exceptional in being a more evangelical kind of Anglican, but the royals were always slightly declasse compared to the established English noble families. (Note that even Victorian high-Church Anglicanism was something American evangelicals would have considered cucked).

One area where the old-time religion has largely ceased to exist (at least for Protestants and American Catholics) is that even the more conservative branches of Christianity struggle to condemn divorce and take it seriously. The British Aristocracy divorce less than American elites (particularly Red Tribe elites), but often enough for it to be embarrassing.

Chins do love to joke about the royal family being upper-middle class, although I don’t know how seriously they actually take that line of argument.

The version I am more familiar is that they are parvenus, having come over from Hanover in the 18th century. This is only partially fair - the late Queen comes from old-established Scottish aristocracy on her mother's side, and of course the Prince of Wales comes from bona fide English upper class stock through the Spencers.

That the romantic English identity described, or which shines through, in the writing of the country's greatest poets and playwrights and novelists is essentially limited to the England of the top 5%, which has its own culture and values, and which is in effect a nation unto itself.

Not buying this at all.

I think your theory would need to be substantiated with genetic analysis. My understanding is basically the complete opposite of your theory: due to the higher fertility and lower infant mortality of the upper classes, the continent experienced persistent downward social mobility through generations and significant evolutionary pressures like the black death. This resulted in essentially the genetic replacement by the upper classes of the lower classes some times over.

The effect was the emergence of a middle class and giving even the lower classes a higher quality, such that a few of them could go to a new world on a new continent and build a civilization in the blink of an eye.

It's been awhile since I read Gregory Clark's work, but that was the impression I came away with, and I'm not buying that there's a significant genetic differentiation between the classes that at all resembles, say, the Indian caste system.

I'm also not buying that you are trying to relegate English identity to only 5% of the population. Let me guess- you are not English. I imagine you have some pretty latent hostility towards the English to come up with a cockamamie theory to remove them from their own ethnic heritage. In your view, the half-Jew half-Brahmin elite will have a better claim to English identity than the English. I wonder why you believe that...

the child of a teacher

And thus middle-class. Schoolteaching is the quintessential middle-middle career. Enoch Powell's education was typical of the near-elites of his day (he went to a grammar school, then to a public school on a scholarship). Enoch's Tory colleagues wouldn't (and didn't, until he went off on one) treat him as an uncultured interloper like Ramsay MacDonald.

Consider this, since you're on the far right yourself: why was Enoch Powell arguably the only major 20th century British politician to express major reservations about mass immigration and to attempt to stop it?

It's a consequence of the post-war ideological realignment that made racialized thinking for European people taboo. You are trying to reduce this behavior to class interests, but it's better explained by a post-war ideological upheaval. Opposition to mass immigration is associated with the far right, which is now indelibly associated with the Holocaust. High-status people have a strong incentive to stay in the walled garden of a prevailing civic religion.

A half-Jew, half-Brahmin is not English and never will be, no matter how many times he attends Wimbledon or what a piece of paper says. Why is it only the "far right" recognizes this fundamental, physical reality of English ethnic heritage, while it faces so much hostility from everyone else (including you) who even deny that such a thing exists? My answer explains this phenomenon better than yours.

The main critics of Powell were other conservatives of high birth.

Some were, some weren't. Edward Heath (leader of the Tories) and Iain Macleod (highest ranking liberal Tory) weren't. It's true that most supporters of Powell were working class, but you'd expect that if they were a purely representative sample of the British public.

What is more significant is that Powell found an issue that cut across party lines, so that e.g. Labour-voting dock workers supported him.

It's not just Holocaust education, the Nuremberg trials and denazification set the tone for the entire post-war moral order, which had certainly been part of public consciousness by the late 1960s. The same was true in the United States. Were the elites really all that different from the height of the British Empire, or was it a change in ideology? Obviously it was the latter. It wasn't the Norman invasion that caused the shift from the height of the British Empire to a British elite that hates its own English heritage.

Very interesting post! It made me wonder about upwards social mobility in britain today. How does the elite react to nouveau riche "upstarts"? Are, for example, sucessful tech founders assimilated? Do they have to study obscure poetry in their 40s in order to fit in? Or is the process delayed by one generation until the heirs had time to go through the elite institutions and become socialized according to their standing?

You can't fit in the British upper class. You can only be born in it. You can marry a member and your kids will be ...

Just to pose an uninformed question (because I can't be bothered), to what extent is 'Britishness' as a common identity even authentic now that the empire has been gone for decades, considering that the only commonality I can name among the English, the Welsh and the Scots (besides them sharing the same island as their homeland - let's ignore Ulster for a moment) was that all of them took part in maintaining the empire, with or without arms, and thus considered themselves 'British' in the sense of assuming an imperialist/colonialist identity? Ever since these 3 nations have formed a single polity, building an empire is the only thing they've ever known. As far as I can tell, they have nothing else in common, and since 1945, this is also gone. I guess Scottish aspirations to political independence prove that, as do the regional (if that's the correct word) results of the Brexit referendum.

Why do you use the term "caste" when there is a fair bit of mobility between them?

Not OP but: Perhaps to imply that there is much less mobility between them than the average American reader might expect had the word "class" been used instead? (And also to imply that birth remains disproportionately important in determining one's class despite increasing social and financial mobility.)

If assimilation into this elite is so easy given a little money, as you seem to suggest, how can this status "define ... every aspect of one's outcome in life"? Can you give examples of people (or types of people) that we'd consider PMC in the American context but who can never be members of the British elite?

Funnily enough I think we have an extremely salient example of this very thing in Meghan Markle.

Funnily enough I think we have an extremely salient example of this very thing in Meghan Markle HRH the Duchess of Sussex.

It is worth pointing out for the benefit of American readers that the reason why she isn't welcome in the British elite is because she is an American who refuses to assimilate, not because she is mixed-race (we don't consider her black given her skin tone and ancestry - the fact that she insists she is Black based on the US-specific one-drop rule is part of the problem). The last American to marry into the Royal Family was Wallis Simpson, and that didn't work out well either.

It is also worth pointing out that actresses are not PMC by default, although HRH is given her background and worldview.

Fairly good apart from the final paragraph, which ignores the 21st century entirely.

Absent AI, it'd be a reasonable proposition to advance. With how crucial and attractive AI is in a world of diminishing talent, it's mostly laughable.

One can't rule success at creating 'aligned' AI which would allow perpetuation of current situation by letting the elite exhibit almost perfect control over society.

I wasn't considering 'Yud Doom' scenario either - I don't think it's that likely because Yud just makes so many weird assumptions that the whole thing starts to look like an apocalyptic cult thinking.

What I had in mind is that people are going to make a mess out of AI, so there are going to be unaligned AIs, or at least enough AIs aligned to enough differing interests that we avoid the doom a world government would be.

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 could have written this post, I feel the exact same, the whole thing made me even more cynical about the average person. But what creeps me out the most is

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.

What does this phenomenon really tell us? To me, the implications are quite disturbing.

When I've gone around loudly proclaiming to be right about something (online or IRL) and then turn out to be wrong, I feel highly embarrassed when I get called out after the fact. In my better moments I respond with humility, and in my worse moments I respond with rage or misdirection. But the point is that I respond somehow, I feel something.

But a lot of the covid fanatics seem to simply not care at all that they were wrong. When you call them on it, you might get a shrug and a "things were different then," or even just a vague confused stare -- why are you still talking about that? Don't you know it's $currentyear? Haven't you heard about Putin?

When they were shouting about killing grandma or plague rats, I had understood those utterances as words that containing meaning or argument. But was I wrong? Were the vast majority of people literally just making mouth noises that simply signalled their alignment with the current Correct Opinion? I'm not being metaphorical here -- the Covid hysteria makes me wonder whether a large majority of our population just parrots slogans to jockey for status without engaging their thinking brains at all (outside of status calculation I guess)? If so, this would explain their apathy about their argument being wrong. "What argument?" they might respond.

Yes, it's not news that the average person is not a deep thinker. Everyone here is aware of that. But to me, the above implies that many people are not just "not deep thinkers." If they were, that wouldn't bother me much -- they and myself would be essentially the same in that we both think, just to different degrees.

But maybe these people are not just shallow thinkers, but non-thinkers. The difference between thinkers and non-thinkers is huge, and I am weirded out by the idea. It almost feels like sharing a society with a bunch of p-zombies (EDIT: to be clear, I don't actually think these people are literal p-zombies). Recent memes about internal monologues and "The Breakfast Question" come to mind. If this model is closer to the truth, it changes my outlook on many things.

"When they were shouting about killing grandma or plague rats, I had understood those utterances as words that containing meaning or argument."

I think that, fundamentally, most people just wanted Covid to go away and to return to normality as fast as possible. The governments, after feeling the initial high of the all-in-the-same-boat feeling of Spring 2020 and the relatively normal (in most parts of the West, if memory servers) summer 2020, got worried that they were in for a long slog after Covid "returned" in autumn/winter 2020/2021 and then got fixated on the idea that there is One Weird Trick they can do to make it go away. And there sure was a good candidate for One Weird Trick: the vaccines.

I think this really explains the rest. The Western governments really, truly weren't, as some conspiracy theorists claimed, trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer the society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was". At the same time, they felt they couldn't just do nothing, or many people might die and they'd get blamed for it (many people did die, but since they were at least trying to do something, that at least blunted the criticism.)

If one remembers initial promises about the vaccines, they were actually quite modest, in line to what we now know the vaccine does (ie. not that much). However, at some point the hype cycle got out of control and the governments and everyone else started believing that the One Weird Trick really was here, just vaccinate everyone and Covid is over and no large lockdowns are needed. (This was preceeded by a similar but smaller hype cycle around masks being the One Weird Trick, which was sufficient to make masking a thing that still continues among the hardcore Covidians).

The furious hatred against "grandma-killers" and "plague rats" was, then, really a feeling that it was those people, the anti-vaxxers and Covid-skeptics, who were responsible for the One Weird Trick not working. Politicians, media, ordinary citizens - what they felt was that the vaccines would really work as promised if everyone just was responsible and got the vaccine. And it was of course easier for public opinionmakers to blame a small, already-hated group (antivaxxers were a popular target for disdain even before Covid) than to admit that there really was no One Weird Trick.

Even after the initial vaccine hype cycle, there was another one over the Covid vaccine passports, but even here the tone was already different. The vaccine passports were presented as a way to run down measures for most of the population - only leaving the hated ones to suffer from the measures. Of course this was a doomed and idiotic attempt from the get-go, but it probably served for some to get them to the mindset where they could just start to let go of the measures and the fear. Perhaps this was the real purpose.

Thus, it also followed that once it became really clear the vaccine really wasn't what the hype cycle promised, everything just died down. It turned out that the way to make "Covid go away" was simply to run the measures down and stop worrying about Covid. At least here, this was aided greatly by Russia starting the Ukraine War and this, then, becoming the huge global thing to worry about. And once this happened people just mostly also actively started to forgot just how crazy the preceeding years were, precisely because they wanted to forget it all.

The Western governments really, truly weren't, as some conspiracy theorists claimed, trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer the society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was".

I think government leaders largely deferred to public health authorities, and those public health authorities saw this as the opportunity of their lifetime to Do Good and Make A Difference. Bureaucrats being bureaucrats, they weren't keen to acknowledge any shortcomings or limits to their knowledge, and put their hands in all the pies they could fit in. Many of those bureaucrats had a very ideological take on what Doing Good looks like. My state banned fishing and then later on one of its counties promoted having sex through a hole in a shower curtain.

They also never put any safeguards against abuse in place. Not just on health departments but no level of government put in any explicit limits on what could be done, or requiring legislative approval, or even gave an explicit deadline of under what conditions the government would declare it over. It was a blank check, heck a credit card with no limits that only expired when those who had been given the card declared they no longer needed it.

And to me, I see some elements of what red-pillers call a shit-test; one we clearly failed as a society. Most people just meekly accepted whatever the government decided whether or not it made sense. In fact, the people were more upset at the pushback than anything else. And while I don’t think the government did all of this with future applications in mind, I think the government has basically learned that it can actually get away with quite a lot if it provided that the people are frightened enough.

My state banned fishing and then later on one of its counties promoted having sex through a hole in a shower curtain.

Link please

Fishing ban: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/mar/25/statewide-fishing-ban-ordered-by-washington-wildli/

It lasted until May 5. No accommodation for people who obtain significant amounts of food from catching their own.

Shower curtains for sex: https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2020/12/07/covexxx-19-has-king-county-public-health-gone-too-far/

Y'know, I wonder how COVID affected the "glory hole" tag on various sites...

Surely you know about how Canada's CDC actually recommended gloryholes for pandemic-safe sex, which is the most ridiculous and short-sighted wannabe bandwagon jumping thing I've ever seen:

https://www.complex.com/life/2020/07/canadian-health-officials-suggest-glory-holes-for-sex-during-covid19

More comments

I think that a large part of public health authority decisionmaking was simply trying to take burden off their workers, who often were particularly horribly overburdened at the start of the crisis but without matching bonuses or pay increases (since the future of the budgets of those institutions had also, for obvious reasons, gone completely up in the air). Basically the only way to placate the workers they had at this point was lobbying for restrictions in hopes that it would somehow reduce this burden of work. However, increasingly as the crisis went on, this was also countered and balanced by businesses lobbying for reopening (including vaccine passports as a partial mean of reopening).

If one remembers initial promises about the vaccines, they were actually quite modest, in line to what we now know the vaccine does (ie. not that much).

Strong disagree, as outlined in this post.

The specificized success criterion was preventing infection. The stated effect was preventing infection. Anyone that now tells you that the scientists were only testing whether it made individuals less likely to die is badly misinformed or is telling a whopper.

Underlined. I was wrong on this one. They didn't study "transmission", because stopping transmission would be unnecessary if the vaccine stopped infection.

I think Stefferi is right if he is talking about expectations for the vaccine before the first trial results were released. Especially focusing on scientific expectations, not the partisan "If Trump release a vaccine before the election it'll be rat poison".

Sure, fair enough. That was the consensus among immunologists I was chatting as early as March of 2020, from my recollection of in person conversations, that if we want something quick, that's feasible, but that it isn't likely to work all that well and that the tradeoffs on safety for rushing are probably not great. All in all, I don't think Covid or the vaccines really brought anything that was very scientifically surprising, but publicly broadcast narratives were far enough from actual science that people kept being surprised.

Yes, I'm talking about the very first chatter there was on the vaccine, ie. some months after March 2020. I didn't quite get /u/WalterOdim's point about FDA, and by Dec 2020 the hype cycle was already running hard.

This is lazy and ahistorical apologia for criminal malfeasance on a global scale.

The medical industry literally produced a virus, let it out into the populace, killed millions, and then got governments to pay them billions and mandate that people buy their products, and continue getting regular injections for all time!

But yes, everyone was well intentioned and kind, it was a bit of a rough time, we all had a reaction, blah blah blah.

Trump proved polling, politics and media was bullshit. Covid proved the medical industry is heinous bullshit. And the po-faced attempts at reasonability now, three years too late, is pathetic.

It's my honest appraisal of the situation and the motivations among the politicians and other media types, based on a close monitoring of the situation and numerous conversations I've had with such people.

continue getting regular injections for all time!

But... that hasn't happened? How many people have gotten a Covid injection for the last year or so? Or in the future?

Yes, the attempt failed.

The mandate still hasn't been rescinded (for three more days), it's just been gutted by the courts for being wildly unconstitutional, and everyone is ignoring it and pretending it doesn't exist. Including you!

The Western governments really, truly weren't, as some conspiracy theorists claimed, trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer the society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was". At the same time, they felt they couldn't just do nothing, or many people might die and they'd get blamed for it (many people did die, but since they were at least trying to do something, that at least blunted the criticism.)

While I think the second part is surely correct -- ass-covering is an age-old political first-responder -- I'm not sure that many governments were anxious for life to return to "as it was." It need not be conspiratorial, but as the underlying theme of progressivism is that 'everything is terrible until we achieve utopia,' there was a lot of incentive for blue governors, urban mayors and unions to try to leverage the crisis as an opportunity for systemic change to some pretty fundamental aspects of life, like remote work and schooling, the operation of elections, etc. That these things have mostly returned to normal was, in my understanding, not without resistance and only because of normie insistence on "as it was."

Globally speaking there was, in the end, fairly little difference between right-wing and left-wing politicians in the harshness of Covid measures - or, rather, there were both right-wingers and left-wingers going with heavy, proactive measures approach (say, Orban and Ardern) or anything from light to non-existent measures (AMLO in Mexico, Bolsonaro in Brazil). It's not something one can strictly blame on progressivism, and the crisis certainly was also used for all sorts of agendas by all sorts of parties.

I get the feeling this has been uncontroversial among the upper classes for most of history, and universal suffrage is a radical idea, especially when paired with centralized media communications.

Simply recalling being in the classroom in high school, or remembering the last time I drove on the interstate, is enough to make what you wrote resonate very intuitively.

That said, don’t be too hasty. We can’t read everyone’s minds, and I myself irl am indistinguishable from a grillpilled go-alonger. I nod in complete agreement when reading @Tophattingston, but the most disobedience I ever engaged in was forcing people to provide me a mask if I was required to have one.

There are people who will stand aside and allow the DeSantises of the world to make their own changes. And the current regime will look to us and conclude that we’re among the p-zombies for having our silent wishes granted.

Learning that universal suffrage was universally regarded as insane prior to the mid-19th century (and even then, the only change was in the U.S.!) is one of those things I can't "unsee." It just explains so many liberal democratic dysfunctions (see Legutko's book).

Fair point about not being able to read minds. I don't want to take my original point too far; I don't think that the people I'm talking about are literal p-zombies. Of course they have an inner life and (IMO) share with me the inherent dignity (in the old sense of "honor and duty") of being made in the image and likeness of God. But maybe they shouldn't be involved in the political decision making process.

To me, even that rudimentary cause-and-effect thought (if I shout the right slogans, covid will go away) would be comforting because it would mean that there's at least some thinking going on. But my uncomfortable, reluctant suspicion is that a sizeable minority (at least?) don't even engage at that level. They're simply not engaging at all.

I think we all actually kind of do this sort of thing in certain situations. I know nothing about sports other than what I've gleaned from others' conversations and watching my dad yell at the TV growing up. That said I can still make comments in a casual conversation along the lines of "Yep, that's our $NFL_TEAM, choking at the 1 yard line, as is tradition, haha." When I say that, I'm really just making mouth noises that convey "We are similar! I wish to be friendly!" I'm communicating zero information about my opinions or thoughts on sports, even though it might seem otherwise. I'm not actually engaging my brain at all.

Maybe this is actually a good thing? Perhaps most people were, after all, born to live simple lives and have no desire or ability to form coherent political thoughts? It really gives me a dim view of democracy, dimmer than the one I had before covid.

Maybe this is actually a good thing? Perhaps most people were, after all, born to live simple lives and have no desire or ability to form coherent political thoughts? It really gives me a dim view of democracy, dimmer than the one I had before covid.

It may be just an issue of abstracting. Politics, beyond the very simple, involves a lot of abstractions, and the capacity or interest of many people to handle more than a few simple abstractions at the same time (as in doing short multiplication or division) seems limited. As David Stove put it when defending positivism against the criticism that it robs life of the spiritual and transcendent wonders of religion and philosophy:

For when common humanity does venture in thought beyond the concerns of common life, it is a thousand to one that atrocity, and not just absurdity, will result. Do the scenes of Tehran, Kabul, Beirut in 1986 disgust and appall you? Then learn to see in them the scenes of Alexandria in 415, of Toulouse in 1218, of Munster in 1535, and all the other famous beauty-spots of your beloved Christian centuries.

Yes, I think you're right, and I think the right response when we see people reacting to things that are completely beyond their realm of understanding is compassion and empathy, not condescension and cynicism.

The fact that modern society is able to keep us from helping less educated people around us through top-down silencing and oppression is really rather sick, I don't necessarily lay the blame on people reacting with cynicism in this thread when they also are met with overwhelming social forces that tried to silence them as well. But on a visceral level it strikes me as ugly when smart people reduce dumber people in this way though I can also see how smarter people are being degraded by the powers at the same time.

But a lot of the covid fanatics seem to simply not care at all that they were wrong. When you call them on it, you might get a shrug and a "things were different then," or even just a vague confused stare -- why are you still talking about that? Don't you know it's $currentyear? Haven't you heard about Putin?

I feel a lot of them have either made a subconscious decision to just move past the COVID meme, or internalized the initial reports/sense that the vaccinations were a lot more effective a difference maker than they are and assume that they did 98% of the work in bringing back normalcy.

Were the vast majority of people literally just making mouth noises that simply signalled their alignment with the current Correct Opinion?

Yes.

Allow me to jerk the circle, once again, along with everyone else. For the past decade and a half I had fully come around around to the idea that my exceptionalism at critical thinking and questioning authority was a false shadow created by being a teenage edge lord.

I discovered that virtually nobody I know in meatspace was capable of looking beyond fear and hate, even when faced with obvious lies and propaganda. I am outnumbered (if not outgunned) and have felt persistently alone in the world for 3 years now.

It sucks.

How can I trust that they have any deeply held convictions or principles at all, if the sentiment comes and goes that easily?

Why would you trust that?

In my estimation the vast majority are largely amoral and just go with the flow. My wife is mostly amoral for example, she doesn't have moral opinions on almost anything. She isn't stupid or malevolent, she just doesn't care.

When I want to talk about some moral issue she just zones out because she gets bored. She wants to talk about what happened at her work or what she is planning for the garden or the baby room.

Very few people have moral opinions as anything more than accessories or as part of cheerleading for their team. People do get incredibly passionate about cheering/booing though.

This is one of the reasons why I'm of the opinion that democracy sucks at scale.

I'm embarrassed to say it took me until I was 30 to de-quokka and finally realise that people were voting for what was good for themselves and not what was good for society.

Based and error-theory pilled

My wife is mostly amoral for example, she doesn't have moral opinions on almost anything. She isn't stupid or malevolent, she just doesn't care.

When I want to talk about some moral issue she just zones out because she gets bored.

Does that have any impact on how you view your relationship with her? Or are you more like, "I didn't get with her because of her political opinions, so why would I care if she doesn't have any"?

It impacts my view on her a bit but not the relationship, it might even be healthy, we complement each other.

How do you trust then that if the winds of sentiment change she won’t peace out as she has no hiding underlining principles?

I don't think (stated) underlying principles are in any way trustworthy. I believe in people conforming to their nature and self interest.

A similar sentiment has been on my mind for the last few weeks as well. I was sitting around listening to music one day and just thought about the last two or three years of my life and how bizarre that period of time was. In real time we saw media conglomerates shape how millions of people thought and behaved, saw western democratic leaders reveal themselves to be authoritarians, forced millions of other people to get vaccines against their will, and now, just a couple years later, all pretend as if none of it ever happened at all. Trudeau recently came out at a press conference and explained how he never "actually" forced anyone to get the vaccine, and just "put the incentives" in front of them. Leaders of developed countries literally gaslighting the population. The worst part about it is that eventually everyone will believe that as well.

I don’t think most of it was that new. We’ve had a full century of practice at manufactured consent and manufactured responses. George Orwell was talking about it in 1984, and Aldous Huxley talked about it in Brave New World. The COVID response mostly revealed that fact to the public, or at least those able to grasp it without falling for various conspiracy theories. Mass media has always been like this and is still like this, the idea of news as the first draft of history has always been a bit of propaganda as they’re not really giving history in an honest way but the first draft of narrative. They’re writing the stuff as they want it remembered, as the cathedral wants future generations to think about it.

You've got to mention Walter Lippmann and his 1922 book Public Opinion

That makes it 101 years, justifying the full century rhetoric :-)

Turn the switch off and it's all forgotten. Like it never even happened.

One thing that's pretty funny about it if you're able to remove yourself from the darkness a bit is that the people who still seem to be holding some remaining fear are almost exclusively the smartest and the dumbest. Where I live, it's basically only underclass people and academic types that are still wearing masks. The people in the smart group seem to be operating on the basis that nothing changed and that Covid is still very concerning because of long Covid and therefore they will continue to mask up; nothing much changed between the post-vax summer when masks were still required and the present time, so they're able to think through it be confused at why people dropped masking. The dumbest seem to just kind of keep doing the same thing without any meaningful thought behind it - I see these people walking around with masks on their chins still, in 2023.

The middle, the ordinary grill-pilled Americans, seem perfectly content with the idea that two years of deranged behavior successfully stopped the new plague, so everything can be normal again.

There's a family in my neighborhood -- mom, dad, three kids -- that takes walks together every day. Still fully masked even outdoors.

I think mom relaxed the rule for one of her kids. She was out with just the one kid when we ended up crossing paths on a narrow trail and as soon as she saw me she was calling to her kid to mask up. It also wasn't a normal surgical mask, it was some kind of child ventilator with a rubber seal.

This is a wealthy area of the Pacific Northwest, so they're probably on the smart end.

In my corner of the world I see a lot more Women than men wearing masks. And my suspicion is that they do it just to forego Make up for half of their face, instead of for any real concern over Covid.

I have a similar experience, except that I've heard them say that they use it to not feel ugly. The eyes tend to be the most attractive part of someone's face and it's relatively easy to make them look better using make-up. It's harder with a mouth, chin, jawline, cheeks etc.

It's the bell curve meme!

Ah, here we are.

The worst part of all this is unlike any other disaster, say loss of immediate family or assault, I have absolutely no one in real life I can talk to, completely uncensored, about how I felt about it or how I feel now. At best all I have ever had are online friends and anonymous spaces like this one, baduk and LockdownSkepticism. Everywhere else just dogpiled you.

In regards to following the official line, I knew a lady in my kids school community who was a staunch masker, pro-vaccine, whatever it takes person. Eventually covid regulations ended, her daughter got sick with a second bought of covid and she had her daughter back within a week despite symptoms... It wasn't covid she was acting against rationally but just going with the official line...

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.

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend complained that I'm too cynical. I retorted that it's hard for me not to feel cynical about humanity when I now know that tens of thousands of my fellow countrymen so greatly prefer working from home over going into the office, that they're completely fine with throwing tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen out of work indefinitely if it means they get to keep working from home. And not merely throwing these people out of work, but actively scorning them as selfish anti-vaxxer far-right granny-murderers when they have the nerve to (perfectly understandably) complain about being out of work through no fault of their own.

This was my first firsthand exposure to the kind of pathological selfishness of the PMC. I thought it didn't exist outside of Bret Easton Ellis novels. I was wrong.

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.

Like others, I also identify with this sentiment and I feel like I could have written this exact thing. However, maybe that shouldn't be surprising. After all, we're both on the Motte. As a rule, I try to never believe in my own exceptionalism, or the exceptionalism of any group I'm a part of. It's just too easy to think that you're special, or that you're right. Surely there must be tons of other groups that would point at us and claim we're hypocrites due to some rubric that we're not even aware of.

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.

I also wonder if you're living in a blue tribe setting

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.

A few reasons:

1: To cover up the fact that our CDC had directly funded the production of the Covid virus, in conjunction with the Chicoms, and it had gotten out. That's bad for China, bad for the US, bad for the CDC, and bad for Fauci.

2: Trump was president yet, and it was an opportunity to tank the economy and change a bunch of election rules to get him out of office. Worked, sort of. Even with all that they barely scraped out a "win".

3: The sheer hatred and contempt the PMC has for normie americans, and their delight in punishing them for the actions and paranoias of the PMC.

But those don't really explain the global strong media reaction.

That's easy. They're all psychological colonies of whatever the US PMC thinks.

Fuck's sake, Finland holds BLM rallies.

You're all living in America.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Rr8ljRgcJNM

https://www.fininst.uk/events/black-lives-matter/

https://finlandtoday.fi/over-3000-people-join-the-black-lives-matter-protest-in-helsinki-i-am-so-very-proud-of-finland-says-organizer/

https://www.euronews.com/2020/07/08/finland-investigates-complaints-of-police-participation-in-black-lives-matter-protest

For what it's worth I think the Irish PMC has a comparable degree of contempt for the working-class Irish, which they dress up with progressivism in much the same way as their US counterparts.

My hypothesis remains unfalsified: the media reaction and government reaction was a tool for societal changes, not a tool for saving lives.

It was like those SF movies where some monster, disaster, or disease is ravaging the city, and a plucky scientist shows up saying the response has been all wrong. Only, instead of the authorities or the military listening and solving the problem in half an hour of screentime, they lock him out of the building and the media starts calling him an anti-science conspiracy theorist.

Beats me.

It gave people a lot of outward symbols to latch onto, behaviors you could use to signal your allegiance - the mask, the vaccine card, staying at home. Participating in those rituals felt good, and it helped sustain the memeplex. That was definitely part of it.

It also gave people an excuse to stay at home, watch netflix and avoid social interactions.

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".

My sister-in-law is a PA and worked in the COVID ward of her hospital. Ventilation isn't and never was something that is done lightly, and it especially wasn't something that was done lightly in the early days of COVID given the fears of a shortage. She said that people didn't go on ventilators until they couldn't breathe on their own and were otherwise going to die. I'll grant you that some of the early COVID treatments were later found to be sub-optimal, but in those early days they were the best that we had, and we can't fault the medical profession for not knowing everything that we know now.

I’m not “blaming” anyone in the sense of saying those doctors should’ve known. But we later found out things like cpap machines were much more efficient

It was scary in the first few weeks. I was scared. But pretty quickly realized this wasn’t the Black Death. Shame on the media et al not catching up to that.

There was a "deadly variant" in NYC during that 11 week period in early 2020, but it was not a "deadly covid variant," it was a deadly treatment protocol and behavior by NYC healthcare workers.

And the media fear narrative only amplified the heinous treatment of covid+ patients (or at least those suspected of or finally popped + at those hospitals by healthcare workers.

If you see two places in the entire world which had a magnitude worse outcome at the same time nearby places with the same demographics do not have those outcomes, trying to claim it was caused by a "deadly variant" virus is nonsense because it requires you to believe the virus is incredibly infections, avg death being over 2 weeks post symptoms, but also didn't spread outside of NYC or northern Italy to nearby areas with similar demographics, density (an also debunked correlative variable), etc.

83% of all covid-blamed deaths in NYC in 2020 were in hospitals in an 11 week period. For an "incredibly deadly variant," you would see far more people dying at home instead of what happened which was people with suspected covid would be isolated, dangerously drugged, mechanically ventilated, and then let die with very little care from healthcare workers as they drowned in their own fluids from bacterial pneumonia without antibiotic treatment.

But if you lived there then, as I did, it was scary as fuck and you likely knew a lot of people who were very ill and some who died.

I commuted regularly to NYC for work for weeks-months at a time and had a front-row seat as the city whipped itself up in a panic glued to their computers and tvs and swallowed everything being fed to them. Luckily for me, I was able to avoid getting anywhere near NYC for the duration of the hysteria. The best NYers can say is they were duped and fell for it.

Nonsensical covid restrictions caused serious harm to my kids (and ultimately caused financial harm as we changed a lot of things to get our kids out of a stifling covid environment which was really hard to find in our neck of the woods). I don’t want to sound callous but the old have always died from viruses. That is sad. I mean this sincerely that it sucks your dad died and I wish that didn’t happen (my dad died though not from covid). But the reason so many are (were?) pissed off is that we didn’t really do anything to stop those deaths; instead we just imposed harms on society and specifically the the youngest with basically zero benefit. I will have a party the day Fauci and Randi die. Hell will gain two citizens.

People who supported restrictions were not merely "afraid" but actively calling for mass violence to be committed against dissenters like myself. Most notably, my repeated false imprisonment. If anything I think I am often too charitable.

False imprisonment? Please explain.

Surely lockdowns. House arrest without trial.

I'm sure that's what he means, but note bene that non-zero people were literally imprisoned (like, in prison) for protesting. Here in Canada we have folks still facing charges and living under blatantly unconstitutional court orders restricting them from contact with other dissents among other things:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/freedom-convoy-organizer-faces-additional-charge-over-tiktok-video-advising-horn-blowing-1.6352722

Being terrified of Covid in March 2020, when it was a largely unknown quantity, is understandable. Being willing to experiment with drastic and unproven measures to combat the spread of the virus was likewise understandable at that time.

But no one can trot out that defense for their behaviour in, say, March 2021. By that point we knew just about everything important about the virus and what NPIs were effective at combatting it that we were ever going to.

Enacting a lockdown in March 2020 is an understandable and forgiveable overreaction to an unknown quantity. Enacting a lockdown in March 2021 is a pointless and self-destructive exercise in cruelty which should land its architects in the dock in the Hague.

+1 to the all of the above and some of my experience with mandates:

By Sep 2021, I saw about 40% compliance with State-required retail mask mandates in the red parts of Nevada.

By Mar 2022, I saw about 10% or less compliance with the Federal public transportation mandate on city busses in Denver and its suburbs.

The problem is the incentives and asymmetry makes it rational to follow herd behavior. the downside of non-compliance is more expensive than the cost of compliance. wearing a mask is easier than possibly being fired or not having access to services. the TSA knows that a lot of people will choose screening over not flying

Which heuristic serves better across all fields at all times: trusting the establishment and the experts

or: trusting contrarians and heretics?

The rational, logical thing to do is to follow the consensus and not waste your lifespan shoveling what might be sand.

Unless you one derives pleasure from their motte adjacent activities WE are the stupid ones; wasting our lives arguing about how many angels will fit on the head of a pin.

Surely this trust is modulated by how apparently competent the regime is. Every Soviet citizen knew that the one guy who believed the propaganda was a rube, however compliant they acted.

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.

Do they really?

One thing the pandemic taught me is that people's experiences vary a lot by the country or state or city, but still, do they really?

Here, we had everyone masking in shops etc without much grumbling, like, all right, why not. But I remember exactly one case of a guy asking me to keep the distance and it was so weird, like dude, you actually take it that seriously? And he was apologetic asking me to step back, rather than frothing at the mouth.

So: it's entirely possible that my experience is completely different from your experience. But on the other hand I can't help but suspect that my IRL and online experiences respectively are actually very much the same as yours, but I'm better at discriminating between the two and dismissing online crazies as not representative of the people.

I actually had someone ask me from across the street, “Where’s your mask?”

I said back, “It’s in the car. I didn’t expect to encounter anyone between parking my car and my front door.” He apologized and walked on.

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.

Even though I think the disease was real and needed at least some level of intervention, I fear that we’ve learned all the wrong lessons and are creating the basis for severe oppression in the name of safety, especially things that should never have been seriously considered. And the reason is that I think most white-collar people are so safetyist that it skewed the entire thing to maximal government intervention and control without any thought to the wider implications.

The inflation and supply chain issues should have been obvious to anyone giving thought to how our supply chain actually works. We don’t keep warehouses full of goods “in the back” as the Karen would say. Everything is manufactured and shipped in a very short timeframe. Our system is set up to deliver just in time. Which, obviously means that you can’t just “shut down” manufacturing or cut shifts back or whatever else without breaking the thing. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t have food processing plants shut down and still have food on the shelves or turn on a dime from restaurant ready food to grocery food. It doesn’t work.

And the level of authoritarianism that we enabled without thinking about it is insane. In Australia, you needed permission to go more than a couple of miles from home. You needed and easily revocable pass in some parts of Europe and China. Even in America, health departments were empowered to simply order things closed without so much as a hearing. And without any regulation requiring that they make businesses forced to curtail operations by the government to be able to sue or demand payment for their loses. Also the “emergency” had no legally enforceable end date or even a requirement for re-authorization. The emergency will last *until the people empowered to run your life decide that it’s over and they’ll simply hand it back.” Which, as you point out, only ended in May 2023, after being declared in March of 2020. Three years and two months of fiat control unanswerable to anyone is not something I find compatible with the idea of human rights. In fact, had you told people of the “before times”, even if you’re talking about the 2000s, they’d have assumed a coup had taken place in these countries. You need a pass to enter a business? Permission to open? Permission to leave your home?

Can we start to criticize the response yet?

Can we talk about rolling stone lying about ivermectin overdoses clogging hospitals?

Can we talk about cnn changing joe rogan's skin tone when he got covid for like a day?

Can we now talk about the financial incentives of some of the pharma companies and the hard push for mandatory vaccines?

Or the people who got fired for asking these questions?

Or the Lancet study for hydroxychloroquinen that had more covid subjects reported than covid cases for some countries. Who fakes a clinical trial to show something is ineffective if they don't have reliable cure waiting in the wings?

I was (and am) a heavy covid response skeptic (and continue to think the need to find a cure was for the vast majority of the population a solution in search of a problem) and saw a lot of sketchy data / science during the lockdown. What you are purporting takes the cake. Do you have a cite?

This summarizes it well https://ahrp.org/the-lancet-published-a-fraudulent-study-editor-calls-it-department-of-error/

It's the surgisphere scandal. Impossible data initially taken at face value because it was politically convenient.

I read this summary of the scandal and it seems that papers based on false data provided by Surgisphere claimed that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective, which led to delays in real trials of hydroxychloroquine, but also that ivermectin was effective, which led to its use before the results of real trials were available.

Among the people who were arguing about covid treatment based on politics before any sound research was available, there was one side (Trump and co.) that supported the use of both drugs and another (CNN and co.) that claimed both were ineffective and opposed their use. The Surgisphere scandal appears to be embarrassing for both sides.

In the end, the trials determined that neither drug was effective.

Oh, you can even say that it was a lab leak, now:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903

It accelerated existing trends: the security state, government regulation of social media, political polarization, the decline of small businesses. I don't see it as turning point in any area.

What are all the ways people here would say the pandemic era changed the world?

It made the mask a cult symbol in the United States (and possibly other Puritan countries as well). I recently traveled to Italy and was surprised that just about no one was wearing mask. If I saw someone in a mask, it was almost always a US tourist.

As a high-cost signal of tribal allegiance, it's not quite at the level as a Confederate flag or a neck tattoo, but it's quite impressive how so many people in the U.S. still wear the mask despite everything.

I'll forgive the indoor maskers. It's silly that a few people at my work are still wearing ineffectual paper or cloth masks. But fine. They're allowed to be a bit silly. They must wrongly think they are doing some good.

It is the present day outdoor maskers that I really look down on. Outdoor transmission was never a thing. There's no uncertainty about that now. For some family to walk by all wearing ineffectual cloth masks on a hiking trail is absurdity. At this point we are beyond the possibility of any benefit of masking and they are wearing masks merely because they like wearing masks.

I'll forgive the indoor maskers.

I won't. They wear a symbol of allegiance to safetyism and this marks them as enemies on at least one dimension. People that are still masking would have almost uniformly supported things like mask mandates, closed down businesses, and compulsory vaccination. People that forced a bunch of nonsense on me don't get to fall back on it just being a personal choice now.

Similar to how someone wearing a Swastika probably also supports the implications of that Swastika rather than merely being attracted by it's abstract windmill geometry.

supports the implications of that Swastika

The cycle of the seasons in the northern hemisphere?

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As a high-cost signal of tribal allegiance, it's not quite at the level as a Confederate flag or a neck tattoo, but it's quite impressive how so many people in the U.S. still wear the mask despite everything.

Interesting, I think the last time I saw someone out and about with a mask in the US (not counting on airplanes/in airports) was... October? Definitely last year. What % are you seeing around you?

Is this concentrated to big blue cities? I've done a fair amount of travel around the country since then, but admittedly not to LA/NYC/SF

Plenty of people in NYC and on New Jersey Transit still wearing masks. A small minority, but enough so you see them all the time.

Probably seeing 10% at the grocery store in Seattle.

I work in an office with about 50 people and two of them wear masks daily. This is in a medium sized midwestern city.

It looks to me like the masking rate in coastal cities and college towns is about what it was in East Asia pre-covid i.e. <5% masked at any given time and most of them just on public transportation or because they are sick.

As a high-cost signal of tribal allegiance

But I imagine it's not always consciously so, or not completely so. Some people were and presumably still are masking because they thought it actually was effective and felt like they were following the rules and doing their part for society, not just because they thought it made them look like an upstanding democrat.

That's probably kind of true for a lot of things that function as tribal markers, though, that the social regions aren't the conscious reason why someone does them.

I see relatively little masking. Even in very crowded, indoor events that are heavily left-aligned only a handful of people are wearing a mask. I sometimes see people wearing one who I know usually don't, which in my experience means they really need to not get COVID (e.g. upcoming wedding or international trip) so the same is likely true of some of the few people I see masking elsewhere (or e.g. they live with an elderly relative or immune-compromised partner, something like that).

I recently traveled to Italy and was surprised that just about no one was wearing mask.

My friends who lived in NYC in February 2020 are very over COVID and have been for a while. On the assumption they they all got it already, so it's over for them. It would make sense for Italy having been hit hard early to have similar feelings.

It would make sense for everybody to have those feelings since Omicron, when we were suddenly topping 5 million confirmed new cases per week in the US. I was quite paranoid about avoiding Covid before the vaccines came out, and even afterward I figured it couldn't hurt to stay masked in public and reduce transmission rates a little and get exposed less frequently ... but after the peak outbreak case rate jumped 5-fold? At that point it was clear we're all going to be getting exposed to Covid again, frequently, for the rest of our lives, unavoidably, and "just hope your immune system can handle it each time", maybe with a slight improvement via "don't get overweight", is the last defense.

I see maskers from time to time. They're usually, from the looks, upper-to-middle class older people. I don't think it's meant to signal political allegiance, at least.

Criminals also still mask frequently.

I find a lot of people I work with from Asia still mask a lot. And no, these were not Asian people who masked a lot before Covid, at the max it was only when they were sick.

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.

I at least will not forget that businesses, lives destroyed on useless preventive measures while these experts kept their jobs and faced no accountability for being so wrong.

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

I think it will be a defining moment in Ireland in a non-obvious sense (i.e. aside from the economic damage, govermnent overreach etc). For all the crazies that were involved in the anti-lockdown movement (I say this as an unvaccinated person with many friends in the same boat), and for how weak open dissent was during that time, anti-lockdowners managed to organise enough to build a base of dissidents (in the sense of being enemies of almost every political party) that has outlasted the pandemic.

Protesting isn't very common in Ireland, and when it happens it's usually the farmers, socialists, or some American thing like BLM, but since the pandemic we have seen some pretty big protests against asylum seekers that draw from a completely new base, and with these new hate speech laws I expect to see more. I can't tell if the people protesting asylum seekers are the same people who protested the lockdowns (though this is a common accusation), but in any case dissidents are braver, more energetic and more organised than before. The organising has had to be done from scratch so it's still very poor, but if someone could find a banner to unite these seemingly separate groups there could be some real opposition to the last few years of Irish governance.

Pessimistically, they don't organise but it will still be a defining moment in that in likening future protests to the anti-lockdowners the government has the perfect smear to shut opposition down.

It's not over until they take down the perspex wagie cages in the supermarket. Even banks and the other traditionally physically secured service counters are back to being wide open in the way they were already becoming pre-pandemic.

Sometimes I see faded, expiring one way labels on the floor in shops. They'll remain there until they completely perish.

What a mess we made, when it all went wrong.

I regularly see old signs about mandatory masks, etc. No ones cares these days.

My dentist still makes people wear them. They even have air filters, but half of them aren't turned on.

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I was pleasantly surprised when I went to donate blood the other day and found that masks were no longer mandatory for donors, and only one member of staff was wearing one. I thought they'd hold out indefinitely.

Where I am, that's not been a requirement for like a year-plus, I think.

I don't really see those in supermarkets these days, except in the Asian grocery chain.

Still see them at my local Target and walgreens. Probably just down to the manager and if they have time/etc to take them down

The public buses in my city have stickers on the windows encouraging people to leave the window open, with bright yellow and black Covid branding. I make a point of removing one such sticker whenever I take a bus.


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